the site of Kemune can be dated to the time of the Mittani Empire, which dominated large parts of northern Mesopotamia and Syria from the 15th to the 14th century BCE. The Mittani Empire is one of the least researched kingdoms of the Ancient Near East. The archaeologists now hope to obtain new information about the politics, economy, and history of the empire by studying cuneiform tablets discovered in the palace.
Tag: archaeology
Mayan Civil War?
Trophy skulls, together with a growing list of scattered finds from other sites in Belize, Honduras, and Mexico, provide intriguing evidence that the conflict may have been civil in nature, pitting rising powers in the north against the established dynasties in the south.
What the Celts drank
Our analyses confirm that they indeed consumed imported wines, but they also drank local beer from the Greek drinking bowls. In other words, the Celts did not simply adopt foreign traditions in their original form. Instead, they used the imported vessels and products in their own ways and for their own purposes. Moreover, the consumption of imported wine was apparently not confined to the upper echelons of society. Craftsmen too had access to wine, and the evidence suggests that they possibly used it for cooking, while the elites quaffed it in the course of their drinking parties
Conflict Amber
Burmese amber offers paleontologists an unprecedented glimpse into the Cretaceous. But it comes from a conflict zone.
Virtual Angkor
a groundbreaking collaboration between Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life. Built for the classroom, it has been created to take students into a 3D world and to use this simulation to ask questions about Angkor’s place in larger networks of trade and diplomacy, its experience with climate variability and the structure of power and kingship that underpinned the city.
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the colossal, densely populated cities would have constituted the largest empire on earth at the time of its peak in the 12th century.
Amber Millipede
The 3D reconstruction of a 99M-year-old millipede discovered in Burmese amber allowed for the description of an entirely new suborder, and is just one of the many exciting discoveries in Burmese amber. Burmese amber, mostly coming from the Hukawng Valley in Kachin State, northern Myanmar, is valuable not only for understanding of the Myriapoda fossil record and historical biogeography, but also including fantastic fossils of frogs, bone and feathers from theropod wings, a whole bird trapped in amber, and the previously discussed feathered tip of a dinosaur tail.
UK Iron Age ritual burials
The Iron Age site at Childrey Warren was particularly fascinating as it provided a glimpse into the beliefs and superstitions of people living in Oxfordshire before the Roman conquest. Evidence elsewhere suggests that burials in pits might have involved human sacrifice. “These findings open a unique window into the lives and deaths of communities we often know only for their monumental buildings, such as hillforts or the Uffington White Horse. The results from the analysis of the artifacts, animal bones, the human skeletons and the soil samples will help us add some important information to the history of the communities that occupied these lands so many years ago.”
Ubar
Most people associate Atlantis with a sunken city or continent that is long gone and hidden beneath the waters. However, Arabia has its own legend of a lost city, the so-called “Atlantis of the Sands“, which has been the source of debate among a number of historians, archaeologists and explorers. Perhaps Ubar is in Rub’ al-Khali, “The Empty Quarter”, but “archaeologists remain divided on whether it is indeed the ‘Atlantis of the Sands.’ Many have changed their opinion and now claim that Habarut, across the border in Yemen, could be the site of Ubar.”
Ancient Greece colors
Once upon a time, long before wars, natural disasters and erosion took hold of the ancient Greek statues, these ivory gems vibrated with color. Ancient Greek sculptors valued animated and pulsating depictions as much as they valued perfection and realism, and it has finally become fact that these artists utilized color in their creations. The stark white Parthenon once breathed in blues, yellows and reds, and—though it took 1000s of years for this to be solidified in art historical circles—now, scholars are finally able to display the ancient world with the same rainbow vitality it once possessed.
Ancient Footprints
Dinosaurs, elephants, and giraffes were all exciting enough. More personal than stone tools, more dynamic than skeletal remains, human footprints create an unparalleled link to the distant past. The analysis of preserved human and animal footprints—known as ichnology, from the Greek word for track—allows us to imagine people not so different from us, standing, running, and playing, 100s or 1000s or even millions of years ago. “Tracks are more exciting than body fossils. They can tell a story.”
Hours of 3D photogrammetry work reveal the tracks of ancient humans on the South African coast.
Human tracks encode a startling amount of information, enough for scientists to create a brief, but illuminating, biography of a person or group of people. The average person takes an estimated 224m steps over the course of a lifetime. When preserved, footprints are a library of clues about a human’s activities, speed of travel, height, weight, and sometimes even sex. They are, however, remarkably rare in the archaeological record. In the past few years, researchers have found them in unexpected places scattered around the world: modern beaches. Finding ancient footprints in such a dynamic environment seems counterintuitive. Is there anything more ephemeral, after all, than footprints in the sand? You’d think that the action of waves and wind would wipe footprints away quickly. But, in 2012, massive storms in Wales revealed fossilized forests—and the footprints of a child, facing a prehistoric sea. In 2013, researchers stumbled across the 800 ka tracks left behind by children and adults, a small family perhaps, playing on a windswept English beach. The following year, researchers working on British Columbia’s Calvert Island found footprints dating back to the earliest days of human presence in the Americas. The one thing they all have in common is proximity to the ocean.
2023-02-26: Towards more children in Archaeology
Finding evidence of Ice Age children is difficult. It’s not just that their small, fragile bones are hard to locate. To understand why we forget about them in our reconstructions of prehistory, we also need to consider our modern assumptions about children. Why do we imagine them as ‘naive’ figures ‘free of responsibility’? Why do we assume that children couldn’t contribute meaningfully to society? Researchers who make these assumptions about children in the present are less likely to seek evidence that things were different in the past.
But using new techniques, and with different assumptions, the children of the Ice Age are being given a voice. And what they’re saying is surprising: they’re telling us different stories, not only about the roles they played in the past, but also about the evolution of human culture itself.
Human bones are fragile things, but some are more fragile than others. The larger, denser bones of adults tend to be better preserved in the archaeological record than those of children, whose bones are more like a bird’s than an elephant’s: they are smaller, more porous and less mineralized, lack tensile and compressive strength, and may not be fully fused to their shafts (in the case of long bones). These skeletons are more vulnerable to both sedimentary pressure (when buried underground) and erosion from acidic soil and biodegrading organic matter. This is one of the main reasons why telling the stories of prehistoric children has been so difficult.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 