Archaeology Briefs

NEW PICTURE OF HUMAN ORIGINS -- DENISOVANS, NEANDERTHALS AND HOMO SAPIENS!

2012-01-31T10:56:00.000-08:00

The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.
The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an interview.

The Denisovans (pronounced dun-EE-suh-vinz) were first described a year ago in a groundbreaking paper in the journal Nature made possible by genetic sequencing of the girl’s pinky bone and of an oddly shaped molar from a young adult.
Those findings have unleashed a spate of new analyses. Scientists are trying to envision the ancient couplings and their consequences: when and where they took place, how they happened, how many produced offspring and what effect the archaic genes have on humans today. Other scientists are trying to learn more about the Denisovans: who they were, where they lived and how they became extinct.

A revolutionary increase in the speed and a decline in the cost of gene-sequencing technology have enabled scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, to map the genomes of both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. Comparing genomes, scientists concluded that today’s humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania also carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. A study published in November found that Southeast Asians carry about 1 percent Denisovan DNA in addition to their Neanderthal genes. It is unclear whether Denisovans and Neanderthals also interbred.

A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “the hobbits” because they were so small, also walked the earth until about 17,000 years ago. It is not known whether modern humans bred with them because the hot, humid climate of the Indonesian island of Flores, where their remains were found, impairs the preservation of DNA.

This means that our modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human history that just one type of human has been alive, said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was the lead author of the Nature paper on the Denisovans.

For many scientists, the epicenter of the emerging story on human origins is the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, where the girl’s finger bone was discovered. It is the only known place on the planet where three types of humans — Denisovan, Neanderthal and modern — lived, probably not all at once. John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose lab is examining the archaic genomes, visited the cave in July. It has a high arched roof like a Gothic cathedral and a chimney to the sky, he said, adding that being there was like walking in the footsteps of our ancestors. The cave has been open to the elements for a quarter of a million years and is rich with layers of sediments that may contain other surprises. Some of its chambers are unexplored, and excavators are still finding human remains that are not yet identified. The average temperature for a year, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, bodes well for the preservation of archaic DNA.

Dr. Reich and his team have determined through the patterns of archaic DNA replications that a small number of half-Neanderthal, half-modern human hybrids walked the earth between 46,000 and 67,000 years ago, he said in an interview. The half-Denisovan, half-modern humans that contributed to our DNA were more recent. And Peter Parham, an immunologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has used an analysis of modern and ancient immune-system genetic components — alleles — to figure out that one of the Denisovan-modern couplings most likely took place in what is now southeastern China. He has also found some evidence that a Neanderthal-modern pair mated in west Asia. He stressed, however, that his study was just the first step in trying to reconstruct where the mating took place.

The value of the interbreeding shows up in the immune system, Dr. Parham’s analysis suggests. The Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived in Europe and Asia for many thousands of years before modern humans showed up and had developed ways to fight the diseases there, he said in an interview. When modern humans mated with them, they got an injection of helpful genetic immune material, so useful that it remains in the genome today. This suggests that modern humans needed the archaic DNA to survive. The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.

Although little is known about the Denisovans — the only remains so far are the pinky bone and the tooth, and there are no artifacts like tools. Dr. Reich and others suggest that they were once scattered widely across Asia, from the cold northern cave to the tropical south. The evidence is that modern populations in Oceania, including aboriginal Australians, carry Denisovan genes. Dr. Reich and others suggest that the interbreeding that led to this phenomenon probably occurred in the south, rather than in Siberia. If so, the Denisovans were more widely dispersed than Neanderthals, and possibly more successful.

But the questions of how many Denisovans there were and how they became extinct have yet to be answered. Right now, as Dr. Reich put it, they are “a genome in search of an archaeology.”

ISTANBUL SUBURBS -- A SECOND CENTURY B.C. CITY HAS BEEN FOUND

2012-01-30T11:01:00.000-08:00

For 1,600 years, this city - Turkey's largest - has been builtand destroyed, erected and erased, as layer upon layer of life has thrived on its seven hills. Today, Istanbul is a city of 13 million, spread far beyond those hills. And
on a long-farmed peninsula jutting into Lake Kucukcekmece, 13 miles west of the city center, archaeologists have made an extraordinary find.

The find is Bathonea, a substantial harbor town dating from the second century B.C. Discovered in 2007 after a drought lowered the lake's water table, it has been yielding a trove of relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., a period that parallels Istanbul's founding and its rise as Constantinople, a seat of power in the Eastern Roman/Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.

While there are some historical records of this early period, precious few physical artifacts exist. The slim offerings in the Istanbul section of the Archaeological Museums here reflect that, paling in comparison with the
riches on display from Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Lebanon.

So Bathonea (pronounced bath-oh-NAY-uh) has the potential to become a "library of Constantinople," says Sengul Aydingun, the archaeologist who made the initial discovery.

After the drought exposed parts of a well-preserved sea wall nearly two and a half miles long, Dr. Aydingun and her team soon saw that the harbor had been equipped with docks, buildings and a jetty, probably dating to the fourth century. Other discoveries rapidly followed. In the last dig season alone, the archaeologists uncovered port walls, elaborate buildings, an enormous cistern, a Byzantine church and stone roads spanning more than 1,000 years of occupation.

"The fieldwork Sengul has conducted over the last few years is spectacular," said Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol in England who surveyed Bathonea for two field seasons. "The discoveries made are now
shedding a completely new light to the wider urbanized area of Constantinopolis. A fantastic story begins to unveil."

In 2008, for example, Hakan Oniz, an archaeologist from Eastern Mediterranean University who specializes in underwater research, investigated a structure in the lake that local lore held was some kind of mystical minaret that appeared and disappeared in relation to the rate of sinful behavior by nearby villagers. The ruins, about 800 feet from shore, may have been a lighthouse.

Since then, Dr. Aydingun's team and researchers from eight foreign universities have found a second, older port on the peninsula's eastern side, its Greek influences suggesting that it dated to about the second century B.C.

Nearby, atop the round foundations of a Greek temple, they found the remains of a fifth- or sixth-century Byzantine church and cemetery with 20 burials, and a large stone relief of a Byzantine cross. Coins, pottery and other
artifacts indicate that the church suffered damage in the devastating earthquake of 557 but was in use until 1037, when a tremor leveled it - crushing three men whose bodies were found beneath a collapsed wall, along with a coin bearing the image of a minor emperor who ruled during the year of the quake.

Because the archaeologists are at the beginning of a multiyear dig at a site not known from historical sources, they are hesitant to draw many conclusions. Even the name Bathonea is a placeholder, inspired by two ancient references: the first-century historian Pliny the Elder's "Natural History," which refers to the river feeding the lake as Bathynias; and a work by a ninth-century Byzantine monk, Theophanes, who called the region Bathyasos.

The archaeologists know this much: The site was large. It sprawled across at least three square miles, and its sea wall is nearly half the length of the one that surrounded Constantinople itself. It was moderately wealthy; the
region was a country retreat for the urban elite, drawn by its fertile hunting grounds and Lake Kucukcekmece itself, the freshwater body closest to the city. They built villas and palaces all around the region.

Bathonea was also well connected. Some pottery was made as far away as Palestine and Syria, typical of places with access to foreign goods. It had wide stone roads, the earliest dating to the Roman era.

But its relationship to Constantinople is still unclear. "I like the idea of Bathonea as a satellite port of a major city," said Bradley A. Ault, a classical archaeologist with the University at Buffalo who has studied ancient port cities in Greece and Cyprus. "It falls in line with Athens and Piraeus, Rome and Ostia."

The Bathonea archaeologists also hope to uncover more artifacts dating to the earliest days of civilization. In 2007, Dr. Aydingun and Emre Guldogan of Istanbul University found 9,000-year-old flint tools at the site that could be evidence of the earliest pre-pottery farming settlement in Europe. Bathonea's role - and its real name - can be determined only through further study, Dr. Aydingun said.

Ground-penetrating radar has indicated that extensive structures remain beneath the soil. And as all of their efforts have been focused on the waterfront, the archaeologists have yet to investigate the patches of trees and brush farther inland that farmers have long avoided because their plows cannot cut through them.

Dr. Aydingun suspects there is a good reason for that. "I think all of these buildings continue," she said. "Can you imagine?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/science/istanbul-yields-a-treasure-trove-in-ancient-bathonea.html?_r=1

DOG LOVERS! DOMESTICATION GOES BACK TO 33,000 YEARS!

2012-01-29T13:34:00.000-08:00

A dog skull unearthed in a Siberian cave presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and suggests modern dogs may be descended from multiple ancestors

An ancient dog skull, preserved in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia for 33,000 years, presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication and, together with equally ancient dog remains from a cave in Belgium, indicates that domestication of dogs may have occurred repeatedly in different geographic locations rather than with a single domestication event.

"Both the Belgian find and the Siberian find are domesticated species based on morphological characteristics," said Greg Hodgins, a researcher at the University of Arizona's Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory and co-author of the study that reports the find. "Essentially, wolves have long thin snouts and their teeth are not crowded, and domestication results in this shortening of the snout and widening of the jaws and crowding of the teeth."

The Altai Mountain skull is extraordinarily well preserved, said Hodgins, enabling scientists to make multiple measurements of the skull, teeth and mandibles that might not be possible on less well-preserved remains. "The
argument that it is domesticated is pretty solid," said Hodgins. "What's interesting is that it doesn't appear to be an ancestor of modern dogs."

At 33,000 years old, the Siberian skull predates a period known as the Last Glacial Maximum, or LGM, which occurred between about 26,000 and 19,000 years ago when the ice sheets of Earth's last ice age reached their greatest extent and severely disrupted the living patterns of humans and animals alive during that time. Neither the Belgian nor the Siberian domesticated lineages appear to have survived the LGM.

However, the two skulls indicate that the domestication of dogs by humans occurred repeatedly throughout early human history at different geographical locations, which could mean that modern dogs have multiple ancestors rather than a single common ancestor. "In terms of human history, before the last glacial maximum people were living with wolves or canid species in widely separated geographical areas of Euro-Asia, and had been living with them long enough that they were actually changing evolutionarily," said Hodgins. "And then climate change happened, human habitation patterns changed and those relationships with those particular lineages of animals apparently didn't survive."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uoa-dsd012312.php

TÃRTÃRIA AND THE SACRED TABLETS--FREE DOWNLOAD

2012-01-24T11:49:00.000-08:00

During September of 1961, three famous inscribed tablets were unearthed during Nicolae Vlassa’s excavation of the archaeological site of Tãrtãria. Since their discovery, these Transylvanian artifacts kindled a wave of controversy regarding the possibility that Southeastern Europe developed an archaic script in Neolithic times.

Unfortunately, most studies separate the inscriptions from the context of the ritual pit-grave of the magic-religious practitioner buried with the tablets (Milady Tãrtãria). However, this composite burial made of her osseous remains, her tools/adornments/identifiers, and the tablets was a sacralized unity intended to consecrate her as a respected ancestor for an early Vinèa community.

TÃRTÃRIA AND THE SACRED TABLETS (2011) is authored by Gheorghe Lazarovici, Cornelia-Magda Lazarovici, and Marco Merlini in recognition of the 50th anniversary of Nicolae Vlassa’s excavation of Tãrtãria. These three authoritative archaeologists redact this archaeo-semiotic investigation where archaeological context – observed in conjunction with other related information – provides insights for examining the sign system employed at Tãrtãria. Sign analysis is, in turn, utilized as a filter for archaeological data.

New, extended excavations at Tãrtãria have recently begun. They are organized by the Lucian Blaga University – IPCTE at Sibiu and directed by Sabin Adrian Luca.

TÃRTÃRIA AND THE SACRED TABLETS is offered as a free download thanks to EURO INNOVANET (Rome, Italy) and the Institute of Archaeomythology (Sebastopol, CA, USA).

In order to download the book for free, go to http://www.prehistory.it/ and follow the instructions.

AMAZON'S LOST WORLD -- CARVINGS AND OTHER EVIDENCE OF BRAZILIAN PREHISTORY

2012-01-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.

"What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes," said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.

Instead of being pristine forests, barely inhabited by people, parts of the Amazon may have been home for centuries to large populations numbering well into the thousands and living in dozens of towns connected by road networks,
explains the American writer Charles C. Mann. In fact, according to Mr Mann, the British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished on his 1925 quest to find the lost "City of Z" in the Xingu, one area with such urban settlements.

In addition to parts of the Amazon being "much more thickly populated than previously thought," Mr. Mann, the author of "1491," a groundbreaking book about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, said, "these people purposefully modified their environment in long-lasting ways."

As a result of long stretches of such human habitation, South America's colossal forests may have been a lot smaller at times, with big areasresembling relatively empty savannas. Such revelations do not fit comfortably into today's politically charged debate over razing parts of the forests, with some environmentalists opposed to allowing any large-scale agriculture, like cattle ranching and soybean cultivation, to advance further into Amazonia.

Scientists here say they, too, oppose wholesale burning of the forests, even if research suggests that the Amazon supported intensive agriculture in the past. Indeed, they say other swaths of the tropics, notably in Africa, could
potentially benefit from strategies once used in the Amazon to overcome soil constraints.

While researchers piece together the Amazon's ecological history, mystery still shrouds the origins of the geoglyphs and the people who made them. So far, 290 such earthworks have been found in Acre, along with about 70 others in Bolivia and 30 in the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Rondônia. Researchers first viewed the geoglyphs in the 1970s, after Brazil's military dictatorship encouraged settlers to move to Acre and other parts of the Amazon, using the nationalist slogan "occupy to avoid surrendering" to justify the settlement that resulted in deforestation.

But little scientific attention was paid to the discovery until Mr. Ranzi, the Brazilian scientist, began his surveys in the late 1990s, and Brazilian, Finnish and American researchers began finding more geoglyphs by using
high-resolution satellite imagery and small planes to fly over the Amazon. Denise Schaan, an archaeologist at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil who now leads research on the geoglyphs, said radiocarbon testing indicated
that they were built 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, and might have been rebuilt several times during that period.

Researchers now believe that the geoglyphs may have held ceremonial importance, similar, perhaps, to the medieval cathedrals in Europe. This spiritual role, said William Balée, an anthropologist at Tulane University, could have been one that involved "geometry and gigantism." Still, the geoglyphs, located at a crossroads between Andean and Amazonian cultures, remain an enigma.

For Brazil's scientists and researchers, Ms. Schaan said, the earthworks are "one of the most important discoveries of our time." But the repopulation of this part of the Amazon threatens the survival of the geoglyphs, after being
hidden for centuries. Forests still cover most of Acre, but in cleared areas where the geoglyphs are found, dirt roads already cut through some of the earthworks. People live in wooden shacks inside others. Electricity poles dot the geoglyphs. Some ranchers use their trenches as watering holes for cattle. "It's a disgrace that our patrimony is treated this way," said Tiago Juruá, the author of a new book here about protecting archaeological sites including the earthworks.

"This is a new frontier for exploration and science," Mr. Juruá said. "The challenge now is to make more discoveries in forests that are still standing, with the hope that they won't soon be destroyed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/americas/land-carvings-attest-to-amazons-lost-world.html?_r=3

SEAFARING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN GOES BACK TO THE MESOLITHIC -- NEW INFORMATION

2012-01-24T09:53:00.000-08:00

Seafaring before the Neolithic - circa 7th millennium BCE - is a controversial issue in the Mediterranean. However, evidence from different parts of the Aegean is gradually changing this, revealing the importance of early coastal and island environments. The site of Ouriakos on the island of Lemnos (Greece) tentatively dates to the end of the Pleistocene and possibly the beginning of the Holocene, circa 12,000 BP.

A team formed by N. Laskaris, A. Sampson and I. Liritzis from the Laboratory of Archaeometry, University of the Aegean, Department of Mediterranean Studies, Rhodes; and F. Mavridis from the Ephorate of Palaeo-anthropology and Speleology of Southern Greece suggested that obsidian sources on the island of Melos in the Cyclades could have been
exploited earlier. Studies of material from Franchthi cave in the Argolid indicated Melos as its origin, but obsidian hydration dating was not applied to the artifacts recovered.

Obsidian, or 'volcanic glass', has been a preferred material for stone tools wherever it is found or traded. It also absorbs water vapor when exposed to air - for instance, when it is shaped into a tool - and absolute or relative dates can be determined for that event by measuring the depth of water penetration. In 10,000 years, the expected hydration depth is about 10 mm from the tool surface.

Two routes for the obsidian found at Franchthi have been considered: a direct one of around 120 kilometers with islets in between, and another one through Attica including crossings of 15 to 20 kilometers between islands.
The presence of obsidian in mainland and island sites indicates that these voyages included successful return journeys.

Sites in Ikaria, in Sporades, and on Kythnos demonstrate that, during the Mesolithic, a well established system of obsidian exploitation and circulation existed - a phenomenon that has its routes even earlier, as dates from sites in Attica indicate. Furthermore, obsidian artifacts have recently been found in two other Mesolithic sites in Greece, one in the island of Naxos and the other one in the small island of Halki. Exchange systems therefore brought obsidian to the eastern and the north-west Aegean, and even reached coastal inland sites of mainland Greece such as Attica, though not yet found in mainland sites. Possibly through sites in this latter region obsidian was also brought to the Peloponnese.

INDIAN MOUNDS PARK IN QUINCY (ILLINOIS-USA) BEING RECLAIMED AND EXPOSED AFTER MANY YEARS

2012-01-15T13:56:00.000-08:00

Local archaeologists and volunteers are removing decades of dense overgrowth from prehistoric Native American earthworks in Indian Mounds Park (Quincy, Illinois, USA) - one of the best preserved complexes still evident in the Upper Mississippi River valley. The project began in November and will continue into spring. The mounds and nearby earthworks date from 200 BCE to 1000 CE. The state may have had as many as 10,000 mounds, but only about 500 are left - many on private land.

Work has so far revealed a terraced embankment with an enclosure surrounding three of the mounds that was only hinted at in University of Chicago archaeologist survey work done in the 1920s. Steve Tieken, president of the Quincy-based North American Archaeological Institute, says there are 23 mounds within Quincy's park system. "We did discover one large major mound that was previously undocumented and the remnants of two to three mounds". Concerned with the overall condition of the mounds and their long-term future, Tieken led an effort to reclaim them beginning in 2009.

Volunteers tried to assess the mounds, scaling ladders and trees to get the most accurate measurements. "It was an arduous process to measure, to see how they've changed. Even though they're protected, natural factors take their toll," says Dave Nolan, of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. "One can only imagine what the terraced enclosure must have looked like as you approached up and down river along the Mississippi. It would have been visible for miles and been an awe-inspiring landmark."

Nolan adds, "People can now come to Quincy and view these spectacular earthen monuments in a manner closer to that envisioned by the original builders".

Edited from Quincy Herald-Wing (26 December 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/73p2jr5
[1 image]

CAVE PAINTINGS FOUND IN PERU

2012-01-15T13:50:00.000-08:00

The president of the Cave Art Peruvian Association, Gori Echevarria reported the finding of cave paintings depicting humans, animals and geometric figures (circa 8-12,000 years old) in the province of Churcampa, located in the Peru's central Huancavelica region.

Echevarria said six cave paintings were identified in a 20-meter stone wall which depict humans in hunting positions. The cave is located at some 3,200 meters above sea level in Torongana mountain.

The 'Quilcas', which is the native name for this art form, are painted in red, white and black and are believed to be at least 8 to 12,000 years old, the archaeologist said. "This finding confirms the great cognitive development of ancient Peru and establishes a reference its pictorial tradition. Most important is the variation and extension of the motifs and scenes," he added.

Edited from Andina (29 December 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/7at2rh8
[1 image]

CHINA'S HISTORICAL TREASURES THREATENED BY TOMB RAIDERS

2012-01-15T13:48:00.000-08:00

China's extraordinary historical treasures are under threat from increasingly aggressive and sophisticated tomb raiders. The thieves use dynamite and even bulldozers to break into the deepest chambers, and night vision goggles and oxygen canisters to search them. The size and value of the relics demonstrates the audacity of the raiders - last year, Chinese authorities recovered a 27-ton sarcophagus stolen from Xi'an and shipped to the USA.

"Before, China had a large number of valuable ancient tombs and although it was really depressing to see a tomb raided, it was still possible to run into a similar one in the future," said Professor Wei Zheng, an archaeologist at Peking University. "Nowadays too many have been destroyed. Once one is raided, it is really difficult to find a similar one. Archaeologists are now simply chasing after tomb raiders."

With thousands of sites - many in remote locations - the scope of China's heritage poses a particular challenge. The problem became worse as China's economy opened up, with domestic and international collectors creating a huge market for thieves. One researcher estimated that 100,000 people were involved in the trade nationally.

Luo Xizhe of the Shaanxi provincial cultural relics bureau told China Daily: "If we don't take immediate and effective steps to protect these artifacts, there will be none of these things left to protect in 10 years." Police have already stepped up their campaign against the criminals and the government is devoting extra resources to protecting sites and tracing offenders. This year it set up a national information center to tackle such crimes.

Edited from The Guardian (1 January 2012)
http://tinyurl.com/77lczj4
[1 image

CAVE PAINTINGS -- 2,000 YEARS OLD -- FOUND IN MEXICO

2012-01-15T13:43:00.000-08:00

Mexican archaeologists found some 3,000 cave paintings, some almost 2,000 years old, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. The discoveries were made between August and October 2011, but were not announced until specialists confirmed their antiquity and completed their analysis.

The paintings came to light through the Rupestral Art Project of the Victoria River Basin - which includes semi-desert regions in the states of Queretaro and Guanajuato - developed by experts and directed by archaeologist Carlos Viramontes. The pictographs were found at 40 rock sites. The oldest images refer to rites of passage, healing, prayers for rain and mountain worship, and were created by ancient hunter-gatherer societies that occupied the area during the first centuries CE. These paintings, with yellow, red and black as the predominating colors, generally represent human figures. Often in hunting and battle scenes they carry bows and arrows. "A great diversity of animals is also to be seen, and radiating circles that probably represent the sun," Viramontes said.

The expert said that the ancient hunter-gatherers who "created images on rockfaces were doing more than just leaving an imprint of their collective memory of historic, climatic and ritual occurrences - they painted the exposed fronts and sheltered backs of boulders as points of contact between the material and spiritual world."

The discoveries are added to the more than 70 rock-art locations discovered in Guanajuato since the late 1980s. The oldest rupestral art documented in Mexico up to now is in Baja California and dates back some 7,400 years.

STONE AGE TEMPLE ON ORKNEY (SCOTLAND) DATES 500 YEARS BEFORE STONEHENGE

2012-01-08T12:10:00.000-08:00

THE discovery of a Stone Age temple on Orkney looks set to rewrite the archeological records of ancient Britain with evidence emerging it was built centuries before Stonehenge.

Archeologists have so far found undisturbed artifacts including wall decorations, pigments and paint pots, which are already increasing their understanding of the Neolithic people. Experts believe the huge outer wall suggests the site was not domestic, while the layout of the buildings has reinforced the view it might have been a major religious site. Archaeologists think the temple was built 500 years before Stonehenge, regarded as the center of Stone Age Britain.

However, only 10% of the site at Ness of Brodgar has been excavated and it could be years before the scale and age of the discovery is fully understood. It sits close to the existing Ring of Brodgar stone circles and the standing
stones of Stenness, near to the town of Stromness.

The uncovered wall around the edges of the site was built with 10,000 tonnes of quarried rock and may have been up to 10 ft high. Thermal technology also indicates the site could cover the same area as five football pitches, with some parts potentially older than Stonehenge, in south-west England, by as much as 800 years. Charcoal samples from beneath the wall indicate it was built around 3200 BC. A 30mm high figurine with a head, body and two eyes, and called the "Brodgar Boy", was also unearthed in the rubble of one of the structures.

About 18 months ago, a remarkable rock colored red, orange and yellow was unearthed. This is the first discovery in Britain of evidence that Neolithic peoples used paint to decorate their buildings. Project manager Nick Card said the discoveries are unparalleled in British prehistory and that the complexity of finds is changing the "whole vision of what the landscape was 5000 years ago." He said it was of "a scale that almost relates to the classical period in the Mediterranean with walled enclosure and precincts". Mr Card added: "It's a huge discovery; in terms of scale and complexity there really is nothing else quite like it.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/orcadian-temple-predates-stonehenge-by-500-years.16330802

WORLD'S OLDEST TEMPLE AND THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION FEATURED IN DEC 19-26 NEW YORKER MAGAZINE

2012-01-04T16:42:00.000-08:00

There is a vast complex of Stonehenge-style megalithic circles called Gobekli Tepe in the Urfa, Turkey countryside as reported by Elif Batuman in a fascinating article in the New Yorker. Gobekli is estimated to be 11,000 years old (6 1/2 thousand years older than the Great Pyramid, 5 1/2 thousand years older than the earliest cuneiform texts and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho.)

The site comprises more than 60 multi-ton T-shaped limestone pillars, most of them engraved with bas-reliefs of dangerous animals. Interestingly, the site has yielded no traces of habitation. And then, strangely, the pillars appear to have been buried deliberately and all at once around 8,200 B.C., some 1300 years after their construction.

Ms Batuman goes on to say: The idea of a religious monument built by hunter-gatherers contradicts most of what we thought we knew about religious monuments and about hunter-gatherers ... Formal religion, meanwhile, is suppose to have appeared only after agriculture produced such hierarchical social relations as required a cosmic back-story to keep them going and supplied a template for the power relationship between gods and mortals. The findings at Gobekli Tepe suggest that we have the story backward -- that it was actually the need to build a sacred site that first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend long periods of time in one place, to secure a stable food supply and eventually to invent agriculture.

Do read the rest of the article on pages 72 -85 of the Dec 19-26 New Yorker Magazine --- fascinating!

FIRST ROMAN METROPOLIS NORTH OF THE DANUBE IS BEING EXCAVATED

2012-01-03T10:49:00.000-08:00

Featuring numerous temples, an amphitheater, a large forum with associated buildings, gladiator schools, massive fortifications and several necropolises, casual observers might think that they were walking among ruins not far from the center of ancient Imperial Rome herself. But this site is located on a plain at the foot of the Retezat Mountains in Southern Transylvania, Romania. Here, archaeologists have been systematically uncovering an ancient Roman center that, during its heyday in the 2nd century A.D., commanded the countryside as the capital of the conquered Dacian provinces.

After the mighty Dacians were finally defeated in 106 A.D. by the forces of Trajan's legions, a city was built upon the very location where a major battle between the Roman legions and the Dacian troops took place. Known as
Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, with an area of 30 ha, it sported a population of perhaps as many as 25,000 people during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, built on the rich commerce of gold, iron, and copper, among the other resources of
Dacia. Its monuments were constructed of high quality limestone and marble, valued so highly over the centuries that Medieval churches and castles to this day still display fragments from the Roman Sarmizegetusa bas-reliefs
and statues that once graced the original city. The forum itself was quarried for lime for more than a hundred years, as later Medieval builders began to construct more with cement and less with brick.

Archaeologists first begun excavating the site from 1924 to 1936 under the direction of Prof. C. Daicoviciu. Beginning again in 1973, excavations continued under Daicoviciu, along with professors D. Alicu and I. Piso. Most
recently, investigations have been carried out by the Archaeological Techniques and Research Centre (ArchaeoTek - Canada) and the Center for Roman Studies (University Babes-Bolyai in Cluj, Romania) under the direction
of professors Andre Gonciar and Ioan Piso. Their team of professionals and students will return during the summer of 2012 to explore more of its features.

Ancient structures already identified include the Amphitheater, a gladiator school, the Goddess Nemesis Temple, the Liber Pater Temple, temples to Aesculap and Hygia, a temple basilica, the "Big Temple", a temple to the god Silvanus, glass blowers workshops, the Horreum, thermae, the Forum, and a procurator's office. Virtual econstruction examples of excavated structures provided by Reconstituiri.ro are shown below.

ArchaeoTek is currently seeking students and volunteers who would be interested in becoming a part of the current excavations, taking place from July 8 to August 11, 2012. Those interested should visit the website at
http://www.archaeotek.org/roman_capital_of_the_dacian_provinces.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/december-2011/article/large-roman-city-uncovered-in-romania

FINALLY! STONEHENGE ANCIENT BLUESTONES MATCH OUTCROP IN WALES -- 160 MILES AWAY

2012-01-02T15:05:00.000-08:00

Geologists announced this week: Some of the volcanic bluestones in the inner ring of Stonehenge officially
match an outcrop in Wales that's 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the world-famous site.

The discovery leaves two big ideas standing about how the massive pieces of the monument arrived at Salisbury Plain: entirely by human hand, or partly by glacier. As it looks today, 5,000-year-old Stonehenge has an outer ring of 20- to 30-ton sandstone blocks and an inner ring and horseshoe of 3- to 5-ton volcanic bluestone blocks.

The monument's larger outer blocks, called the Sarsen stones, were likely quarried some 20 to 30 miles (32 to 48 kilometers) away in what's now England, where sandstone is a common material.

The origin of the bluestones, however, has weighed heavy on the hearts of archaeologists. Rocks resembling the material under a microscope haven't been found anywhere relatively near Stonehenge-at least until now. Pinpointing the stones' origins is crucial to understanding how so many heavy hunks of rock made their way to the open plain where Stonehenge now stands.

For about two decades, Ixer and study co-author Richard Bevins, of the National Museum of Wales, have searched for the origins of the bluestones in outcrops around Wales. As late as two years ago, the pair thought the blocks couldn't have come from the country-no samples from Welsh outcrops matched the Stonehenge blocks. But not all of the samples collected over 20 years had yet been prepared for examination under a microscope. To be absolutely certain, the geologists began slicing up their remaining rocks.

The rocky outcrop fingered by the duo's analysis is called Craig Rhos-y-Felin, which is now located on private land near a sheep farm. The site is a long, bush-covered set of crags the size of four double-decker buses. The new find leaves two prominent theories for how the Welsh rocks got to Salisbury.

Humans could have quarried the site and dragged the blocks on wooden rafts. Or a giant glacier may have chiseled off the blocks and ferried them about a hundred miles (160 kilometers) toward Stonehenge, with humans dragging them
the rest of the way. If humans did the digging, archaeologists might detect marks left by tools or some other evidence. But if signs of human quarrying are lacking, the glacier idea might gain the upper hand.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/12/111222-stonehenge-bluestones-wales-match-glacier-ixer-ancient-science/

"LAYERS OF ANCIENT JERUSALEM"

2011-12-30T11:01:00.000-08:00

I usually don't refer my readers to a magazine but here's an exception: In the January/February 2012 Biblical Archaeology Review there is a splendid article about the Western Wall Plaza Excavation.

To quote briefly "Actually the site of he excavation was outside the city until the eighth century B.C.E. It is located on the northeastern slope of the so-called 'western hill'; In King David's time, Jerusalem was confined to the 10-12 acres ridge south of the Old City known even today as the city of David. Then Solomon extended the city northward where he built the Temple on a much smaller enclosure than the one built by Herod the great a thousand years later. Not until King Hezekiah's time, in the eighth century B.C.E. was the city exteded west to the western hill -- the present area of Mount Zion, the Armenian Quarter and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City."

The details of the dig and the illustrations are marvelous. Possible to read http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=38&Issue=1&ArticleID=6

HOW DID RESEARCHERS PIN POINT AGES OF CHILDREN WHO PAINTED IN THE CAVES?

2011-12-30T10:32:00.000-08:00

I was so intrigued by the previous article about children painting in the caves that I emailed Leslie Van Gelder who was one of the prime researchers. How did she figure out their ages? Here is her edited answer:

The most in depth answer to your question is best found in an article we published in Antiquity in 2006. (Here's the link to the reference if you want to get the article http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/080/ant0800937.htm). That has the long version of the methodology that we used to study childrens' and adults hands.

The short version is that in the cave we had been collecting data on lines that had been drawn with three fingers held together because no matter what the three fingers were the same three fingers, whether left hand or right. We then replicated the wall surface by using clay and asked people of many ages to draw a similar marking with their hands and then we measured the results. We asked people who worked in schools in a number of different countries to work with children in their classes to collect data for us as well as we were especially interested in children because we knew many of the measures in the cave were small.

What we found was that there was a definite clear point of measure where children under 5 seemed to have a measure of 30mm or smaller for their 3 fingered width. Given that we had measures of 22, 28, and 31mm in the cave, that was enormously helpful.

We've also looked at the heights of their flutings from the floor. That, in some areas, gives us a sense of their height, too.

I hope that helps a little in explaining. The Antiquity article would give you the most in depth explanation.
Best wishes and thanks again for your interest,
Leslie
_______________
Leslie Van Gelder, Ph.D.
Program Director
Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership
Walden University
leslie.vangelder@waldenu.edu

NEANDERTHALS BUILT HOMES!

2011-12-30T09:59:00.000-08:00

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 44,000 year old Neanderthal building that was constructed using the bones from mammoths. The circular building, which was up to 26 feet across at its widest point, is believed to be earliest example of domestic dwelling built from bone.

The new findings suggest these ancient humans had settled in areas to the degree that they built structures where they lived for extended periods of time. Analysis by researchers from the Muséum National d'Histories Naturelle in Paris also found that many of the bones had been decorated with carvings and ocher pigments.

Laëtitia Demay, an archaeologist who led the research, said: "It appears that Neanderthals were the oldest known humans who used mammoth bones to build a dwelling structure. This mammoth bone structure could be described as the basement of a wooden cover or as a windscreen. Neanderthals purposely chose large bones of the largest available mammal, the woolly mammoth, to build a structure. The mammoth bones have been deliberately selected and were circularly arranged. Under a cold climate in an open environment, the lack of wood led humans to use bones to build protections against the wind."

The bone structure was found near the town of Molodova in eastern Ukraine on a site that was first discovered in 1984. It was constructed of 116 large bones including mammoth skulls, jaws, 14 tusks and leg bones. Inside at least 25 hearths filled with ash were also discovered, suggesting it had been used for some time. The researchers believe that the Neanderthals both hunted and killed the mammoths for meat before using their bones but also collected some of the bones from animals that had died of natural causes.

Simon Underdown, a senior lecturer in biological anthropology who researches Neanderthals at Oxford Brookes University, said: "It's another piece in the newly emerging Neanderthal jigsaw puzzle. Far from being the stupid cavemen of popular image it's becoming increasingly clear the Neanderthals were a highly sophisticated species of human. We can now add shelter building to the list of advanced behaviors that includes burying the dead, spoken language, cooking and wearing jewelery."

MAYAN CALENDAR DOES NOT PREDICT THE END OF THE WORLD

2011-12-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

The end is not quite nigh. At least that is the conclusion of a German expert who says his decoding of a Mayan tablet with a reference to a 2012 date denotes a transition to a new era and not a possible end of the world as others have read it. The interpretation of the hieroglyphs by Sven Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia was presented for the first time on Wednesday at the archaeological site of Palenque in southern Mexico.

His comments came less than a week after Mexico's archaeology institute acknowledged there was a second reference to the 2012 date in Mayan inscriptions, touching off another round of talk about whether it predicts the end of the world. Gronemeyer has been studying the stone tablet, which was found years ago at the archaeological site of Tortuguero in Mexico's Gulf coast state of Tabasco. He said the inscription described the return of the mysterious Mayan god Bolon Yokte at the end of a 13th period of 400 years, known as Baktuns, on the equivalent of 21 December 2012. Mayans considered 13 a sacred number. There is nothing apocalyptic in the date, he said. The text was carved about 1,300 years ago. The stone has cracked, which has made the end of the passage almost illegible.

"The date acquired a symbolic value because it is seen as a reflection of the day of creation," Gronemeyer said. "It is the passage of a god and not necessarily a great leap for humanity."

Last week, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology said a second inscription mentioning the 2012 date was on the carved or moulded face of a brick found at the Comalcalco ruin, near the Tortuguero site. It is being kept at the institute and is not on display. Many experts doubt the second inscription is a definite reference to the date cited as the possible end of the world, saying there is no future tense marking like there is in the Tortuguero tablet.

The institute has tried to dispel talk of a 2012 apocalypse, the subject of numerous postings and stories on the internet. Its latest step was to arrange a special round table of Mayan experts this week at Palenque, which is where Gronemeyer made his comments.

THE WESTERN WALL OF THE TEMPLE MOUNT WAS NOT COMPLETED DURING KING HEROD'S LIFETIME

2011-12-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority discover a ritual bath beneath the Western Wall of the Temple Mount that shows the construction of that wall was not completed during King Herod’s lifetime

Who built the Temple Mount walls? Every tour guide and every student grounded in the history of Jerusalem will immediately reply that it was Herod. However, in the archaeological excavations alongside the ancient drainage channel of Jerusalem a very old ritual bath (miqwe) was recently discovered that challenges the conventional archaeological perception which regards Herod as being solely responsible for its construction.

Recently, reinforcement and maintenance measures were implemented in the pavement of Jerusalem’s main street from 2,000 years ago, used by pilgrims when they went up to the Temple Mount. This was done as part of the project to re-expose the drainage channel that passes beneath the street, running from the Siloam Pool in the City of David to the Jerusalem Archaeological Garden near the Western Wall. The excavations at the site are being conducted on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, in cooperation with Nature and Parks Authority and the East Jerusalem Development Corporation, and are underwritten by the Ir David foundation. The excavations are directed by archaeologist Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, with assistance from Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa.

In an excavation beneath the paved street near Robinson’s Arch, sections of the Western Wall’s foundation were revealed that is set on the bedrock – which is also the western foundation of Robinson’s Arch – an enormous arch that bore a staircase that led from Jerusalem’s main street to the entrance of the Temple Mount compound.

According to Professor Reich, “It became apparent during the course of the work that there are rock-hewn remains of different installations on the natural bedrock, including cisterns, ritual baths and cellars. These belonged to the dwellings of a residential neighborhood that existed there before King Herod decided to enlarge the Temple Mount compound. The Jewish historian Josephus, a contemporary of that period, writes that Herod embarked on the project of enlarging the compound in the eighteenth year of his reign (that is in 22 BCE) and described it as “the largest project the world has ever heard of”.

When it was decided to expand the compound, the area was confiscated and the walls of the buildings were demolished down to the bedrock. The rock-cut installations were filled with earth and stones so as to be able to build on them. When the locations of the Temple Mount corners were determined and work was begun setting the first course of stone in place, it became apparent that one of the ritual baths was situated directly in line with the Western Wall. The builders filled in the bath with earth, placed three large flat stones on the soil and built the first course of the wall on top of this blockage.

While sifting the soil removed from inside the sealed ritual bath, three clay oil lamps were discovered of a type that was common in the first century CE. In addition, the sifting also yielded seventeen bronze coins that can be identified. Dr. Donald Ariel, curator of the numismatic collection of the Israel Antiquities Authority, determined that the latest coins (4 in all) were struck by the Roman procurator of Judea, Valerius Gratus, in the year 17/18 CE. This means that Robinson’s Arch, and possibly a longer part of the Western Wall, were constructed after this year – that is to say: at least twenty years after Herod’s death (which is commonly thought to have occurred in the year 4 BCE).

This bit of archaeological information illustrates the fact that the construction of the Temple Mount walls and Robinson’s Arch was an enormous project that lasted decades and was not completed during Herod’s lifetime.

THE VOICE OF OUR AUSTRALOPITHECUS AFARENSIS ANCESTOR!

2011-12-14T21:15:00.000-08:00

Working backward from clues in ancient skeletons, Dutch researcher Bart de Boer has built plastic models of an early hominin's vocal tract and recreated the sounds our ancestors may have made millions of years ago.

Non-human primates have an organ called an air sac - a large cavity that connects to the vocal tract - linked to an extension on the hyoid bone known as the hyoid bulla. Modern humans have neither an air sac nor an extension on the hyoid bone, but Australopithecus afarensis - a hominin species that roamed Africa approximately 3.9 million to 2.9 million years ago - had a hyoid bulla, and likely an air sac as well.

De Boer built models of the human vocal tract both without an air sac, like modern humans, and with one, as Australopithecus afarensis would have had. By pushing air through the models, he could hear what various vowels sounded like.

The air sacs acted like bass drums, resonating at low frequencies, and causing vowel sounds to merge; according to Charles Harvey at New Scientist, [an Australopithecus] would have had a greatly reduced vocabulary. What, then, might our ancestors' first words have been? With air sacs, vowels tend to sound like the 'u' in 'ugg', but studies suggest it is easier to produce a consonant plus a vowel, and 'd' is easier to form with 'u'. "I think it is likely cavemen and cavewomen said 'duh' before they said 'ugg'," says de Boer.

Edited from NewScientist (23 November 2011), Discover Magazine (28 November 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/bqbtmpk
[2 images, 1 audio file]
http://tinyurl.com/cpgf84w
[1 image]

CHUMASH -- CALIFORNIA INDIANS -- HEALTH MAY HAVE DECLINED FROM EVERYDAY USE OF TAR

2011-12-14T09:26:00.000-08:00

A long-term health decline among prehistoric Indians in California (USA) may be linked to their everyday use of tar, which served as glue, waterproofing, and even chewing gum.

The Chumash lived in dense villages of up to 20,000 people in the Channel Islands and Southern California Coast (Santa Barbara to Malibu) and used shell beads as currency. The hunter-gatherers collected tar from the plentiful natural seeps on the islands and used the gummy substance for everything from building canoes to casting broken bones to making chewing gum. While analyzing skeletons of 269 Chumash males and females from various periods, a team of anthropologists found a marked decrease in skull size over time, according to the research, published in May in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

PAHs in bitumen are known toxins - byproducts of modern fossil fuel combustion, cigarette smoking, road paving, and roofing. The chemicals are easily taken up by the human body through breathing, ingestion and skin contact, and can be distributed to organs, tissues, and fetuses. Major health problems - including cancer, altered hormone levels, and damage to internal organs - have been connected to PAH exposure.

Modern tar from seeps in ancestral Chumash territory have high levels of toxic PAHs. The Chumash not only used the tar regularly, they used it more and more as the years went by, based on increasing levels of bitumen found in artifacts. Bitumen was used to waterproof tightly woven fiber baskets that served as water bottles. The Indians also heated the tar to make it more malleable, producing fumes that could have easily been inhaled. Tar was also used as an adhesive in bone whistles, flutes, shell containers, abalone dishes, the mouthpieces of smoking pipes, and musical rattles. Women wore grass skirts weighted with bits of tar. They began building canoes with multiple wooden planks about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, using tar to seal any spaces where the planks met, to plug holes, and as an adhesive in a canoe's body and paddles.

Edited from National Geographic News (6 October 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/67o6jwp
[1 drawing, 1 image]

ALTAMIRA CAVE IN SPAIN -- THREATENED!

2011-12-14T09:20:00.000-08:00

Scientists and managers of the World Heritage Site of Altamira Cave in the Cantabria region of Spain are deeply concerned that recent calls to reopen the cave, closed to mass tourism since 1977, would lead to the cave paintings' destruction.

Recent studies have shown that intense human traffic caused the deterioration of the paintings, produced by modern humans living in or near the cave between 18,500 and 14,000 years ago.

The cave was first discovered in 1897 by amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who interpreted the paintings as belonging to the late Palaeolithic era - claims considered controversial until several other similar sites were discovered in 1902. The artwork - which includes images of bison, dear, wild boar, horses, goats, abstract shapes and handprints - was created from pigments made from ochre, hematite and charcoal, and is considered among the most complex Palaeolithic art ever found.

In 2008, scientists using Uranium-thorium dating techniques determined that some of the artwork may be between 25,000 and 35,000 years old.

Edited from NewScientist, Popular Archaeology (6 October 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/65o949uì
[1 image]
http://tinyurl.com/6xnklpo
[4 images]

MONGOLIA -- TEN PREHISTORIC SITES DISCOVERED

2011-12-14T09:16:00.000-08:00

Archeologists have discovered 10 prehistoric sites in the Badain Jaran Desert, China's third largest desert located in northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. An archeological team composed of 11 experts from Inner Mongolia, Beijing and Sichuan have unearthed a large number of stone and pottery items dating back 5,000 years from the sites, which, the experts believe, indicate an ancient civilization once flourished in the desert.

Experts say one of the most important findings was a black-red painted pottery jar, which represents Neolithic art that dates back 4,500 years. It was unearthed from a site where archaeologists had discovered extensive cultural remains covering an area of over 15,000 square meters. Experts said stone wares made of flint and agate were found in all the newly discovered sites.

The Badian Jaran Desert is 47,000 square km and sparsely populated. It is famous for having the tallest stationary sand dunes in the world - some of them reaching 500 meters of height. It also features spring-fed lakes that lie between the dunes, and Chinese archeologists said all the ancient sites have been found near those lakes.

Edited from Xinhuanet.com (18 October 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/65drdjs

BRONZE AGE BRITAIN REVEALED AS NEVER BEFORE!

2011-12-10T11:19:00.001-08:00

Six boats hollowed out of oak tree trunks are among hundreds of intact artifacts from 3,000 years ago that have been discovered in the Cambridgeshire fens of eastern England. The scale, quality and condition of the objects have astonished archaeologists - the largest bronze age collection ever found in one place in Britain - and barely a fraction of the site has been excavated. The dig is likely to continue for years.

David Gibson, head of Cambridge University's archaeological unit, said the discoveries were internationally important. "One canoe would be great. Two, exceptional. Six almost feels greedy". The boats - two of which bear unusual decoration - are in such good condition that the wood grain and color can be seen clearly, as can signs of repairs by their owners. One is 8.3 meters long; the smallest, just over 4 meters.

Unique textile fragments, wicker baskets and wooden sword handles have survived. There are even containers of food, including a bowl with a wooden spoon still wedged into the contents, now analyzed as nettle stew, which may have been a favorite dish in 1000 BCE.

The artifacts were preserved because they were immersed in deep layers of peat and silt. When those layers are lifted off, "the objects are so pristine", said Mark Knight, the unit's senior project officer, "it's as if 3,000 years never happened." The artifacts were submerged under an ancient watercourse along the southern edge of the Flag Fen Basin, land altered over millennia by rising sea levels. Knight said: "In our [bronze age] landscape... you could have walked along the bottom of the fenland basin and to the bottom of the North Sea hunting for deer. By the Roman period, you were perched up at Peterborough, looking out over a huge expanse of peat and reed swamp."

Along the 150-meter stretch of a bronze age river channel, they have found the best preserved example of prehistoric river life. There are weirs and fish traps in the form of big woven willow baskets, plus fragments of garments with ornamental hems made from fibrous bark and jewelery, including green and blue beads. Extensive finds of metalwork include bronze swords and spears, some apparently tossed into the river in perfect condition, possibly as votive offerings. One of the bronze age swords is of a type normally found in northern Spain.

Knight said: "Often at an excavation, it takes much imagination for it to become apparent. This site doesn't need that. It's intact. It feels as if we've actually caught up the [bronze age] people. It feels like we're there."

FOLLOW UP ON HOW THE RESEARCHERS FOUND OUT THE AGES OF THE CHILDREN WHO PAINTED IN CAVES

2011-12-08T11:00:00.001-08:00

The article about children painting intrigued me but it did not say how the researchers knew how old the children were who painted in the caves. So I emailed Dr. Leslie van Gelder of Walden U, the head researcher, and asked her how they did it. I was delighted with her reply:

"The most in depth answer to your question is best found in an article we published in Antiquity in 2006. (Here's the link to the reference if you want to get the article http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/080/ant0800937.htm). That has the long version of the methodology that we used to study childrens and adults hands.

The short version is that in the cave we had been collecting data on lines that had been drawn with three fingers held together because no matter what the three fingers were the same three fingers, whether left hand or right. We then replicated the wall surface by using clay and asked people of many ages to draw a similar marking with their hands and then we measured the results. We asked people who worked in schools in a number of different countries to work with children in their classes to collect data for us as well as we were especially interested in children because we knew many of the measures in the cave were small.

What we found was that there was a definite clear point of measure where children under 5 seemed to have a measure of 30mm or smaller for their 3 fingered width. Given that we had measures of 22, 28, and 31mm in the cave, that was enormously helpful.

We've also looked at the heights of their flutings from the floor. That, in some areas, gives us a sense of their height, too. "

Many thanks to Dr. van Gelder!

"POMPEIAN RED" IS REALLY YELLOW!

2011-12-08T10:51:00.001-08:00

This is probably more for decorators than archaeologists but I couldn't resist!! The Art Newspaper (No.229, Nov.2011) reports new research into the truth behind what we know as “Pompeian” red.

The color name was taken from the red seen in the frescoes discovered in the excavations of Pompeii. It is now known that in many of these the original color was yellow. Researchers at the National Institute of Applied Optics, Florence, Italy, attribute the shift in color to chemical reaction of the yellow pigments to the gases released by
the eruption of Vesuvius.

For many years certain scholars have believed that as many as 57 frescoes from Herculaneum and Pompeii were originally yellow. Now it is believed that of the 303 known frescoes 165 frescoes were originally red

LOST CITY LIES BENEATH THE STRAIT OF THE DARDANELLES

2011-11-25T11:22:00.001-08:00

A group of scientists and archeologists from Canakkale (Dardanelles) University have found traces of a lost city,
older than famed Troy, now buried under the waters of Dardanelles strait.

Led by associate professor Rüstem Aslan, the archeology team made a surface survey in the vicinity of Erenkoy, Canakkale on the shore. The team has found ceramics and pottery, what led them to ponder a mound could be nearby. A research on The found pottery showed that the items belonged to a 7000 years old ancient city. The team has intensified the research and discovered first signs of the lost city under the waters of Dardanalles Strait.

The lost city lies in the sea floor in the Aegean entrance of the strait on the shores of Europen side. The professor told"the pottery indicates the city is from around 5000 BC. We believe the civilizations on the shores of Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits had been buried under water. This latest mound discovered is also 90% under water and gives significant hints on the sea levels then."

http://www.nationalturk.com/en/lost-city-older-than-troy-found-in-canakkale-turkey-14086

DORDOGNE CAVE SHOWS CHILDREN LEARNED TO PAINT SOME 13,000 YEARS AGO

2011-11-25T11:14:00.001-08:00

Research indicates young children expressed themselves in an ancient form of finger-painting. And, just as in modern homes, their early efforts were given pride of place on the living room wall. A Cambridge University conference on the archaeology of childhood reveals a tantalizing glimpse into life for children in the palaeolithic age, an estimated 13,000 years ago.

Archaeologists at one of the most famous prehistoric decorated caves in France, the complex of caverns at Rouffignac in the Dordogne known as the Cave of a Hundred Mammoths, have discovered that children were actively helped to express themselves through finger fluting - running fingers over soft red clay to produce decorative crisscrossing lines, zig-zags and swirls. The stunning drawings, including 158 depictions of mammoths, 28 bisons, 15 horses, 12 goats, 10 woolly rhinoceroses, four human figures and one bear, form just a small proportion of the art found within the five-mile cave system.

The majority of the drawings are flutings covering the walls and roofs of the many galleries and passages in the complex. One chamber is so rich in flutings by children it is believed to be an area set aside for them. The marks of four children, estimated to be aged between two and seven, have been identified there. "It suggests it was a special place for children. Adults were there, but the vast majority of artwork is by children," said Jess Cooney, a PhD student at the university's archaeology department.

The presence of children's art was first revealed in 2006 by archaeologists Leslie Van Gelder, of Walden University, in the US, and her husband Kevin Sharpe. Cooney, working alongside Van Gelder, has spent two years analyzing
the presence of the hunter-gatherer offspring. Flutings thought to be by a five-year-old girl are the most prolific
throughout the cave system. Work by four adults has also been identified, though it is possible there were two further adults present. The juxtaposition of the flutings of individuals indicate the relationships between the cave dwellers, the researchers say. For example, the markings show that one seven-year-old girl was most often in the company of the smallest of the adults, probably a male and possibly an older brother.

"Some of the children's flutings are high up on walls and on the ceilings, so they must have been held up to make them or have been sitting on someone's shoulders," said Cooney. Flutings by the two-year-old suggest the child's hand was guided by an adult. Cooney said: "The flutings and fingers are very controlled, which is highly unusual for a child of that age, and suggests it was being taught. The research shows us that children were everywhere, even in the deepest, darkest, caves, furthest from the entrance. They were so involved in the art you really begin to question how heavily they were involved in everyday life. Cooney said the object of her research was "to allow prehistoric children to
have a voice", because so much archaeological study focused on men's activities.

"What I found in Rouffignac is that the children are screaming from the walls to be heard. Their presence is everywhere. And there is a five-year-old girl constantly shouting: 'I wanna paint, I wanna paint'."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/30/stone-age-toddlers-art-lessons

EXCAVATIONS AT MES AYNAK UNEARTHING TREASURES BUT SITS UPON A COPPER MINE THAT CHINA AIMS TO EXPLOIT

2011-11-20T08:50:00.001-08:00

The gold still glistened after a more than 1,000 years underground; the gemstones glinted at their first touch of sunlight, undimmed by a millennium in the dirt. “It’s a necklace,” said a Polish archaeologist breathless with excitement. “They’ve found a gold necklace!”

As the fine grey sand of Afghanistan’s sun-bleached mountains was gently sieved away, there was treasure in the pan: tiny golden orbs adorned with even smaller gold beads, tulip-shaped pendants no bigger than a fingernail, red gemstones and swirling gold bowls, like acorn lids. Next to them were two spoons and a brooch made of copper, green from corrosion, and two copper hairpins embellished with gold.

Excavations at Mes Aynak have already unearthed three Buddhist monasteries and an ancient copper mine replete with statues, coins, reliefs and murals – which is more than enough to secure its place as one of the most significant archaeological digs in a generation.

Yet last week’s discovery was the first time since archaeologists started work in 2009 that anyone has found jewelery in the mountains, 35km south of Kabul, and with at least three more monasteries still to be explored, Afghan officials hope the discoveries will elevate Mes Aynak into the archaeological pantheon, alongside Tillya Tepe, home of the Bactrian hoard. The archaeological remains in Logar province date from the 1st to the 7th centuries; first settled by the Khushan dynasty and eventually abandoned by the Hephtalites, with the advent of Islam to Afghanistan.

“The gold, the wall paintings, the statues all suggest that the inhabitants of the site were quite wealthy,” said Hans Curvers, leading archeologist on site. “Not a surprise when you live in the place were the Khushan empire mines, its main financial resources.” But the treasure is both a blessing and a burden for the Afghan government, which is desperate to start exploiting its minerals as a source of income.

The archaeological sites sit directly on top of a world class copper deposit which a Chinese state mining company paid $3 billion (£1.9bn) to acquire, in 2008. It was Afghanistan’s largest foreign investment, and allegedly came with a $30m bribe to the then minister of mines. The Afghan government hopes to earn up to $350m a year in royalties – equivalent to 20 per cent of Kabul’s tax revenue – once the mine is operational, but recently agreed a 12-month delay, to give the archaeologists more time.

“The artifacts are right on top of the copper,” said Nasir Ahmad Durrani, deputy minister of mines. “Unless we remove them we can’t get to the mine.” The government has also spent $6.5m clearing Soviet-era landmines from the site. “The landmines and artifacts amounted to a force majeure,” Mr Durrani added. “The original timelines didn’t take into account the realities on the ground … but we believe that by 2014 we will be able to start commercial production.”

Western officials are less sure. The Chinese have improved the road to the mine and built a camp to house their workers but they are yet to start work on the railway or the power station, stipulated in their contract, which they will need to purify the copper and then export it. Omar Sultan, the deputy minister of culture, said he was confident the archaeologists would excavate the areas in immediate danger before the Chinese “start blowing it up”.

“We are not going to let anybody destroy our culture and I haven’t seen any intention to go and do that from the Chinese or anybody else,” he said.

He hopes to relocate the monasteries, block by block, in a purpose-built museum nearby.

“This was a crossroads of civilizations,” he said. “We have a cultural heritage that doesn’t just belong to Afghanistan. It belongs to all of humanity.”

ALEXANDER THE GREAT MONUMENTS IN SHAMBLES -- ACCORDING TO PAKISTANI REPORT

2011-11-20T08:40:00.001-08:00

The historical monuments including the Fort of Mong, which relate Mandi Bahauddin region to before the Christ era, are in a shambles and urgently need to be revived to keep alive the relics of Alexander the Great in Pakistan, The Nation has learned.

Mong village has a few signs of the fort of Raja Porus that fought a formidable battle against Alexander the Great. The battle is counted as the last heroic fight of the Macedonian king. Alexander, after conquering states of Afgania and Asia of that time, encamped on the northern bank of the river Jal which has been renamed as River Jhelum near Harranpur in district Jhelum.

He came to know about King Porus and he sent a messenger to call upon him to give in to his empire and accept his lordship else be ready against all the odds. However, Raja refused to bow down before the threats and got ready to face the challenge.

The Porus army led by the son of Porus anticipated the Macedonian men in Khewa village on the southern bank of the River Jhelum which was called by the Greeks as Hydaspes. The fight is remembered as the ‘Battle of Hydaspes’ but locally as the ‘Battle of Jhelum’. It was fought in 326 BC and more than 4,000 elephants also participated.

On the first day of the heroic battle, Prince Harsy Roy, the son of Raja Porus, was killed and the beloved horse of Alexander the Great was wounded by one of the Porus arrows as the famous Hollywood film ‘Alexander” also shows the scene. Although Porus was supported by elephants, 300 chariots, 4,000 cavalry, 3,000 infantry, yet he could not compete with the force of Alexander and was defeated and arrested.

When he was presented before the Macedonian King who triumphantly asked Raja, ‘How do you expect to be treated’, Porus replied, “As a king ought to be.” The reply impressed Alexander and he forgave the Raja and returned his wealth and state to him.

This historical event is an unforgettable chapter in world history. However, the Pakistani government's apathy is destroying the historic monuments related to the fighters. Alexander set up three towns at that time in Mandi Bahauddin. Nicacaea (victory) was given to present Mong; Bucephalus and Helena were set up in the memory of his horse Phalia and Helen of Troy respectively. The Nation reports that nothing has been done to keep alive these monumental places.

PREHISTORIC ART SITE IN SOUTHERN EGYPT DISCOVERED ALMOST 50 YEARS AGO NOW BEING DATED

2011-11-20T08:29:00.001-08:00

A Canadian archeologist is being credited — nearly 50 years after the fact — with discovering a prehistoric petroglyph site in southern Egypt that is now being described as a "Lascaux-on-the-Nile" because of its similarity in age and style to France's world-famous, cave-wall gallery of Stone Age cattle, deer and horses.The inscribed Egyptian images of extinct wild oxen, hippopotami, fish, gazelle and other animals — now firmly dated to a time in the late Pleistocene era at least 15,000 years ago — are being hailed as the oldest rock art in North Africa and as a pivotal discovery in the evolution of artistic behavior by ancient humans.

It has taken nearly a half-century for experts to obtain a reliable age for the animal figures, which number close to 200 and are found etched into a sandstone cliff high above the banks of the Nile River at Qurta, about 600 kilometers southeast of Cairo. That's where the young Canadian scientist Philip Smith — a University of Toronto archeologist from Fortune, N.L. — was working in 1962 and 1963 as part of a federally sponsored series of "rescue" digs aimed at preserving traces of ancient Egyptian settlements before their potential destruction from the building of the Aswan Dam. Smith, who went on to a distinguished 40-year career at the University of Montreal, was probing an archeological site from thousands of years before the Egyptian pyramids were built when he "accidentally" discovered the carvings at Qurta.

Now 84 and long retired from archeological field work, Smith told Postmedia News that he remembers scrambling up the cliffs to take a photograph of a dig site on the plain below when he suddenly spied scores of animals carved into the rocks. "They were everywhere on the rock," Smith said. "But we weren't able to date it directly. At that time there was no way of dating art on the cliffs themselves." He recalls, though, that he "speculated that it was certainly pre-pharaohnic — before the pharaohs — and probably pre-neolithic, before the introduction of agriculture. But, of course, I wasn't able to go much further back than that."

Years passed. Then decades. No further study of the Qurta animal engravings was carried out, and even knowledge of their whereabouts was lost to a younger generation of scientists. Then, about five years ago, Belgian archeologists working on paleolithic sites in Egypt found evidence of prehistoric rock art at a different site and began a broader study that turned up the Canadian research at Qurta from the early 1960s. That led to the latest research on the Qurta carvings, to be published in the December edition of the journal Antiquity by a team of scientists from Belgium and the U.S.

They used a process called "optically stimulated luminescence" to test the wind-blown sediments accumulated on the etchings to determine the last time the most deeply buried grains of sand were exposed to sunlight. Their study pegs the creation of the artwork at between 15,000 and 19,000 years ago. That places the Egyptian carvings in roughly the same timeframe as the famous cave paintings of animals at Lascaux and other Ice Age sites in Europe.

"The paleolithic rock art at Qurta reveals that the well-known cave art of the late Pleistocene in Europe was not an isolated phenomenon," study co-author John Coleman Darnell, a Yale University professor of Egyptology, states in a summary of the study. "Qurta puts North Africa firmly in the world of the earliest surviving artistic tradition, and shows that tradition to have been geographically more widespread than heretofore imagined."

Read more: http://www.canada.com/technology/Long+forgotten+Canadian+find+shakes+understanding+ancient+humans/5728755/story.html#ixzz1eGPoUlWs

WHY DO WE SEE "HOMININ" INSTEAD OF "HOMINID?"

2011-11-20T08:24:00.001-08:00

If you follow news about human evolution, you’ve probably noticed that our ancestors are increasingly called hominins rather than hominids. Why the change? It’s the result of researchers revising how they classify primates.

The system of taxonomy that biologists use to categorize animals, plants, bacteria and other organisms is based on the work of the 17th-century scientist Carl Linnaeus. It consists of nested, hierarchical groups that get more and more narrow as you go down the taxonomic chain. To understand what the terms hominins and hominids mean, let’s first look at the traditional classification of modern humans.

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata (animals that have a notochord at some point in their lives; in fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, the notochord becomes the vertebral column)

Class: Mammalia

Order: Primates (lemurs, bush babies, tarsiers, monkeys, apes and humans)

Family: Hominidae (modern humans and our close extinct relatives, such as Ardipithecus and Australopithecus)

Genus: Homo

Species: sapiens

Under this system, the term hominid refers to members of the Hominidae family (in taxonomy, names that end in -idae refer to a family). But in the past few decades, the definition of Hominidae has been broadened to include orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees because of the recognition that these apes are very closely related to humans. In the past, they had their own family—Pongidae—based on the physical characteristics that seemed to unite the great apes as a group. Genetic analyses, however, indicated that gorillas and chimpanzees are actually more closely related to humans than they are to orangutans. Therefore, the Pongidae family didn’t make sense (in technical terms, it was paraphyletic). The genetic discoveries led to a new classification of humans, starting at the family level.

Family: Hominidae (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans)

Subfamily: Homininae (gorillas, chimpanzees and humans)

Tribe: Hominini (humans and our close extinct relatives; the group that was called Hominidae in the previous classification)

Genus: Homo

Species: sapiens

Here, the term hominin refers to the tribe Hominini. That’s why many of our extinct ancestors are now called hominins. But it’s not technically wrong to call them hominids—all members of Hominini are also members of the subfamily Homininae and the family Hominidae, that’s how the nesting system works. It’s just a less precise term.

At Hominid Hunting, we generally use the term hominid in the traditional sense of the word: humans and their close extinct ancestors. But rather than being old-fashioned, I think it means we’re allowed to write about chimpanzee, gorilla or orangutan evolution from time to time.

LONDON'S NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM RECEIVES CASTS OF A 1.9 MILLION YEAR OLD CREATURE

2011-11-20T08:13:00.001-08:00

This 1.9-million-year-old creature caused a sensation when the discovery of its fossil remains in South Africa was first announced in 2010. A. sediba has a curious mix of ape and human features, suggesting it could be one of our direct ancestors. "This is one of the most exciting and controversial fossil finds of recent years and it's fantastic to have this material at the museum," said Prof Ian Owens, the NHM's director of science.

"Researchers will get to work with it, but also the public will get to see it, and we hope that will really help bring the science alive," he told BBC News.

The replicas are a gift from the government of the Republic of South Africa and the University of the Witwatersrand, which is leading the investigation into the fossils. The real specimens were found at Malapa in the famous Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, just to the northwest of Johannesburg. They were pulled from a pit - a depression left in the ground by a cave complex that lost its roof through erosion. Identified as the remains of an adult female and a juvenile male, the two individuals were quite possibly mother and son.

It seems they died together in some tragic accident that saw them either fall into the cave complex or become stuck in it. After death, their bodies were washed into a pool and cemented in time along with the skeletons of many other animals - sabre-tooth cats, hyenas, antelope, even birds and mice. "All of this accumulation happened very, very quickly - in a few days, weeks or months," said lead researcher Prof Lee Berger of the Institute for Human Evolution at Wits University. "Once we've completed this project, we're going to be able to show a texture of a moment in time that we have never seen before except in maybe the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the burial of Pompeii."

Scientists are now engaged in an intense debate over the status of A. sediba in the story of our origins.

Prof Berger and his colleagues say the creature's mix of ancient and modern traits probably makes it central to that story. They propose that A. sediba could even sit on, or very close to, the line that led directly to us - modern humans (Homo sapiens). Other scientists remain to be convinced, and argue too little is known about the diversity of ancient human forms this far back in time to make any bold statements. What is not in doubt is the remarkable preservation of the fossils, which includes a stunning articulated hand. The hand of a female with nearly all its bones In something of a coup for the NHM, the replicas have copies of bones not yet described in the scientific literature - a knee bone, vertebrae, and fragments of lower jaw from the female.

So good was the process of fossilisation at Malapa that more finds are sure to follow. It is expected that many of the parts missing from the existing skeletons will be unearthed at some point, along with the bones of other A. sediba individuals. "We have not excavated yet but we can see at least four others," said Prof Berger. "There's a baby that may be about 18 months of age based on the arm we can see. There's probably another juvenile. There's probably another two adults."

SOUTH AFRICA CAVE REVEALS 100,000 YEAR OLD PAINT POT

2011-10-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

Archaeologists have excavated a 100,000-year-old paint pot including all tools an ancient artist needed in the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Researchers discovered red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to mix up a paste, MailOnline reported.

“This discovery represents an important benchmark in the evolution of complex human cognition,” said head of the archaeology team Professor Christopher Henshilwood, from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. “It shows humans had the conceptual ability to source, combine and store substances that were then possibly used to enhance their social practices,” he added.

Researchers claim that the tool kits were evidence of early technological development, rudimentary knowledge of chemistry and long-term planning. The findings indicate that humans were certainly thinking in a modern, cognitively-advanced way. “It's possible the paint was used to paint bodies, human skin. It could have been used to paint designs on leather or other objects,” Henshilwood stated.

The southern Cape Coast cave, situated 200 miles east of Cape Town, has been attracting scientists with a plethora of treasures since the early 1990s.

LIBYA'S ANCIENT TREASURES -- NOW WHAT?

2011-10-29T11:06:00.000-07:00

About 5 years ago I visited Libya on an Archaeological Institute of America tour. Even then we were concerned about the lack of conservation of some wonderful Greek and Roman sites. We had to walk right on top of stunning mosaics so I was most interested in the following:

Libya's ancient treasures have so far largely survived civil war intact, but with the death of Muammar Gaddafi they could be at greater risk than ever from looters and unrest, the U.N. cultural agency said on Friday. Speaking at a conference on safeguarding Libya's heritage, UNESCO chief Irina Bokova warned delegates that death of Muammar Gaddafi could herald a risk to Libyan treasures just as thousands of archaeological pieces vanished after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Conquered by most of the civilizations that held sway over the Mediterranean, Libya has a rich legacy that includes five sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List, such as the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna and the ancient Phoenician trading post of Sabratha. According to a fact-finding mission that went to Libya in September to assess the damage inflicted from the seven-month conflict, many of the country's accessible treasures have survived unscathed thanks in part to UNESCO providing the NATO-led alliance with geographic coordinates of key cultural sites. So far, Libya has only seen one major theft -- a collection of 8,000 coins and other precious aritifacts -- whose disappearance Bokova described as a "natural disaster."

The coastal country has all the makings for a vibrant tourism business with warm weather, beaches, antiquities and proximity to Europe -- all factors that helped its neighbors build thriving tourism industries. But unlike Tunisia and Egypt's antiquities, which millions of tourists visit each year, Libya's treasures have been seen by few foreigners since Gaddafi's 1969 revolution. Tourism could help Libya diversify its economy away from dependency on oil and gas.

"To pick oneself up and reconcile, the Libyan people will now need to count on their strongest assets," Bokova said. "World heritage sites, and more generally its cultural sites and wealth, are part of its engine of reconstruction." The new government needs to inform its people about their cultural heritage, said Hafed Walda, a Libyan who advises the country's department of antiquities and was part of the recent mission.

"Libyans aren't really aware of the importance of their heritage and it's up to the new government to make them understand the splendor of their country from the Sahara to the Mediterranean ... the true Libyan identity," he said.

"FOODPRINTS" HELP REVEAL WHAT OUR ANCESTORS ATE

2011-10-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

If the eyes are the romantic's window to the soul, then teeth are the anthropologist's trick door to the stomach.

Scientists have relied on the size and shape of teeth and skulls to figure out what our early human ancestors ate on a regular basis; certain teeth appear ideal for grinding nuts and seeds, while others seem to have evolved for slicing meat or leaves. Now two researchers have taken this approach a step further, examining the microscopic wear and tear on individual teeth to see what different hominins, like members of Australopithecus, Paranthropus and our own genus, Homo, were really munching on. Think of these markings as "foodprints" that reveal evidence of an individual's last few meals.

As it turns out, many of these early human ancestors bit off a lot more than we thought they could chew. Paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas explains the work he did with Matt Sponheimer of the University of Colorado at Boulder, which was published this month in the journal Science.

We're trying to understand the ecology of human ancestors: what they did for a living, how they interacted with their environment. We wanted to know what the actual behavior of our ancestors was. But then we looked at the microscopic wear on the teeth. It's like a footprint — certain foods cause scratches, certain foods cause pits. The pattern of wear tells you about the foods. Then we look at the chemistry of the teeth — in particular the carbon — which is the result of the foods you eat. Different kinds of foods have different kinds of carbon. For example, if you look at grasses — tropical grasses and sedges have one kind of carbon, but trees and bushes have a different kind of carbon because they each have a different kind of photosynthesis.

The best example is not with a direct human ancestor but one of our near cousins, called Paranthropus. There are different species of Paranthropus, and we looked at two of them: one from southern Africa and one from eastern Africa. Like us, they walked on two legs when on the ground, and their brains were a bit larger than chimpanzees'. We used to believe they were dietary specialists because they had big crests on their skulls, which would have anchored large chewing muscles, and big teeth. We thought these animals ate nuts, fruits and seeds. So for the microscopic wear on the teeth, if these were hard-object specialists their teeth should be pitted-up like the moon. Also, their carbon should be a particular type that typically comes from tree products, such as nuts and seeds. But when we looked at eastern African Paranthropus, it was nothing like that. The teeth had a different kind of carbon, and they were loaded with scratches, not pits. It looks like they were specializing on grass, not nuts and fruit seeds. So it was the exact opposite of what we expected to find.

How will this change the way we study ancient diets? It's a completely new and different way of looking at these things. It's thinking about ecology rather than old dry bones — thinking about the animals as they were in life. This tells us what different species were eating. So can this reveal what the environment looked like back then? Absolutely. Sponheimer and I have been working on rodents — they're great at fossil human sites because they live in a small area and their diets are very influenced by their environments. So if a bunch of rodents are loaded up on the kind of carbon in tropical grasses and they're in the same place as a human ancestor, we know that human ancestor lived in a tropical grassland.

FIRST FULLY INTACT VIKING BOAT UNCOVERED IN BRITAIN DATING TO ABOUT 1,000 AD

2011-10-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

The UK mainland's first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been uncovered in the west Highlands, archaeologists have said. The site, at Ardnamurchan, is thought to be more than 1,000 years old. Artifacts buried alongside the Viking in his boat suggest he was a high-ranking warrior. Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb from the University of Manchester said the "artifacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain". She has been excavating artifacts in Ardnamurchan for six years. The universities of Manchester, Leicester, Newcastle and Glasgow worked on, identified, or funded the excavation. Archaeology Scotland and East Lothian-based CFA Archaeology have also been involved in the project which led to the find.

The term "fully-intact", used to describe the find, means the remains of the body along with objects buried with it and evidence of the boat used were found and recovered. The Ardnamurchan Viking was found buried with an axe, a sword with a decorated hilt, a spear, a shield boss and a bronze ring pin. About 200 rivets - the remains of the boat he was laid in - were also found. Previously, boat burials in such a condition have been excavated at sites on Orkney. Other finds in the 5m-long (16ft) grave in Ardnamurchan included a knife, what could be the tip of a bronze drinking horn, a whetstone from Norway, a ring pin from Ireland and Viking pottery.

The finds were made as part of the Ardnamurchan Transition Project (ATP) which has been examining social change in the area from the first farmers 6,000 years ago to the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries. Viking specialist Dr Colleen Batey, from the University of Glasgow, has said the boat was likely to be from the 10th Century AD.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-15333852
video at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15359061

STONE TOOLS UNCOVERED IN BAJA CALIFORNIA DATED BETWEEN 8-9,000 YEARS OLD

2011-10-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

A team of Mexican archaeologists has discovered hundreds of
rudimentary man-made tools and artifacts dating back to the Early Holocene
era (between 8,000-11,000 years ago) in the northwestern state of Baja
California Sur, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH,
said.

The objects were found at an archaeological site known as El Coyote, located
in the Los Cabos region, the INAH said, adding that they "bolster the
hypothesis" that the first colonists of the hemisphere populated the region
via watercraft migration, following coastlines from northeast Asia southward
into the Americas.

The researchers found cut and polished seashells, fishing devices and stone
tools used for cutting and scraping (choppers, percussive devices, planes,
scrapers and knives) that date back between 8,600 and 9,300 years.

Those tools were used to work with plant fibers and wood, as well as for
prying open mollusk shells.

Archaeologists have found similar artifacts in that region over the past
three years, leading them to believe that the first settlers of the Americas
moved down the coast and arrived what is today known as the Baja California
peninsula.

Human skeletons have not yet been discovered and therefore it is "impossible
to know to which ethnic group (the inhabitants of El Coyote) belonged," the
INAH said.
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/entertainment/2011/10/20/mexican-archaeologists-find-000-year-old-tools/

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINE BACKGROUND ILLUMINATED BY A LOCK OF HAIR

2011-09-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

A lock of hair, collected by a British anthropologist a century ago, has yielded the first genome of an Australian Aborigine, along with insights into the earliest migration from the ancestral human homeland somewhere in northeast Africa. The Aboriginal genome bolsters earlier genetic evidence showing that once the Aborigines’ ancestors arrived in Australia, some 50,000 years ago, they somehow kept the whole continent to themselves without admitting any outsiders.

The Aborigines are thus direct descendants of the first modern humans to leave Africa, without any genetic mixture from other races so far as can be seen at present. Their dark skin reflects an African origin and a migration and residence in latitudes near the equator, unlike Europeans and Asians whose ancestors gained the paler skin necessary for living in northern latitudes. “Aboriginal Australians likely have one of the oldest continuous population histories outside sub-Saharan Africa today,” say the researchers who analyzed the hair, a group led by Eske Willerslev of the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

Dr. Willerslev is an expert at working with ancient DNA, which is usually highly fragmented. Use of the ancient hair reduced the possibility of mixture with European genes and sidestepped the political difficulties of obtaining DNA from living Aborigines. The DNA in the Aboriginal genome, when compared with DNA from other peoples around the world, shows that when modern humans first migrated out of Africa the ancestors of the Aborigines split away from the main group very early, and before Europeans and East Asians split from each other, Dr. Eske and his colleagues write in an article published online Thursday in the journal Science. Based on the rate of mutation in DNA, the geneticists estimate that the Aborigines split from the ancestors of all Eurasians some 70,000 years ago, and that the ancestors of Europeans and East Asians split from each other about 30,000 years ago.

The Aborigine occupation of Australia presents a series of puzzles, starting with the nature of their stone tools. The early stone tools found in Australia are much simpler than the Upper Paleolithic tools that appear in Europe at the same era. “I don’t understand why they looked so primitive,” said Richard Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University. Primitive as the tools may be, the first inhabitants of Australia must have possessed advanced boat-building technology to cross from the nearest point in Asia to Sahul, the ancient continent that included Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania until the rise of sea level that occurred at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. But there is no archaeological evidence for boats, Dr. Klein said.

Despite the Aborigines’ genetic isolation, there is evidence of some profound cultural exchange that occurred around 6,000 years ago. The stone tools become more sophisticated, and the population increased. The Aborigines did not domesticate plants or animals, but a wild dog, the dingo, first appears in the archaeological record at this time. Researchers led by Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm reported this month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that they had traced the spread of the dingo across the islands of the Pacific by analyzing ancient DNA in the bones of Polynesian dogs. The dingo originated on the Asian mainland and became part of the Polynesian domestic menagerie along with the pig, the chicken and the rat. This ensemble had reached New Zealand by A.D. 1250. How the dingo arrived in Australia is an “enigma,” Dr. Savolainen writes, because none of the other elements of Polynesian culture are found there. Even stranger, dogs always travel with their masters, yet there is no sign yet of Polynesian genes in the Aborigine population.

Most of Australia is a forbidding desert, and this barrier may have been the downfall of most invasions, whether of people or of animals, Dr. Klein said. The ancestors of the Aborigines were lucky enough to find their way south, where there is more vegetation, and the dingo is a skillful hunter, able to look after itself. But this leaves unexplained the cultural changes that began around or shortly after the dingo’s arrival. “Something remarkable happened in Australia 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, and it involved much more than the dingo,” Dr. Klein said.

LA COTTE ON JERSEY HAS EXCEPTIONAL LONG TERM RECORD OF NEANDERTHAL BEHAVIOR

2011-09-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

The site at La Cotte de St Brelade reveals a near-continuous use of the cave site spanning over a quarter of a million years, suggesting a considerable success story in adapting to a changing climate and landscape, prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens.

The La Cotte ravine has revealed the most prolific collection of early Neanderthal technology in North West Europe, including over 250,000 stone tools. These include stones with sharpened edges that could be used to cut or chop, known as hand axes. The huge amounts of carefully manufactured tools show just how
technologically skilled early Neanderthal groups were.

"The artifacts from the site don't just tell us about what people were doing at the site itself, but throughout the landscapes that are now underneath the channel,"
continues Dr Scott. "Neanderthals were traveling to Jersey already equipped with good quality flint tools, then reworking them, very, very carefully so as not to waste anything. They were extremely good at recycling."

La Cotte's collapsed cave system contains intact ice age sediments spanning a quarter of a million years, revealing a detailed sequence of Neanderthal
occupation and occasional abandonment, against a background of changing climate. "The site is the most exceptional long-term record of Neanderthal behavior
in North West Europe," says Dr Matt Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.

HAND AXES MADE BY HOMO ERECTUS 1.8 MYA (300,000 YEARS EARLIER THAN PREVIOUS DATE)

2011-09-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, atleast 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, published this week in Nature, raises new questions about where these tall and slenderearly humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-makingtechnology.Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 yearsago. Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found, but the discovery in the 1990s ofequally old Homo erectus fossils in the country of Georgia has led others to suggest an Asian origin. The study in Nature does not resolve the debate butadds new complexity. At 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus in Dmanisi, Georgia was still using simple chopping tools while in West Turkana, Kenya, according to the study, the population had developed hand axes, picks and other innovative tools that anthropologists call "Acheulian.""The Acheulian tools represent a great technological leap," said study co-author Dennis Kent, a geologist with joint appointments at Rutgers University and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Why didn't Homo erectus take these tools with them to Asia?"In the summer of 2007, a team of French and American researchers traveled to Kenya's Lake Turkana in Africa's Great Rift Valley, where earth's plates aretearing apart and some of the earliest humans first appear. Anthropologist Richard Leakey's famous find--Turkana Boy, a Homo erectus teenager who livedabout 1.5 million years ago-was excavated on Lake Turkana's western shore and is still the most complete early human skeleton found so far.Six miles from Turkana Boy, the researchers headed for Kokiselei, an archaeological site where both Acheulian and simpler "Oldowan" tools had been found earlier. Their goal: to establish the age of the tools by dating the surrounding sediments. Past flooding in the area had left behind layers of silt and clay that hardened into mudstone, preserving the direction of Earth's magnetic field at the time in the stone's magnetite grains. The researchers chiseled away chunks of the mudstone at Kokiselei to later analyze the periodic polarity reversals and come up with ages. At Lamont-Doherty's Paleomagnetics Lab, they compared the magnetic intervals with other stratigraphic records to date the archeological site to 1.76 million years."We suspected that Kokiselei was a rather old site, but I was taken aback when I realized that the geological data indicated it was the oldest Acheulian site in the world," said the study's lead author, Christopher Lepre, a geologist. The oldest Acheulian tools previously identified appear in Konso, Ethiopia, about 1.4 million years ago, and India, between 1.5 million and 1 million years ago.The Acheulian tools at Kokiselei were found just above a sediment layer associated with a polarity interval called the "Olduvai Subchron." It is named after Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, where pioneering work in the 1930s by Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary, uncovered a goldmine of early human fossils. In a study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters last year, Lepre and Kent found that a well-preserved Homo erectus skull found on east side of Lake Turkana, at Koobi Fora Ridge, also sat above the Olduvai Subchroninterval, making the skull and Acheulian tools in West Turkana about the same age.The skill involved in manufacturing a hand axe suggests that Homo erectus was dexterous and able to think ahead. At Kokiselei, the presence of bothtool-making methods-Oldowan and Acheulian-- could mean that Homo erectus and its more primitive cousin Homo habilis lived at the same time, with Homoerectus carrying the Acheulian technology to the Mediterranean region about a million years ago, the study authors hypothesize. Delson wonders if Homoerectus may have migrated to Dmanisi, Georgia, but "lost" the Acheulian technology on the way.The East African landscape that Homo erectus walked from about 2 million to 1.5 million years ago was becoming progressively drier, with savannagrasslands spreading in response to changes in the monsoon rains. "We need to understand also the ancient environment because this gives us an insightinto how processes of evolution work-how shifts in early human biology and behavior are potentially caused by changes in the climate, vegetation oranimal life that is particular to a habitat," said Lepre. The team is currently excavating a more than 2 million year old site in Kenya to learn more about the early Oldowan period. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-08/teia-hss082911.php

Libya's sites seem OK

2011-09-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

Libyan archaeologists are beginning to inspect the country's priceless historical sites, hoping part of their cultural heritage and economic future has not been ruined by war."It is the first time I go there since the war, Kadhafi's troops were inside and I want to know what happened," said Fadel Ali Mohammed, Libya's freshly appointed minister for antiquities.Setting out from the Tripoli hotel that has become his temporary home, the 62-year-old -- a doctor in archaeology and Greek philology -- begins the drive west to Sabratha, one of Libya's most treasured archaeological sites. Despite multiple checkpoints armed by young volunteer militiamen, it only takes 90 minutes to get there. But it is an anxious 90 minutes for the man who is now in charge of protecting Libya's past.Slowly Old Sabratha comes into focus. First a few Corinthian columns, then the top half of its show-stopping 1,800-year-old Roman theatre, strikingly cast against the waves of the southern Mediterranean.Despite battles raging in the area just weeks ago, it appears only one light-arms skirmish took place between Moamer Kadhafi's troops and the fighters who would come to overthrow him.Mohammed, who in the 1970s spent a year in Kadhafi's jails before fleeing to Greece, scans the west side of the 5,000-capacity theatre and comes across three bullet holes he says can be easily restored. The damage assessment from world-beating sites at Leptis Magna and Cyrene to the east are equally positive. With at least three of Libya's five UNESCO sites preserved, locals hope tourists will now flock to Libya like they do to neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia."It was very difficult for tourists to come under the Kadhafi regime," said Hadi Mafuz, a Sabratha tourism official. [The Archaeological Institute of America group that I traveled with some 6 years ago was one of the few American groups allowed in Libya]I

NEW FOSSIL FIND -- SEDIBA -- SHOWS COMBINED TRAITS OF APELIKE AND HUMANLIKE FEAURES

2011-09-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

An apelike creature with human features, whose fossil bones were discovered recently in a South African cave, is being greeted by paleoanthropologists as a likely watershed in the understanding of human evolution. The discoverer of the fossils, Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, says the new species, known as Australopithecus sediba, is the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans. Several other paleoanthropologists, while disagreeing with that interpretation, say the fossils are of great importance anyway, because they elucidate the mix-and-match process by which human evolution was shaped. Dr. Berger’s claim, if accepted, would radically redraw the present version of the human family tree, placing the new fossils in the center. The new species, in his view, should dislodge Homo habilis, the famous tool-making fossil found by Louis and Mary Leakey, as the most likely bridge between the australopithecenes and the human lineage. Australopithecenes were apelike creatures that walked upright, like people, but had still not forsaken the trees. Dr. Berger and his colleagues present this claim in five articles in the current issue of Science that describe various aspects of the new fossils. As is common in the field of paleoanthropology, the discoverer of a new fossil is seeking to place it as close as possible to the direct line of human descent, while others are resisting that interpretation. The principal significance of the new fossils is not that Australopithecus sediba is necessarily the direct ancestor of the human genus, other scientists said, but rather that the fossils emphasize the richness of evolutionary experimentation within the australopithecine group. Besides two skulls reported last year, researchers led by Dr. Berger have since retrieved an almost complete right hand, a foot and a pelvis. The bones are especially well preserved because their owners apparently fell into a deep cave and a few weeks later were swept into a sediment that quickly fossilized their bones. The rocks above the cave have gradually eroded away, bringing the fossils to the surface, where one was found by Dr. Berger’s 9-year-old son, Matthew, in 2008, while chasing his dog. That fall into the cave happened 1.977 million years ago, according to dating based on the rate of decay of uranium in the rock layer that holds the fossils. In the articles in Science, Dr. Berger’s team describes novel combinations of apelike and humanlike features in the hand, foot and pelvis of the new species. The hand, for instance, is apelike because it has long, strong fingers suitable for climbing trees, yet is also humanlike in having a long thumb that in combination with the fingers could have held tools in a precision grip. A cast of the inside of the skull shows an apelike brain, but one that had taken the first step toward being reorganized on human lines. This mixture of apelike and humanlike features suggests that the new species was transitional between the australopithecines and humans, the researchers said at a news conference on Wednesday. Given its age, Australopithecus sediba is just old enough to be the ancestor of Homo erectus, the first species that paleoanthropologists agree belonged to the human ancestry and which existed 1.9 million years ago. The new fossils display the modular way in which evolution operates: they have mostly known features but in novel combinations that have never been seen before. Both Dr. Bernard Wood (George Washington U) and Dr.Ian Tattersall (American Museum of Natural History) see Dr. Berger’s discovery as pointing to the great variety of australopithecine apes, from which it will be very difficult to select the particular species that gave rise to humans. Dr. Tattersall believes the leap to humans may have been brought about very suddenly, perhaps by a few critical genetic changes, which is why the transition is so hard to trace in the fossil record.

EXCAVATIONS IN KENYA SHEDDING LIGHT ON EARLY TOOL MAKING AND HABITATS

2011-08-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

A team of scientists at the site of Olorgesailie in the East African Rift Valley of south central Kenya, Africa, are uncovering stone tools and geological clues that may hold some answers as well as raise new questions about the evolution of early human stone toolmaking and use and the environment in which the early humans lived up to 1.2 million years ago.

Led by Dr. Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program and in conjunction with the National Museums of Kenya, the current efforts involve a multidisciplinary team of scientists focusing on two separate but related sites in the Olorgesailie region that have recently produced abundant evidence of early human activity likely associated with Homo erectus, an extinct ancestral human that lived in the area between 1.2 and 490,000 years ago, and later early human activity that produced a more sophisticated industry of stone tools.

Like Olduvai Gorge, Koobi Fora, and Hadar, the Olorgesailie region has long been a focus of research related to human origins. Featuring ancient sediments laid down and altered or formed over millions of years as a result of geologic activity associated with the surrounding Rift Valley as well as shifting climates, its exposed sediment beds have yielded an abundance of fossils and stone tools.
that have afforded scientists a rich array of data for studying the
emergence and habitat of these early humans.

Olorgesailie is most noted for the numerous Acheulean stone handaxes, defining one of the largest single assemblages of handaxes in the world. In addition, in June of 2003, a team led by Potts discovered a human frontal skull bone dated to between 900,000 and 970,000 years old, identified as classifiable to Homo erectus. It was
found about 1.5 km from deposits of stone handaxes found in the same layer as the fossil discovery.

Working in the shadow of an ancient volcano a short distance from their field camp, the research team has been uncovering a wealth of stone artifacts and fossil remains of animals that they hope will give them a clearer picture of life for the early humans that walked this terrain and managed to survive or adapt to a fluctuating climate and geological landscape.

One site, an elephant butchery site where 990,000-year-old fossilized elephant bones have been excavated (referred to as Site 15), yielded not only fossilized bones with cut marks, but also more than 2300 stone tools surrounding the bones. More recently, the fossil bones of zebra and antelope, as well as stone flakes, boulders and hand-sized hammerstones (stones with depressions) were found at the site. Study of phytoliths (microscopic fossilized plant remains) found embedded on the hammerstones
revealed that they were used as anvils for crushing plants, possibly for eating. Overall analysis of the finds at this site has revealed that it may have been a drying wetland environment of reeds and other marsh plants where early humans found animals to butcher for their meat and bone marrow.

The second site, called "BOK-2" has yielded Middle Stone Age (MSA) stone points found within younger layers dating from 493,000 to 220,000 years ago. The most
recent excavation there in July, 2011 uncovered more than 150 stone artifacts concentrated in a one meter square -- the densest assemblage ever found at this site. MSA stone tools are considered to be representative of a more sophisticated and diverse stone tool technology characterized by small obsidian points and retouched flakes, a package of implements that enabled greater effectiveness and efficiency in the early human hunt for and preparation of food.

These discoveries are considered significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they seem to predate similar MSA stone tool assemblages found in other parts of Africa and the world that are dated to around 285,000 to 125,000 years ago. More surprising still were excavations at Olorgesailie in 2010 at a 625,000-year-old site, producing nearly one thousand stone tools, some of which showed evidence that early humans were striking small blades from carefully prepared stone cores, a technique not known to be generally used until the later, MSA period.

Says Potts of these finds, "they indicate that even during the handaxe period, early humans were beginning to hit upon a new way of knapping stone. This new approach to toolmaking involved making smaller flakes by carefully planning how you strike one stone against another.........So here's the question we are testing in our excavations: Could it be that stone tools in the layers at Olorgesailie tell us about the oldest known transition from handaxes to the Middle Stone Age? We'll need a lot of digging and evidence to know this for sure".[1]

Farther west of Olorgesailie, another related story has been unfolding. For the past decade, Potts has also been co-directing work at a site called Kanjera South on the Homa Peninsula, a land mass that extends off the southern shore of the Winam Gulf, part of Lake Victoria. Here, he and project leader Dr. Thomas Plummer of Queens College in New York have excavated stone tools and butchered animal bones associated with some of the oldest humans to have lived in a grassland environment, dating from 1.9 to 2.0 million years ago.

The tools belonged to the Oldowan industry, a comparatively simple stone tool technology and the earliest known stone tool system attributed to hominins. The Oldowan was first discovered during the 1930's by Louis S.B. Leakey at Olduvai Gorge. Analysis of the variety of materials from which the stone tools were created provided evidence that suggested that the raw materials were obtained at distances of up to 13 kilometers from the point at which they were last deposited in the form of tools. This established the longest distance at which hominins, or early humans, have transported materials for toolmaking from one point to another.

What has distinguished these excavations perhaps more than any other in the past is this research team's "paleolandscape approach" to investigation and excavation, providing a means to place their site finds within a much broader context so that they can be understood and interpreted more meaningfully within the geologic and climatological environment within which they existed. Because of this, the stone tool artifacts and fossils become stars on a bigger stage.

The excavations and research at Olorgesailie and Kanjera South are expected to continue for years into the future, with plans to share the experience with the public through ongoing updates to the Smithsonian Human Origins Program website. Interested readers and the public are invited to read more about these specific discoveries and much more at the Smithsonian Human Origins Program's Olorgesailie Field Blog.

.

MARYLAND (US) SITE DATED TO 9,270 YEARS AGO

2011-08-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

Three years of digging at a prehistoric Indian site in Anne Arundel County has unearthed the oldest structures and human habitations in Maryland and is making this bluff above the Patuxent River one of the most important archaeological sites in the Mid-Atlantic.

Last week, archaeologists learned from carbon-14 dating that a stone hearth they uncovered this summer was last used 9,290 years ago. That makes the site, called Pig Point, twice as old as the earliest carbon-dated human habitation found previously in Maryland.

Yet the carbon-14 date is just the latest in a series of extraordinary discoveries at the South County site that are drawing the interest of archaeologists from throughout the region.

Beginning in 2009, the team led by Anne Arundel County archaeologist Al Luckenbach has found oval patterns of wigwam post holes dating from 800 to 3,000 years ago, the oldest human structures ever found in Maryland.

They have found highly decorated pottery, tools of stone and bone, personal ornaments, copper beads from the Great Lakes, exotic tools and ceramics from the Ohio and Delaware valleys, fossil shark teeth from Southern Maryland and shells from the ocean beaches.

Luckenbach's team is still finding evidence of human occupations from the Early Archaic period, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago. As they dig even deeper into the bluff, and back in time, the next period they would reach is the "Paleo Indian" or "Clovis" time, roughly 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. Last year, neighbors showed Luckenbach several fluted Clovis spear points they picked up in a field at the foot of the bluff. So his team is now on the lookout for more Paleo-Indian artifacts in their excavations, finds they could document and date.

Setting aside the extraordinary artifacts, archaeologists say Pig Point is most unique and valuable because of its nearly 10,000-year record of continuous human habitation. At Pig Point, the tools, ceramics, food waste and traces of wigwams have
been repeatedly buried by fresh deposits of soil, probably washed down from higher on the bluff. That has left a continuous record, 6 or 7 feet deep, with the oldest occupations at the bottom of the layer cake, and the most recent at the top. And carbon-14 dates from many of the 13 layers have confirmed their ages. "The whole sequence [of C-14 dates] fit the way they should," Curry said. "It's very clear that the 6 feet of sediment is undisturbed."

Based on the unique and exotic artifacts he's recovered at Pig Point, Luckenbach believes the area may have been an important junction for trade, cultural and perhaps religious exchange between the Ohio Valley and the Atlantic coast, and still other cultures to the north and south.

Despite financial woes at both the state and county levels, the work has continued for three seasons, funded by Anne Arundel County and grants from the Maryland Historical Trust, as well as private donations. County staff, volunteers and college interns from at least four states have dug two days a week, every week, from April to the first frost.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-pig-point-archaeology-20110814,0,3824207.story

ROMAN AMPHITHEATER FOUND NEAR YORK IN NORTHERN ENGLAND

2011-08-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

The lost amphitheater of northern England has been found on a Yorkshire hilltop in a discovery with major implications for the study of Roman Britain.

Centuries of speculation have ended with a printout from geomagnetic scanners which reveals a great tiered bank of seats below curving hummocks in a field now frequented only by a herd of cattle. Crowning the summit of Studforth Hill, the oval arena would have combined spectacles and entertainments with a magnificent 360-degree view, making it the equivalent of a national theater of the north.

The find by Cambridge University archaeologists – led by a young woman who grew up locally and was told the amphitheater legend by her grandfather – seals the importance in Roman times of the small village of Aldborough, between Harrogate and York.

It also adds to growing evidence that Britannia Inferior, as the northern province was known, was busier, more prosperous and cultured than previously thought. There have been a relative shortage of digs and studies of civilian sites in the area, compared with hundreds in Britannia Superior, today's south.

"Its discovery leaves little doubt that Isurium Brigantium, as Aldborough was called in Roman times, was the civil capital of the Britons known as Brigantes, effectively the population between Derbyshire and Hadrian's Wall," said Martin Millett, professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge.

The sweeping curve of the amphitheatre, which crowns a long series of discoveries at Aldborough, lay hidden because of changing fashions in archaeology, shortage of money for excavations and pressure for resources to go elsewhere.

The breakthrough came with geomagnetic and ground radar in which more than a square mile of cottages and pasture were turned into a grid, which Ferraby, Millett and volunteer students paced with handheld scanners and others examined on a machine akin to a lawnmower. They called locals to a packed meeting this week to announce the amphitheater had at last been tracked down.

Most of the tiered seats were quarried or hacked out centuries ago, but the high bank which forms the crown of Studforth Hill hides the surviving section. The geomagnetic scan detected a large mass of material and then tiering, which is crudely reflected by ridges in the grassy surface until it disappears under a small copse.

"We don't yet know whether the seats are stone, which would have been the best quality, or a mixture of timber and compacted earth which has been found at other sites in the UK," said Ferraby. "But there are at least four rows and an extra ridge of land behind the trees suggests that there may have been a fifth. Whatever the material, it would have been an imposing building."

The Cambridge team is now completing its geophysical survey of the Roman town's entire site, which will be analyzed for possible excavation points, possibly including the amphitheater, if funding can be found.

EXCITING NEWS ABOUT ROCK ART IN THE SOUTHWEST --PETROGLYPHS OF MAMMOTHS FOUND IN UTAH

2011-08-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

Rock art specialists Ekkehart Malotki and Henry Wallace report the discovery of portrayals of mammoths and a possible bison at the Upper Sand Island rock art site along the San Juan River in southeastern Utah (USA), most likely dating between 13,000 and 11,000 BP (before present). Until now, no unambiguously ancient rock art imagery of Ice Age megafauna has been found in North America.

The now generally accepted notion is that there were multiple waves of immigrants prior to Clovis (circa 13,500 BP). Icons of the Ice Age, mammoths were extinct at the latest by 10,800 BP. However, most ancient recognizable and datable art in the American West is almost exclusively non-iconic, with a overwhelming bias for abstract-geometric motifs.

The Upper Sand Island rock art site extends intermittently for several hundred meters along the vertical Navajo Sandstone cliffs bordering the flood-plain of the San Juan River. Consisting exclusively of petroglyphs, the site was first recorded in 1985. With the exception of a brief paper, none of the different rock art styles, occurring in multiple clusters at the site, have been described. The image of one supposed mammoth was known to some archaeologists and rock art enthusiasts, but because of its difficult access - on a vertical cliff face several meters above ground level - it was never scientifically investigated and its authenticity remained in question.

The lines of the mammoth and bison images are both pecked and ground. Some portions of the design follow natural microscopic fissures in the cliff face. That the artist chose this location, and drew the most diagnostic portions of the creature following a natural feature of the rock, demonstrates that the artist saw the likeness of the mammoth in the rock prior to making the image.

Closely associated with the mammoth is a much larger image that suggests a bison, which partially overlaps the dorsal ridge of the underlying mammoth. Their placement some 5m above the remnants of an ancient gravel bar, which in turn rises an additional 7 to 8m above the current floodplain, betrays the panel's deep antiquity. At the time of its manufacture, the artist's access to the rock face must have been facilitated by a considerably higher ground level.

The authentication of two petroglyph depictions of mammoths along Utah's San Juan River clearly confirms the consensus of Late Pleistocene researchers that Paleo-american humans lived side by side with now-extinct megafauna in the fossil- and archaeologically-rich region of south-eastern Utah.

Edited from Rock Art Research, 2011 - Volume 28, Number 2
http://www.stonepages.com/docs/malotki-wallace.pdf
[13 images]

IOWA (USA) 7,000 YEAR OLD SITE UNCOVERED

2011-08-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

University of Iowa archaeologists announced the discovery of a 7,000-year-old archaeological site in Des Moines (Iowa, USA). The site, nicknamed 'the Palace' because of its size and preservation, yielded the remains of two humans, a woman and an infant, that are the oldest human bones to be found in the state.

"This site is important because it was intensively occupied and very quickly river floods sealed the deposits and very quickly preserved items that otherwise could have been lost" according to State Archaeologist John Doershuk. Because so many items were found together at the site - archaeologists gathered more than 6,000 artifacts - it helps researchers put into context the information they learn about how the villagers lived, what they ate and how they were developing as a people, Doershuk added.

Construction work was ongoing at the site, when workers moving dirt noted charcoal and burned earth stains, Doershuk said. The Office of the State Archaeologist, was called to the site in December 2010 to monitor the work and investigate interesting findings. Archaeologists worked through May to collect as much information and as many artifacts as possible before construction work had to return to that portion of the site.

They found the remnants of four oval-shaped deposits, possibly houses, as large as 800 square feet with hearths. "It became clear very quickly that the site was something spectacular - something none of us had seen before or probably will ever again, as well-preserved house deposits of this age are extremely rare west of the Mississippi River Valley," Bill Whittaker, a project archaeologist who co-directed the dig, said.

The burial pit was discovered in March, about six or seven feet below the ground surface. Items were found in the grave along with the remains, including a spear point. The age of the site was determined by radiocarbon dating based on wood charcoal from the burial feature and also the spear point found there, by matching it to the time frame of other similar artifacts found in the Midwest, Doershuk said.

The crew also used laser technology to map more than 12,000 archaeological data points so they can develop 3-D models of the site with computer software.

"The field work is done... but we have at least a year's worth of analysis and writing and comparative work," Doershuk said. "All the artifacts will be officially stored at the archaeological depository at our office at UI, but we'll probably loan them out for display at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines and other locales.

While construction at the site continues, there is adjacent, unexcavated land that researchers believe will yield more archaeological finds, and they are working on a preservation plan.

Edited from The Gazette (18 August 2011), Press-Citizen.com (19 August 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/3ps7ngn
[1 image, 1 video]
http://tinyurl.com/3tbewpb

DENISOVIANS -- NEANDERTHALS -- LINKED TO MODERN PEOPLE

2011-08-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea.

All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.

An earlier, incomplete analysis of Denisovan DNA had placed the group as more distant from both Neanderthals and humans. On the basis of the new findings, the scientists propose that the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans emerged from Africa half a million years ago. The Neanderthals spread westward, settling in the Near East and Europe. The Denisovans headed east. Some 50,000 years ago, they interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia, bequeathing some of their DNA to them.

“It’s an incredibly exciting finding,” said Carlos Bustamante, a Stanford University geneticist who was not involved in the research.

The research was led by Svante Paabo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Liepzig, Germany. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have pioneered methods for rescuing fragments of ancient DNA from fossils and stitching them together. In May, for example, they published a complete Neanderthal genome.

The stocky, barrel-chested Neanderthals left a fossil record stretching from about 240,000 to 30,000 years ago in Europe, the Near East and Russia. Analyzing the Neanderthal genome, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues concluded that humans and Neanderthals descended from common ancestors that lived 600,000 years ago.

But the scientists also found that 2.5 percent of the Neanderthal genome is more similar to the DNA of living Europeans and Asians than to African DNA. From this evidence they concluded that Neanderthals interbred with humans soon after they emerged from Africa roughly 50,000 years ago.

Dr. Paabo’s success with European Neanderthal fossils inspired him and his colleagues to look farther afield. They began to work with Anatoli Derevianko of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who explores Siberian caves in search of fossils of hominins (species more closely related to living humans than to chimpanzees, our closest living relatives).

Last year, Dr. Derevianko and his colleagues sent Dr. Paabo a nondescript fragment of a finger bone from a cave called Denisova. Dr. Derevianko thought that the
fossil, which is at least 50,000 years old, might have belonged to one of the earliest humans to live in Siberia.

Dr. Paabo and his colleagues isolated a small bundle of DNA from the bone’s mitochondria, the energy-generating structures within our cells. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues were surprised to discover that the Denisova DNA was markedly different from that of either humans or Neanderthals. “It was a great shock to us that it was distinct from those groups,” Dr. Paabo said in an interview.

Dr. Paabo and his colleagues immediately set about to collect all the DNA in the Denisova finger bone. Once they had sequenced its genome, they sent the data to researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., to compare with other species.

The Massachusetts scientists concluded that the finger bone belonged to a hominin branch that split from the ancestors of Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years ago. Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have named this lineage the Denisovans.

Next, the researchers looked for evidence of interbreeding. Nick Patterson, a Broad Institute geneticist, compared the Denisovan genome to the complete genomes of five people, from South Africa, Nigeria, China, France and Papua New Guinea. To his astonishment, a sizable chunk of the Denisova genome resembled parts of the New Guinea DNA.

“The correct reaction when you get a surprising result is, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ ” said Dr. Patterson. To see if the result was an error, he and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of seven more people, including another individual from New Guinea and one from the neighboring island of Bougainville. But even in the new analysis, the Denisovan DNA still turned up in the New Guinea and Bougainville genomes.

If the Denisovans did indeed have a range spreading from Siberia to South Asia, they must have been a remarkably successful kind of human. And yet, despite having the entire genome of a Denisovan, Dr. Paabo cannot say much yet about what they were like. “By sequencing my complete genome, there’s very little you could predict about what I look like or how I behave,” he said.

One solid clue to what the Denisovans looked like emerged in January. Dr. Paabo and his team had flown to Novosibirsk to share their initial results with Dr. Derevianko. Dr. Derevianko then presented them with a wisdom tooth from Denisova.

That match offers some hope that if researchers can find the same kind of tooth on a fossil skull, or perhaps even a complete skeleton, they’ll be able to see what these ghostly cousins and ancestors looked like in real life.

Dr. Bustamante also thinks that other cases of interbreeding are yet to be discovered. “There’s a lot of possibility out there,” he said. “But the only way to get at them is to sequence more of these ancient genomes.”

ENGLAND'S WESTERN-MOST ROMAN TOWN UNCOVERED

2011-08-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

A chance discovery of coins has led to the bigger find of a Roman town, further west than it was previously thought Romans had settled in England.The town was found under fields a number of miles west of Exeter, Devon. Nearly 100 Roman coins were initially uncovered there by two amateur archaeological enthusiasts.

It had been thought that fierce resistance from local tribes to Roman culture stopped the Romans from moving so far into the county. Sam Moorhead, national finds adviser for Iron Age and Roman coins for the PAS at the British Museum, said it was one of the most significant Roman discoveries in the country for many decades.

After the coins were unearthed by the local men out using metal detectors, Danielle Wootton, the University of Exeter's liaison officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), which looks after antiquities found by the public, was tasked with investigating further. After carrying out a geophysical survey last summer, she said she was astonished to find evidence of a huge landscape, including at least 13 round-houses, quarry pits and track-ways covering at least 13 fields, the first of its kind for the county. "You just don't find Roman stuff on this scale in Devon," said Ms Wootton.

She carried out a trial excavation on the site, and has already uncovered evidence of extensive trade with Europe, a road possibly linking to the major settlement at Exeter, and some intriguing structures, as well as many more coins. "This was a really exciting discovery," said Ms Wootton. But she said most exciting of all was that her team had stumbled across two burial plots that seem to be located alongside the settlement's main road.

Not enough excavation has been done yet to date the main occupation phase of the site, but the coins that were found range from slightly before the start of the Roman invasion up until the last in 378 AD.

The Romans reached Exeter during the invasion of Britain in AD 50-55, and a legion commanded by Vespasian built a fortress on a spur overlooking the River Exe. This legion stayed for the next 20 years before moving to Wales. A few years after the army left, Exeter was converted into a bustling Romano-British civilian settlement known as Isca Dumnoniorum with all the usual Roman public buildings, baths and forum.
It was also the principal town for the Dumnonii tribe, a native British tribe who inhabited Devon and Cornwall. It was thought that their resistance to Roman rule and influence, and any form of 'Romanisation' stopped the Roman's settling far into the south west. For a very long time, it was thought that Exeter was the limit of Roman settlement in Britain in the south west, with the rest being inhabited by local unfriendly tribes.

OLDEST STRUCTURE DISCOVERED IN MEROE, SUDAN

2011-08-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

Hidden beneath an ancient palace in what is now central Sudan, archaeologists have discovered the oldest building in the city of Meroë, a structure that also may have housed royalty.

The capital of a vast empire that flourished around 2,000 years ago, Meroë was centered on the Nile River. At its height, the city was controlled by a dynasty of kings who ruled about 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) of territory that stretched from southern Egypt to areas south of modern-day Khartoum.

People of Meroë built palaces and small pyramids, and developed a writing system that scholars still can't fully translate today. Although Meroë has been excavated off and on for more than 150 years, archaeologists are not yet clear on how it came to be. The city seems to have emerged out of nowhere. [Image Gallery: Ancient Rock Art of Sudan]

TRIAD OF FELINES FOUND SOUTH OF MEXICO CITY -- PROBABLY OLMEC

2011-08-08T08:20:00.000-07:00

With a little help from archaeologists, three giant cats have slunk into view after spending thousands of years underground in central Mexico.

Carved in a vaguely Olmec style into a stone monolith, the seated jaguars-or
possibly mountain lions-may have been part of a decorative hillside wall that was crawling with big-cat carvings, experts suggest.

The circa 700 B.C. carving, dubbed the "Triad of Felines" by archaeologists, was found about 60 miles (a hundred kilometers) south of Mexico City at Chalcatzingo, an archaeological site known to have had ties to the Olmec civilization.

Measuring about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall and 3.6 feet (1.1 meters) wide, the carving was originally set within a hillside and was designed to be clearly visible from a village below, experts say.

The discovery is only the latest of about 40 large stone carvings found at Chalcatzingo since 1935-many of them depicting cats, said David Grove, an anthropologist at the University of Florida who conducted research at Chalcatzingo for 30 years beginning in the 1970s.As an example of Olmec-style art, Grove added, "Triad of Felines" is "spectacular."

It took experts months to piece together and restore the 11 fragments that make up the cat-trio carving. At the same time, the scientists are assembling a theory in which the "Triad" is itself just one piece of a larger puzzle.

"Triad of Felines" may have been part of a collection of carvings that dotted the Chalcatzingo landscape, perhaps as spiritual "billboards" along pilgrimage route, archaeologists suggest.

"One of our hypotheses is that, in the time from 800 to 500 B.C., there was a frieze along the entire Cerro Chalcatzingo," or "Chalcatzingo hill," project member Mario Cordova Tello, an archaeologist with Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), said in a statement.

The Olmec occupied south-central Mexico from about 1500 to 400 B.C. and are thought by many to have had a large influence on other Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Maya-and the people of Chalcatzingo. (Get the full story of the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)

"Triad of Cats," though, is unique in depicting sitting animals, Grove said. The cats in the new carving also appear to have supernatural traits, such as flaming eyebrows and stylized mouths reminiscent of traditional Olmec masks.

"Something having to do with mythology is being expressed in these carvings
... but I am still trying to figure out exactly what it is," Grove said.
"Not a lot is known about Olmec religion."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110801-three-cat-carving-felines-triad-olmec-mexico-science/

SMUGGLING EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES -- 4 CHARGED

2011-07-31T07:33:00.000-07:00

Federal authorities have announced that they had broken up an international ring that had been smuggling Egyptian antiquities into the United States. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations department said it was the first time that a cultural property smuggling network had been dismantled in the United States.

The charges filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn accuse three antiquities dealers and a collector of conspiring to smuggle an Egyptian sarcophagus and other items, and of laundering money. All of the suspects have been arrested except for a Jordanian dealer who operates out of Dubai. Brenton Easter, a federal agent who led the investigation, which began in 2008, said the items seized had a market value of $2.5 million.

They include a Greco-Roman style sarcophagus, a nesting set of three sarcophagi that dates from about 664 to 552 B.C., and limestone figures. The authorities said these were smuggled from Dubai between October 2008 and November 2009 and were ultimately bought by the collector, Joseph A. Lewis II of Virginia. He bought them from a dealer, Mousa Khouli, who lives in Brooklyn and operates Windsor Antiquities in Manhattan. The dealer, in turn, acquired them from Salem Alshdaifat, owner of Holyland Numismatics in Bloomfield, Mich., and Ayman Ramadan, who runs a company in Dubai called Nafertiti Eastern Sculptures Trading, according to the authorities.

It is not clear when or how the objects were taken out of Egypt, but they have been authenticated and carbon dated, Mr. Easter said.

Mr. Khouli allegedly provided Mr. Lewis with false provenances, stating that the objects were part of a collection that his father had assembled in Israel in the 1960s — a story that authorities say Mr. Lewis knew to be untrue.

Investigators also reported recovering Middle Eastern and Asian artifacts and more than a thousand antique coins. Federal prosecutors are seeking to return the Egyptian artifacts to Egypt, where the recently resigned minister of antiquities, Zahi Hawass, said he was grateful for the work by American officials. He said he hoped an arrest of Mr. Ramadan, the Jordanian dealer, would provide information about how the objects were smuggled out of Egypt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/arts/design/federal-authorities-charge-4-people-in-antiquities-smuggling.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

WILL THIS HELP TO PREVENT ILLEGAL IMPORTS OF ANTIQUITIES FROM GREECE?

2011-07-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading “Chasing Aphrodite:” The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum by Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino. It's a terrific reporting job on the Getty! How Marion True and other curators at all Museums are guilty of bringing from Europe, especially Greece and Italy, no provenance antiquities.

While in the Greece on a diplomatic visit this weekend, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stavros Lambrinidis, concerning the imposition of import restrictions on archaeological and Byzantine objects. The new memorandum, which still has to be ratified by the Greek Parliament, would make it illegal for protected works of art to enter the US without the approval of Greek authorities.

The signing of the memorandum was yet another demonstration of the US government’s vocal support of Greece’s austerity measures to help the debt-ridden country get back on its feet. “America is just as committed to Greece’s future as we are to preserving your past,” Clinton said at the signing. “During these difficult economic times, we will stand with you. We are confident that the nation that built the Parthenon, invented democracy, and inspired the world can rise to the current challenge.”

According to a fact sheet released by the US State Department, “the agreement will strengthen collaboration to reduce looting and trafficking of antiquities, and provide for their return to Greece. It also aims to further the international interchange of such materials for cultural, educational, and scientific purposes.”

“We are trying to protect our treasures from illegal diggings and excavations,” Lambrinidis said at the signing. “That is why this MOU that we’re about to sign is so important.” Clinton said that the agreement “will protect Greece’s culturally significant objects even further from looting and sale on the international market” by helping to “reduce the incentive to illegally remove such objects in the first place”. She added: “We know from experience that measures like this work. This will be our 15th cultural property agreement. And in countries from Cambodia to Cyprus, we have seen real results.”

PALESTINIANS RESTART 100 YEAR OLD DIG NEAR NABLUS

2011-07-31T07:09:00.000-07:00

Archaeologists unearthing a biblical ruin inside a Palestinian city in the West Bank are writing the latest chapter in a 100-year-old excavation that has been interrupted by two world wars and numerous rounds of Mideast upheaval. Working on an urban lot that long served residents of Nablus as an unofficial dump for garbage and old car parts, Dutch and Palestinian archaeologists are learning more about the ancient city of Shekhem, and are preparing to open the site to the public as an archaeological park next year.

The project, carried out under the auspices of the Palestinian Department of Antiquities, also aims to introduce the Palestinians of Nablus, who have been beset for much of the past decade by bloodshed and isolation, to the wealth of antiquities in the middle of their city.

"The local population has started very well to understand the value of the site, not only the historical value, but also the value for their own identity," said Gerrit van der Kooij of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who co-directs the dig team.
The digging season wrapped up this week at the site, known locally as Tel Balata.

The city of Shekhem, positioned in a pass between the mountains of Gerizim and Eibal and controlling the Askar Plains to the east, was an important regional center more than 3,500 years ago. As the existing remains show, it lay within fortifications of massive stones, was entered through monumental gates and centered on a temple with walls five yards (meters) thick.

The king of Shekhem, Labaya, is mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of the Pharaonic archive found at Tel al-Amarna in Egypt, which are dated to the 14th century B.C. The king had rebelled against Egyptian domination, and soldiers were dispatched north to subdue him. They failed.

The city also appears often in the biblical narrative. The patriarch Abraham, for example, was passing near Shekhem when God promised to give the land of Canaan to his descendants in the Book of Genesis. Later, Abraham's grandson Jacob was camped outside the walls when a local Canaanite prince raped his daughter, Dinah. Jacob's sons sacked the city in vengeance. The body of Jacob's son Joseph was brought from Egypt hundreds of years later by the fleeing Israelites and buried at Shekhem.

Two millennia ago, the Romans abandoned the original site and built a new city to the west, calling it Flavius Neapolis. The Greek name Neapolis, or "new city," later became enshrined in Arabic as Nablus. In Hebrew, the city is still called Shekhem.

Nablus has since spread, and ancient Shekhem is now surrounded by Palestinian homes and car garages near the city's eastern outskirts. One morning this week, a garbage container emitted smoke from burning refuse not far from the remains of the northwestern city gate in a curved wall built by skilled engineers around 1600 B.C.

A visitor can walk through the gate, passing through two chambers before emerging inside the city. From there it is a short walk to the remains of the city's temple, with a stone stele on an outdoor platform overlooking the houses below.

The identity of the city's residents at the time remains unclear. One theory posits that they were Hyksos, people who came from northern Syria and were later expelled from Egypt. According to the Bible's account, the city was later Canaanite and still later ruled by Israelites, but archaeology has not corroborated that so far, van der Kooij said.

A German team began excavating at the site in 1913, with Nablus under the control of the Ottoman Turks. The dig was interrupted by World War I but resumed afterward, continuing sporadically into the 1930s under British rule. Much of the German documentation of the dig was lost in the Allied bombings of WWII.

American teams dug at the site in the 1950s and 1960s, under Jordanian rule. Israel conquered Nablus, along with the rest of the West Bank, in the 1967 Mideast war.

Over the years, the site fell into disrepair. The neglect was exacerbated after the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s, when Nablus became a center for resistance to Israeli control. Its condition further deteriorated after the second, more violent, uprising erupted in 2000, drawing Israeli military incursions and the imposition of roadblocks and closures that all but cut the city off from the outside world. In recent years, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority increasingly asserting security control over the cities of the West Bank, Israel has removed some roadblocks and movement has become more free.

The new excavations and the establishment of the archaeological park are a joint project of the Palestinian Tourism Ministry, the Dutch government and UNESCO. The project began last year and is scheduled to end with the opening of the park in 2012. For the Palestinians, whose Department of Antiquities was founded only 15 years ago, the dig demonstrates a growing interest in uncovering the ancient past.

The department now has 130 workers and carries out several dozen rescue excavations every year on the sites of planned building projects in areas administered by the Palestinian Authority, said Hamdan Taha, the department's director. Ten ongoing research excavations are being conducted with foreign cooperation.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=49288

MORE ON BUDDHIST RELICS IN AFGHANISTAN

2011-07-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Sometime soon, perhaps in as little as 14 months, the sprawling, 9,800-acre Mes Aynak site will be crushed by Chinese bulldozers hunting for copper — a clear choice of economic development over historic preservation in a country trying to overcome decades of war, religious extremism and occupation.

"As an archaeologist, of course I'm worried about this," said Khair Muhammad Khairzada, a researcher at the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, which is overseeing the dig. "I want all of the archaeological sites to be saved. But at the same time, Afghanistan's economy is also important. It needs to grow."

And so, a dozen archaeologists and 100 Afghan laborers are working like army ants to finish the dig. Many valuable relics were looted long ago, and the archaeologists won't be able to save the ancient edifices from the mining company. But they can remove the statues, pottery and gold and silver coins still buried within the buildings.

"We don't know exactly how much time we have to excavate the site. Sometimes the deadline is 14 months and sometimes it's two years. It will depend on the Chinese," said Nicolas Engel, a young French archaeologist with James Joyce spectacles. "That big mountain over there, that's where copper ore is located," he said, gesturing toward a long, scrub-covered ridge. "So inside of that mountain, the Chinese want to do an open pit mine, which means this whole area will be destroyed."

The race to salvage whatever they can of Afghanistan's ancient, storied past is the latest in a long line of ordeals that Afghan historians and archeologists have had to face. Looters have been as destructive as war, pouncing on sites filled with centuries-old statues and coins long before archaeologists arrive. Most of the looted relics find their way to Pakistan and from there to the international black market.

Today, the promise of mining wealth overshadows the treasured ruins of Mes Aynak. Afghanistan's untapped mineral wealth is staggering, estimated by U.S. geologists at nearly $1 trillion. Reserves include large amounts of copper, gold, cobalt, lithium and other metals.

The untapped copper deposits in the Lowgar province mountains are believed to be one of the world's largest reserves of the ore. China has been scouring the world for raw materials to feed its industrial growth, and the Afghan government in 2007 awarded China Metallurgical Group Corp. the contract to mine at Mes Aynak, a $2.9-billion endeavor that makes it Afghanistan's largest development project.

Afghan archaeologists say they recognize the potential that mining holds for their country's economy. But they also want to preserve a heritage that encompasses conquests by Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, and periods when Buddhism was the dominant religion.

On a recent sun-scorched morning, Engel's diggers worked at a furious pace, kicking up billowing clouds of dust as their spades and pick-axes exposed a large reliquary that housed red-painted Buddha statues. The archaeologists and laborers work from 6 a.m. until early afternoon, six days a week. To meet the mining company's deadline, Engel said, his team would have to hire 100 archaeologists and 800 laborers. The Afghan Institute of Archaeology can't afford that. "So we simply tell the diggers they need to work as quickly as possible," said Afghan archaeologist Abdul Qadir Temory.

The site sat abandoned for centuries. Gaping holes in the earth mark where looters have been recently. The goal for Engel and the other archaeologists is to find whatever's left, document the layout of the Buddhist settlement, and cart away small sections of the structures so they can be preserved in a museum that one day is to be built nearby.

Some of the artifacts found at Mes Aynak are now displayed at Kabul's National Museum: a 5th century wooden Buddha, a 3rd century Bodhisattva figure carved from schist, an array of gold and silver coins and Buddha heads made of plaster and clay. Several larger Buddha statues, some as tall as 13 feet, remain at the Mes Aynak monastery, a 5th century warren of chambers and reliquaries that the government keeps behind a locked and guarded gate.

Archaeologists and laborers who have been unearthing the ancient citadel know it will be pulverized one day soon. They find that hard to accept. "Yes, mining is important for the economy, but the history and heritage of Afghanistan is equally important," said Mohammed Rabi, the archaeologist overseeing excavation of the citadel. "I just wish we had more time and money to save it all."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-afghan-archeology-20110712,0,1385452.story

OYSTERMOUTH CASTLE AT MUMBLES IN (UK) WALES HAS REOPENED

2011-07-18T10:53:00.000-07:00

Swansea's Oystermouth Castle has reopened after the completion of the first phase of a £1m revamp. The work provides public access into part of the castle for the first time in hundreds of years. It also includes a 30ft (10m) high glass bridge. The work is part a £19m Welsh Government project to boost the contribution tourism at heritage sites makes to the Welsh economy.

Oystermouth Castle, which overlooks the Mumbles, closed last autumn, and the building project is said to assure the building's long term sustainability.

The bridge gives access into Alina's Chapel, which is thought to be linked to Alina de Breos, daughter of William de Breos III, Lord of Gower. It was added to the castle in the 14th Century and is its highest point, giving views across Swansea Bay.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-14167952

STOLEN EGYPTIAN ARTIFACTS HAVE BEEN RECOVERED

2011-07-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

Nearly two dozen artifacts stolen from a museum magazine during unrest in relation to the Egyptian revolution in January have been returned, Minister of State for Antiquities Zahi Hawass confirmed on Friday. [Hawass has once again resigned --- possibly fired-- from his post as of the week of July 15th, 2011]

Scores of historic items were stolen or destroyed when violence broke out on January 28 as anti-government protests continued, resulting in the ouster of President Mubarak. Among the targets was the Qantara museum magazine near the city of Ismaila in northeast Egypt and the famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Egyptian authorities had earlier created a 'Red List' of missing items and submitted it to Interpol and other international organizations in hopes to recover the artifacts of historic value. A further more 22 items have now been removed from that list after they were seized earlier this week.

Hawass said the items include rare pottery which dates back to the age of the Hyksos and five bronze coins which date back to the Ptolemaic area. He did not say where they were recovered, or if any arrests were made in connection.

Almost 300 artifacts have now been returned since the unrest.

NEW GENOME STUDIES SHOW THAT AFRICAN AND NON-AFRICAN POPULATIONS INTERMIXED WELL AFTER MIGRATION OUT OF AFRICA 60,000 YEARS AGO

2011-07-18T09:22:00.001-07:00

Researchers have probed deeper into human evolution by developing an elegant new technique to analyze whole genomes from different populations. One key finding from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute's study is that African and non-African populations continued to exchange genetic material well after migration out-of-Africa 60,000 years ago. This shows that interbreeding between these groups continued long after the original exodus.

For the first time genomic archaeologists are able to infer population size and history using single genomes, a technique that makes fewer assumptions than existing methods, allowing for more detailed insights. It provides a fresh view of the history of humankind from 10,000 to one million years ago.

"Using this algorithm, we were able to provide new insights into our human history," says Dr Richard Durbin, joint head of Human Genetics and leader of the Genome Informatics Group at the Sanger Institute. "First, we see an apparent increase in effective human population numbers around the time that modern humans arose in Africa over 100,000 years ago.

"Second, when we look at non-African individuals from Europe and East Asia, we see a shared history of a dramatic reduction in population, or bottleneck, starting about 60,000 years ago, as others have also observed. But unlike previous studies we also see evidence for continuing genetic exchange with African populations for tens of thousands of years after the initial out-of-Africa bottleneck until 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.

"Previous methods to explore these questions using genetic data have looked at a subset of the human genome. Our new approach uses the whole sequence of single individuals, and relies on fewer assumptions. Using such techniques we will be able to capitalize on the revolution in genome sequencing and analysis from projects such as The 1000 Genomes Project, and, as more people are sequenced, build a progressively finer detail picture of human genetic history."

The team sequenced and compared four male genomes: one each from China, Europe, Korea and West Africa respectively. The researchers found that, although the African and non-African populations might have started to differentiate as early as 100,000 to 120,000 years ago, they largely remained as one population until approximately 60,000 to 80,000 years ago.

Following this the European and East Asian ancestors went through a period where their effective population size crashed to approximately one-tenth of its earlier size, overlapping the period when modern human fossils and artifacts start to appear across Europe and Asia. But, for at least the first 20,000 years of this period, it appears that the out-of-Africa and African populations were not genetically separated. A possible explanation could be that new emigrants from Africa continued to join the out-of-Africa populations long after the original exodus.

"The novel statistical method we developed is computationally efficient and doesn't make restrictive assumptions about the way that population size changed. Although not inconsistent with previous results, these findings allow new types of historical events to be explored, leading to new observations about the history of mankind." The researchers believe that this technique can be developed further to enable even more fine-grained discoveries by sequencing multiple genomes from different populations. In addition, beyond human history, there is also the potential to investigate the population size history of other species for which a single genome sequence has been obtained.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110713131419.htm

STATUE OF CALIGULA, BIZARRE ROMAN EMPEROR, UNVEILED IN ITALY

2011-07-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Italian police unveiled a colossal marble statue believed to be a rare image of the incestuous and lunatic Roman emperor Caligula sitting on a throne.

The statue lay buried for nearly 2,000 years near Lake Nemi, south of Rome, where Rome's third emperor Caligula, who ruled from 37 to 41 A.D., had two enormous "love boats." The statue was recovered last January, when finance police stopped tomb robbers trying to smuggle large, elaborately carved, marble pieces out of the country. In order to find the statue's missing pieces, the archaeologists excavated
the area where the tomb robbers conducted their illegal dig.

The remains of a large, semicircular nymphaeum, or fountain court, emerged. Originally enclosed by a series of 23-foot-tall columns, the fountain court boasted a niche at its center in which Caligula' statue once stood. Indeed, the area contained more than one hundred fragments belonging to the statue, including the head. Moreover, the archaeologists unearthed some other 150 objects, such as vases
and pieces of jewelry.

Made from Greek marble of Paros, considered in antiquity the world's best and most precious, the statue shows a young robed man, sitting under a pillow on a beautifully decorated throne as the god Zeus. On the left foot, the statue is wearing the "caligae" military boot after which the notorious Roman emperor, whose real name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, was nicknamed. (Little Boots)

The capricious emperor, who is said to have made his favorite horse Incitatus a senator, used to sail his spectacular ships on Lake Nemi, not far from where his statue stood, indulging his sensual proclivities.

According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the vessels had "sterns studded with gems and ample space for baths, porticoes, and dining rooms, and a great variety of vines and fruit-bearing trees. Reclining on these ships all day long, he would sail amid choral dancing and singing."

The ships were scuttled in a "damnatio memoriae" (aimed at erasing someone from history) after the 29-year-old emperor was murdered in his palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome by his own guard.

They were recovered in 1927 during the rule of dictator Benito Mussolini. Measuring 230 feet by 66 feet, the ships still feature details such as exquisite wolf heads adorning the end of the beams and decks covered with marble and mosaics. A lakeside ship museum was built for the extraordinary finds, but German troops torched them during World War II.

Although the ships are lost forever, Caligula is set to return to Nemi. His colossal statue, cleaned of the earth that had covered it for two millennia and re-assembled, will be permanently displayed at the ship museum.

http://news.discovery.com/history/caligula-statue-unveiled.html

STOLEN IRAQI ANTIQUITIES RETURNED

2011-07-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

A cache of Iraqi antiquities, as well as objects from the Saddam Hussein era, were headed home Thursday after being found on military containers at Christie’s auction house and on Craigslist, among other places.

An estimated 15,000 pieces were stolen from Iraq’s National Museum in pillaging after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and many more are believed to have been smuggled out since then by U.S. military personnel and contractors. More than half of the items that have turned up in the United States or elsewhere have been repatriated to Iraq, but treasured items remain missing.

Investigators from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tracked down the most recent finds (about 30) as part of four separate investigations – in Florida, New Jersey, Texas and Arkansas – over the course of several years. The items include a Western Asiatic necklace believed to date to the 2nd or 3rd century B.C., serving pieces and utensils inscribed with the crest of Iraq’s Baath Party, and a marble slab from one of Hussein’s palaces.

The slab was initially discovered on Craigslist, where it had been listed for sale by a member of the U.S. Army. Investigators, posing as interested buyers, contacted the seller online and later met him at his house. When they got there, he led them to his garage, where the slab was being kept. He said he obtained it while patrolling towns in Iraq.

CONNECTICUT DIG UNCOVERING ARTIFACTS FROM PREHISTORIC TO 19TH CENTURY

2011-07-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

Tucked away off Gallows Hill Road, near Redding, Connecticut, Ernie Wiegand, a Norwalk Community College archaeology professor, and his students have been digging and discovering prehistoric and historic artifacts left in the ground for hundreds and thousands of years. “We’ve been working here for 10, almost 11 years now,” said Mr. Wiegand.

A proposed subdivision for the property triggered a cultural assessment that eventually led to Mr. Wiegand’s interest in the property. Arrow Point Development was going to build 30 houses on the land, but because of the wetlands on the property, the developer called the state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni. He, in turn, called the Redding town archaeologist to do an archaeological survey of the area, said Kathleen von Jena, the Planning Commission’s cultural resource adviser. This survey was the framework for the townwide Cultural Resource Assessment Survey, which identified areas that had potential prehistoric and historic artifacts, she said.

It was found that the property had archaeological resources and the land was then determined to be a nature sanctuary and could not be built on, said Mr. Wiegand.
As a result of the survey, only two houses were ultimately built on the property.

“I want to investigate a few more portions... There’s no reason to excavate everything, I want to leave the majority open for future digs,” said Professor Wiegand. “When future technology is developed, we are able to use those new techniques and maybe find things we wouldn’t be able to find now.”

Mr. Wiegand has mapped out areas to be explored by his students. They’ve found broken spear points and flakes of quartz and flint that date back to 2000 BC, said Mr. Wiegand. It has been thought that the area might have been a prehistoric hunting ground, he said.

Rocks with red markings were also found near an area that was said to be a prehistoric fireplace. Mr. Wiegand said it was carbon dated to be about 4,000 years old. Next to that there was a depression in the ground where the group decided to dig a pit. Eighteenth century Native American artifacts were found close in proximity. There were big pottery pieces and redware milkpan fragments found within an inch of one another. It was determined that these were once dropped and broken on a dirt floor, said Mr. Wiegand.

By referring to old census records, he thought he would be able to see who lived in that area during the 19th Century. Information is not clear but it is thought that two or three freed African Americans lived as tenant farmers on the Gallows Hill property, but it is not clear which side of the road they were on, said Mr. Wiegand.
“There might have been a house here. We hoped to find walls, but we never did,” he said.

“We’ve found plates, platters, hand-wrought nails,” he said. English pottery including a Delft tin-glazed tea set was found in addition to clay tobacco pipes, flat glass and window putty. “This shows that a window was once there,” said Mr. Wiegand “and we found part of a shoe buckle. We haven’t found many animal remains, just a pig molar and a cow molar. We haven’t found any buttons or eating utensils which would indicate someone living here.”

A few more digs are planned over the summer and in the fall, said Mr. Wiegand. After the dig is complete the artifacts that were discovered will belong to the town and The Nature Conservancy, which own the land, Mr. Wiegand said

REMAINS OF A HOUSE UNCOVERED NEAR HAIFA, ISRAEL, DATE BACK NEARLY THREE MILLENNIA

2011-07-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

The remains of a house uncovered in the city of Haifa are the best-preserved yet from the Kingdom of Israel, dating back nearly three millennia.

The site of the discovery was excavated about 40 years ago, but neglect had left the structure hidden until now. Layers of earth and garbage had piled up atop it, and off-road vehicles had plowed over the area, damaging the artifacts.

When archaeologists recently re-exposed the area during a dig, they found the four-room home to be remarkably good shape, the best-preserved house from the period of the Kingdom of Israel found so far, the researchers said today (July 6). The dig is in an area called Tel Shikmona.

"We had seen the structure in the old photographs and were sorry that such a rarely preserved finding had disappeared due to neglect. We were not even sure that we would be able to find it again. It was practically a miracle that we managed to locate and uncover it and that it is still so well-preserved," said the leaders of the excavation team, Shay Bar and Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa.

The dig also unearthed remains of a Persian city from about 2,400 years ago and a Byzantine town from approximately 1,500 years ago.

EARLIEST MODERN HUMANS FROM SOUTHEAST EUROPE WORE JEWELRY AND PROBABLY PRACTICED CANNIBALISM

2011-07-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

The remains, described in PLoS One, date to 32,000 years ago and represent the oldest direct evidence for anatomically modern humans in a well-documented context. The human remains are also the oldest known for our species in Europe to show post-mortem cut marks.

"Our observations indicate a post-mortem treatment of human corpses including the selection of the skull," co-author Stephane Pean, a paleozoologist and archaeologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, told Discovery News. "We demonstrate that this treatment was not for nutritional purposes, according to comparison with game butchery treatment, so it is not a dietary cannibalism."

Instead, Pean said that he and his colleagues believe that the "observed treatment of the human body, together with the presence of body ornaments, indicates rather a mortuary ritual: either a ritual cannibalism or a specific mortuary practice for secondary disposal." The scientists made those assessments after studying human remains and artifacts discovered at a shelter-cave site called Buran-Kaya III in the Ukraine.

Although this is a more complete archaeological setting, the actual first known Homo sapiens from Europe dates to 34,000 years ago from Pestera cu Oase in Romania. Yet another single modern human from Kostenki 1 in Russia dates to 33,000 years ago.
The age of all of these discoveries intriguingly suggests that these first members of our species in Europe may have coexisted with Neanderthals.

Artifacts excavated at the site include five mammoth beads, one engraved plate made out of mammoth ivory and 35 perforated shells. Since no mammoth remains or craft debris were found, it's likely that the objects were made off-site. The remains of pointed bone tools and stone projectiles indicate these early Europeans were active hunters with busy associated tool and weapon-making industries.

Marcel Otte, a professor of prehistory at the University of Liege, has also excavated at Buran-Kaya III. He told Discovery News that he and his team found evidence for a 30,000-year-old culture at the same site, indicating the region was continuously inhabited for thousands of years after the first modern humans arrived.

TREASURE TROVE FOUND BENEATH A TEMPLE IN SOUTHERN INDIA

2011-07-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

A court-ordered search of vaults beneath a south Indian temple has unearthed gold, jewels and statues worth an estimated $22 billion, government officials have announced.

The treasure trove, at the 16th century Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, is widely believed to be the largest find of its kind in India, catching officials in the state of Kerala by surprise and forcing the government to send two dozen police officers to the previously unguarded shrine for round-the-clock security.

The discovery has also revived questions about who should manage the wealth, much of which is believed to have been deposited at the temple by the royal family of the princely state of Travancore, which acceded to India when the country became independent in 1947. Some of the vaults under the temple have not been opened for nearly 150 years, temple officials have said.

Temples in India often have rich endowments, mainly from donations of gold and cash by pilgrims and wealthy patrons, but the wealth discovered at Padmanabhaswamy dwarfs the known assets of every other Indian temple. Such assets are typically meant to be used by administrators to operate temples and provide services to the poor, but they have often become the subject of heated disputes and controversies.

India's Supreme Court ordered the opening of the vaults at Padmanabhaswamy to assess the wealth of the temple after a local activist, T. P. Sundararajan, filed a case accusing administrators of mismanaging and poorly guarding the temple. Descendants of the royal family still control the trust that manages the temple, which is devoted to the Hindu god Vishnu.

Searchers have found bags of gold coins, diamonds and other jewels and solid-gold statues of gods and goddesses. Searchers started to unseal "Section B" of the vaults, a large space that was expected to reveal another sizable collection, said P. T. Chacko, the spokesman for the chief minister of Kerala, Oommen Chandy.

India's Supreme Court will decide what happens to the treasure and the rest of the temple, which sits in the heart of Kerala's capital, Thiruvananthapuram, once it has established the total value of the holdings, which could take months to finish. Early estimates of the treasure have been raised several times as searchers have opened more of the vaults in recent days.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/world/asia/05india.html?_r=2&hpw

TINY CAMERA REVEALS INSIDE OF ANCIENT MAYAN TOMB

2011-07-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

A tiny remote-controlled camera peered inside the tomb of a Mayan ruler that has been sealed for 1,500 years, revealing red frescoes, pottery and pieces of a funerary shroud made of jade and mother of pearl.

The tomb was discovered in 1999 inside a pyramid among the ruins of the Mayan city of Palenque in the hills of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

But until now archeologists had not been able to access the vault believed to hold the remains of a Mayan ruler who lived between AD 431 and 550, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a recent release.

By dropping the small camera 16 feet deep through a small hole at the top of the pyramid, researchers were able to get the first view of the intact tomb. "The characteristics of the funeral site show that the bones could belong to a sacred ruler from Palenque, probably one of the founders of a dynasty," said archeologist Martha Cuevas. The tomb's walls are painted in a rich red with paintings of Mayan figures.

The Mayans flourished between AD 250-900 and Palenque is one of the most important Mayan archeological sites.

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110624/sc_nm/us_mexico_tomb
photos at:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/pictures/110629-tiny-camera-maya-tomb-palenque-mexico-science/

8,000 YEAR OLD AUROCH BBQ FOUND IN THE NETHERLANDS

2011-07-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

Around 8,000 years ago, prehistoric hunters killed an aurochs (a wild Eurasian ox) and their grilling techniques were frozen in time.Stone Age barbecue consumers first went for the bone marrow and then for the ribs, suggest the leftovers of an outdoor 7,700-year-old meaty feast described in the July issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The remains, found in the valley of the River Tjonger, Netherlands, provide
direct evidence for a prehistoric hunting, butchering, cooking and feasting
event. The meal occurred more than 1,000 years before the first farmers with
domestic cattle arrived in the region.

Although basic BBQ technology hasn't changed much over the millennia, this
prehistoric meal centered around the flesh of an aurochs that was larger than today's cows. It sported distinctive curved horns.

"The animal was either caught in a pitfall trap and then clubbed on the head, or shot with a bow and arrow with flint point," co-author Wietske Prummel, an associate professor of archaeozoology at the University of Groningen, told Discovery News.

Prummel and colleague Marcel Niekus pieced together what happened by studying an unearthed flint blade found near auroch bones. These show that after the female auroch was killed, hunters cut its legs off and sucked out the marrow.

According to the study, the individuals skinned the animal and butchered it, reserving the skin and large hunks of meat for carrying back to a nearby settlement. Chop marks left behind by the flint blade show how the meat was meticulously separated from the bones and removed. Burn marks reveal that the hunters cooked the meaty ribs, and probably other smaller parts, over an open fire. They ate them right at the site, "their reward for the successful kill," Prummel said.

The researchers suspect these people lived in large settlements and frequented the Tjonger location for auroch hunting. After the Iron Age, the area was only sparsely inhabited -- probably due to the region becoming temporarily waterlogged -- until the Late Medieval period.

The aurochs couldn't escape extinction."It became extinct due to the destruction of the habitat of the auroch since the arrival of the first farmers in Europe about 7500 years ago," Prummel said. "These farmers used the area inhabited by auroch for their dwellings, arable fields and meadows. The aurochs gradually lost suitable
habitat." The last aurochs died in 1627 at a zoo in Poland.

http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-barbeque-aurochs-110627.html

13,000 YEAR OLD MAMMOTH BONE HAS IMAGE OF A MAMMOTH -- FOUND IN FLORIDA

2011-07-08T06:57:00.000-07:00

Forensic tests confirm the age of an etched Ice Age bone. The 13,000-year-old mammoth bone inscribed with an image of a mammoth is the real deal.

The carved bone, which depicts a walking mammoth, was found near Vero Beach in east-central Florida in 2006 or 2007. Since its discovery, scientists have been working to determine the authenticity of the 13,000-year-old artifact. Now, several experiments reveal the etching is indeed ancient, scientists reported recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Since the carving does not really look like any of the mammoth incising and cave art that come from Europe, "it could be the people were here doing their own art, and may have had a memory of art in the Old World," speculated study leader Barbara Purdy, a professor emerita at the University of Florida.

When preliminary forensic tests on the bone began in 2009, Purdy "literally went on the assumption that [the carving] was a fake," she told National Geographic News at the time. But these tests, and further analysis by the Smithsonian team, convinced Purdy that the etching was real.

The team compared elements in the engraved bones with others from the site, which once hosted giant beasts and nomadic bands of Ice Age hunters.

The scientists also observed the etching via optical and electron microscopy, which revealed "no discontinuity in coloration between the carved grooves and the surrounding material," according to a statement. This suggests that both surfaces aged at the same time, and that the grooves were not made more recently with metal tools.

Scientists also determined the 15-inch-long (38-centimeter-long) bone fragment had belonged to one of three animals: a mammoth, a mastodon, or a giant sloth—all of which died out in the region at the end of the last ice age, between about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.

In 2009, discoverer and local fossil hunter James Kennedy noticed the image only after dusting off the bone, which had sat under his sink for a few years. Purdy, the anthropologist, said, "This is the first glimpse of real art in the Western Hemisphere, and I think that's our starting point for something that might be found in the future if we start looking closely at these old bones." She said she hopes that the bone—now locked in a safety deposit box with an uncertain fate—will end up in a museum.

For now, art and anthropology buffs can see a cast of the carved bone, now part of an exhibit at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110622-mammoth-bone-oldest-art-americas-science/

LASCAUX -- STILL UNDER THREAT!

2011-06-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

This story is particularly interesting because I was able to gain entrance for my small group (7) into Lascaux in 1995. We did dip our shoes in acid (see below) but did not don hair nets and over-clothes. And we were only allowed in for 20 minutes with our excellent guide who spoke to us some 30 minutes before we went in.

Tucked away on a hillside in Montignac, in the Dordogne region of southwest France, the dame of Lascaux is an Ice Age treasure. Her walls are covered with remarkable pictures of horses, extinct bison and ibexes, painted when Man was still a hunter-gatherer and his survival far from certain. But the cave is also at threat from invisible invaders: microbial contaminants resulting from some awful mistakes made last century. Discovered by four teenagers in 1940, Lascaux became a massive draw after World War II, luring as many as 2,000 visitors a day. The cave was eventually closed to the public but the damage was done. Humans had brought in heat, humidity and microbes, upsetting the cave's ecosystem.

In 1960 as a young man, Jean Clottes was moved to tears by the confident strokes of black, red and ochre and their witness to the human odyssey. He later became a specialist in prehistoric wall painting -- and joined the campaign to save the precious site.

In an extremely rare visit to the cave last week, Clottes explained Lascaux had been affected in ways no-one could have predicted 60 or so years ago. "The cave was completely disturbed," said Clottes, 78. "In 1947 alone, they dug out 600 cubic metres of sediment to make an entrance and concrete path and installed lighting for the public." Six hundred cubic metres (22,000 cubic feet) is the equivalent to about eight 12-metre (40 foot) shipping containers.

The cave was closed in 1963 after green mould started to appear. This was followed in the late 1990s by the emergence of a white fungus, Fusarium solani. The bug either infiltrated the cave through a new ventilation system or during work during heavy rain to install it. The outbreak was tackled aggressively, including the use of fungicides and antibiotic compresses applied to the walls.

In 2007, black spots of a different fungus, of the Ochroconis group, sparked the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to threaten to place Lascaux on its "World Heritage in Danger" list.

Chastened, conservationists today focus on a multi-disciplinary approach, believing any single thrust has side effects in other fields. The cave is fitted with passive sensors to monitor air circulation, temperature and humidity but intervention is kept to a minimum. The fungus seems to be in retreat, for it is limited to a few grayish traces on the bare rock and on small areas of some paintings.

Under scientific guidance, the human presence is limited to a total of 800 hours per year, including maintenance and academic research. Two hundred meters (yards) from the cave is a visitors' center with a replica that receives some 300,000 tourists a year.

Visitors to the cave don sterile white coveralls, a plastic hair cap, latex gloves and two pairs of slip-on shoe covers. Previously they had to dip footwear in a germ-killing bath, but this was deemed to be another source of destabilization.
Entrance is made through two airlocks, one of which is an "air curtain" designed to keep out external humidity yet not affect the natural drafts that circulate in the cave through fissures.

The paintings themselves, viewed in the glimmer of an LED forehead lamp, are breath-taking. The strokes by unknown hands trigger a shock of how we humans today are linked to our distant forebears. After exactly 45 minutes, our visit is over. We are ushered out, the doors are sealed and the bison, horses and ibexes return once more to dark and silence.

Recently Ian Tattersall, emeritus curator at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC who leads tours for the AMNH to the painted caves of France, was asked what was his greatest experience in the caves -- he answered quickly: "Lascaux."

CRAFTING ANCIENT TOOLS DEVELOPED MODERN HUMAN BRAIN

2011-06-26T08:03:00.000-07:00

I am particularly interested in this story because our Prehistoric People Program takes authentic stone age tools (on loan from UCLA's Fowler Museum) out to classrooms. We pass the tools to (usually) 6th graders and they can see how early people developed very slowly until -- bang! -- modern people and their complicated tools arrive on the scene! We have reached over 67,000 students since the program began (1975) in the Connecticut/New York area.

LUND, Sweden, June 21 (UPI) -- Advanced crafting of stone spearheads and other tools contributed to the development of new ways of human thinking and behaving, Swedish archaeologists say. Researchers at Lund University say the technology for creating such tools took a long time to acquire, and required step-by-step planning and increased social interaction across generations, which led to the human brain developing new abilities.

Small groups of people wandering across Africa 200,000 years ago resembled contemporary humans anatomically but did not think the way we do today, the researchers said in a Lund release Tuesday.

But in a period of transformation about 80,000 years ago early modern humans who existed in what is now South Africa used advanced technology for the production of spearheads and the complicated crafting process developed the working memory and social life of humans.

"When the technology was passed from one generation to the next, from adults to children, it became part of a cultural learning process which created a socially more advanced society than before," Lund researcher Anders Hogberg said. "This affected the development of the human brain and cognitive ability."

This social learning contributed to the subsequent development of early modern humans' cognitive ability to express symbolism and abstract thoughts through their material culture, the researchers said.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/06/21/Study-Ancient-tools-developed-human-brain/UPI-58841308694628/print/#ixzz1QOWZYXYt

EGYPTOLOGIST SUSPECTED OF SMUGGLING ARTIFACTS FROM ISRAEL

2011-06-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

Retired lecturer from the US allegedly sold antiquities to tourists for $20,000, tried to leave country with ancient coins. He was held for questioning after allegedly selling and trying to smuggle abroad hundreds of valuable archeological artifacts.

The suspect, a former history lecturer specializing in Ancient Egypt, is alleged to have sold ancient coins and other historical relics to some 20 tourists he was guiding in Israel, and to have tried to leave the country with cash and checks totaling over $20,000. Customs authorities in conjunction with Antiquities Authority officials detained the suspect at Ben-Gurion Airport as he prepared to board a flight to the US. After admitting to the alleged offenses and filing a hefty deposit to ensure his return for trial, he was allowed to leave the country.

The arrest came after a week-long surveillance operation by undercover Antiquities Authority agents. On Monday officials saw the suspect selling antiquities to tourists in a hotel. Once the sale was completed, they searched the suspect’s room and belongings, discovering hundreds of ancient artifacts they believe were stolen by antiquities robbers from sites around the country.

Earlier on Monday, officials stopped the tourists he had been guiding at the Taba border crossing with Egypt. Eilat customs officials discovered 20 members of the group had illegally obtained archeological artifacts in their possession, and apparently intended to take them out of the country without permits.

The tourists said most of the items were purchased from the guide during their visit to Israel. The items included bronze and silver coins dating to the Second Temple period, clay oil lamps from the Roman and Byzantine eras, and ancient glass and ceramic vessels.

“The sale of antiquities without a permit and the export of antiquities from Israel without permission are criminal offenses for which the penalty prescribed by law is up to three years imprisonment,” said Amir Ganor, director of the Antiquities Authority’s Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery.

“Those buying antiquities from unauthorized dealers place themselves and their money at risk, purchase antiquities at exorbitant prices and are actually encouraging antiquities robbery and the plundering of the country’s history,” he said.

CT STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST BEMOANS DESTRUCTION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES

2011-06-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

Connecticut State Archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni says about 80 percent of the state's estimated 6,000 identified archaeological sites have been destroyed over time by subdivisions, strip malls and roads. Bellantoni says Connecticut still has unique and diverse archaeological resources. Some date back more than 9,000 years, including fossilized mastodon remains and makeshift tools from early nomadic Paleo-Indian hunting groups.

BRONZE AGE BURIAL MOUNDS IN DORSET (UK)

2011-06-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

Work has started to excavate three Bronze Age burial mounds on Golden Cap in Dorset.

The 4,000-year-old mounds are at risk from coastal erosion and are being excavated by the National Trust before they are lost to the sea. There are five burial mounds visible on the summit of Golden Cap, the highest point of the coast path through Dorset at 191m (626ft) above sea level. Each mound measures about 15m (49ft) in diameter.

It is not known exactly how high each one is because they have been covered by sand blown in from the cliff edge. Each one currently stands at about 1m (3ft) high. Preliminary excavation work was carried out on the mounds in May 2009. It is hoped the current excavation will uncover more about the people who originally built them.

Martin Papworth, a National Trust archaeologist, said: "These Bronze Age round barrows are important features of the landscape of Dorset and have a valuable story to tell, but the archaeological information contained in these burial mounds can only be preserved through excavation and record." All five burial mounds are expected to be lost through cliff collapses in the next 50 years. Mr Papworth added: "The barrows are scheduled monuments and English Heritage has granted permission for the National Trust to excavate the most vulnerable parts of the barrow group." It is thought the mounds would have been about two miles inland at the time they were built.

In June 1992 a trench was excavated across the south-west barrow, which dates to about 2000 BC. It was found that 30% of this mound had already been lost through coastal erosion. In 1800 half of it was dug into to create a signal station to warn against attack by Napoleonic forces during the French invasion.

.

PIRAEUS -- THE PORT OF ATHENS -- WAS ONCE AN ISLAND

2011-06-20T06:52:00.000-07:00

Piraeus, the main port of Athens, was an island from 4800 - 3400 BC, some 4500 years before the Parthenon was built on the Acropolis. This discovery was made by a French-Greek team led by Jean-Philippe Goiran, who studied and dated sediments collected in the Piraeus area.

The research was carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Athens, Paris 1 and Paris Ouest, and is published in the June 2011 issue of the journal Geology.

Looking at Piraeus today, it is hard to believe that this urban area was once an island separated from the mainland by a stretch of water. And yet, in the first century AD, the Greek geographer Strabo hypothesized that Piraeus had once been an island. Located approximately seven kilometers southwest of Athens, this vast rocky hill was home to the three ancient ports of the Greek capital, Zea, Mounichia and Cantharos. During the fifth century BC, this strategic place was connected to Athens by a road protected by high walls, known as the 'Long Walls', that guaranteed safe travel.

Until recently, no archaeological research had ever been carried out to verify Strabo's hypothesis. To put his intuition to the test, researchers from France and Greece took around ten geological core samples from boreholes over 20 meters deep in what is today the Cephissus (Kifisos) plain located between Piraeus and Athens. They compared the sedimentary records contained in the core samples with written records. Each sedimentary bed was dated using the carbon-14 method. This stratigraphic study enabled the researchers to discover four main stages in the evolution of coastal landscapes in the Piraeus region.

During the first stage, 6 700 - 5 500 BC, sea levels in the Mediterranean were considerably lower than today. The hill of Piraeus was not an island and was geographically connected to the mainland. Then from 4 800 - 3 400 BC, sea levels rose, and Piraeus became an island. During the third stage, from 2 800 BC on, sea levels started to rise more slowly, while at the same time massive amounts of sediment were carried down by rivers in the region. This dual phenomenon caused sediments to build up on the Cephissus plain, which led to the establishment of a lagoon environment. Finally, in the fifth century BC, at the time the Parthenon was being built on the Acropolis, the lagoons were still present. To build the Long Walls, the engineers of the time were therefore forced to fill in these wetlands.

http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/06/2011/the-port-of-athens-was-once-an-island

KEROS -- IN THE AEGEAN -- ISLAND OF FIGURINE FRAGMENTS -- A MYSTERY

2011-06-20T06:37:00.000-07:00

In June 1963 Colin Renfrew stepped onto the scrub-covered Aegean Island of Keros on the basis of a tip-off. In search of material for his studies, the young Cambridge graduate had been intrigued by rumors of recent looting on the almost uninhabited island - told to him by a Greek archaeologist.

Evidence of looting abounded and he reported back to the Greek Archaeological Service that smashed marble statues and bowls as well as broken pottery lay scattered over the hillside. Despite the destruction, it was clear that the fragments were Early Cycladic, an interesting find in itself, but as he was to realize later, he had actually stumbled upon the first evidence of an astonishing Bronze Age ritual.

A year later, the Greek Archaeological Service carried out a major recovery project, finding fragments of a type of sculpture found previously mainly in Cycladic Bronze Age graves. The simplicity of these beautiful serene figurines, with their folded arms, sloping feet and featureless faces, are said to have inspired modern artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore.

On Keros, apart from a single intact figurine, all of the recovered items were broken. There were 'body parts' in their hundreds - an elongated foot, a single breast, a folded arm, a pair of thighs, a face - all jumbled together.

However, when the 'Keros Hoard', which was widely believed to be part of looted material from the island, appeared on the antiquities market in the 1970s - and these were also broken fragments - so the mystery deepened. The question was raised whether Keros was actually an ancient burial ground that had been destroyed by looters, breaking every single figurine in their haste, or the site of something else entirely?

A new opportunity to investigate came in 1987, when Renfrew, by then a Professor in the Department of Archaeology, and two Greek archaeologists were permitted to excavate and survey the looted area - which they called Special Deposit North. "We recovered great quantities of broken material and yet as we excavated more we found no indications of tombs," said Professor Renfrew.

The fragments were not grave goods and the first of several astonishing features came to light, as Professor Renfrew explained: "As I studied the marble materials for publication, I realized that nearly all of the breakages seemed to be ancient and not the result of the looting. They had been deliberately broken before burial."

It was another two decades before Professor Renfrew was able to return, this time for three seasons of excavation - ending in 2008 - and with an international team of almost 30 experts. The post-excavation analysis of the finds is now nearing conclusion.

In the first year, the Cambridge-Keros project team excavated at the southern site and confirmed the presence of another Special Deposit, but this time completely undisturbed by looters. Most of the material was bundled together in small pits up to two meters in diameter. The breakages were old and deliberate and with an absence of marble chips - expected in the case of breakages at the location of the deposition - it was proof that the fragments had been broken elsewhere. Later radiocarbon dating confirmed they had been deposited over a 500-year period from between 2800 BC to 2300 BC.

"But the strangest finding of all was that hardly any of the fragments of the 500-odd figurines and 2,500 marble vessels joined together," said Professor Renfrew. "This was a very interesting discovery. The only conclusion we could come to was that these special materials were broken on other islands and single pieces of each figurine, bowl or pot were brought by generations of Cycladic islanders to Keros."

Meanwhile, across the short stretch of water to Dhaskalio, a very different picture was emerging. From the outset, the islet showed evidence of having been a major Bronze Age stronghold with structures built on carefully prepared terraces circling a summit, on which a large hall was erected. The settlement dates from around the time of the Special Deposits, before being abandoned around 2200 BC.

Examination of its geology showed that the beautifully regular walling of the settlement was imported marble rather than the flaky local limestone found on Keros. Remarkably, in the same era as the pyramids were being built and Stonehenge erected, Cycladic islanders were shipping large quantities of building materials, probably by raft, over considerable distances to build Dhaskalio.

Here, too, there were puzzling finds: a stash of about 500 egg-shaped pebbles at the summit and stone discs found everywhere across the settlement. And, although there was evidence that the olive and vine were well-known to the inhabitants of Dhaskalio, the terrain there and on Keros could never have supported the large population the scale of the site implies, suggesting that food also was imported.

One answer is to hypothesize a largely transient population. Several strands make this plausible, as Dr Michael Boyd, who is collating the results of the post-excavation analysis, explained: "Archaeobotanical evidence implies that the site was not intensively occupied year-round, and the imported pottery and materials suggests the possibility of groups coming seasonally from elsewhere."

As the team members conclude their analysis of the finds, all indications point towards Keros having been a major ritual center of the Cycladic civilization. "We believe that the breaking of the statues and other goods was a ritual ..a chosen sanctuary to preserve the effects," said Professor Renfrew.

This wouldn't be the first time a sanctuary has been identified on the Greek islands - Delphi, Olympia and Delos for instance - but it would be the earliest by about 2,000 years and certainly the most mysterious.

http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/06/2011/island-of-broken-figurines-shedding-new-light-on-keros-mystery

SKELETON OF A CHILD FROM 108,000 YEARS AGO -- WORLD'S OLDEST --FROM MOROCCO

2011-06-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Last year, while a Penn team of archaeologists, led by Harold Dibble, was working in Morocco,members uncovered a treasure beyond anything they'd imagined - a skeleton of a child from 108,000 years ago.

They don't know what killed him at about age 8, but his remains are believed to be one of the most complete ever found of this period.

The skeleton promises to open a window into a pivotal time in human evolution when Neanderthals still ruled Europe, and Africans were inventing art and symbolic thought.

One of Dibble's students was the first to notice a piece of bone the size of a quarter, said Dibble, who is a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. To everyone's surprise, the bone was part of a remarkably complete skull and upper body of a child that died 108,000 years ago, as shown by various dating techniques.

The work was funded by National Geographic, whose cable channel will present a special program based on the finding, titled The World's Oldest Child.

From analyzing the teeth, Dibble's team estimated he or she was 6 to 8 years old. Dibble bestowed the name Bouchra, meaning good news in Arabic. It's a feminine name, but he has since decided it's more likely to have been a boy.

In that earlier time, 108,000 years ago, modern Homo sapiens - people who looked like us - had emerged in Africa and begun to spread to the Middle East. Neanderthals populated parts of Eurasia. Africa was thought to be a patchwork of so-called modern Homo sapiens and somewhat different-looking "archaic humans."

The Moroccan site, called Smuggler's Cave, was home to a group of people who ate rabbits, gazelles, and seafood, and made some of the world's earliest art in the form of shell beads, Dibble said.

The only earlier evidence for art is the use of ochre pigments in southern Africa, he said. Neanderthal people by that period had begun to bury their dead, but left no evidence for any form of symbolic communication or art.

The child had bigger teeth than a person would have today - a trait that's also seen in some of the first modern humans to venture out of Africa. "They looked like us but not exactly like us," Dibble said. Archaic people had somewhat different features - including a brow ridge or lack of a chin. But they may have been ancestral to us since these populations were capable of interbreeding.

http://articles.philly.com/2011-06-16/news/29665786_1_modern-humans-neanderthals-skeleton

EXCELLENT INFORMATION ON PREHISTORIC PEOPLE

2011-06-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

Too long to give you a brief! Be sure and go to the interactive site at the end of the story. It's wonderfully done and quite accurate as to present day dating and information.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43299152/ns/technology_and_science-science/

PAKISTAN WILL LOSE THOUSANDS OF ROCK ART CARVINGS DUE TO THE BUILDING OF A PROPOSED DAM

2011-06-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Pakistan is going to lose one of the most precious rock art carvings in the world due to construction of the Diamer-Basha Dam. The proposed site of the dam hosts at least 30,000 ancient art carvings and inscriptions which may vanish forever due to the construction of this reservoir.

The northern area of Pakistan is a mountainous region which lies between the western Himalayas, the Korakoram in the east and the Hindukush in the west. Here, the junction of the ancient routes made the upper Indus a cradle and crossroads of different civilizations.

Travelers, invaders, merchants, pilgrims and artisans from different ages and cultures used the legendary silk route and its branches to enter in the region. Many of them left their cultural and religious signs on the rocks, boulders and cliffs.

The sun-tanned smooth rocks attracted more visitors and settlers to carve their own signs, symbols, inscriptions and artworks on the same locations. And hence, gradually a rock art archive accumulated in the area and eventually became a wonderland of some 50,000 rock carvings and 5,000 inscriptions from different civilizations ranging from the eighth millennium BC to the coming of Islam (since the 16th century AD) in the region.

The diversity of the rock carvings in the region has turned the area into one of the most important rendezvous of petroglyphs in the world.

In 1884, a Hungarian traveler, Karl Eugen discovered a Buddhist carving in present Baltistan. In 1907, a veteran explorer, Ghulam Muhammad unveiled another Buddhist petroglyph from the Diamer district.

When the 750 km long, Karakorum Highway (the modern Silk Road) inaugurated in 1978, thousands of more engravings came to view which inspires a German scholar, Karl Jettmar to further explore the rock art wealth.

In 1980, Karl Jettmar and Pakistan’s father of archaeology, Ahmed Hassan Dani launched a Pak-German study group to systematically investigate the ancient rock art in the region. See below for full story and the amazing images!

http://tinyurl.com/3td5sjl
[6 images]

9,000 YEAR OLD RARE SKELETONS -- SHOULDN'T THEY BE STUDIED?

2011-06-16T08:59:00.000-07:00

Two of the oldest known skeletons in the Americas - uncovered in 1976 on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean during construction at the home of a University of California, San Diego (USA) chancellor, and dated between 9,000 and 9,600 years old - may be among the most valuable for genetic analysis in the continental United States.

Under federal law, bones are returned to a tribe that can prove 'cultural affiliation' through artifacts or other analyzes. But last year, federal officials issued new rules that make it easier to return bones and funerary objects that are not culturally affiliated to tribes. Scientists and museums have been considering a legal challenge to the new rule, fearing the loss of many valuable specimens. The La Jolla skeletons could end up as the case by which that rule is challenged. At nearly 10,000 years old, the skeletons in question are so ancient that they are not culturally linked to any tribe.

The two people (a man and a woman) had consumed seafood year-round rather than seasonally, and were buried together. The bones are in such good condition that it is likely scientists could extract DNA from them. Archaeologist Daniel Sandweiss is reported as suggesting that DNA analysis of Paleo-indian skeletal remains along the west coast of the U.S.A. will help us learn more about how people first spread throughout the American continents.

Edited from Wired Science, and "Powered By Osteons" (20 May 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/3fnsxbm
[4 images]
http://tinyurl.com/3d44zxc
[1 image]

TEXAS HAS PREHISTORIC CAVE PAINTINGS!

2011-06-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

A complex and colorful mural 45 meters wide and 4 meters high painted on canyon walls some 4,000 years ago, is being scanned with lasers to produce a high-resolution 3-D image, in efforts to gauge the mural's deterioration, detect images long ago weathered away, and protect it from the unintended consequences of a nearby reservoir.

Panther Cave - so-named from the 4 meter long figure of a leaping red panther guarding its entrance - overlooks the Rio Grande about 80 kilometers west of Del Rio, and is among the best known of several hundred prehistoric pictograph sites that dot the steep, rugged canyons along the USA-Mexico border.

"They are ancient texts, not just drawing on walls," says Carolyn Boyd, head of the Shumla School, an archeological research center working with state and federal agencies on the project.

A camera about the size of a microwave oven passes over a 15 to 25 centimeter square on each scan, collecting images accurate to 1mm. Color photographs are then overlaid on the images to give researchers a clear picture of how the site has changed over the centuries. Other images taken with color-sensitive photo equipment reveal parts of the paintings no longer visible to the naked eye. Check out the images -- they are amazing!

Edited from Associated Press, Beaumont Enterprise (29 May 2011)
http://tinyurl.com/3l9qhmc
[4 images]

LIBYA'S GADHAFI HIDING MISSILES AT LEPTIS MAGNA?

2011-06-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

Pressure is mounting on the parts of Libya that remain under the control of Moammar Gadhafi. Between rebel attacks from the east and west, relentless NATO air strikes and growing gas and food shortages, it seems inevitable that the Libyan government will fall. But Libyan officials insist they aren't going anywhere. They claim they remain firmly in charge of their territory. To prove it, the government minders, who strictly control foreign journalists' movements there, Wednesday arranged for simultaneous trips east, west and south of Tripoli.

NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported on her arranged tour of Leptis Magna. The site is enormous (I visited it several years ago) and the officials briefly showed them the site where, of course, they said, no weapons were hidden. However, Professor Susan Kane of Oberlin (see next paragraph) also reported to NPR that Libyan colleagues are sure that weapons have been stored in the area.

After a hiatus of 23 years, in 2006, an international mission (under the direction of Professor Susan Kane, Oberlin College) resumed archaeological work in Cyrene, Libya. Cyrene, a designated UNESCO World Heritage site in eastern modern Libya, was the leading city of the Libyan Pentapolis. Settled by Greek colonists toward the end of the 7th century B.C., it remained an active Graeco-Roman city of distinctively Hellenic character until the time of the Islamic conquest (A.D. 643).

ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN DICTIONARY FINALLY FINISHED AFTER 90 YEARS

2011-06-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

Scholars at the University of Chicago have completed -- after 90 years -- the 21 volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries.

This was the language that Sargon the Great, King of Akkad in the 24th century B.C. spoke to command what is reputed to be the world's first empire and that Hammurabi used around 1700 B.C. to proclaim the first known code of laws. It was the vocabulary of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Nebuchadnezzar II called on these words to sooth his wife, homesick for her native land, with the promise of cultivating the wondrous Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

At a recent conference, historians, archaeologist and specialists in ancient Semitic languages assessed the significance of the comprehensive dictionary, which Gil Stein, director of the University's Oriental Institute, said "is an indispensable research tool for any scholar anywhere who seeks to explore the written record of the Mesopotamian civilization."

One scholar, Jerold Cooper, Professor emeritus in Semictic languages at Johns Hopkins University said the dictionary's importance "can't possibly be overestimated." It opens up for study "the richest span of cuneiform writing," he said, referring to the script invented in the fourth millennium B.C. by the ealier Sumerians in mesopotamia.

This was probably the first writing system anywhere, and the city-states that arose in the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys (present day Iraq, Syria --the earliest urban and literate civilizations). The dictionary with 28,000 words now defined in their various shades of meaning, covers a period from 2500 B.C. to A.D. 100.

The dictionary is more of an encyclopedia than simply a concise glossary of words and definitions. many words with multiple meanings and extensive associations with history are followed by page after page of discourse ranging through literature, law, religion, commerce and everyday life. For example, there are 17 pages devoted to the word "umu" meaning "day." And the word "ardu" for slave, introduces extensive material available on slavery in the culture.

"Every term, every word becomes a window into the culture," said Martha T. Roth, Dean of Humanities at Chicago who has worked on the project since 1979 and has been its editor in charge since 1996.

A full set sells for $1,995, and individual volumes range from $45 to $150. But they are also available, free of charge, online.

NEW INFO ON ROAMING HABITS OF AUSTRALOPITHECINES IN SOUTH AFRICA

2011-06-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

A new study of the teeth of 19 australopithecines from two famous cave sites in South Africa suggests that, when it came time for members of the human family to find a mate in South Africa about 2 million years ago, females moved away from their birthplaces far more often than males.

Lead author Sandi Copeland, a paleo-anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA), along with colleagues, analyzed tooth enamel from two species closely related to the australopithecines. The pattern held for both species.

Copeland says, "This is the first direct evidence that exists for dispersal patterns among early hominins." The findings suggest that such patrilocal organisation of social groups is ancient in human ancestors, perhaps dating back to the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees, as some researchers have proposed. This is similar to the dispersal pattern found in chimpanzees, bonobos, and many human groups, but dissimilar to that of most gorillas and other primates.

Copeland isn't sure why males would move less than females in a region where there were no natural barriers. She plans to see if the pattern holds in australopithecines in other parts of Africa - to see if this was the usual way australopithecines organized their clans. It is still not clear where the roaming female australopithecines identified in the study spent their formative years, she added.

TAR ON THE BEACHES OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA MAY HAVE AFECTED CHUMASH HEALTH

2011-06-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

Because I winter in Southern California, I'm well aware of the tar that comes up on the beach. I always thought it was from the tankers off shore but this article says these clumps of a sticky black substance with a texture halfway between molasses and rubber have been there since prehistoric times. Could these tar balls - collected by humans for thousands of years - provide evidence that our long-standing relationship with hydrocarbons was toxic from the outset?

Long before we started asphalting roads, prehistoric people around the world used bitumen, which seeps from the ground naturally in places. Archaeological finds suggest that California's prehistoric locals, the Chumash people, eagerly collected the tar balls. They used them to caulk the seams of ocean-going craft and waterproof woven baskets to make drinking vessels, as well as for making casts for broken bones and poultices for sore joints. Some Chumash even chewed bitumen like gum.

We now know that bitumen can be a source of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) - pollutants that have been linked to a number of health problems. To find out whether California's tar balls had the potential to damage the Chumash's health, Sebastian Wärmländer of Stockholm University in Sweden and colleagues analyzed samples taken from Californian beaches and from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. They found the tar contained 44 PAHs, including many known carcinogens.

Wärmländer's team then turned to the Chumash's bones to see whether the tar balls had had an effect on their health. Most symptoms of health problems caused by PAHs reveal themselves in the flesh, but studies have suggested that mothers who are exposed to PAHs during pregnancy give birth to smaller than average babies, who become shorter than average adults.

Wärmländer and his colleagues measured 269 adult skulls from burials made between 6500 BC and AD 1780 on Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa islands off California's coast. They found that, over the generations, the skulls of men decreased from 3370 cubic centimeters to 3180 cm3. The women's skulls decreased from 3180 cm3 to 2980 cm3. Previous studies have shown femur length declined over this period too.

The decreasing stature of the Chumash suggests declining health, says Wärmländer's team. This has been suggested before, but this is the first time bitumen has been considered as a contributor to this decline.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS -- A MUST SEE

2011-05-26T17:58:00.000-07:00

“Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” the amazing Werner Herzog film that explores Chaurvet Cave is now playing in local movie theaters. (THE WEEK OF MAY 25TH)

The cave, in the Ardeche Valley of southeast France, was found in 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eilette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire (and named for the lead speleologist).

Film-maker Herzog was allowed in the cave with his camera crew for a very limited time and yet has photographed in wonderful detail these images. They are the earliest cave paintings ever found, some from about 31,000+ years ago and others from 28,000.

Lions, bears, bison, rhinos, horses and even a leopard seemingly move across the walls. Experts with different specialties discuss the various aspects. If you want to learn more, see Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave by Chauvet, Deschamps and Hillaire. Epilogue by Jean Clottes and Foreword by Paul Bahn (Clottes and Bahn are preeminent in the field of cave art).

VIKING SHIP -- EARLIER THAN THOUGHT AND NOT JUST A BURIAL SHIP!

2011-05-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

For years, it was widely believed that the ancient Tune ship on display at the Viking Ships Museum in Oslo was used mainly as a so-called "grave ship," perhaps even built for the purpose of being buried in the grave of an important Viking. Now a new doctoral dissertation claims that it was not only an ocean-going sailing vessel, but even grounded in its time and underwent repairs.

The Tune ship is the lesser-known and in the poorest condition of the three vessels on display at the museum. It was discovered on a farm on Rolvsøy, north of Fredrikstad, and excavated from a burial mound in 1867.

The grave was unusually large, measuring 80 meters in diameter and around four meters high, according to the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. The vessel, built around 900AD, was best preserved in the areas where it had been buried under thick clay.

Its remnants, however, paled when the stately Gokstad ship was discovered in 1880 and the Oseberg ship in 1903-04 on the other side of the Oslo Fjord. Now, archaeologist Knut Paasche of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) maintains in his newly finished doctoral dissertation that the Tune ship was also used on the high seas.

Paasche doesn't believe the Tune ship was a ceremonial ship that only was rowed inland until it was brought ashore and used in the burial mound. His studies revealed both ruts and signs of wear and tear under the keel, which he contends show that the ship was in use for a long time.

The Cultural History Museum now reports as well that the vessel "has probably been a fast, ocean-going vessel." Right behind the mast, a burial chamber was built and in it lay a man. Even though the grave had been plundered before its excavation, research has revealed remains of burial gifts, parts of a ski, the skeleton of a horse and remnants of his weapons including a sword handle.

"While the Gokstad ship was a large ocean-going trading vessel, and the Oseberg ship close to a pleasure yacht, the Tune ship was a fast-sailing courier ship along the coast," Paasche told Aftenposten. He said it was equipped with unusually strong rigging for such a small vessel that also was built for 12 oarsmen.

Paasche believes the craftmanship also suggests that early residents of today's Norway were sailing long before Viking times, given the knowledgeable boat-building behind the Tune ship. He said such building techniques could only have been rooted in maritime experience and handed down through generations.

http://www.newsinenglish.no/2011/05/09/viking-ship-not-just-ceremonial/

PIG POINT, MARYLAND (USA) AMAZING EARLY SITE

2011-04-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

Multiple excavations at the site of Pig Point, Maryland, have borne some of the oldest artifacts found in the Mid-Atlantic states - pottery, arrow and spear points and remnants of wigwams, fires and foodways - and there likely is more to come. "They could have been here for 10,000 years," said Al Luckenbach, the county's archaeologist. "We have carbon-dated artifacts 8,500 years old." Luckenbach and his colleagues likely have uncovered a site spanning the range of human settlement in the Mid-Atlantic.

What makes Pig Point stand out is the depth of archaeological evidence all in one location. He explained that other sites may have artifacts just as old but they usually are spread several levels apart - one layer of pottery from the 12th century, for instance, then another layer three or four feet deeper. At Pig Point the artifacts have been found buried together, one period to the next stacked on top of one another.

The settlement likely served as a base camp for multiple bands of native Americans. Algonquin peoples and their predecessors likely were drawn to the shallows of Jug Bay and its wealth of fish, shellfish and other sources of sustenance. There also is evidence it was a center of trade. Several artifacts, such as a rolled copper bead, or points made of stone found in Ohio, have been unearthed.

The digging at Pig Point began in earnest in 2009 with funding from the Maryland Historic Trust aimed at locating and analyzing Middle Woodland period (0 to 500 A.D.) prehistoric sites. The Lost Towns Project had been digging prehistoric sites over the years, searching deeper and in more detail many Native American settlements mapped out over a generation ago. It also came about through the publicity-shy property owner's willingness to allow big chunks of his property to be dug up and sifted for the sake of historic curiosity.

One of the first finds that sent chills up the spines of the archaeologists
was a few dark smudges in the dirt. Those round spots turned out to be the remnants of saplings thrust into the ground for a wigwam, the oblong shelters favored by the indigenous people of the region. Then they found another row of posts, then another.
"We have the oldest structures ever found in Maryland," Luckenbach said. "And the first found in Tidewater Maryland," Pig Point's wigwams, thought to be about 16 by 12 feet, are considerably older. The first was about 800 years old. Carbon dating on the other post holes showed they were even older - one from the 6th century and another from the 3rd century.

It seems every layer uncovered in the methodical system utilized by archaeologists has turned up another eureka moment. If not a piece of pottery preceding the birth of Christ, it was an even older spear point. Crews have found preserved bone tools, arrowheads made of deer antler, needles and awls made of bone, flaking tools, plus shards of pottery, clam shells, fish and wildlife bones. And then there are the points - arrow points, spear points, some in the familiar triangle shape, others rounded, still others longer oblong affairs.

The oldest, a Palmer point, could be 10,000 years old. Pig Point also is the farthest south Archaic triangle points have been found. Previously a New Jersey site, well-known among archaeologist as Abbott Farm, south of Trenton, was the southernmost location the Archaic period points had been found. Other points found include Piscataway points from roughly 1,000 B.C. Bifurcate points dated at 5,000 B.C. also were unearthed. Pottery found at the site includes the first intact native American pot Luckenbach has ever held. The 2.5-inch paint pot was found next to a heavily burned fire pit along with pieces of unfired clay, leading county staff to believe it got lost under the fire built to fire a batch of pottery. Carbon dates from that layer of the dig have run from 1260 to 1320 A.D. A tube pipe circa 500 A.D. and chunks of a gorget, a semicircular stone worn around the neck, are among the other prominent finds. Aside from the depth and plenty, it's the unusual items found there that have sparked interest and wonder. There are items uncovered there from the Adena mound building cultures of the Midwest, for instance.

But why would it all converge at Pig Point? Theories abound. The wealth of artifacts found so far will keep the Lost Towns staff and scores of interns busy for years. And there will be more to come. After two full seasons of digging, the thousands of artifacts uncovered at Pig Point have been moved to the county archaeology lab at Historic London Town and Gardens in Edgewater. There every piece is meticulously cleaned, numbered and cataloged. Then the study can begin.

So they are back at it at Pig Point, digging and scraping, sifting and
sorting, finding out who we are.

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/top/2011/04/17-45/Amazing-artifacts-unearthed-at-Pig-Point.html?ne=1

TOUR NERO'S PALACE IN THIS SLIDE SHOW!

2011-04-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

Notorious for being a cruel megalomaniac tyrant who persecuted early Christians, had his stepbrother, two of his wives and even his own mother murdered, Rome's fifth emperor, Nero, has never been held dear in Roman history.

Take a visual tour of Emperor Nero's palace in this slide show at http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/nero-palace-reconstructed-virtual-110415.html

The remains of the magnificent estate on the Palatine hill where the emperor lived in the first years of his reign, will open to the public at the end of the summer, Italian authorities announced at the opening of a major exhibition on the controversial emperor.

Stretching for about 1.2 miles along key archaeological sites of ancient Rome, the exhibition, which runs until Sept. 18, aims to show the many faces of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37 - 68 A.D. ).

Nero became emperor at just age 17 in 54 A.D. After his people took up arms against him, Nero fled Rome and stabbed himself in the throat before he could be arrested. He was 31.

The palace, named Domus Transitoria, was an architectural masterpiece which stretched from the Palatine, where Nero first lived with his grand-uncle and adoptive father Claudius and his mother Agrippina, to the gardens of Maecenas on the Esquiline.

The residence was grandiose, but it did not last long. Built around 60 A.D., it was ruined in the Great Fire four years later and was replaced by the Domus Aurea, one of the most opulent palatial complexes ever constructed.

After Nero's death, subsequent emperors officially damned his legacy and destroyed most of whatever remained of Nero's first castle after the great fire. However, excavations, begun in the 18th century and continued afterwards, brought to light some fragmentary complexes.

"Based on the archaeological evidence, we have produced the first ever 3D virtual reconstruction of the complex," Rea said.

Italy's junior culture minister Francesco Maria Giro explained to reporters touring the show that the exhibit is "not an attempt at rehabilitating Nero. It helps to explain his merits, his qualities but also his failings, to give a fuller image."

The complex is expected to open to limited groups of visitors in September.

EVIDENCE OF MINOANS AT MIDDLE BRONZE AGE PALACE IN THE WESTERN GALILEE REGION OF PRESENT-DAY ISRAEL

2011-04-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

Excavations at a large Middle Bronze Age Canaanite Palace in the western Galilee region of present-day Israel are revealing mounting evidence of an ancient Minoan cultural presence in ancient Canaan during the 17th century B.C.E.

A recent and ongoing excavation is opening a new window on the possible presence of ancient Minoans revealing what may be the earliest known Western art found in the eastern Mediterranean.

Known as Tel Kabri (located near its namesake kibbutz not far from historic Acco and the resort town of Nahariya on the coast of Israel), the site features an early Middle Bronze Age (MB I) palace dated to the 19th century B.C.E., making it, along with ancient Aphek and possibly Megiddo, the earliest MB palace discovered in present-day Israel. This conclusion was drawn as a result of excavations conducted there as recently as December 20, 2010 to January 10, 2011. But the tell-tale signs of an Aegean presence or influence at the site show up in a later developmental phase of the palace structure some 150 to 200 years later in the overlying MB II palace dated to the 17th century.

Reports Dr. Eric Cline of George Washington University and Co-Director of the excavations along with Assaf Yasur-Landau of Haifa University, "Excavations conducted by [Aharon] Kempinski and [Wolf-Dietrich] Niemeier from 1986 to 1993 at the site of Tel Kabri -- now identified as the capital of a Middle Bronze Age Canaanite kingdom located in the western Galilee region of modern Israel -- revealed the remains of a palace dating to the Middle Bronze (MB) II period (ca. 1700 - 1550 B.C.E.). Within the palace, Kempinski and Niemeier discovered an Aegean-style painted plaster floor and several thousand fragments originally from a miniature Aegean-style wall fresco."(1)

The new excavations under the direction of Cline and Yasur-Landau have added to the discovery. Reports Cline, et al., "During the 2008 and 2009 excavations at Tel Kabri more than 100 new fragments of wall and floor plaster were uncovered. Approximately 60 are painted, probably belonging to a second Aegean-style wall fresco with
figural representations and a second Aegean-style painted floor."(2)

Additionally, the excavations during the summer of 2009 and the winter of 2010/2011 have revealed emerging clues of a possible Minoan influence on the architecture of the site. A stone structural feature unearthed outside of the northern wall of the palace in 2009 shows a configuration characteristically attributable to Minoan construction. "It's only one level of stones thick," says Cline. "But it zig-zags. You usually see that on Crete, where it is a ceremonial walkway around a palace. It is either a walkway or the bottom of a wall......I think it is a roadway or walkway and that it may well be going around the palace. This roadway may be headed toward the missing west entrance to the palace."

The excavations at Tel Kabri are still young, but the finds to date have set
the stage for much more to come. All indications thus far point to the
probability that more frescoes will be found, further supporting the Minoan
connection. Looking at the larger picture, researchers hope to be able to
reconstruct the life-cycle of the Canaanite palace, determine its actual
size, and find answers to a host of new questions that have emerged as the
investigations have progressed.

"It's like no other site I have seen because it [the palace] is so huge yet
it was really only occupied during the Middle Bronze Age," says Cline.
"There is a lot more to learn. I think that we've only just begun to scratch
the surface."

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/april-2011/article/archaeologists-uncover-evidence-of-a-minoan-presence-among-ancient-canaanites

MYCENAEAN TABLET FOUND IN SOUTHWEST GREECE DATES TO 1490-1390 B.C. -- UNUSUALLY EARLY FOR SUCH TABLETS!

2011-04-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

The discoverers and other specialists in Greek history said the tablet, one of the oldest known examples of writing in mainland Europe, should cast light on the political structure and bureaucratic practices near the beginning of the renowned Mycenaean period, 1600 to 1100 B.C. At its height, the culture supported the splendor of palaces at Mycenae and Pylos and inspired the heroic legend of the Trojan War, immortalized in Homer's Iliad.

"This is a rare case where archaeology meets ancient texts and Greek myths," Michael B. Cosmopoulos, director of the excavations, said last week in announcing the discovery.

Dr. Cosmopoulos, an archaeologist and professor of Greek studies at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, said the tablet, only 2 inches by 3 inches, was a surprise uncovered last summer in the middle of an olive grove in southwest Greece, near the modern village of Iklaina. Judging by pottery in the dump, the tablet dates to sometime from 1490 to 1390 B.C. Scholars said they had little evidence before that clay tablets were made and used to keep state records so early in Mycenaean history.

The Missouri team had investigated the Iklaina site for 11 years, and in the last couple of summers examined the extensive evidence of stone walls of what may have been a palace at a district capital. Some walls are decorated with frescoes showing ladies of the court and ships with dolphins cavorting in water. There are also remains of a drainage and sewer system far ahead of its time.

Previous excavations had yielded clay writing tablets from 1200 B.C., close to the approximate time of the supposed Trojan War, and some references to Iklaina as an administrative center associated with Pylos. Dr. Cosmopoulos said in an interview that the new findings appeared to show that some 200 years earlier this may have been the seat of an independent chiefdom that had already achieved a degree of literacy and political organization.

On one side, the tablet has one readable word, a verb meaning to prepare to manufacture. Along the broken edges are other characters, but not enough for scholars to make out the word or words. On the reverse side, the tablet gives a list of men's names alongside numbers. Cynthia Shelmerdine at the University of Texas, Austin, was the first to read the writing and assess its importance. "The fact that we have a tablet like this means that this government had scribes, and scribes are a product of bureaucracy," Dr. Cosmopoulos said.

Archaeologists are only beginning to consider the implications of the discovery. It suggests that political states in ancient Greece originated at least a century and a half earlier than had been documented. Iklaina may have started small and been conquered and annexed by one of the expanding
powers, like Pylos, in the same region.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/science/05archeo.html?_r=1

FRAGMENTS AND TEXTILE FOUND IN PERUVIAN CAVE DATED TO 12,000 YEARS AGO

2011-04-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

Textiles and rope fragments found in a Peruvian cave have been dated to around 12,000 years ago, making them the oldest textiles ever found in South America, according to a report in the April issue of Current Anthropology.

The items were found 30 years ago in Guitarrero Cave high in the Andes Mountains. Other artifacts found along with the textiles had been dated to 12,000 ago and even older. However, the textiles themselves had never been dated, and whether they too were that old had been controversial, according to Edward Jolie, an archaeologist at Mercyhurst College (PA) who led this latest research.

The cave had been disturbed frequently by human and geological activity, so it was possible that the textiles could have belonged to much more recent inhabitants. What's more, the prior radiocarbon dates for the site had been taken from bone, obsidian, and charcoal-items that are known to sometimes produce inaccurate radiocarbon ages. According to Jolie, charcoal especially can produce dates that tend to overestimate a site's age.

"By dating the textiles themselves, we were able to confirm their antiquity and refine the timing of the early occupation of the Andes highlands," Jolie said. His team used the latest radiocarbon dating technique-accelerated mass spectrometry-to place the textiles at between 12,100 and 11,080 years old.

The textile items include fragments of woven fabrics possibly used for bags,baskets, wall or floor coverings, or bedding. They were likely left by settlers from lower altitude areas during "periodic forays" into the mountains, the researchers say. "Guitarrero Cave's location at a lower elevation in a more temperate environment as compared with the high Andean [plain] made it an ideal site for humans to camp and provision themselves for excursions to even higher altitudes," Jolie and his colleagues write.

Jolie's research also suggests that women were among these earliest high altitude explorers. Bundles of processed plant material found in the cave indicate that textile weaving occurred on site. "Given what we know about textile and basket production in other cultures, there's a good possibility that it would have been women doing this work," Jolie said.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-04/uocp-cdi041311.php

NEW STUDY SUGGESTS THAT LANGUAGE ORIGINATED IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

2011-04-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.

The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible,” said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

“We’re uneasy about mathematical modeling that we don’t understand juxtaposed to philological modeling that we do understand,” Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University, said about the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. Atkinson’s new article because it does not conflict with any established area of linguistic scholarship.

Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language “is not something my method can speak to,” Dr. Atkinson said.

“What’s so remarkable about this work is that it shows language doesn’t change all that fast — it retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years,” said Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in England who advised Dr. Atkinson. Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human expansion across the globe.

In the wake of modern human expansion, archaic human species like the Neanderthals were wiped out and large species of game, fossil evidence shows, fell into extinction on every continent shortly after the arrival of modern humans.

RACE TO SAVE BUDDHIST RELICS IN AFGHANISTAN

2011-04-10T11:16:00.000-07:00

MES AYNAK. A rescue operation is underway to save as much as possible from ancient Buddhist monasteries in Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, before the mountains become an open-cast mine and the site is destroyed. In what is now the world’s largest archaeological dig, around 1,000 workers are trying to excavate artifacts from the country’s second most important Buddhist site (along with Hadda), after Bamiyan.

The site, a former training camp of Osama bin Laden, has been leased to a Chinese mining company for copper production. Only what can be excavated and removed to safety will be saved.

Despite the impending archaeological loss, Mes Aynak has received scant attention internationally. Moreover, Afghanistan’s heritage has suffered much in recent years from civil war, looting and the vandalism of the Taliban.

Mes Aynak (Little Copper Well) lies 25 miles south-east of Kabul, in a barren region. The Buddhist monasteries date from the third to the seventh centuries, and are located near the remains of ancient copper mines. It is unclear whether the monastery was originally established to serve the miners or if the monks set up there to work the mines themselves.

During the early 2000s, widespread looting occurred at the Buddhist sites after the Kabul government found it difficult to impose control. Archaeologists are now uncovering dozens of statues with missing heads that were broken off to sell.

Mes Aynak’s fate changed again in 2007, when the government negotiated a 30-year mining concession with the state-owned China Metallurgical Group. The archaeological remains sit on the world’s second largest copper deposit. The $3bn deal represents the largest business venture in Afghanistan’s history. The mining project should bring major economic benefits for the country, but it involves digging a huge open-cast mine that will envelop most of the archaeological remains. Although mining has not yet begun, large numbers of Chinese workers are already developing the infrastructure.

The rescue excavations began in 2009 at Gol Hamid, which lies in a mountain pass adjacent to a Chinese camp. Work was undertaken by the National Institute of Archaeology and the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan. Part of the monastic compound was excavated, leading to the discovery of a vaulted chapel, monks’ cells and storerooms. Polychrome terracotta statues were also found, including a sleeping Buddha.

Last year the archaeological work moved to Tepe Kafiriat, higher up the mountains. The 260 ft walled complex originally had eight stone-clad stupas (ceremonial towers for relics), surrounding the main stupa. Among the finds are a 25 ft-long reclining Buddha and wall paintings. Archaeologists also discovered a pair of large feet, which are all that remains of a 10 ft statue (the main part was looted or destroyed in the early 2000s). An ancient wooden Buddha was also discovered, which very rarely survive. Although comparatively little has been excavated, the archaeologists are supposed to complete their work within 14 months. Mining is due to start in 2014.

Last month The Art Newspaper spoke to Omar Sultan, the deputy minister for information and culture. He pledged that from this month, the number of archaeologists would rise from 30 to 65. The number of laborers would be increased tenfold, from 90 to 900. The site is guarded by a force of 1,600 soldiers. Excavation costs are now estimated at $28m, although it is not clear whether the whole site has been surveyed. Funding is coming from the ministry of mines, and possibly from the Chinese company. The Chinese have also promised to send archaeologists.

The most important portable finds have been transferred to the National Museum in Kabul, although its storage and conservation facilities are inadequate to handle the volume of material that has been unearthed. On 15 March, finds from Mes Aynak went on display in Kabul. “Along the Silk Road: Recent Excavations from Mes Aynak”, featuring 70 of the most important discoveries, was funded by the US embassy in Kabul. The government has plans to build a new museum near Mes Aynak, on a site in Logar province. It will be five miles from the mine. There are hopes of moving some of the stupa bases and reconstructing them in the new museum.

REMINDER -- HERZOG'S FILM ON CHAUVET CAVE OPENS !

2011-04-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

Werner Herzog’s new film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, tells the story of the ancient creation and modern discovery of the stunning rock-art of the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche Valley, south-east France. Shot in 3-D, the documentary takes the audience deep inside the huge caverns to marvel at the vivid, almost cinematic depictions of animals that date back some 32,000 years. The apparent freshness of these ancient images, and the technical ability they demonstrate, is staggering.

LEAD CODICES A FAKE -- BLOGGERS CAUGHT ON RIGHT AWAY!

2011-04-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

It has been fascinating to see how the story of the lead codices has been examined on the blogs and already found wanting. I agree with James McGrath: The biblioblogging community should be proud. It seems that yet again the collective effort of scholars and other interested parties with blogs has shed more light on an issue than the media or any one individual managed to, and has done so quickly and effectively. The next time someone asks "Why blog?" I will mention this as an example of the sort of thing that makes blogging worthwhile for all.If you have not been following the latest developments, here are the key recent links (i.e. yesterday and today) in the blogs, all of which also have additional links:

Daniel O. McClellan: Peter Thonemann on the Lead Codices

Paleojudaica: Hebrew-Inscribed-Metal-Codices Watch: A Fake

Paleojudaica: Hebrew-Inscribed-Metal Codices Watch

Forbidden Gospels: Lead Codices? Come on!

Very well done to the bloggers who managed quickly to get on top of this story, in spite of the thin reporting, confusion and misinformation in much of the media.

EARLIEST CHRISTIAN WRITING FOUND IN NORTHERN JORDAN BETWEEN 2005 AND 2007

2011-04-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born.

A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol. A Jordanian Bedouin opened these plugs, and what he found inside might constitute extremely rare relics of early Christianity. That is certainly the view of the Jordanian government, which claims they were smuggled into Israel by another Bedouin. The Israeli Bedouin who currently holds the books has denied smuggling them out of Jordan, and claims they have been in his family for 100 years. Jordan says it will "exert all efforts at every level" to get the relics repatriated.

The books, or "codices", were apparently cast in lead, before being bound by lead rings. Their leaves - which are mostly about the size of a credit card - contain text in Ancient Hebrew, most of which is in code. If the relics are of early Christian origin rather than Jewish, then they are of huge significance.

One of the few people to see the collection is David Elkington, a scholar of ancient religious archaeology who is heading a British team trying to get the lead books safely into a Jordanian museum. He says they could be "the major discovery of Christian history", adding: "It's a breathtaking thought that we have held these objects that might have been held by the early saints of the Church." He believes the most telling evidence for an early Christian origin lies in the images decorating the covers of the books and some of the pages of those which have so far been opened.

Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies at Sheffield University, says the most powerful evidence for a Christian origin lies in plates cast into a picture map of the holy city of Jerusalem. "As soon as I saw that, I was dumbstruck. That struck me as so obviously a Christian image," he says.

"There is a cross in the foreground, and behind it is what has to be the tomb [of Jesus], a small building with an opening, and behind that the walls of the city. There are walls depicted on other pages of these books too and they almost certainly refer to Jerusalem." It is the cross that is the most telling feature, in the shape of a capital T, as the crosses used by Romans for crucifixion were.

"[Another] one of the things that is most likely pointing towards a Christian provenance, is that these are not scrolls but books. The Christians were particularly associated with writing in a book form rather than scroll form, and sealed books in particular as part of the secret tradition of early Christianity."
Another potential link with the Bible is contained in one of the few fragments of text from the collection to have been translated. It appears with the image of the menorah and reads "I shall walk uprightly", a sentence that also appears in the Book of Revelation.

Never has there been a discovery of relics on this scale from the early Christian movement, in its homeland and so early in its history.

IRAQI MARSHES EXPLORED BY NSF SCIENTISTS FOR ORIGINS OF URBAN LIFE

2011-04-03T15:52:00.000-07:00

The first non-Iraqi archaeological investigation of the Tigris-Euphrates delta in 20 years was a preliminary foray by three women who began to explore the links between wetland resources and the emergence and growth of cities last year.

"Foreign investigations in Iraq stopped in the 1990s," said Carrie Hritz, assistant professor of anthropology, Penn State. "Iraqis continued research, but because their work is unpublished, we are unsure of where they surveyed."

The marshlands in Iraq and Iran were drained between 1950 and the 1990s. While initial explanations were that Iraq needed the land for agricultural uses, more often than not, politics played a role. After the first Gulf war, Saddam Hussein drained the areas between the Tigris and Euphrates to control and punish Shia dissidents among the Marsh Arabs.

Restoration of the Hammar marshes is now a high national priority. If we do not act quickly, the window of opportunity for conducting work in this region will close, according to the researchers who include Hritz; Jennifer Pournelle, research assistant professor, School of the Environment, University of South Carolina, and Jennifer Smith, associate professor of geology, Washington University in St. Louis.

The project aims to investigate the contributions of the early-mid Holocene shoreline of the gulf and marshes to the economic foundations of Mesopotamian cities. The researchers are looking at archaeological sites from 5,000 B.C. to Islamic times.

Carrying out any type of survey in a country at war is difficult and making arrangements becomes a daunting task. "Ultimately, we found that the only way to get into the country that was cost effective was to go on a tour with a British tour company," said Hritz. "While in Bagdad, we met with the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, and they encouraged us to visit the sites with a SBAH representative and report back to them any observations."

The researchers also used local Iraqi security for their trip rather than hiring a foreign security firm. They spent a week on their British tour going from Baghdad to Basra and then spent five days with a private guide doing geoarchaeological survey in the Basra area.

Beside the preliminary survey, their aim was to establish collaborations with researchers at the University of Basra. They gave lectures at the university and met with geologists to determine what the researchers needed and the part that researchers and university could play.

Looting and damage to university laboratory equipment occurred during the initial stages of the current war in Iraq. The researchers plan to include the University of Basra scientists in their future work and hope to use not only their expertise, but also enhance their facilities.

"One thing we were able to do was to move forward the process to get the University of Basra access to JSTOR," said Hritz. "They now have access." JSTOR is an online database of more than 1,000 academic journals.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ROMAN NINTH LEGION?

2011-03-26T13:18:00.000-07:00

The disappearance of Rome's Ninth Legion has long baffled historians, but could a brutal ambush have been the event that forged the England-Scotland border, asks archaeologist Dr Miles Russell, of Bournemouth University.

The theory that 5,000 of Rome's finest soldiers were lost in the swirling mists of Caledonia, as they marched north to put down a rebellion, forms the basis of a new film, The Eagle, but how much of it is true?

For the English, the massacre of the Ninth is an inspiring tale of home-grown Davids" successfully taking on a relentless European "Goliath". For the Scots, given the debate on devolved government and national identity, not to say the cultural impact of Braveheart, the tale has gained extra currency - freedom-loving ghlanders resisting monolithic, London-based imperialists.

The legend of the Ninth gained form thanks to acclaimed novelist Rosemary Sutcliff, whose masterpiece, The Eagle of the Ninth, became an instant bestseller when published in 1954.

But historians have dissented, theorizing that the Ninth did not disappear in Britain at all, arguing both book and film are wrong. Their theory has been far more mundane - the legion was, in fact, a victim of strategic transfer, swapping the cold expanse of northern England, for arid wastes in the Middle East. Here, sometime before AD 160, they were wiped out in a war against the Persians. But, contrary to this view, there is not one shred of evidence that the Ninth were ever taken out of Britain.

In fact, the last certain piece of evidence relating to the existence of the Legion from anywhere in the Roman Empire comes from York where an inscription, dating to AD 108, credits the Ninth with rebuilding the fortress in stone. Some time between then and the mid-2nd Century, when a record of all Legions was compiled, the unit had ceased to exist.

The early years of the 2nd Century were deeply traumatic for Britannia. The Roman writer Fronto observed that, in the reign of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117 - 138), large numbers of Roman soldiers were killed by the British. The number and full extent of these losses remain unknown, but they were evidently significant. The anonymously authored Augustan History, compiled in the 3rd Century, provides further detail, noting that when Hadrian became emperor, "the Britons could not be kept under Roman control".

The fact that they took up residence in the legionary fortress of York suggests that the "great losses" of personnel, alluded to by Fronto, had occurred within the ranks of the Ninth.

It would seem that Sutcliff was right after all.

It was the Ninth, the most exposed and northerly of all legions in Britain, that had borne the brunt of the uprising, ending their days fighting insurgents in the turmoil of early 2nd Century Britain.

The loss of such an elite military unit had an unexpected twist which reverberates to the present day. When the emperor Hadrian visited Britain at the head of a major troop surge, he realised that there was only one way to ensure stability in the island - he needed to build a wall.

The ultimate legacy of the Ninth was the creation of a permanent border, forever dividing Britain. The origins of what were to become the independent kingdoms of England and Scotland may be traced to the loss of this unluckiest of Roman legions.

Dr Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology
at Bournemouth University.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12752497

COLLAPSE OF MAYAN CIVILIZATION BLAMED ON ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE

2011-03-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

The collapse of the Mayan civilization was due to environmental damage caused by deforestation and damage to the agricultural system, a leading U.S. archaeologist said at the 3rd International Congress on Mayan Culture.

"It was a collapse and not an abandonment, because the second is temporary; while the first represents an abandonment over the long term and the destruction of the social and economic system that maintains a state, as occurred in the said region," Dr. Richard D. Hansen said at the opening of the conference in the Caribbean city of Merida.

Hansen, senior scientist at the Institute for Mesoamerican Research in the Department of Anthropology at Idaho State University, said that the Mayan cities of the "Pre-classic" period (1000 B.C.- A.D. 150) were "the world's largest in terms of their volume." He said that these cities were "located in the Mirador-Calakmul Basin, a settled region on both sides of the border between Mexico and Guatemala.

Hansen, who is leading the Mirador Basin research project in Guatemala, said that the fall of cities including Nakbe, Wakna and Tintal occurred toward the end of the Pre-classic period due to the excessive exploitation of natural resources.

This was similar to what occurred at the end of the Classic period (A.D. 300-900) in cities such as Palenque, Copan and Tikal, due to environmental damage stemming from the excessive cutting of trees for (fuel) ... and production of stucco with which they recovered the buildings, the expert said.

He went on to say that the "'conspicuous' consumption of natural resources caused deforestation and damage to the agricultural system, which hindered cultivation of enough food to maintain a population that during that period reached around 1 million residents throughout the Basin." Hansen said that this conclusion is the product of 30 years of study during which he collected archaeological evidence, including pollen, isotopes, ceramics, among other things, that allowed him to verify the environmental depredation.

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=389544&CategoryId=13003

HOMO ERECTUS HAD A "TOOL MILL" IN CHINA SOME 600,000 YEARS AGO

2011-03-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Xinhau News reported the discovery of an early to middle Pleistocene stone tool making factory used by Homo erectus in the Lushi Basin, South Luo River, in central China on March 6, 2011. The discovery was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The discovery was dated using pedostratigraphic analysis, optically stimulated luminescence, and magnetostratigraphic analysis to between 600,000 and 620,000 years of age. The site is representative of flake and core technology and is similar in comparison to other sites in China where Homo Erectus has been found.

This is the first discovery of a "factory" for tool making which may indicate a higher level of sophistication in the organization of Homo Erectus society than was
previously known.

The discovery was a collaborative effort by Australian and Chinese researchers.

http://www.examiner.com/paelenotology-science-news-in-national/600-000-year-old-stone-tool-mill-discovered-china