Tag: archaeology

Kane has been found

Athenians and Spartans clashed at the isle of Kane in 406 BC, one of the last battles of the Great Peloponnesian War. Some 100 ships were sent to the bottom of the Aegean Sea as a result of the prolonged, hard-fought naval battle. Archaeologists have long debated the location of Kane, but none of the islands in the Aegean seemed to fit the descriptions. At long last, thanks to artifacts and core samples, the location of Kane has been identified, as has the reason it took so long to find it: It isn’t an island anymore.

Istanbul history

When the excavation reached what had been the bottom of the sea, the archeologists announced that they could finally cede part of the site to the engineers, after one last survey of the seabed—just a formality, really, to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. That’s when they found the remains of a Neolithic dwelling, dating from 8 ka BP. It was previously unknown that anyone had lived on the site of the old city before 3.3 ka BP. The excavators, attempting to avoid traces of Istanbul’s human history, had ended up finding an extra 5000 years of it.

CSI Bog

Since the 18th century, the peat bogs of Northern Europe have yielded 100s of human corpses dating from as far back as 10 ka BP. Like Tollund Man, many of these so-called bog bodies are exquisitely preserved—their skin, intestines, internal organs, nails, hair, and even the contents of their stomachs and some of their clothes left in remarkable condition. Despite their great diversity—they comprise men and women, adults and children, kings and commoners—a surprising number seem to have been violently dispatched and deliberately placed in bogs, leading some experts to conclude that the bogs served as mass graves for offed outcasts and religious sacrifices. Tollund Man, for example, had evidently been hanged.

Oversized Bronze Age axes

Radiocarbon dating found the axes were made between 3.8 and 3.5 ka BP, a period bridging the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age. This places them among the earliest bronze artifacts ever discovered in Denmark. Bronze axes from this era are so rare only 5 of them have been found before in Denmark, Sweden and northern Germany. That means the Boest find has in one fell swoop doubled the number of these Bronze Age axes in the archaeological record of northern Europe. When you consider that
Bent Rasmussen and his brother, enlisted by Bent during excavations to cover more ground with their metal detectors, found another 4 smaller axes and a spear tip, it’s clear that this field in Boest was an important place during the early Bronze Age.

Mapping Rome underground

We journeyed via the icy, crystal clear waters of subterranean aqueducts that feed the Trevi fountain and 2000 year old sewers which still function beneath the Roman Forum today, to decadent, labyrinthine catacombs. Our laser scans map these hidden treasures, revealing for the first time the complex network of tunnels, chambers and passageways without which Rome could not have survived as a city of 1M people.

3.3 ma Stone tools

Our ancestors were making stone tools even earlier than we thought—some 700 ka older, dating to 3.3 ma ago, in northern Kenya. “These aren’t the very first tools that hominins made. They show that the knappers already had an understanding of how stones can be intentionally broken, beyond what the first hominin who accidentally hit 2 stones together and produced a sharp flake would have had. I think there are older, even more primitive artifacts out there.”