Tag: archaeology

25K trafficked artifacts

This is the culmination of 4 years of investigation into a major smuggling ring that began with the discovery of a looted archaeological site in the small town of Riesi in the Caltanissetta area of central Sicily. Before the coordinated raids, Italian authorities confiscated 3K artifacts, 1200 forgeries and 1500 tools of the looting trade including metal detectors.

A leg up in the afterlife

Archaeologists can only speculate about the motivation behind the unusual Virú burials. 1 suggestion is that the extra limbs may have served as a sacrificial offering to accompany the dead to the afterlife. Additional lab work will determine if there was any sort of relation between the individuals buried and the owners of the additional body parts.

Ainu

For much of the 20th century, Japanese government officials and academics tried to hide the Ainu. They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was steadfastly creating a national myth of homogeneity. So officials tucked the Ainu into files marked “human migration mysteries,” or “aberrant hunter-gatherers of the modern age,” or “lost Caucasoid race,” or “enigma,” or “dying race,” or even “extinct.” But in 2006, under international pressure, the government finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous population. And today, the Japanese appear to be all in.

on the Ainu, which have been on the islands of japan for more than 10x as long as the japanese people, who came from korea 3 ka ago.

Extremely aged wine

i’m not an expert, but this one might have gone bad?

The Römerwein, or Speyer wine bottle—so called after the German region where it was discovered in the excavation of a 4th century AD Roman nobleman’s tomb—dates “back to between 325 and 359 AD,” and has the distinction of being “the oldest known wine bottle which remains unopened.”

Non-african mummies

We found the ancient Egyptian samples falling distinct from modern Egyptians, and closer towards Near Eastern and European samples (Fig. 4a, Supplementary Fig. 3, Supplementary Table 5). In contrast, modern Egyptians are shifted towards sub-Saharan African populations. Model-based clustering using ADMIXTURE37 (Fig. 4b, Supplementary Fig. 4) further supports these results and reveals that the 3 ancient Egyptians differ from modern Egyptians by a relatively larger Near Eastern genetic component, in particular a component found in Neolithic Levantine ancient individuals36 (Fig. 4b). In contrast, a substantially larger sub-Saharan African component, found primarily in West-African Yoruba, is seen in modern Egyptians compared to the ancient samples.

2021-11-05: Mummification is also older than previously thought:

The preserved body of a high-ranking nobleman called Khuwy, discovered in 2019, has been found to be far older than assumed and is, in fact, 1 of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever discovered. It has been dated to the Old Kingdom, proving that mummification techniques 4 ka BP were highly advanced. The sophistication of the body’s mummification process and the materials used – including its exceptionally fine linen dressing and high-quality resin – was not thought to have been achieved until 1 ka later.

Nodosaur

A dinosaur fossil that was discovered in a bitumen pit in Alberta, Canada, in 2011 is the best-preserved specimen of a nodosaur ever discovered, and it is truly a spectacle to behold. The herbivore died 110 ma BP in a riverbed and was swept to sea where it was swiftly buried in the mud and sediment of the seabed. Resting on its back, the nodosaur’s soft tissues, armor plating and thorny ridges became mineralized, preserving its form in stone.

Decoding Roman Handwriting

Soon afterward, Nicholson published the Latin text with his translation. It was a letter between 2 early Christians, providing unique evidence of a busy, active, literate faith community. The writer, Vinisius, enjoined the recipient, Nigra, to be “strong in Jesus,” and warned her against welcoming an adherent of the Arian heresy (which argued that Christ, in human form, was not divine). The discovery was widely and enthusiastically covered in the newspapers, with only a few notes of caution sounded about the likelihood of Nicholson’s reading being accurate. There the matter rested for 90 years, until Tomlin decided to take another look at Nicholson’s photographs. As he studied them (the original artifact had, alas, disappeared), he found that Nicholson had made 1 disastrous error: he had read the entire inscription upside down. Tomlin published his own reading in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. The inscription was, in fact, a defixio, or curse tablet, 100s of which had been flung by ancient Roman visitors into the sacred spring of the goddess Sulis Minerva, in Bath. Often, these curses would be aimed at a thief, urging the goddess to visit all kinds of discomforts on the miscreant (“May he or she be unable to urinate,” for example). Nicholson’s lead tablet, Tomlin found, used a familiar formula. The thief of the unknown object—“whether they be man or woman, boy or girl”—was to be denied sleep until what had been taken was returned.

The heap of trash in Rome

Monte Testaccio is an artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of fragments of broken amphorae dating from the time of the Roman Empire. It is one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 20k m2 at its base and with a volume of 580k cubic m, containing the remains of an estimated 53m amphorae. It has a circumference of nearly 1km and stands 35m high, though it was probably considerably higher in ancient times.