Archaeology News

Hey there listeners! We have a great show for you this week. Our guest is the founder and CEO of Archaeology in the Community, an organization that helps bring archaeology and history to the community in an urban setting.

Ateam of archaeologists and volunteers led by Newcastle University’s Professor Ian Haynes with site director Tony Wilmott has started work in Maryport until 22 July.

This is the third year they have excavated at this important Roman site, commissioned by the Senhouse Museum Trust with in kind support from Newcastle University and the permission of the landowners the Hadrian’s Wall Trust.

Ascertaining the meaning of the ancient script Linear B becomes a detective story.

On March 30, 1900, during the excavation of the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, site of the legendary labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus took flight, workmen unearthed a clay tablet inscribed with an unknown script. Some of the characters of the script looked like the letters of an alien alphabet, others like alien hieroglyphics. In the following weeks and months workmen unearthed more tablets, several hundred of which had fallen from a floor above into a terra cotta bathtub.

The tablets contained messages sent from the dawn of history, from before the time of Homer, but they were messages that could not be received. No one knew what language people spoke 30 centuries ago on Crete, and there was no Rosetta stone among the discoveries at Knossos. (There were, however, other enchanting wonders — elaborate lavatories, murals of griffins and dolphins.) For 50 years, the inscriptions seemed impossible to crack. The code’s ultimate decipherment would turn out to be one of the great scientific detective stories of the 20th century — The Mysterious Case of Linear B.

Archaeological field surveys on sites along the Corridor 10 route in construction through the region of Pirot, south-eastern Serbia, culminated in a discovery of graves from the Iron Age that contain skeletal remains of warriors together with their spears and knives.

Turkey’s well-known ancient site of Alacahöyük, which currently draws around 50,000 visitors a year, is located in the Central Anatolian province of Çorum. Works at the site are set to continue, to uncover more clues like those found last year in order to prove that the settlement in the ancient site of Alacahöyük began 1,500 years earlier than previously thought.

The head of the Alacahöyük excavations, Professor Aykut Çınaroğlu, said that the first excavations had started at the ancient site in 1907, and lasted only 15 days, and were then restarted in 1935 on the order of Atatürk.

Çınaroğlu said that this year’s digs in Alacahöyük, which is known as Turkey’s first national excavation area, would begin next month, adding that the works would focus on following up the pieces that were found last year and proved that the first settlement was seen in the area much earlier than thought.

In the light of data to be revealed during excavations, Çınaroğlu said they had previously estimated that housing dated back to 8,500 years ago in Alacahöyük, “But we had suspicions that it might date back to earlier times. Last year we began finding pieces from the Neolithic age, confirming our suspicions. We could not have found a Neolithic settlement but objects that will shed light on this settlement. Thus we saw that housing dated back to 1,500 years earlier than we have known so far. This year we will focus on these objects and try to find the traces of this settlement.”

As the summer holidays approach, The Local is touring Germany's UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Today we visit the historic Roman Limes.

The Upper-Germanic Roman Limes covers a total distance of 550 kilometres. Around 2,000 years ago its forts, watchtowers, walls and palisades protected the mighty Roman Empire from independent Germania.

It is the longest and one of the most impressive archaeological monuments in Europe, marking the frontier where the highly developed civilisation of ancient Rome met 'barbaric' Germania.

The Limes run from Bad Hönningen/Rheinbrohl on the River Rhine to the Regensburg area on the River Danube. Alongside Roman remains preserved in their original condition, there are restored buildings, excavations and reconstructions. The course of the border wall can still be made out in places as it stretches in long, straight lines across forests and pastureland.

When excavating urban sites, the team from Historical Perspectives, Inc. (HPI), is used to discovering a variety of features and artifacts during the course of fieldwork. Generally, archaeologists in urban contexts expect to recover an array of historical resources and can become jaded until a particularly unusual artifact is uncovered. Over the last few decades however, the HPI archaeologists have encountered many interesting sites and artifacts that have led the field team on numerous journeys of discovery

Qatar’s Al Zubarah Archaeological Site, which has outstanding universal value as the Gulf’s most complete and well-preserved pearl trading and diving town of the 18th-19th centuries, is likely to be inscribed in the Unesco World Heritage List.
“The nomination process will be completed this month,” Qatar Museums Authority’s chief archaeology officer Prof Thomas Leisten said yesterday.
Qatar’s largest and most impressive archaeological site, the abandoned coastal town of Al Zubarah, with 60 hectares of ruins within its former walls,  is situated about 100km to the northwest of Doha in the district of Al Shamal.
The settlement was founded around 1760 by the Banu Utba tribe from Kuwait, seeking to create a safe trading haven in the Gulf, as other long-established ports were destroyed, occupied, or ridden with plague.
Over a very short period of time, Al Zubarah, quickly rose to become the foremost centre for pearl-based trade and commerce in the region, and Qatar’s largest and most important town.
Its location in central Gulf was instrumental in making Al Zubarah the premier pearling and trading town in the region after the decline of Basra in Iraq.

It took less than 10 seconds to reveal the truth about the wounded soldier from the army of Philip II of Macedon, after a radiologist performed an X-ray on a section of ulna (one of the two forearm bones). Prof. Agelarakis was then able to confirm his hypothesis about the veteran and how he survived a devastating injury that would have plagued him until his death.

In a quest to make concrete more durable and sustainable, an international team of geologists and engineers has found inspiration in the ancient Romans, whose massive concrete structures have withstood the elements for more than 2,000 years.

By Owen JarusLiveScience Some 1,000 years ago, the Vikings set off on a voyage to Notre Dame Bay in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, new evidence suggests.

A wispy-haired mummy's head, bleached skulls, and arm and leg bones are piled outside looted tombs.

A mummified hand with leathery-skinned fingers pokes from the sand.

Ancient burial wrappings from mummified bodies — torn apart to find priceless jewelry — unravel across the desert like brown ribbon, or tangle near broken bits of wooden coffins still brightly painted after nearly 3,000 years underground.

With bones scattered everywhere, this 500-acre plot looks like the aftermath of a massacre rather than an ancient burial ground.

“You see dogs playing with human bones, children scavenging for pottery,” says Egyptian archaeologist Monica Hanna, stepping cautiously around grisly remains and deep pits dug into tombs by looters.

Gladiz Collatupa, an archaeologist, once stashed six mummies at her parents' house for safe keeping. That was when she dug for artifacts in the dirt of Peru, rich with the leavings of past cultures like the Inca and the Moche. Now she digs through packages at the post office instead, searching for ancient treasure being smuggled out of the country.

Ms. Collatupa and a colleague, Sonia Rojas, an art historian, are a pair of Indiana Joneses in reverse. Instead of swashbuckling around the world looting ruins, they try to keep Peru's ancient riches from being spirited out of the country by mail.

"With less danger," noted Ms. Rojas, a petite woman in glasses with a keen interest in colonial Peruvian paintings. She wears a khaki vest with a large button that says, "I defend my cultural heritage."

The women work for Peru's Ministry of Culture as part of a program aimed at stopping the illegal export of valuable historic and prehistoric objects and artwork, a depletion that began nearly 500 years ago with the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire and has never stopped.

Last year, the post office team, which Ms. Collatupa joined in August, replacing another archaeologist, made 22 seizures, totaling dozens of items.

A mist-covered mountain in Cambodia gives up its treasure, writes Lindsay Murdoch.

Scratched and exhausted, Damian Evans pushed through dense jungle into a clearing where mountain villagers long ago attempted to grow rice, stepping on to a weed-covered mound.

''Bingo,'' the Australian archaeologist said as he picked up and examined an ancient sandstone block.

Ancient rock art is under threat due to climate change, and a project has been launched to develop methods to enable everyone to contribute to its protection.

The CARE project is a collaboration between heritage and science research interests at Newcastle University and Queen’s University Belfast. Its primary objective is to co-produce a user-friendly, non-intrusive Condition Assessment Risk Evaluation (CARE) toolkit for gathering and organising information essential for the long-term safeguarding of ancient rock art that exists out in the open.

So this was more than just a dance contest. Folded in was the ability to summarize your work succinctly. In Stewart's case, that work is titled “Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking, and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa.” His highly stylized chase of an antelope—played by fellow University of Oxford archaeologist Giulia Saltini-Semerari—followed by processing and sharing of the goods, was elegant. “What I most looked for was that scientific ideas came across,” said Gschmeidler. “He did this perfectly.”

No one was surprised when he scooped the prize. For one thing, Stewart wore nothing but a shimmering, translucent loin cloth. (That's worth a few bonus points in my book.) But the judges told me afterward that his dance stood out because it accomplished two things at once. Most importantly, “he connected with the audience,” said Pastorini. “That is the purpose of dance: to create emotions.” A big help was his choice of music—a jazz interpretation of African Pygmy tribal music by Herbie Hancock—which created an atmosphere of funky ancientness.

Some researchers are suggesting that Neanderthals were driven to extinction by a massive volcanic eruption near Naples. The suggestion is one of the topics under debate this week at a conference at London's British Museum examining what forces led to the destruction of the Neanderthals and what led to the triumph of the homo sapiens. One new theory holds that a gigantic eruption of the volcano in the Campi Flegrei area near Naples 39,000 years ago was catastrophic for the Neanderthals. That was the biggest volcanic eruption in Europe for more than 200,000 years and scientists say that its enormous plumes of ash would have blotted out the sun for months, or possibly years. And that, in turn, would have caused temperatures to plummet and filled the atmosphere with toxic matter that may have contributed to the end of the Neanderthals. But not all scientists agree. Some argue the Neanderthals were already extinct before the eruption. This is just one of the major issues at the conference called: "When Europe was covered by ice and ash". At the meeting scientists will also try to understand why homo sapiens are the only species left today and why other version of humanity died out.

British Archaeology #131 (July/August) has a feature by Pippa Bradley that caught my interest. It’s about a Wessex Archaeology dig in 2004-05 at Cliffs End farm in Thanet, a piece of north-east Kent that was an island up until the 16th century when silting finished connecting it to mainland England. What we’re dealing here is ritual murder, some pretty amazingly strange disposal of the dead and ancient Scandinavian migrants. Use of the site begins in earnest with six ring-ditch barrows during the Early Bronze Age (2200-1500 cal BC). These were poorly preserved and yielded few interesting finds.

When did cities begin to thrive in Poland? Was it associated with the German colonization in the thirteenth century, or had the Piast developed these centres several hundred years earlier? Prof. Zbyszko Górczak of the Institute of History, A. Mickiewicz University in Poznań, presents contemporary position of Polish historiography.

"The history of the dispute between the Polish and German historiographers is long and dates back to the birth of modern historiography in the second half of the nineteenth century. The dispute was intertwined with nationalist slogans, German scientists and politicians viewed the matter of the formation of cities in the East as evidence of the inferiority of Slavic civilization, which of course gave rise to protests of Polish science. The conflict has not died down until the end of the communist era in the late 1980s" - explained Prof. Górczak.

From the very beginning, Polish scientists argued the native and very early birth of urban life in Poland. This was supported by renowned scholars like Prof. Gerard Labuda and Prof. Henryk Łowmiański. At the other extreme were German researchers, convinced that the idea of the formation of the cities was brought to the East only by immigrants from Germany.

A new highway touted as a way to ease Beirut's notorious traffic has angered residents and activists who say it will destroy rare old houses that survived Lebanon's 15-year civil war.

The Fouad Boutros highway overpass is a long-stalled project, dating back to before the 1975-1990 civil war, and intended to route unnecessary traffic away from some of the city's most congested areas.

For now, the only part of the route completed is a single bridge, which was finished before the war began and has remained as a lone reminder of the old plans.

The Council for Development and Reconstruction, a government organisation intended to help rebuild post-war Lebanon, says the road will significantly improve traffic in the city.

Stretch can bring out faint pictographs that are invisible to the naked eye.  It works on digital camera images.  No special filters or lighting are needed.  To see what it can do check out the slide shows, especially Rocky Hill and Tulare. 

After a 22-year hiatus, archaeological excavations will begin once again in the ancient city of Sebastapolis in the Central Anatolian province of Tokat’s Sulusaray district.

Sulusaray district administrator Yaşar Kemal Yılmaz said Sebastapolis was known as one of the most significant ancient cities in the Central Black Sea and Northeastern Anatolian region.

Yılmaz said the ancient city had been the capital of a number of states in the past. “One of the leading Roman cities, Sebastapolis, is regarded as a ‘second Ephesus’ by archaeologists and experts. It is a highly significant area. But because of some technical problems and a lack of interest, the excavations that were carried out between 1987 and 1991 were insufficient. The ancient city is in a bad and idle situation. We are doing our best for the protection of ancient pieces there with the help of security forces. Excavations should begin as soon as possible to unearth these works and present them to the world,” he said.