1000 Ancient Sites Revealed by Aerial Scan of Scotland’s Arran Island
Archaeologists in Scotland have concluded a cutting-edge archaeological project which has revealed around 1,000 previously unknown archaeological sites on the Isle of Arran.
There is an island off the coast of Scotland which contains some of northern Europe’s most spectacular standing stones, megalithic tombs, and ruins of ancient farming communities going back around 6,000 years.
I am not talking about Orkney or Shetland but another magical island only a short ferry crossing from Glasgow on Scotland’s west coast, which according to an Island Review article is more famous for its moors and mountains, arts and crafts, beer and whisky, than for its glorious prehistoric archaeology.
I am of course are speaking about the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde where archaeologists from Historic Environment Scotland (HES) recently flew airborne laser scanning (lidar) devices over the land surface to generate a 3D image of prehistoric settlements, medieval farmsteads, and even a Neolithic monument, which the BBC called an “exceptionally rare find.”
The remains of a hut circle became clear from the LIDAR scanning results.
LIDAR and the Rise Of “Rapid” Archaeology
The lidar data is available from the Scottish Government Remote Sensing Portal and the survey results are available to view on Canmore – Scotland’s National Record of the Historic Environment. It was the largest survey of its type that has ever been conducted.
Dave Cowley, Rapid Archaeological Mapping Manager at Historic Environment Scotland ( HES) said it has shown scientists that there are “double” the number of ancient monuments on the Isle of Arran than they had previously known about and Scottish heritage leaders say “tens of thousands” of further sites might be found using the scanning technology.
Cowley also told reporters that the new 3D technology allowed for a “rapid” archaeological survey conducted over weeks rather than months or years, and it also allowed the discovery of sites that might even have been impossible to find.
Among the structures identified from the air are medieval and post-medieval shielings (circular stone structures which sheltered sheep from winds), which detail how upland areas were used by shepherds.
Post-medieval shielings were identified for the first time with LIDAR.
Furthermore, archaeologists identified a magnificent medieval roundhouse – a type of circular wooden home with a conical roof that was built in Britain from the Bronze Age throughout the Iron Age and into the medieval period .
Mesolithic Pitchstone Traders
The Isle of Arran is the largest island in the Firth of Clyde and the seventh largest Scottish island . It is often referred to as a “geologist’s paradise,” and as far back as the Neolithic, and the Early Bronze Age, pitchstone from the Isle of Arran were transported around Britain.
According to a study published on Researchgate, worked Arran pitchstone from radiocarbon-dated pits indicate that on the Scottish mainland all archaeological pitchstone derives from outcrops on the Isle of Arran.
And on the island, pitchstone-bearing assemblages include diagnostic types from the Mesolithic that was traded extensively throughout Britain during the Early Neolithic period.
Pitchstone blades and microblades from Auchategan, Argyll & Bute
The Isle of Arran – An Ancient Spiritual Center
On Arran, archaeologists find a type of burial structure classified as a ‘Neolithic Clyde Cairn’ which are stone and earth mounds that enclose a chamber lined with larger stone slabs. They are thought to have been used for public community rituals.
Several Bronze Age sites have been excavated and the monastery of Aileach was founded by St. Brendan in the 6th century with the nearby Holy Isle being a center of his spiritual activities. Holy Isle has a long history as a sacred site of pilgrimage with its healing holy well , 6th century monk St Molaise’s hermit cave, and a 13th-century monastery.
ome of the Soay sheep that live wild on Holy Isle in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, are seen grazing by the Buddhist stupas which line the approach to the Centre for World Peace and Health.
Lidar technology is quickly building a new picture of Scotland’s historic environment and the new study on Arran is another step as the aerial scanning technology becomes more widely available.
And if the scientists’ speculations are right, and “ tens of thousands more ancient sites ” are discovered across the rest of Scotland, a whole new generation of archaeology, and archaeologists, will be attracted to the Highlands of Scotland.
Archaeologists Uncover an Ancient Roman Game Board at Hadrian’s Wall
The cracked stone board was likely used to play ludus latrunculorum, Rome’s favorite game.
Life in the Roman legions is often presented as constant excitement, with endless military campaigns subduing people throughout Europe and the Near East. But the truth is Roman soldiers had down time.
The board was likely used in the bath house at Vindolanda, one of 14 forts along Hadrian’s Wall, but was repurposed as a floor stone in the adjacent building after it was broken.
As evidenced by a gridded gaming board recently uncovered during excavations of Hadrian’s Wall, a 73-mile-long fortification in what’s now northern England that once delineated the northern frontier of the Roman Empire, soldiers played games to pass the time.
Tony Henderson at Chronicle Live reports that the cracked stone game board was uncovered late last month while archaeologists excavated a third century building behind the bath house at Vindolanda, one of 14 forts along Hadrian’s Wall. It’s believed that the board was likely used in the bath house, but was repurposed as a floor stone in the adjacent building after it was broken.
It’s unknown how the board was cracked, but a spokesperson for the site tells Henderson it could be a colorful story. “You can almost picture the losing Roman tipping the board up in frustration, causing it to break,” he says.
This is not the only game board found at Vindolanda. Five other boards dating from the third to fifth centuries have been found along with glass and stone gaming tokens.
Construction of Hadrian’s Wall began in 122 A.D. at Roman emperor Hadrian’s behest and took six years to complete. It was the northernmost border of the Roman Empire until 138 A.D., when the emperor Antoninus Pius abandoned it and built a turf wall about 100 miles to the north.
Twenty years later, the Romans had to fall back to Hadrian’s Wall due to attacks by Caledonian tribes. The forts along Hadrian’s Wall were then occupied by Roman forces until around 400 A.D.
So what were soldiers on the frontier playing to pass the time? The grid on the stone is for a game called ludus latrunculorum, translated from Latin as “the game of mercenaries.” While archaeologists have found game boards and pieces at sites all across the Roman Empire, they have yet to figure out exactly how the game is played.
The website Ancient Games reports that ludus is first mentioned in the second century B.C. by the writer Varro who noted that it was a game played on a grid. A poem by an anonymous writer from the first century A.D. provides some details, including the fact that players captured each other’s pieces, moving backward and forward on the board.
Roman poet Ovid reveals that pieces were captured by surrounding an opposing piece with two game tokens. The game appears to be a more sophisticated variation of checkers, but we can only speculate on the official rules of the game.
That hasn’t prevented some game lovers from trying to develop rules from the little we know, and there are even some commercial versions available.
The game board is not the only recent news from Vindolanda, which has been excavated by the Vindolanda Trust since 1970. In that time, researchers have found thousands of artifacts from legionaries, including rare items made of wood and leather that have survived in the area’s mucky, oxygen-free soil.
Most famously, in 1973, archaeologists dug up hundreds of well-preserved wooden writing tablets that give insight into life at the camp for the average soldier as well as information on how the garrison was administered.
The notes include requests for commanders to send their soldiers more beer, a letter from one entrepreneurial civilian brother to another about making some cash off the soldiers, a birthday invitation and a request for a promotion, among other topics.
Last year, diggers found two sets of rare hipposandals, or iron objects used on the feet of horses, that recently went on display at the site’s Roman Army Museum. It’s not known if they are temporary horseshoes or some sort of restraint. They also found a strange, child-size bronze hand, which was likely part of a cult ritual.
There will undoubtedly be more cool finds, and maybe more game boards. Vindolanda researchers have only excavated about 25 percent of the site. At the current pace, it will take 150 years to unearth the entire area.
This 3,500-Year-Old Greek Tomb Upended What We Thought We Knew About the Roots of Western Civilization
They had been digging for days, shaded from the Greek sun by a square of green tarpaulin slung between olive trees. The archaeologists used picks to break the cream-colored clay, baked as hard as rock, until what began as a cluster of stones just visible in the dirt became four walls in a neat rectangle, sinking down into the earth.
The warrior was buried in an olive grove outside the acropolis of Pylos. Though archaeologist Carl Blegen explored the olive grove in the 1960s, he did not find anything.
Little more than the occasional animal bone, however, came from the soil itself. On the morning of May 28, 2015, the sun gave way to an unseasonable drizzle. The pair digging that day, Flint Dibble and Alison Fields, waited for the rain to clear, then stepped down into their meter-deep hole and got to work. Dibble looked at Fields. “It’s got to be soon,” he said.
The season had not started well. The archaeologists were part of a group of close to three dozen researchers digging near the ancient Palace of Nestor, on a hilltop near Pylos on the southwest coast of Greece. The palace was built in the Bronze Age by the Mycenaeans—the heroes described in Homer’s epic poems—and was first excavated in the 1930s.
The dig’s leaders, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, husband-and-wife archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio, had hoped to excavate in a currant field just downslope from the palace, but Greek bureaucracy and a lawyers’ strike kept them from obtaining the necessary permits. So they settled, disappointed, on a neighboring olive grove.
They cleared the land of weeds and snakes and selected a few spots to investigate, including three stones that appeared to form a corner. As the trench around the stones sank deeper, the researchers allowed themselves to grow eager: The shaft’s dimensions, two meters by one meter, suggested a grave, and Mycenaean burials are famous for their breathtakingly rich contents, able to reveal volumes about the culture that produced them.
Still, there was no proof that this structure was even ancient, the archaeologists reminded themselves, and it might simply be a small cellar or shed.
Dibble was clearing earth from around a large stone slab when his pick hit something hard and the monotony of the clay was broken by a vivid flash of green: bronze.
The pair immediately put down their picks, and after placing an excited call to Davis and Stocker they began to carefully sweep up the soil and dust. They knew they were standing atop something substantial, but even then they did not imagine just how rich the discovery would turn out to be.“It was amazing,” says Stocker, a small woman in her 50s with dangling earrings and blue-gray eyes. “People had been walking across this field for three-and-a-half-thousand years.”
Yet remarkably little is known of the beginnings of Mycenaean culture. The Pylos grave, with its wealth of undisturbed burial objects and, at its bottom, a largely intact skeleton, offers a nearly unprecedented window into this time—and what it reveals is calling into question our most basic ideas about the roots of Western civilization.
Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, husband-and-wife archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati, discovered the warrior’s grave.
In The Iliad, Homer tells of how Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, led a fleet of a thousand ships to besiege the city of Troy. Classical Greeks (and Romans, who traced their heritage to the Trojan hero Aeneas) accepted the stories in The Iliad and The Odyssey as a part of their national histories, but in later centuries scholars insisted that the epic battles fought between the Trojan and Mycenaean kingdoms were nothing more than myth and romantic fantasy. Before the eighth century B.C., archaeologists argued, societies on the Greek mainland were scattered and disorganized.
Today, Blegen’s work at Pylos is continued by Stocker and Davis (his official title is the Carl W. Blegen professor of Greek archaeology). Davis walks with me to the hilltop, and we pause to enjoy the gorgeous view of olive groves and cypress trees rolling down to a jewel-blue sea.
Davis has white-blond hair, freckles and a dry sense of humor, and he is steeped in the history of the place: Alongside Stocker, he has been working in this area for 25 years. As we look out to sea, he points out the island of Sphacteria, where the Athenians beat the Spartans during a fifth-century B.C. battle of the Peloponnesian War.
Behind us, Nestor’s palace is surrounded by flowering oleander trees and is covered with an impressive new metal roof, completed just in time for the site’s reopening to the public in June 2016 after a three-year, multimillion-euro restoration. The roof’s graceful white curves protect the ruins from the elements, while a raised walkway allows visitors to admire the floor plan.
The stone walls of the palace now rise just a meter from the ground, but it was originally a vast two-story complex, built around 1450 B.C., that covered more than 15,000 square feet and was visible for miles. Visitors would have passed through an open courtyard into a large throne room, Davis explains, with a central hearth for offerings and decorated with elaborately painted scenes including lions, griffins and a bard playing a lyre.
The Linear B tablets found by Blegen, deciphered in the 1950s, revealed that the palace was an administrative center that supported more than 50,000 people in an area covering all of modern-day Messenia in western Greece. Davis points out storerooms and pantries in which thousands of unused ceramic wine cups were found, as well as workshops for the production of leather and perfumed oils.
This era, extending until the construction of palaces at Pylos, Mycenae and elsewhere, is known to scholars as the “shaft grave period” (after the graves that Schliemann discovered). Cynthia Shelmerdine, a classicist and renowned scholar of Mycenaean society at the University of Texas at Austin, describes this period as “the moment the door opens.”
It is, she says, “the start of elites coming together to form something beyond just a minor chiefdom, the very beginning of what leads to the palatial civilization only a hundred years later.” From this first awakening, “it really takes a very short time for them to leap into full statehood and become great kings on a par with the Hittite emperor. It was a remarkable thing to happen.”
Yet partly as a result of the building of the palaces themselves, atop the razed mansions of early Mycenaeans, very little is known of the people and culture that gave birth to them. You can’t just tear up the plaster floors to see what’s underneath, Davis explains. The tholos itself went out of use around the time the palace was built. Whoever the first leaders here were, Davis and Stocker had assumed, they were buried in this plundered tomb. Until, less than a hundred yards from the tholos, the researchers found the warrior grave.
Aerial view of the warrior’s grave
The later site of 14th-century B.C. Nestor’s Palace
A bronze sword with a gold-coated hilt was among 1,500 items buried with Pylos’ “griffin warrior.”
Today known as Voidokilia, the omega-shaped cove at “sandy Pylos” is where Homer recounted that Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, was welcomed by Nestor while searching for his father.
Bull sacrifice was practiced by the Mycenaeans at Pylos, as recounted in The Odyssey. The autumn olive harvest is an ancient ritual that survives today.
The tholos tomb at Pylos
Davis and Stocker disagree on where they were when they received Dibble’s call from the dig site. Stocker remembers they were at the team’s workshop. Davis thinks they were at the local museum. Dibble recalls that they were in line at the bank. Whichever it was, they rushed to the site and, Stocker says, “basically never left.”
About a week in, Davis was excavating behind the stone slab. “I’ve found gold,” he said calmly. Stocker thought he was teasing, but he turned around with a golden bead in his palm. It was the first in a flood of small, precious items: beads; a tiny gold birdcage pendant; intricately carved gold rings; and several gold and silver cups.
“Then things changed,” says Stocker. Aware of the high risk of looting, she organized round-the-clock security, and, apart from the Ministry of Culture and the site’s head guard, the archaeologists agreed to tell no one about the more valuable finds. They excavated in pairs, always with one person on watch, ready to cover precious items if someone approached.
The largest ring discovered was made of multiple finely soldered gold sheets.
And yet it was impossible not to feel elated, too. “There were days when 150 beads were coming out—gold, amethyst, carnelian,” says Davis. “There were days when there was one seal stone after another, with beautiful images. It was like, Oh my god, what will come next?!” Beyond the pure thrill of uncovering such exquisite items, the researchers knew that the complex finds represented an unprecedented opportunity to piece together this moment in history, promising insights into everything from religious iconography to local manufacturing techniques.
The discovery of a golden cup, as lovely as the day it was made, proved an emotional moment. “How could you not be moved?” says Stocker. “It’s the passion of looking at a beautiful piece of art or listening to a piece of music. There’s a human element. If you forget that, it becomes an exercise in removing things from the ground.”
Fragments of Ancient Life
From jewelry to gilded weapons, a sampling of the buried artifacts researchers are using to fill in the details about the social currents in Greece at the time the griffin warrior lived
Like any momentous archaeological find, the griffin warrior’s grave has two stories to tell. One is the individual story of this man—who he was, when he lived, what role he played in local events. The other story is broader—what he tells us about the larger world and the crucial shifts in power taking place at that moment in history.
Analyses of the skeleton show that this 30-something dignitary stood around five-and-a-half feet, tall for a man of his time. Combs found in the grave imply that he had long hair. And a recent computerized facial reconstruction based on the warrior’s skull, created by Lynne Schepartz and Tobias Houlton, physical anthropologists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, shows a broad, determined face with close-set eyes and a prominent jaw. Davis and Stocker are also planning DNA tests and isotope analyses that they hope will provide information about his ethnic and geographic origins.
And this has been the scholarly consensus ever since: The Mycenaeans, now thought to have sacked Knossos at around the time they built their mainland palaces and established their language and administrative system on Crete, were the true ancestors of Europe.
Significantly, weapons had been placed on the left side of the warrior’s body while rings and seal stones were on the right, suggesting that they were arranged with intent, not simply thrown in. The representational artwork featured on the rings also had direct connections to actual buried objects.
“One of the gold rings has a goddess standing on top of a mountain with a staff that seems to be crowned by a horned bull’s head,” says Davis. “We found a bull’s head staff in the grave.” Another ring shows a goddess sitting on a throne, looking at herself in the mirror. “We have a mirror.” Davis and Stocker do not believe that all this is a coincidence. “We think that objects were chosen to interact with the iconography of the rings.”
Horns, which symbolize authority, appear on this bronze bull’s head and three gold rings.
In their view, the arrangement of objects in the grave provides the first real evidence that the mainland elite were experts in Minoan ideas and customs, who understood very well the symbolic meaning of the products they acquired. “The grave shows these are not just knuckle-scraping, Neanderthal Mycenaeans who were completely bowled over by the very existence of Minoan culture,” says Bennet. “They know what these objects are.”
“I think we should all care about that,” says Shelmerdine. “It resonates today, when you have factions that want to throw everybody out [of their countries]. I don’t think the Mycenaeans would have gotten anywhere if they hadn’t been able to reach beyond their shores.”
Intact Brandy Bottles and 200-Year-Old Pub Discovered Under Building Site in Manchester
An unexpected discovery was made when works began for a 13-storey skyscraper for apartments and shops in Manchester, England. Archaeologists brought in to the construction site found the remains of a forgotten 200-year-old pub and neighboring houses.
The Manchester Evening News reports that the archaeologists even know the name of the old pub- the Astley Arms. One of the interesting finds they made inside the rubble is the discovery of about 200-year-old booze bottles.
Some of the bottles still contain brandy. James Alderson, site developer of Mulbury City which is carrying out the build, told the Manchester Evening News “We opened the cork on a few and you can still smell it.
It’s amazing knowing there’s so much history at this site and it’s really exciting. I never expected this kind of thing to be found but we are really fascinated by it all.”
The archaeologists were also able to find the name of the Astley Arm’s 1821 owner, Thomas Evans, on some personalized plates. Aidan Turner, supervisor at the site and senior archaeologist, told the Manchester Evening News that the team managed to track down descendants of the pub’s owner. He said that they discovered one living relative is now living in Texas, USA.
It was found that the Astley Arms had its name changed in 1840. Then owner, Thomas Inglesent, called the pub the Paganini Tavern. However, the name returned to Astley Arms in the 1850s. Historians say that part of the building was rebuilt in 1986, but it was demolished later on.
Keys, pots for quills, and pipes were amongst other artifacts found at the site. The pottery has been dated to the early 1800s and at least some of the bottles are from the late 1900s.
All of these everyday items have a special value for the archaeologists. As Turner said “It’s brilliant because you can suddenly connect it to the local people in the area. It’s nice to be able to connect it directly to living people and their families.”
Alderson added “Part of Manchester’s vast history is being captured in these findings which is really interesting. It really takes you back to the time when they would have been outside of the pub drinking.”
The Manchester Evening News reports that some of the artifacts that have been discovered at the site will be displayed in the future at the Museum of Science and Industry.
A Pompeiian taberna for eating and drinking. The faded painting over the counter pictured eggs, olives, fruit and radishes.
The Roman tavern is also said to have served “as an invaluable indicator of the changing social and economic infrastructure of the settlement and its inhabitants following the Roman conquest of Mediterranean Gaul in the late second century B.C.”
Before the Romans’ arrived in the ancient town, called Lattara, it was an area made up of farmers. The Roman presence created a more diverse economy, and the need for places to eat outside the home.
Two ancient skeletons found holding hands in medieval chapel
Archaeologists have discovered two skeletons holding hands at an ancient site of pilgrimage, in the newly-discovered Chapel of St Morrell in Leicestershire England.
According to a news release in the Leicester Mercury , the remains are that of a man and a woman of a similar age, although researchers are not sure of their identity.
The medieval Chapel of St Morrell was only recently rediscovered after it had become long lost to the pages of history. However, local historian John Morrison, was able to track down its location through researching old historical records, and geophysicists were then called in to take images of the land to locate the exact spot to begin digging. Excavations at the site have now been ongoing for the last four years.
Volunteers Lotty Wallace and Ken Wallace work on a small section of the excavation.
Old records refer to the chapel as being dedicated to Saint Morrell, the 4th Bishop of Anjou, France, who lived in the 5 th century AD.
The earliest mention of the chapel was in a will of 1532, and in 1622, a writer notes that multitudes travelled to the chapel to be healed. However, archaeological remains at the site go back as early as the Roman period, some 2,000 years ago.
“This ground has been used as a special sort of place by people for at least 2,000 years,” said archaeologist Vicky Score, of the University of Leicester, who is leading the project.
Along with the two skeletons holding hands, researchers also found seven other sets of remains dating back to the 14 th century AD, each ‘held down’ by a large stone placed on top of their bodies.
“This was a tradition popular in eastern Europe with the idea of keeping the dead down,” said Score.
It is not the first time that archaeologists have unearthed couples holding hands in death. In 2011, archaeologists found the skeletal remains of a Roman-era couple holding hands in a tomb located in Modena, Italy; in 2012, dozens of tombs uncovered in Siberia contained the skeletal remains of couples in loving embrace ; and in 2013, researchers discovered the remains of a medieval couple holding hands in a former Dominican monastery in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
“Whoever buried these people likely felt that communicating their relationship was just as important in death as it was in life,” said Kristina Killgrove, a biological anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, who was involved in the Modena finding.
The skeletal remains of a young couple found in a former Dominican monastery in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
The discovery of skeletons holding hands has often perplexed researchers, who have questioned how they came to die at around the same time.
While the first assumption usually made is that one died and then the other committed suicide, this is unlikely because suicide was regarded as a sin in the Medieval Ages, so anyone who killed themselves would not have been buried in a holy place.
Such findings shine a light on the humanity behind ancient discoveries and lead us to wonder about who they were, how they died, and what their lives may have been like.
Archaeologist Donato Labate, the director of the excavation in Modena, Italy, said that the discovery evokes an uplifting tenderness. “I have been involved in many digs, but I’ve never felt so moved.”
Tollund Man – the preserved face from Prehistoric Denmark and the tale of ritual sacrifice
Tollund Man is the naturally mummified body of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was hanged as a sacrifice to the gods and placed in a peat bog where he remained preserved for more than two millennia.
The face of the Tollund Man is as preserved as the day he died. The look upon his face is calm and peaceful, as though looking upon a sleeping man.
It was 6 th May, 1950, when two brothers cutting peat in the Bjaeldskov bog, an area about 10 kilometres west of the Danish town of Silkeborg, came upon the lifeless body of a man. The man’s physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim and the police were called.
Puzzled by the appearance of the remains and recalling the discovery of two other ‘bog bodies’ in the same bog in 1927 and 1938, the police asked an archaeologist named P. V.
Glob to come and view the discovery. Recognizing that this was an ancient burial, Glob began efforts to remove the body for further study.
The examination of the Tollund Man at the National Museum of Denmark in 1950 revealed an unusually well-preserved body of an adult male who was slightly over five feet tall and approximately 40 years old when he died.
The stubble on his chain, eyelashes, and the wrinkles in his skin can still be observed in minute detail. His last meal was porridge made from 40 different kinds of seeds and grains.
Head of Tollund Man on the left and a restoration image on the right
Tollund Man was naked apart from a leather cap and a wide belt around his waist. Around his neck was a braided leather rope tightened in a noose.
It was clear that he had been hanged – but why? Was he a criminal, a victim of crime, or part of a ritual sacrifice? Archaeologists embarked on an investigation to find out.
The Tollund Man as he appears today.
Like all the other ‘bog bodies’ that have been found, Tollund Man showed no signs of injury or trauma, apart from that caused by the hanging. It was clear that he had also been buried carefully in the bog – his eyes and mouth had been closed and his body placed in a sleeping position – something that wouldn’t have happened if he were a common criminal.
When somebody died in the Iron Age, the body was cremated in a funeral pyre and the ashes placed in an urn, but Tolland Man was buried in a watery place where the early people of Europe believed they could communicate with their many gods and goddesses. He was also killed in the winter or early spring, a time that human sacrifices were made to the goddess of spring.
Taking into account all of these factors, archaeologists believe that Tollund Man was ritually sacrificed. He may have been an offering to the gods in return for peat that was taken from the bog.
The incredible discovery of Tollund Man has brought to life in vivid detail the lives and deaths of the people of prehistoric Denmark. He now resides in a special room of the Silkeborg Museum.
The Huldremose Woman: One of the best preserved and best dressed bog bodies
More than 500 bodies and skeletons were buried in the peat bogs in Denmark between 800 B.C. and A.D. 200.
In 1879, Niels Hanson, a school teacher in Ramten, was digging peat turfs from a peat bog near Ramten, Jutland, Denmark. While doing this, he recovered a bog body of an elderly Iron Age woman. The body became known as “Huldremose Woman” or “Huldre Fen Woman”.
The upper body of the Huldremose Woman.
The woman was more than 40 years old when she ended up in the bog.
Supposedly, the woman had passed away sometime between 160 B.C. and 340 A.D. It is believed that she lived at least 40 years, which to the standards of the time was a very long life. Like most of the bog bodies found in Denmark, the woman from Huldremose was fully clothed.
More than 130 years after its discovery, it remains one of the best preserved and best-dressed bog bodies. This discovery offered a rare opportunity to understand the clothing of the Iron Age in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
The clothing of Huldremose Woman.
The clothes are well preserved, despite being almost 2000 years old.
She was dressed in a costume consisting of a woollen skirt (tied at the waist with a thin leather strap inserted into a woven waistband), a woollen scarf (139-144 cm in length and 49 cm in width, wrapped around the woman’s neck and fastened under her left arm with a pin made from a bird bone) and two skin capes.
The fur coats she was wrapped in were made from the skin of 14 sheep. The sewn-in objects have probably functioned as amulets. Not only was her costume of high quality; it was also colored in a multitude of colors. olor analysis has shown that originally the skirt was blue and the scarf was in red color.
The finding of the woman has encouraged many different debates and interpretations over the years. Medical analysis revealed that she had received a cut to her upper arm, removing her arm from the rest of her body before she was deposited in the peat.
A violent cut with a sharp tool had almost severed her right upper arm before she died.
It was previously believed that the cut to the arm was the cause of death and the woman died as a result of a subsequent loss of blood.
However, later forensic analysis found evidence of strangulation, her hair was tied with a long woolen rope, which was also wrapped around her neck several times.
Mystery messages engraved in Scotland’s rocks up to 5,000 years ago might soon be decoded using 3D scans
About 6,000 rocks that display distinctive “cup and ring” carvings, alongside other ancient engravings, dot the landscape of Britain, with at least one-third of them found in Scotland. Archaeologists have offered several explanations as to what these strange symbols mean. Some have said the ancients inscribed them for ritual ceremonies.
Others believe the carvings served much more practical purposes, that possibly these were territorial markers on ancient trade routes or mapped the stars in the sky.
However, in the words of George Currie, an amateur archaeologist who discovered some 670 rock carvings in Scotland, “many have symbolism that dates back thousands of years and we know little about why they were created.”
A spokesperson from Historic Environment Scotland (HES) noted that “the purpose and significance of rock art to prehistoric and more recent communities is poorly understood.” In 2022, HES was awarded £807,000 (around $1.1 million in U.S. dollars) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to carry out a five-year-long project to reestablish this lost link to Scotland’s prehistoric past.
Cup and ring marks, Source: Historic Environment Scotland
We may never discover the full meanings of the engravings, but the project, making use of 3D scanners, will seek answers by documenting and analyzing a great number of rock carving examples. A result is expected probably by 2021: a database with 2D and 3D models of some of the decorated stones will be created, and perhaps some theories will follow too.
Experts from both the University of Edinburgh and the Glasgow School of Art are involved in the project activities, and scanning is expected to reveal new connections between the symbols, previously overlooked, between the rock carvings. Some are said to go as far back as to the Neolithic days.
Currie has also been invited to participate in the activities. Over a period of more than a decade, he has managed to discover, photograph, and GPS locate 670 rocks alone. While cups and rings are among the most recurring symbols of all, there are others that appear frequently, such as horseshoe shapes or some that remind of human footprints.
The Achnabreck Cup-and-Ring-Marked Rock. Source: Historic Environment Scotland
In statements in Mail Online, Currie, who comes from Dundee, said that “the idea is to cover the whole of Scotland to record all of the rock art in 3D where ever possible.” However, he remarks, challenges are certain to haunt the team as it is uncertain how scanning equipment will be brought to some of the locations of interest. Not all rocks are laid to rest in favorable terrains.
Potentially, the project could answer many other questions, such as why people have revisited the rocks, inscribing new symbols over rocks that had already had engravings. Meanwhile, new findings of rock carvings are still being encountered, with one major discovery of a “previously unrecorded example” being reported by BBC Scotland Highlands and Islands reporters in 2014.
Archaeologists stumbled upon new rock art with cup and ring engravings while trying to relocate one rock in the county of Ross-shire. As they examined the rock, the team was dazzled by corresponding marks on the other side of the rock as well. The discovery counted as a rare find.
Cup and ring marks survive in large numbers from Scotland and have offered a variety of meanings.
Although Britain is the focus of the interest in cup and ring rock carvings, these symbols are not exclusively found only on the island. Differing from place to place, examples have been documented overseas, with many being located in Ireland and Scandinavia, one example being Hartola, Finland, where researchers point out that the cup markings are notably wider compared to the Scottish ones.
More can be seen in the Italian region of Piedmont, but also across Switzerland, on Sardinia, or in Israel. Similar forms can be seen as far away as Gabon and Australia.
2,000-Year-Old Roman Road Uncovered in British Field is Like No Other–And of ‘Global Importance’
Workmen have uncovered a suspected Roman road in a field dating back 2,000 years that could be the only one of its kind in Britain and of ‘world importance.’
Archeologists say the cobbled ford uncovered in Worcestershire could be the finest Roman example of its type in the UK. In fact, the only existing roads in such a state of preservation are found in Pompeii and Rome.
The stretch, measuring 32-ft by 9.6 feet wide (10 x 2.9 meter), was discovered during routine utility work by Severn Trent Water a few weeks ago in an area called Evesham.
The exact location of the discovery is being concealed but it was found by a river where a Roman-era villa complex was previously uncovered four years ago.
Excavations are now taking place to find out more about the site, but experts say everything points to it being a genuine Roman structure—built 1,900 years ago.
“At the moment everything is ticking the boxes for it to be Roman but it still feels too good to be true so we are keeping an open mind,” said Aidan Smyth, archeology officer from Wychavon District Council where the water works were being dug, adding that seeing it first hand “took his breath away.”
The owners of the property contacted Wychavon District Council and a team from Historic England is now expected to analyze the excavations.
The road is a ‘ford,’ or a small river crossing, and also has ruts in the stones indicating it was was used by carts for a long time.
“If it is a first-century Roman feature it is the only one of its kind to be found in Britain to date,” said Smith, who noted no one was building roads like this during the Medieval Period.
Aidan Smyth investigates the Roman road
“If it was to be a Roman feature, with its only comparisons in Rome and Pompeii, you could argue it’s of world importance, not just of national importance. The stonework is absolutely perfect.”
Smith explains in the video below how the Romans were the only road builders to ever build their roads like they built walls. During excavations Smith explains the team found “batted” stone curbs, meaning to be laid at a steep angle rather than vertically. They were made of a different stone than the flat cobbles passersby would walk upon.
“Now I’ve lots of evidence in this part of Evesham for Medieval batted stone walls, my problem is I’ve not got anything Roman to compare it with,” Smith said. “So it’s not that it isn’t Roman, it just could have a Medieval phase to it.”
The native Picts, a Celtic-language speaking tribe, once populated the Scottish Islands, similar to the natives that live on what is now Scotland.
Archaeologists and volunteers are working to preserve human bones exposed by recent storms in an ancient cemetery above a beach on the Orkney Islands.
Several powerful storms on Scotland’s Orkney Islands have now revealed ancient human remains in a Pictish and Viking cemetery dated back to about 1,500 years ago.
To order to protect the damage to the former Newark Bay cemetery on Orkney’s largest island, volunteers are now placing sandbags and clay around. The site dates from the middle of the sixth century when ancient Pictish people inhabited the Orkney Islands.
The site is currently being protected by sandbags.
Picts or Norse?
The cemetery was used for about 1,000 years, and numerous burials from the ninth to the 15th century were Norsemen or Vikings who had seized the Orkney Islands from the Picts. Now, storm waves are destroying the low cliff where the ancient site is located, Peter Higgins from the Orkney Research Center for Archaeology (ORCA), said.
“Every time we have a storm with a bit of a south-easterly [wind], it really gets in there and actively erodes what is just soft sandstone,” Higgins explained.
Approximately 250 skeletons were taken out of the cemetery about 50 years ago, but researchers do not know how far the site extends from the beach. They believe that hundreds of Pictish and Norse bodies are still buried there.
“The local residents and the landowner have been quite concerned about what’s left of the cemetery being eroded by the sea,” Higgins said.
Uncovered bones are usually either coated with clay to protect them or removed from the site after their positions are thoroughly labeled, so it is rather unusual for bones to end up on the beach, he explained.
Researchers do not know yet of the exposed bones belong to Picts or Vikings, as no burial objects or funeral clothes were spotted, and the bodies were buried four of five layers under the surface.
Cultural Transition
Historians claim that the first Norse immigrants to the Orkney Islands established there in the late eighth century, leaving a rising new monarchy in Norway. They used the Orkney Islands to begin their own voyages and Viking raids, and ultimately, all the islands were ruled by the Norse, according to The Scotsman.
The relationship between the Picts and the Norse on the Orkney Islands is highly argued by scholars. They cannot know for sure whether the Norse took over by force, or were settlers who traded and entered marriage with the Picts. However, now, the ancient cemetery at Newark Bay may help researchers answer their questions.
“The Orkney Islands were Pictish, and then they became Norse,” Higgins said. “We’re not really clear how that transition happened, whether it was an invasion, or people lived together. This is one of the few opportunities we’ve got to investigate that.”
A part of the scientific work on the remains would require testing genetic material from the ancient bones, which might demonstrate that some people living on the Orkney Islands today are successors of people who lived there more than 1,000 years ago.
The scientific study of bones from the ancient cemetery at Newark Bay could reveal clues to the cultural transition from Pictish to Norse domination of the Orkney Islands.
“We’re fairly confident that we’re going to find that some local residents are related to people in the cemetery,” Higgins said.
