Missing Great Pyramid Artifact Found in Scotland

When British engineer Waynman Dixon came back from a trip to the Queen’s Chamber, deep within the Great Pyramid of Giza, in 1872, he brought with him a piece of wood that was thousands of years old, along with two other items.

Part of a collection of artifacts known as the “Dixon Relics,” two of the artifacts promptly went to the British Museum.

The shard of wood, however, somehow got lost in the vast collection of the University of Aberdeen’s Asia collection, after the daughter of Dixon’s friend, James Grant, donated it in 1946.

It was an absolute fluke that this vital – though small – artifact was found recently by an archaeologist who works at the university as an assistant curator, Abeer Eladany.

She is, in another delightful coincidence, from Egypt originally, and could not believe it when carbon dating tests revealed the age of the wood, which experts speculate predates the construction of the pyramid itself.

No one is sure, precisely, why the wood was put inside the pyramid – was it from a tree that was near by. Or an old tool for measurements– but experts are just as excited about its age as the find itself.

Neil Curtis, head of museums and special collections for the university, told the Guardian, “Finding the missing Dixon Relic was a surprise, but the carbon dating has also been quite a revelation. It is even older than we imagined.” (The other two relics were a ball and a hook).

Tests show that the wood dates between 3341 and 3094 B.C. The pyramid, on the other hand, was built about 500 years prior. One thing is certain, Curtis added: “This discovery will reignite interest in the Dixon Relics, and how they can shed light on the Great Pyramid.”

One person who is particularly thrilled that the relic, lost for more than 100 years, has finally been discovered is Eladany herself, in no small part because she is from Egypt.

As an archaeologist and researcher, she is all too aware of how important the find is to her native country, but she also sees the humour and irony of finding an artifact in Scotland that is, in a sense, a part of the Great Pyramid.

She said that trying to find the lost relic has been like “…looking for a needle in a haystack. I couldn’t believe it when I realized what was inside this innocuous-looking cigar tin.”

Like so many archaeological finds – pieces of human teeth, bits of leather from the sheath of a sword – the find doesn’t look like much to the untrained eye.

In truth, the wood looks much like the remains of a campfire log, or what’s left after a small construction project made of wood. It’s clearly from a piece of wood that was once much bigger.

But to archaeologists, who are the finders – and keepers – of all kinds of knowledge about how human beings developed and evolved – the ancient shard is a breathtaking window into greater wisdom about the pyramid and its contents.

5,000-Year-Old Wooden Stakes Discovered at Neolithic Site in Scotland

Archaeologists at the Ness of Brodgar ceremonial center in Scotland have discovered two pieces of wood dated to the Neolithic era, reports Craig Munro for the Press and Journal.

Found in two postholes in the floor of a structure at the Orkney site, the prehistoric wooden stakes survived for 5,000 years due to a dip in the floor, which may have funneled moisture into the holes and helped preserve the material.

“The wood is not in good condition, which is hardly surprising after thousands of years in the ground,” says the excavation team in a statement.

Initially, the researchers suspected the wood was too mushy to be lifted out. On August 3, however, archaeologist Jo McKenzie managed to successfully recover one of the stakes. (McKenzie documented the process in a “dig diary” video posted online.)

Next, the team hopes to identify the type of wood present and determine if the wooden stakes were sharpened before being driven into the holes.

“[T]he smaller of the two stakes had a beautifully square base and rested on a flat stone at the bottom of the post-hole, which presumably acted as a cushion,” note the researchers in a separate statement.

The Ness of Brodgar is part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney Unesco World Heritage site. Since 2006, excavations at the site have unearthed a large sandstone building complex, pottery, bones, artwork and stone tools.

As the Guardian’s Kevin McKenna reported in 2016, the site’s builders carried its materials from different parts of the island, sometimes over several miles. This suggests that people from across the area may have used the buildings as meeting places for trade and ceremonial activities.

“I think we had always tended to depict our Neolithic ancestors as Stone Age hippies who frolicked around large stones in some herb-induced fugue,” the site’s director, Nick Card, told the Guardian. “But this settlement depicts a dynamic, skilled and creative people whose workmanship would bear scrutiny with 21st-century methods.”

In addition to the Ness of Brodgar, the World Heritage Site encompasses two stone monuments, the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness; a burial site known as Maeshowe; and a settlement called Skara Brae. The area is known for its Grooved Ware pottery.

This ceramic style, featuring a flat bottom and intricate decoration, has been found in many parts of Britain and Ireland, but the earliest known examples are from Orkney.

Per Orkneyjar, researchers think the invention of Grooved Ware, along with some of the building innovations at Orkney, may have reflected the emergence of an elite group within the Neolithic society. The large amounts of labor that went into the complicated creations appear to have benefitted some people more than others.

The new find took place in the oldest part of the Ness, which dates to around 3100 B.C., according to the Press and Journal. The structure where the wood was discovered is near the complex’s eastern entrance. Archaeologists say it may be a particularly important part of the site because it features external upright slabs called orthostats.

Excavations at Ness Brodgar have been slowed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which prevented work in 2020 and allowed only a limited number of researchers to be on site during the current season.

As BBC News reports, volunteers are helping to cover the site with tarps held down by tires, as they do each year. This technique protects the site from severe weather in the fall and winter.

“The tires serve two purposes—they hold down the protective covers that envelope each trench and offer a degree of support for more fragile areas,” Sigurd Towrie of the Archaeology Institute of the Highland and Islands tells BBC News.

“The site has to be covered over for its protection. Much of the stone used in the construction of the buildings back in the Neolithic laminates when exposed to the elements for any length of time.”

‘Lost’ 2nd-century Roman fort discovered in Scotland

Archaeologists have discovered the buried remains of a Roman fort along Scotland’s ancient Antonine Wall.

Archaeologists have discovered the foundations of a “lost” second-century Roman fort in western Scotland — part of an ill-fated effort to extend the empire’s control throughout Britain.

The fort was one of up to 41 defensive structures built along the Antonine Wall — a fortification of mainly earthworks and wood that ran for about 40 miles (65 kilometers) across Scotland at its narrowest point, according to Historic Environment Scotland (HES), a government agency.

The Roman emperor Antoninus Pius ordered the wall built in A.D. 142 in hopes of surpassing his predecessor Hadrian, who about 20 years earlier had built the fortification known as Hadrian’s Wall about 100 miles (160 km) to the south.

But his push was ultimately unsuccessful, in part because of the hostility of the Indigenous people. (At this time the Romans called them “Caledonians”; later they would call them “Picts,” from a Latin word meaning “painted people,” because of their body paintings or tattoos.) After 20 years trying to hold their new northern line, the Romans abandoned the Antonine Wall in A.D. 162 and retreated back to Hadrian’s Wall. 

“Antoninus Pius was effectively a bureaucrat,” historian and archaeologist John Reid told Live Science. “He had no military experience, and we think he was looking for a win that he could pretty much guarantee against the exotic Caledonian people.”

Reid explained that Roman emperors needed to claim a military victory, and so Antoninus Pius used his conquest of Scotland — while it lasted — to justify his rule.

Reid, who was not involved in the new discovery, is author of the book “The Eagle and the Bear: A New History of Roman Scotland” (Birlinn, 2023) and chairman of the Trimontium Trust, which investigates Roman archaeology in the Scottish Borders region.

“Lost” fort

Archaeologists from HES found the buried remains of the small fort, or “fortlet,” beside a school on the northwestern outskirts of the modern city of Glasgow.

The structure was mentioned by an antiquarian in 1707, but it had never been found since, despite efforts to locate it in the 1970s and 1980s.

The fort consisted of two small wooden buildings surrounded by a rampart of stone and turf up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) high, built along the south side of the Antonine Wall. The rampart had two wooden towers above gates on opposite sides — one at the north to let people, animals and wagons through the wall and one at the south.

But there’s now nothing above ground to show that the fort was ever there; , and the archaeologists located its buried stone foundations using gradiometry, a noninvasive geophysical technique that measures tiny variations in Earth’s magnetic field to detect underground structures. 

About 12 soldiers — many of them local auxiliaries, or “auxilia,” who had signed on to fight for the Romans — would have been stationed at the fort for about a week at a time to keep watch over the area and prevent raids on the fortifications.

They’d then be relieved by a new detachment of soldiers from a larger Roman fort at Duntocher, about a mile (1.6 km) to the east, according to the HES statement.

Roman wall

There’s now little visible evidence of the Antonine Wall, and the newly discovered fortlet is a rare find.

Reid said it helped confirm a theory that the Romans first hoped to duplicate Hadrian’s Wall, with stronger and higher fortifications made of stone and a small fort, or “milecastle,” every mile of its length. “But then they thought better of it and decided they needed proper-sized forts,” he said. 

Roman fortifications in the Tayside region, north of the Antonine Wall, showed that the Romans planned to subjugate all of Scotland, but the Antonine Wall and any northern possessions seem to have been abandoned after A.D. 162, he said. 

Thereafter, Hadrian’s Wall became the northernmost frontier of the empire, seemingly until Roman rule collapsed in Britain in the early fifth century, he said.

Reid’s Trimontium Trust has conducted excavations at Burnswark Hill, the site of a Caledonian hillfort and a fortified Roman military camp built to attack it after Antoninus Pius ordered his legions to conquer Scotland north of Hadrian’s Wall. Among the finds there were whistling sling bullets that the Romans may have used as “terror weapons” against the defenders.

The reason for the Roman eventual withdrawal from the Antonine Wall and back to Hadrian’s Wall is not well understood. 

“There’s lots of debate,” Reid said. “Was it because the Romans got fed up? Was it because the Romans had trouble elsewhere? Was it because it was too costly to run two frontiers? Was it because Antonius Pius died [in A.D. 161]? Nobody’s really sure; I suspect it was a combination of all of those.”