All posts by Archeology worldwide team

NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

13,900-Year-Old Bone Projectile Point in the Americas Found Stuck in a Mastodon’s Rib!

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13,900-Year-Old Bone Projectile Point in the Americas Found Stuck in a Mastodon’s Rib!

A team of researchers led by a Texas A&M University professor has identified the Manis bone projectile point as the oldest weapon made of bone ever found in the Americas at 13,900 years.

The Manis site mastodon rib with embedded point to the left.

Dr. Michael Waters, distinguished professor of anthropology and director of Texas A&M’s Center for the Study of First Americans, led the team whose findings were published this week in Science Advances.

The team studied bone fragments embedded in a mastodon rib bone which was first discovered by Carl Gustafson, who conducted an excavation at the Manis site in Washington state from 1977 to 1979.

Using a CT scan and 3D software, Waters and his team isolated all the bone fragments to show it was the tip of a weapon—a projectile made from the bone of Mastodon, prehistoric relatives of elephants.

“We isolated the bone fragments, printed them out and assembled them,” Waters said. “This clearly showed this was the tip of a bone projectile point.

A mastodon with an arrow pointing to the trajectory of the spear.

This is this the oldest bone projectile point in the Americas and represents the oldest direct evidence of mastodon hunting in the Americas.”

Waters said at 13,900 years old, the Manis point is 900 years older than projectile points found to be associated with the Clovis people, whose stone tools he has also studied. Dating from 13,050 to 12,750 years ago, Clovis spear points have been found in Texas and several other sites across the country.

“What is important about Manis is that it’s the first and only bone tool that dates older than Clovis. At the other pre-Clovis site, only stone tools are found,” Waters said. “This shows that the First Americans made and used bone weapons and likely other types of bone tools.”

He said the only reason the Manis specimen was preserved is because the hunter missed, and the projectile got stuck in the mastodon’s rib.

“We show that the bone used to make the point appears to have come from the leg bone of another mastodon and was intentionally shaped into a projectile point form,” Waters said. 

“The spear with the bone point was thrown at the mastodon. It penetrated the hide and tissue and eventually came into contact with the rib. The objective of the hunter was to get between the ribs and impair lung function, but the hunter missed and hit the rib.”

Waters studied the rib bone previously, presenting findings in a 2011 paper published in Science, in which radiocarbon dating determined the bone’s age and a genetic study of the bone fragments determined that they were mastodon.

“In our new study, we set out to isolate the bone fragments using CT images and 3D software,” he said. “We were able to create 3D images of each fragment and print them out at six times scale. Then we fit the pieces back together to show what the specimen looked like before it entered and splintered in the rib.”

Not much is known about the people who used the Manis spear point other than they were some of the first Indigenous people to enter the Americas. Waters said the Manis site and others are giving archaeologists some insight.

“It is looking like the first people that came to the Americas arrived by boat,” he said. “They took a coastal route along the North Pacific and moved south. They eventually got past the ice sheets that covered Canada and made landfall in the Pacific Northwest.

“It is interesting to note that in Idaho there is the 16,000-years-old Coopers Ferry site, in Oregon is the 14,100-year-old site of Paisley Caves. And here we report on the 13,900-year-old Manis site.

So there appears to be a cluster of early sites in the Northwestern part of the United States that date from 16,000 to 14,000 years ago that predate Clovis. These sites likely represent the first people and their descendants that entered the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age.”

GREENLAND, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Viking Colonies Collapsed Through Over Hunting Walruses

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Viking Colonies Collapsed Through Over Hunting Walruses


Norsemen in exile from Iceland sailed to the shores of Greenland in the 10th century and survived thanks to the ivory of a unique species of walrus on the island. 

The precious material was traded throughout Europe in exchange for wood and iron and it allowed the Vikings to thrive in their desolate home. But just as swiftly as they arrived at the distant island in the Atlantic ocean, all signs of their occupation vanished in the 15th century. 

Experts now believe that their penchant for hunting walruses was ultimately their downfall as they forced the species to extinction, destroying their source of income. 

A modified medieval walrus skull

Norse people settled in Greenland in 950AD after Erik the Red was sent there in exile. By this point, much of Iceland’s native walruses had already been hunted to extinction by Vikings, and the new inhabitants in Greenland had inadvertently stumbled upon the next hunting ground.  

‘Our story starts where the Icelandic story ends. In Iceland, there are walrus finds in early Viking age sites,’ says Dr James Barrett, an academic from the University of Cambridge who led the study into the disappearance of Greenland’s Vikings. 

‘But later, they are described as a rarity. Previous research shows that the population of walruses in Iceland was hunted to depletion quite quickly after the Viking settlement.’

And it seems the Vikings did not learn from the lessons of Iceland, as a new study published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews reveals the same thing happened again. The demise of the Norse folk in Greenland was the very thing that helped them thrive — hunting walrus ivory.  

Academics at the universities of Cambridge, Oslo and Trondheim found that almost all ivory traded throughout Europe in Medieval times came from Greenland walruses.

After Iceland slaughtered its own populations of walruses, Greenland was, for centuries, the only source of the the valuable material. Norse settlements in the south-western region of the island held a monopoly on the material, which was in vogue throughout Europe. 

But as demand soared for the popular material, supply was dwindling and the Vikings forced further north in search of the animals they were overly reliant upon. 

At its peak, walrus ivory was a valuable medieval commodity, used to carve luxury items such as ornate crucifixes or the Viking game hnefatafl. 

The famous Lewis chessmen are made of walrus tusk. They showcase how the marbled effect of the ivory can be sculpted into various artefacts.  

The chessmen are thought to have been made in Trondheim shortly before 1200AD and discovered in the 1830s on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Scientists did not wish to destroy the rare tusks themselves so instead analysed parts of the walrus skull attached to the tusks.

A total of 67 of these skull fragments – known as rostra – were taken from sites across Europe, dating from between the 11th and 15th century.  Ancient DNA (25 samples) and stable isotopes (31 samples) extracted from samples of bone provided clues to the animals’ sex and origins.

It revealed that the Vikings became desperate for ivory and their journeys became longer, more arduous and less fruitful as numbers of mature male walruses dwindled. 

Scientists found that the hunters switched from hunting large males to settling for females and smaller animals. To compound the misery of the Pagan warriors, changing fashions and an emerging market for elephant ivory saw a rapid decline in demand of walrus ivory in the 15th century. 

Dr James Barrett said: ‘Walrus ivory was very popular and valuable especially early in the Middle ages, particularly for use in Romanesque art. 

‘But later, in the 1200s, there was a shift in popularity from walrus to elephant tusks around the time when Gothic art developed.’ With this major financial artery severed, the long-term habitation of Greenland was forced to an abrupt end, academics now believe.  

Dr James Barrett added: ‘Norse Greenlanders needed to trade with Europe for iron and timber, and had mainly walrus products to export in exchange.

‘We suspect that decreasing values of walrus ivory in Europe meant more and more tusks were harvested to keep the Greenland colonies economically viable.

‘Mass hunting can end the use of traditional haul-out sites by walruses.  ‘Our findings suggest that Norse hunters were forced to venture deeper into the Arctic Circle for increasingly meagre ivory harvests. 

‘This would have exacerbated the decline of walrus populations, and consequently those sustained by the walrus trade.’ It is thought that the lack of walruses was not the only issue but it at least played a significant role in the Viking withdrawal from Greenland. 

Other theories the collapse of the civilisation include climate change with the dawn of the ‘Little Ice Age’, unsustainable farming and the emergence of the Black Death.   

‘An overreliance on walrus ivory was not the only factor in Norse Greenland’s demise. However, if both the population and price of walrus started to tumble, it must have badly undermined the resilience of the settlements,’ says co-author Bastiaan Star of the University of Oslo.

WORLD

Ancient pollen provides hints about how plants have adapted to climate change in the past and potentially in the future

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Ancient pollen provides hints about how plants have adapted to climate change in the past and potentially in the future

A new study finds that plants around the world moved poleward during a dynamic period of rising temperatures 56 million years ago.Each spring, many of us become hyper-aware of pollen.

The dust-like substance, which plants release in bulk as they reproduce, is little more than a nuisance to many people as it irritates eyes and noses and coats cars in a light green powder.

But to a palynologist, or pollen researcher, like the University of Melbourne’s Vera Korasidis, preserved pollen records “represent a really unique archive of the earth’s climatic history.” In her research, Korasidis uses fossilized pollen grains to reconstruct ancient ecosystems and climate.

Pollen is a particularly good environmental time capsule. Plants have produced pollen for hundreds of millions of years, investing great amounts of energy into dispersing the reproductive material far and wide.

Despite their tiny size, pollen grains are extremely durable. As a result, fossilized pollen is a more common occurrence in many prehistoric deposits than relatively fragile fossil leaves.

Despite their tiny size, pollen grains are durable, waterproof and widespread—traits that increase their chance of preservation in the fossil record.

As a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Natural History, Korasidis teamed up with Scott Wing, the museum’s curator of paleobotany, to examine 56-million-year-old pollen grains from one of the most dynamic periods in Earth’s climatic history, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).

Sparked by the release of massive stores of carbon dioxide into the oceans and atmosphere from either bubbling volcanoes or massive methane seeps, the PETM was a period of rapid climate change.

Geologists estimate that temperatures rose between 9-and-14 degrees Fahrenheit in less than 10,000 years and remained elevated for 150,000 years. This rapid warming completely transformed marine ecosystems.

However, the impact of the PETM on land is more difficult to parse, Outside of a trove of fossils from the multi-hued badlands of north-western Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, where Wing has spent decades excavating fossil leaves, intact plant fossils from the time period are difficult to find, which limits global understanding of how plants responded to the warming temperatures.

To get a more complete view, Korasidis, Wing and their colleagues analyzed hardy pollen grains preserved in rocks from 38 PETM sites around the world.

Wing and his team have collected thousands of fossilized leaves from Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, one of the few places where intact leaves from the PETM have been found.

“We’d like to have more of a movie than just a snapshot of what the changes were, and pollen gives us a better chance at that because it is preserved more easily,” says Wing, who was a co-author on the new research. “It’s more likely to give you multiple images of what’s happening.”

In a new study published last month in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, the team analyzed the fossilized pollen. Like snowflakes, different types of pollen have different shapes ranging from spiky spores to smooth grains.

By matching the shapes of the grain to pollen from modern plants, the researchers were able to cultivate a botanical who’s who from 56 million years ago, which in turn offered clues to what ancient environments were like during the PETM.

“We can make the connection between what we find fossilized and what’s around today,” Korasidis says. “And that’s really the key—you need to be able to make that connection between the past and the present to infer past climates.”

Together with climate models, the fossilized pollen revealed that warming temperatures during the PETM sparked an era of massive plant migrations.

By dispersing their seeds, plants can move 550 yards or more per year, which makes it possible for plants to cover vast distances over thousands of years. During the PETM, many were trying to beat the heat by migrating towards cooler climates at the poles and higher altitudes.

According to Wing, these widespread movements created a mosaic of different plant types mingling in the same environment. Wyoming was home to seasonally dry subtropical forests where plants common today in Central America thrived. In forests further north, temperate species like birch trees met tropical palm trees.

While this botanical blend seems odd today, it makes more sense when considering that the PETM temperature spike occurred in an already warm world.

There were no ice caps at the poles. Higher latitudes were wet and warm, while lower altitudes became hotter and drier. “It is odd to think about palm trees growing up in the Arctic, but this was such a different world,” Korasidis says. “It’s a world that seems out of place to us today.”

These ancient plants were not the only things feeling the heat during the PETM. Recent research has discovered that many early mammals, including early dog-sized horses, downsized to beat the heat. As the temperature rose, several archaic groups of mammals died out while other groups, including primitive primates, flourished.

While these instances from the PETM offer some insight into how life may respond to a warmer future, both Wing and Korasidis stress that modern climate change far outpaces even this prehistoric temperature spike.

Researchers estimate the rate of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere today is 10 to 20 times faster than it did during the PETM. This accelerated rate threatens to outpace the speed at which some plants can migrate.

During the PETM, some plants were able to move 15 degrees northward within 10,000 years to keep pace with the warming temperatures. However, even fast-moving plants may struggle to keep up with modern temperature changes.

Humans have also restricted plant movement. Paved areas like cities and highways cut off migration routes for certain species. “Plants need somewhere for their seeds to disperse,” Korasidis says.

While people have made it more difficult on plants, they can also help them migrate by opening up nature corridors of connected habitats and planting seeds of at risk plants in more hospitable climates.

Although the PETM is not a perfect analog for modern climate change, Wing believes it illustrates several important lessons, including how rapidly excess carbon dioxide can warm the Earth’s climate. Importantly, it also shows that once carbon enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it sticks around.

“Even though the PETM is geologically short, it lasts 150,000 years, which is nearly as long as there have been Homo sapiens on the planet,” Wing says. “So the next 150,000 years is going to be really different unless we figure out how to fix it before we end up adding a very large amount of carbon to the atmosphere.”

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

A study reveals that the Vikings brought horses and dogs to England

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A study reveals that the Vikings brought horses and dogs to England

Vikings took dogs and horses with them when they travelled from Scandinavia to Britain 1,157 years ago, a study has found. This suggests that they didn’t just steal animals from the settlements they raided, as accounts describe, but brought some with them.

Scientists from Durham University found animal remains alongside the remains of a human at Britain’s only known Viking cremation cemetery at Heath Wood, Derbyshire.

Scientists from Durham University found animal remains alongside human remains (pictured) at Britain’s only known Viking cremation cemetery at Heath Wood, Derbyshire

Analysis showed that the individual was from the Baltic Shield area and crossed the North Sea with their horse and dog, but died shortly after arriving. The researchers believe that they were of high status, as they were allowed to be cremated with their pets.

The remains at the Heath Wood site are associated with the Viking Great Army; a coalition of Norse warriors originating from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They came together under a unified command to invade the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that constituted England in 865 AD.

Lead author Tessi Löffelmann said: ‘This is the first solid scientific evidence that Scandinavians almost certainly crossed the North Sea with horses, dogs and possibly other animals as early as the ninth century AD and could deepen our knowledge of the Viking Great Army.

The remains at the Heath Wood site are associated with the Viking Great Army; a coalition of Norse warriors originating from Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

‘Our most important primary source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, states that the Vikings were taking horses from the locals in East Anglia when they first arrived, but this was clearly not the whole story, and they most likely transported animals alongside people on ships.

‘This also raises questions about the importance of specific animals to the Vikings.’ Previous studies have found that burial ceremonies for Vikings in Iceland included the slaughter of a male horse, which would then be buried alongside the dead.

In 2019, two Viking burial ships were found in Sweden that contained the remains of a man buried with his dog and horse in the stern. It was common to bury the dead on these ships rather than cremating them to show high status and respect. 

For the new study, published in PLOS ONE, scientists were looking for new information about those buried at the Heath Wood cemetery. The site is associated with the Vikings who wintered in nearby Repton in 873 AD.

Repton was a significant royal and ecclesiastical centre in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom Mercia, but became a Viking stronghold for the army after they seized it.

The researchers analysed the strontium in the remains of two adults, one child and three animals – a horse, a dog and possibly a pig.

Strontium is a naturally occurring element that appears in rocks, water and soil, and makes its way into the plants that grow from them. The ratio of different forms, or isotopes, of strontium that appear in a landscape is specific to its geographical location.

Humans and animals eat the plants, and the strontium inside them replaces the calcium in their bones and teeth, remaining there even after their death.

Therefore, the ratio of the different strontium isotopes in their remains can be matched to a specific location, revealing where they came from or settled.

Strontium ratios in the remains of one of the adults and the child match to multiple locations in Europe, including Denmark, south-west Sweden and the area local to the Heath Wood cremation site in England.

Fragment of a sampled cremated horse radius/ulna from burial mound 50 at Heath Wood

But those in the other adult and the three animals are normally found in the Baltic Shield area of Scandinavia, covering Norway and central and northern Sweden.

The pig remnant is not thought to be from a live animal, but instead an amulet brought over to Britain from the individual’s home, or a preserved food source.

All the remains were buried under a mound after cremation, suggesting they were a part of a Scandinavian burial rite and providing ‘a direct link, a proxy, to the ‘homelands’ of those buried’.

Co-author Dr Janet Montgomery said: ‘Our study suggests that there are people and animals with different mobility histories buried at Heath Wood, and that, if they belonged to the Viking Great Army, it was made up of people from different parts of Scandinavia or the British Isles.’

Dr Julian Richards from the University of York co-directed the excavations at the Heath Wood Viking cemetery between 1998 and 2000.

He added: ‘The Bayeux Tapestry depicts Norman cavalry disembarking horses from their fleet before the Battle of Hastings, but this is the first scientific demonstration that Viking warriors were transporting horses to England two hundred years earlier.

‘It shows how much Viking leaders valued their personal horses and hounds that they brought them from Scandinavia, and that the animals were sacrificed to be buried with their owners.’

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Site Of Ancient Egyptian “Great Revolt”, Recorded On Rosetta Stone, Finally Discovered

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Site Of Ancient Egyptian “Great Revolt”, Recorded On Rosetta Stone, Finally Discovered


Archaeologists have long known about the Great Revolt, a battle between the ancient Egyptians and the Ptolemaic Kingdom that lasted from 207 B.C. to 184 B.C., because it is mentioned on the Rosetta Stone and in other historical texts. But now, archaeologists have finally discovered the exact location of one of the revolt’s battles.

In 2009, archaeologists began excavating a site known as Tell el-Timai, where an ancient Greco-Roman industrial city called Thmouis was located on the Nile Delta of northern Egypt.

The excavations were part of the Tell Timai Archaeological Project, an ongoing program by the University of Hawaii to learn more about Thmouis and the role it played in ancient Egypt. The team’s findings were published Dec 2022 in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

The excavations revealed evidence that Thmouis was “ground zero” of a violent conflict, but at first the researchers weren’t certain which one.

Over the next decade, they unearthed the remains of numerous buildings that had been burned to the ground, as well as a cache of artifacts that included weapons like ballista stones along with coins and a headless statue depicting the Ptolemaic queen Arsinoë II.

Weapons found at Tell Timai: Ballista stones, a sling pellet, and an arrowhead

They also discovered an abundance of unburied ancient human remains strewn about the city, according to the study.

“At first I was seeing things that piqued my curiosity and began to realize that we were looking at the destruction layer,” study first author Jay Silverstein, project co-director of Tell Timai and an archaeologist and senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science. “And then we started finding bodies.”

The Ptolemaic period (304 B.C. to 30 B.C.) was started by Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian generals. The Rosetta Stone contains a decree written in 196 B.C., during the reign of pharaoh Ptolemy V, when the Great Revolt was ongoing. 

Both before and after the Ptolemies gained control, ancient Egyptians were meticulous when it came to burying the dead, even creating “elaborate underground embalming workshops,” like the one recently discovered in Saqqara.

“In Egypt, people pay a lot of attention to burying people, so to have people unburied tells you a lot,” Silverstein said. “All these findings were sending a message that there was some event here in history and we had to figure out what it was.”

However, the identities of the deceased are unclear. “The unburied dead could be Greeks who lived at Thmouis who were overtaken by the violence of the insurrection, or they could be Egyptians who died defending the town,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Dating the battleground

Using some of the artifacts plucked from the site, including coins pulled from beneath a home’s floorboards, along with the discovery of an abandoned kiln complex where pottery was produced, archaeologists could better pinpoint the time period of the battle based on when the coins were minted.

Coins and pottery discovered in a destroyed room during the excavations at Tell Timai

During the excavation, they pulled fragments of imported Greek wares and shards of pottery, whose styles helped them determine that the ceramics probably dated to the Ptolemaic Kingdom, Silverstein said.

Within the kiln complex, archaeologists were surprised to find the remains of a man inside a kiln with his legs sticking out.

“I think it’s possible that he had crawled into a non-functioning kiln to try to hide [during the attack],” Silverstein said.

Historical texts also confirm that the kilns were shut down near the end of the Early Ptolemaic period, when the Egyptians unsuccessfully tried to liberate themselves from Ptolemaic rule during the Great Revolt.

The kilns that remained and were unearthed during the excavation were all “truncated at a uniform level,” offering more evidence that an attack happened at the site, according to the study. 

“The evidence of conflict and destruction at northern Thmouis is unequivocal, and the timing is well-placed  and thus coincides with the Great Revolt,” the study authors wrote in their paper.

ASIA, EUROPE, WORLD

125,000 years ago Massive elephants were hunted and killed by Neanderthals 

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125,000 years ago Massive elephants were hunted and killed by Neanderthals 

A new analysis of 125,000-year-old bones from around 70 elephants has led to some intriguing new revelations about the Neanderthals of the time: that they could work together to deliberately bring down large prey, and that they gathered in larger groups than previously thought.

The bones belonged to straight-tusked elephants, a now extinct species that stood nearly 4 meters (just over 13 feet) tall at the shoulder.

Archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser examines the femur of a large adult male straight-tusked elephant
The findings suggest Neanderthals made deep cut marks on the foot bones of straight-tusked elephants to access the rich deposits of fat in the animals’ foot pads.

That’s nearly twice the size of the African elephants that are alive today, and around 4 tons of meat would have been taken from each carcass.

The researchers estimate it would’ve taken a team of 25 people between 3–5 days to skin and then dry or smoke the elephant meat. It points to either a large group of Neanderthals being nearby, or that they had ways of preserving the colossal volume of meat.

In either case, these early humans start to seem more sophisticated than we’d imagined.

“This is really hard and time-consuming work,” Lutz Kindler, an archaeozoologist from the MONREPOS Archaeological Research Center in Germany, told Science.

“Why would you slaughter the whole elephant if you’re going to waste half the portions?”

Evidence of charcoal fires around the archaeological site suggest that the meat would have been dried, which is one way of making it last for longer.

The haul would have been enough to feed 350 people for a week, or 100 people for a month, according to the researchers – that counters the conventional narrative of Neanderthals living in smaller groups of around 20.

The ages of the animals are telling too. These were almost all adult males – if the hominins were scavenging meat from dead elephants, children and females would be expected.

Here, it looks as though they deliberately targeted the larger males for the extra meat, perhaps by driving them into mud or trapping them in pits.

Almost every bone that was examined showed evidence of careful butchery. Marks left by other animals were few and far between, which hints that there wasn’t much meat or fat left on these bones by the time the Neanderthals had finished with them.

Archaeologist Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser examines the femur of a large adult male straight-tusked elephant

“It constitutes the earliest unambiguous evidence for the systematic targeting and processing of straight-tusked elephants, the largest Pleistocene terrestrial mammals that ever lived,” write the researchers in their published paper.

“This has important implications for our views of Neanderthal local group sizes, mobility, and cooperation.”

Around 3,400 elephant bones were studied in total, with researchers finding clear traces of cutting and scraping marks left by flint tools. It’s unusual to find direct evidence of cut marks like this, making it an important find.

The site that these bones were taken from sits near the town of Neumark-Nord in Germany, and was discovered by coal miners in the 1980s. It’s one of the richest sites we have for studying Neanderthal activities of the Last Interglacial (LIG) period, some 130,000–115,000 years ago.

Our hominin cousins are often portrayed as less intelligent or cultured than the human beings that eventually replaced them, but this study is the latest in a growing pile of evidence that there was more to Neanderthals than we might have thought.

“Neanderthals were not simple slaves of nature, original hippies living off the land,” archaeologist Wil Roebroeks, from Leiden University in the Netherlands, told the Associated Press.

“They were actually shaping their environment, by fire… and also by having a big impact on the biggest animals that were around in the world at that time.”

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

Exquisite jewellery from the past was discovered in a Chinese woman’s tomb.

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Exquisite jewellery from the past was discovered in a Chinese woman’s tomb.

A 1,500-year-old tomb unearthed in China was found to contain spectacular golden jewelry inlaid with gemstones and amethysts and a 5,000 bead necklace.

A number of burials from the Northern Wei Dynasty, which this tomb belongs to, have yielded beautiful gold earrings, but experts have said the earrings discovered in this tomb are the most exquisite to have been found from this time period.

Live Science reports that the tomb was first discovered in 2011 but the finding has only recently been described in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics .

The burial was discovered in Datong City, Shanxi Province, by the Datong Municipal Institute of Archaeology, who were assessing a site prior to a construction project.

Datong City was founded in 200BC and located near the Great Wall Pass to Inner Mongolia.

It flourished during the following period and became a resting place for camel caravans traveling from China to Mongolia.

In the 4th and 5th centuries AD, the same era as the burial, Datong (then named Pincheng) became the capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty.

This was also the period that the famous Yungang Grottoes were constructed.

An epitaph found in the tomb’s entrance revealed that the tomb belonged to a woman named Farong, who was the wife of a magistrate.

Farong Tomb

Her skeleton, which was not well preserved, was found in a coffin with her skull resting on a pillow of lime.

The gold earrings have ornate designs, inlaid gemstones, gold chains and amethysts. They contain images of dragons and a human face.

“The human figure has curly hair, deep-set eyes and a high nose; wears a pendant with a sequin-bead pattern on its neck; and has inverted lotus flowers carved under its shoulders,” wrote archaeologists in the journal article.

The necklace was made with around 5,000 beads, including 10 gold beads, 9 gold pieces, 2 crystals, 42 pearls, and over 4,800 glass beads.

The jewelry found in the 1,500-year-old tomb in Datong City. Credit: Chinese Cultural Relics

Interestingly, gold earrings with very similar designs have been found in northern Afghanistan, suggesting trade between the two cultures in ancient times.

Gold earrings have been recovered from numerous other Northern Wei Dynasty tombs, such as those pictured below, but archaeologists have said that the earrings found in this tomb are among the most beautiful ever found from this period.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Long stretch of underground aqueduct found in Naples

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Long stretch of underground aqueduct found in Naples

Once played in by local children, a vast tunnel that goes through a hill in Naples, Italy, is actually a Roman aqueduct, archaeologists say.

Speleologists explore the Aqua Augusta, a Roman aqueduct that was previously the least-documented aqueduct in the Roman world.

Forty years ago, when children in Naples were playing in caves and tunnels under the hill of Posillipo in Italy, they didn’t know their playground was actually a Roman aqueduct.

When they shared their memories with archaeological authorities recently, it kicked off an exploration of one of the longest, most mysterious examples of ancient water infrastructure in the Roman world.

Rome’s famous aqueducts supplied water for baths, drinking, public fountains and more. Built during a period of about half a millennium (roughly 300 B.C. to A.D. 200), aqueducts around the former Roman Empire are highly recognizable thanks to their multitiered arched structure.

But this marvel of ancient architecture represents only a small fraction of the actual water system; the vast majority of the infrastructure is still underground.

Outside of Rome, subterranean aqueducts and their paths are much less understood. This knowledge gap included the newly investigated Aqua Augusta, also called the Serino aqueduct, which was built between 30 B.C. and 20 B.C. to connect luxury villas and suburban outposts in the Bay of Naples.

Circling Naples and running down to the ancient vacation destination of Pompeii, the Aqua Augusta is known to have covered at least 87 miles (140 kilometers), bringing water to people all along the coast as well as inland.

But the complex Aqua Augusta has barely been explored by researchers, making it the least-documented aqueduct in the Roman world.

New discoveries earlier this month by the Cocceius Association, a non-profit group that engages in speleo-archaeological work, are bringing this fascinating aqueduct to light.

This This Roman aqueduct found in Naples supplied water to ancient luxury villas.

Thanks to reports from locals who used to explore the tunnels as kids, association members found a branch of the aqueduct that carried drinking water to the hill of Posillipo and to the crescent-shaped island of Nisida.

So far, around 2,100 feet (650 meters) of the excellently preserved aqueduct has been found, making it the longest known segment of the Aqua Augusta.

Graziano Ferrari, president of the Cocceius Association, told Live Science in an email that “the Augusta channel runs quite near to the surface, so the inner air is good, and strong breezes often run in the passages.”

Exploring the aqueduct requires considerable caving experience, though. Speleologists’ most difficult challenge in exploring the tunnel was to circumvent the tangle of thorns at one entrance. 

“Luckily, the caving suits are quite thornproof,” he said. “After succeeding in entering the channel, we met normal caving challenges — some sections where you have to crawl on all fours or squeeze through.” 

In a new report, Ferrari and Cocceius Association Vice President Raffaella Lamagna list several scientific studies that can be done now that this stretch of aqueduct has been found.

Specifically, they will be able to calculate the ancient water flow with high precision, to learn more about the eruptive sequences that formed the hill of Posillipo, and to study the mineral deposits on the walls of the aqueduct.

Rabun Taylor, a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the report, told Live Science in an email that the newly discovered aqueduct section is interesting because it is “actually a byway that served elite Roman villas, not a city.

Multiple demands on this single water source stretched it very thin, requiring careful maintenance and strict rationing.” 

Taylor, an expert on Roman aqueducts, also said the new find “may be able to tell us a lot about the local climate over hundreds of years when the water was flowing.”

This insight is possible thanks to a thick deposit of lime, a calcium-rich mineral that “accumulates annually like tree rings and can be analyzed isotopically as a proxy for temperature and rainfall,” he explained. 

Ferrari, Lamagna and other members of the Cocceius Association plan to analyze the construction of the aqueduct as well, to determine the methods used and the presence of water control structures.

“We believe that there are ample prospects for defining a research and exploration plan for this important discovery, which adds a significant element to the knowledge of the ancient population” living in the Bay of Naples, they wrote in the report.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Viking Raids Revealed by the Extraction of an Anglo-Saxon Monastery

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Viking Raids Revealed by the Extraction of an Anglo-Saxon Monastery

Anglo-Saxon monasteries were more resilient to Viking attacks than previously thought, archaeologists have concluded. Lyminge, a monastery in Kent, was on the front line of long-running Viking hostility which ended in the victories of Alfred the Great.

The monastery endured repeated attacks, but resisted collapse for almost a century, through effective defensive strategies put in place by ecclesiastical and secular rulers of Kent, University of Reading archaeologists say.

The new evidence is presented after a detailed examination of archaeological and historical evidence by Dr Gabor Thomas, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading.

The excavation at Lyminge in Kent revealed hereto information about monastic resilience in the face of raids by the Vikings.

“The image of ruthless Viking raiders slaughtering helpless monks and nuns is based on written records, but a re-examination of the evidence show the monasteries had more resilience than we might expect,” Dr Thomas said.

Despite being located in a region of Kent which bore the full brunt of Viking raids in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, the evidence suggests that the monastic community at Lyminge not only survived these attacks but recovered more completely than historians previously thought, Dr Thomas concludes in research, published today (30 January 2023) in the journal Archaeologia. 

During archaeological excavations between 2007-15 and 2019, archaeologists uncovered the main elements of the monastery, including the stone chapel at its heart surrounded by a wide swathe of wooden buildings and other structures where the monastic brethren and their dependents lived out their daily lives. Radiocarbon dating of butchered animal bones discarded as rubbish indicates that this occupation persisted for nearly two centuries following the monastery’s establishment in the second half of the 7th century. 

Historical records held at nearby Canterbury Cathedral show that after a raid in 804 CE, the monastic community at Lyminge was granted asylum within the relative safety of the walled refuge of Canterbury, a former Roman town and the administrative and ecclesiastical capital of Anglo-Saxon Kent.

But evidence from Dr Thomas’s dig shows the monks not only returned to re-establish their settlement at Lyminge, but continued living and building for several decades over the course of the 9th century. Dateable artefacts such as silver coins discovered at the site provided Dr Thomas with an insight into the re-establishment of the monastic community.

Dr Thomas said: “This research paints a more complex picture of the experience of monasteries during these troubled times, they were more resilient than the ‘sitting duck’ image portrayed in popular accounts of Viking raiding based on recorded historical events such as the iconic Viking raid on the island monastery of Lindisfarne in AD 793.

“However, the resilience of the monastery was subsequently stretched beyond breaking point. 

“By the end of the 9th century, at a time when Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great was engaged in a widescale conflict with invading Viking armies, the site of the monastery appears to have been completely abandoned. 

“This was most likely due to sustained long-term pressure from Viking armies who are known to have been active in south-eastern Kent in the 880s and 890s. 

“Settled life was only eventually restored in Lyminge during the 10th century, but under the authority of the Archbishops of Canterbury who had acquired the lands formerly belonging to the monastery.”

The latest research article is based on the results of over a decade of archaeological research at Lyminge, directed by Dr Thomas. The village was first established by Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century.

ASIA, IRAQ, WORLD

Drought in Iraq Reveals 3,400-Year-Old City

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Drought in Iraq Reveals 3,400-Year-Old City

Iraq is battling its worst drought in decades. Lack of rainfall and poor resource management has left communities that depend on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers devoid of the water they need to survive. So authorities drained part of the Mosul Dam reservoir in the country’s Kurdistan region this January to keep crops from drying out.

Archaeologists got brief access to the city during another drought in 2018, but this is the first time they managed a comprehensive site study.

As it turns out, the decision preserved more than crops. Out of that drained area, an ancient city emerged—and with just days to examine the area before the waters came back, archaeologists successfully mapped what they believe to have been a major city in the Mittani Empire (also spelled Mitanni Empire) built 3,400 years ago.

People in the area knew the city was there when the dam was created in the 1980s, but the buildings and artifacts that survived the city’s destruction in an earthquake around 1350 B.C.E. had never been fully investigated, Live Science’s Patrick Pester reports.

Parts of the city first arose from the depths during a major drought in 2018, as Smithsonian magazine’s Jason Daley reported at the time. During that brief time, researchers were able to explore a lost palace with massive, 22-foot-high walls, some six feet thick, and discovered “remains of wall paintings in vibrant shades of red and blue.” However, the archaeologists ultimately didn’t have enough time to sufficiently map the city before the waters returned.

So when drought struck again this year, a research team was assembled in a matter of days to hurry out to the site, according to a statement from the University of Tübingen. Researchers obtained short-notice funding through the University of Freiburg to examine as much as the city as possible before it was re-submerged.

The walls of the city were amazingly well-preserved.

Now, archaeologists have a clearer picture of what this ancient city might have been like, thanks to the team’s mapping of numerous large buildings and uncovering of hundreds of artifacts. Among the buildings found were an industrial complex, a fortification with a wall and towers, and a multi-story storage building.

“The huge magazine building is of particular importance because enormous quantities of goods must have been stored in it, probably brought from all over the region,” Ivana Puljiz, an assistant professor of archaeology from the University of Freiburg, says in the statement.

Hasan Ahmed Qasim, chairman of the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization and the expedition’s leader, adds that “The excavation results show that the site was an important center in the Mittani Empire.”

The team was impressed by how well many of the walls—sometimes reaching almost ten feet high—were preserved, despite being made of sun-dried mud and submerged for more than 40 years.

That’s likely due the earthquake that destroyed the city. It turned the upper parts of the walls into rubble, which buried and protected the lower parts of the city for centuries.

Also astonishingly well-preserved: five ceramic vessels containing over 100 cuneiform tablets, some still in their clay envelopes. In the statement, Peter Pfälzner, a professor of archaeology at the University of Tübingen, describes the underwater survival of unfired clay tablets as being “close to a miracle.” The team hopes the tablets, some of which could be letters, will shed more light on what the city and its daily life were like.

It’s possible the site could be the ancient city of Zakhiku, a major hub in the Mittani Empire, which lasted from roughly 1500 to 1350 B.C.E. One of a number of kingdoms and states founded by the Indo-Iranians in Mesopotamia and Syria, at its peak the empire spanned just over 600 miles, extending from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea.

In the empire’s early years, the Mittanis tussled with Egypt over control of Syria until a truce was reached with Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose IV around 1420 B.C.E. The Mittanis fell to the Hittite Empire around 1360 B.C.E., and the Assyrians soon took over the area.

Though the emergence of this underwater city is incredible, it’s not the only abandoned town to have been revealed from the depths by drought this year.

In February, the Spanish village of Aceredo—which was flooded to create the Alto Lindoso reservoir in 1992—was fully exposed during a drought, Gizmodo’s Molly Taft reports.

Though the tops of houses are sometimes visible when the reservoir’s water levels drop, full buildings had never been exposed before this winter, which was unnaturally dry due to climate change.

Before the waters came back, researchers covered the area with tarps and gravel for safekeeping.

Drought can also reveal other archaeological wonders. The 4,000- to 7,000-year-old megalithic monument known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal emerged in 2019 when drought hit a Spanish reservoir that had covered the stones for about 60 years, Smithsonian’s Meilan Solly reported at the time.

Iraq has been hit especially hard by global warming—temperatures there are rising twice as fast as the global average, according to PBS’ Simona Foltyn. Average annual rainfall is down by 10 percent, and as a result, historic wetlands have dried up, livestock are dying, and people are struggling to get fresh water.

For now, there’s still enough water that the Mosul reservoir refilled in February, ending the researchers’ investigation. To protect the city, the team covered the area in tarps overlaid with gravel fill before the waters fully re-flooded the area.

Drought is expected to continue to plague the region. That will be a disaster for locals—and could present other opportunities for archaeologists.

There’s likely plenty left to discover: As Qasim told the Art Newspaper’s Hadani Ditmars, “There are more than 100 underwater sites in the Eastern Tigris area” alone.