Medieval Woman’s Burial in Switzerland Yields Gold Brooch
An excavation of a 7th Century grave site in Switzerland has thrown up a “spectacular” kind of jewellery and afforded valuable insight into medieval society.
A golden brooch was found among other valuable artefacts at the Basel burial site.
The 15 graves belonged to wealthy people of that time who were buried in their finery. The most significant find was a golden robe brooch belonging to a woman aged about 20 at her death.
The woman was also buried with a treasure trove of other jewellery, including 160 pearls, an amber pendant and a belt with an iron buckle and a silver-inlaid tongue.
Other graves revealed high society occupants adorned with highly crafted ornaments.
The archaeological site in Basel, northwest Switzerland, has been excavated over a number of years. In the summer, the body of a warrior was uncovered with a significant head injury caused by a sword blow.
The latest graves were discovered when workers were laying new heating pipes in the city.
“It appears to be a hotspot, a special place where particularly wealthy people were buried,” said Basel cantonal archaeologist Guido Lassau.
Excavations will resume in January and plans are being made to display the finds in a public exhibition.
Ancient barn conversion with steam room found at Roman villa in Rutland
The bathing suite at the Roman villa in Rutland.
If you thought barn conversions were a relatively recent development for the property-owning classes, you’d be wrong – probably by 16 or 17 centuries.
Archaeologists at the site of a Roman villa complex in the east Midlands have discovered that its wealthy owners converted an agricultural timber barn into a dwelling featuring a bathing suite with a hot steam room, a warm room and a cold plunge pool.
Fresh evidence of the villa owners’ lavish lifestyle comes two years after a family found fragments of ancient pottery on a ramble through farmland in Rutland. Archaeologists from the University of Leicester, in partnership with Historic England and Rutland county council, later unearthed a rare mosaic depicting Homer’s Iliad.
The finding – now protected by the government – was described as “the most exciting Roman mosaic discovery in the UK in the last century”.
Work at the villa site.
Now the same team has unveiled further discoveries at the site, including the conversion of a barn the size of a small church.
The barn was supported by large timber posts and may have had two storeys. It was converted to stone in the third or fourth century, with one end becoming a dwelling with many floors, and the other retained for agricultural or craft work.
The main feature of the dwelling was a Roman-style bath suite with sophisticated underfloor heating and heating ducts built into the walls. A tank outside the building may have been used to collect water from the roof.
The team also revisited the area of the mosaic which was thought to be laid in a dining room, known as a triclinium, within the main villa building. They discovered fragments of polished marble, broken stone columns and painted wall plaster that hint at grand decoration.
The dining room had been built as an extension to the main villa, suggesting that the owners wanted a special area for feasting as they gazed over the Iliad mosaic.
A newly found mosaic at the site.
The new excavations also revealed additional mosaics in the corridors leading to the dining room, including one with a kaleidoscopic geometric design.
John Thomas, the deputy director of the University of Leicester archaeological service, said: “It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this Roman villa complex to our understanding of life in late Roman Britain.
While previous excavations of individual buildings, or smaller-scale villas, have given us a snapshot, this discovery in Rutland is much more complete and provides a clearer picture of the whole complex.
“The aim of this year’s work has been to investigate other buildings within the overall villa complex to provide context to the Trojan war mosaic. While that is a wonderful, eye-catching discovery, we will be able to learn much more about why it was here, and who might have commissioned it, by learning about the villa as a whole.”
Duncan Wilson, Historic England’s chief executive, said the site had “posed many questions about life in Roman Britain”. Its significance would become clearer as the evidence was examined over the next few years by specialists, he added.
An Egyptian archaeological mission has unearthed a new part of the Quweisna necropolis in Menoufiya governorate that is replete with mummies with golden tongues.
The discovery was made during excavations carried out in the central Nile Delta governorate in the past three months at the necropolis.
The mission also found a collection of clay pots, golden sheets in the shape of scarabs and lotus flowers, as well as a number of funerary stony amulets, scarabs, and vessels from the late ancient Egyptian, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods.
“The mummies with golden tongues are in a bad conservation condition,” said Mustafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Waziri added that skeleton remains of mummies covered with golden sheets, wooden anthropoid coffins, and copper traces that were once used in making coffins were also found.
Ayman Ashmawi, head of the ancient Egyptian Antiquities Sector, said that the newly discovered part of the necropolis has a different architectural style.
Ashmawi explained that this discovered part is made of mudbrick and composed of a main vaulted hall with three vaulted burial chambers and a burial shaft with two side chambers.
“Early studies on the burials, the mummies, and the funerary collection found indicate that this necropolis was used during three different periods: the late ancient Egyptian, the Ptolemaic, and part of the Roman period,” he added.
Quweisna necropolis, which is one of the most important archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, houses a collection of tombs and burial chambers from several archaeological eras.
This collection reveals the changes in the architectural style of tombs and the burying methods used in the different ages.
Quweisna is also home to a very distinguished necropolis for sacred birds.
During the past archaeological seasons, the mission has succeeded in uncovering a collection of tombs, remains of buildings, mummies, coffins, and sarcophagi, including a huge anthropoid sarcophagus carved in black granite for one of the senior priests of Atribis (today’s Banha in Qalioubiya governorate north of Cairo).
How Did Humans Boil Water Before the Invention of Pots?
On a blustery day in October, Andrew Langley and 13 other graduate students headed to the woods to learn to boil water. They were allowed no obvious cooking vessels: no pots, no pans, no bowls, no cups, no containers at all. But they did bring deer hides, which Langley had carefully procured from deer farms. They were to boil water the Paleolithic way.
Langley is a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of York, and he studies how prehistoric humans cooked without pottery. Ceramics are a relatively recent invention in the long arc of human history.
Pottery shards appear in the archaeological record only 20,000 years ago, first in China and then many millennia later in the Near East and Europe. Metal cookware is an even more recent innovation. For tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before all this, our ancestors were building fires and using heat to make food tastier, safer, and easier to digest. The invention of cooking, anthropologists have argued, helped make humans human.
It’s easy to imagine how prehistoric people could have roasted their food. It’s much harder to imagine how they could have boiled it without pottery. But that’s what Langley, who was helping lead a class of master’s students in archaeology, set out to attempt that October morning. Their boiling experiment was part of a course, and it took place at the York Experimental Archaeological Research Centre, a lakeside grove where researchers try to re-create the prehistoric by hafting arrowheads and weaving baskets out of reeds—and, in this case, boiling water. The students were divided into groups of two or three, and they set out on this extremely simple yet daunting task.
A couple of groups dug pits, filling them with coals and then lining them with either wet clay or deer hide. Others poured water into birch bark or pig stomachs (procured from a Chinese supermarket).
One group hung a deer hide from a tree and started heating small rocks in a fire—a technique inspired by the discovery of fire-cracked rocks in Paleolithic sites. These rocks had split and changed in distinct ways that suggested repeated heating and cooling. Archaeologists think that these stones were heated in fires and then dropped into water for cooking.
But you can’t use just any old rocks for boiling. “The stones are the most tricky part,” Langley says. Wet stones, such as those that have been sitting in a river bed, will explode when the water inside turns into steam. So will stones with air trapped inside them. “Things like granite and basalt are very good,” he says. For safety reasons, Langley provided the students with massage stones that he knew would not explode. Still, the students had to heat the stones gradually to make sure that they did not crack at all. They ended up slowly nudging the stones into the fire over the course of 10 to 15 minutes. Using multiple stones, they were able to get the water inside the deer hide to boil.
Another group was also attempting to boil water inside a deer hide hung directly over a fire—a technique admittedly less grounded in physical evidence from archaeological sites. In 2015, John Speth, a retired anthropologist at the University of Michigan, wrote a paper pointing out that you can actually boil water in a plastic water bottle.
The paper, he was happy to explain to me, was inspired by watching the reality show Survivorman, in which the outdoor expert Les Stroud boils water in a plastic bottle, with his son. Speth quickly found YouTube videos and other evidence of people heating water in paper cups, coconut shells, bamboo tubes, wooden bowls, and even leaves. It turns out that as long as the cooking container is filled with water, it does not get hot enough to ignite.
But when Speth began talking with other archaeologists about this, he found that they had rarely thought about Paleolithic humans boiling water this way, using seemingly flimsy and flammable containers long before the introduction of pottery.
However, ethnographers in the 19th and 20 centuries documented the Celts, Assiniboin, Cree, Ojibwa, and Blackfeet cooking without stones in birch bark, hides, and animal stomachs. These organic materials would have rotted, of course, leaving no artefacts for archaeologists to study. Speth wondered if humans could have boiled liquids this way long before the evidence showed up in the archaeological record.
One group of students decided to put this method to the test. They hoisted their water-filled deer hide directly over a fire, and they planned to let it go as long as the hide stayed intact. The hair on the outside singed, but the skin itself held up just fine. So the students waited and waited and waited. Four hours later, the hide was still intact. It did get very hard, but neither sprung a leak nor burned.
The students tried to boil water in a deer hide directly over a fire.
The water reached 60 degrees Celsius, or 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but it did not come to a boil. And the deer hide definitely added some extra flavour, if you will, to the water. “If you stuck your head over it while it was cooking, you could smell it,” says Christopher Lance, one of the students. They were, I was disappointed to learn, not allowed to drink the hide-boiled water for food-safety reasons.
The students are now writing up the results of their different pot-less boiling techniques. And Speth was incredibly pleased to hear that a group of students decided to put his idea of wet cooking without hot stones to the test.
It’s extremely speculative, he admitted. But archaeology always has to deal with the problem of an incomplete record, and certain types of evidence (i.e., anything that will rot) are always going to be more incomplete than others. It’s about considering the things we see and also the things we don’t see. “If nobody asked the question,” Speth said, “nobody would even think it’s worth thinking about.”
Researchers Revisit Circumstances of Ötzi the Iceman’s Death
A reconstruction of Ötzi on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in the city of Bolzano in South Tyrol, Italy.
The ancient, mummified body of Ötzi the Iceman was found decades ago by hikers in the high Alps — but how did it get there? A new study questions the prevailing story of Ötzi’s death more than 5,000 years ago, suggesting that Ötzi did not die in the gully where he was found. Rather, his remains may have been carried there by the periodic thawing of the ice that surrounded his body.
And researchers propose that other prehistoric people who died in icy, mountainous regions could have been preserved by the same process.
“I think the possibility now is perhaps a bit larger” of finding another prehistoric body, archaeologist Lars Pilø told Live Science. “It’s not so large that I can promise there will be a body in the next decade, but I think that there’s definitely a chance.”
Pilø is the lead author of the new study, published Nov. 7 in the journal Holocene, which takes a fresh look at evidence from Ötzi.
He also leads the Secrets of the Ice project, which is associated with Norway’s Innlandet County Council and the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo; it studies the archaeology of glaciers and ice patches, many of which are now melting and revealing frozen troves of ancient artefacts.
The iceman cometh
The remains of Ötzi, who’s named after the Ötztal Alps where he was found, were discovered on Sept. 19, 1991, by German tourists in an Alpine pass between Italy and Austria.
The hikers first thought they’d found the preserved body of a modern mountaineer, but investigations later determined that Ötzi died about 5,300 years ago.
According to the Secrets of the Ice website, the generally accepted story of Ötzi’s death comes from investigations by archaeologist Konrad Spindler of the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Spindler found that Ötzi had probably been murdered: an arrowhead was embedded in his shoulder, and a deep cut in his hand appeared to be a defensive wound suffered while warding off a blow. He also noted that Ötzi’s backpack, bow and arrow quiver were damaged, which Spindler proposed was a sign of combat.
But Pilø and his colleagues argue that the damage to Ötzi’s equipment was probably caused by the pressure of the ice that surrounded them.
“There’s definitely been a conflict,” he said. “But what we say is that the damage to the artefacts is more easily explained by natural processes.”
Ötzi’s remains were found in a gully, marked here on the lower right with a black arrow, near the Tisenjoch pass in the Ötztal Alps along the border with Italy and Austria.
Otzi’s remains were found at a height of 10,530 feet (3,210 meters) at the place marked with a black circle. An axe that’s thought to have belonged to him was found lower down the slope, at the place marked with a black square.
The site where Otzi’s remains were found, marked here with a red dot, was excavated by scientists from Austria’s University of Innsbruck in 1992.
Ozti’s upper body was found partially resting on the half-submerged rock on the left of this photograph, where one of the scientific team is resting his green boot.
Several artefacts were found near Ötzi’s remains, including this quiver with arrows. They’re damaged, which was interpreted as a sign of conflict, but the new study proposes it might have been caused by the pressure of the ice.
Alpine death
The most significant proposal in the new study is that Ötzi didn’t die at the bottom of the gully where he was found, but rather that his body was carried there as the ice thawed and refroze over several summers.
Early investigations proposed that Ötzi was killed in the gully in the fall season and that his body was protected there from the crushing pressure of a glacier above.
But analysis of the food in Ötzi’s intestine suggests instead that he died in the spring or early summer when the gully would have been filled with ice, Pilø said.
In the new study, the authors propose that Ötzi died somewhere on the surface of a stationary ice patch — not a moving glacier — and that his remains and artefacts were carried into the gully by the periodic thawing and refreezing of the ice.
That means the body and artefacts were exposed at times and may have been submerged in melted ice water, but they nonetheless stood the test of time for thousands of years. So, it’s likely that other long-dead bodies may have been preserved in the same way, he said.
Archaeologist Andreas Putzer of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano in Italy, where Ötzi’s body and artefacts are on display, said that closer investigation of the mummy could confirm if it had indeed been exposed to glacial meltwater over time.
“A mummy submerged in water would lose its epidermis [skin], hair, and nails,” Putzer, who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email. “Normally this happens to bodies of drowned persons.” Pathological research could determine if the remains were ever submerged in melted ice water, as the new study proposes, or if they were continually frozen in ice, he said.
14,000-Year-Old Fossilized Poop Among Oldest Traces of Humans in North America
A 14,000-year-old coprolite, a dried-out piece of human faeces.
For much of the 20th century, the most solid evidence pointing researchers toward who the earliest humans in the Americas were, when they settled and how they lived were 13,000-year-old sharpened stones, known as Clovis points.
However, that timeline has been revised in recent decades, as Erin Wayman reported for Smithsonian magazine in 2012. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of pre-Clovis populations in the Americas at multiple sites, leading them to believe that humans have been here much earlier than previously thought. And in 2007, a team of working in Oregon’s Paisley Caves discovered some of the most solid evidence yet: a cache of ancient human dung.
Researchers used radiocarbon dating to estimate that the dried-out scat, preserved in the arid climate of the caves, was more than 14,000 years old—old enough to upend the “Clovis First” timeline.
Still, some researchers wondered: how could we be sure that the poop was really human? Many archaeologists claimed that the samples, known as coprolites, could have been animal faeces that were later contaminated by human DNA, reports Asher Elbein for the New York Times.
“No one doubts that the coprolites are as old as the radiocarbon dates say they are, they just doubt they are human,” environmental archaeologist John Blong of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom explains to Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky.
“If you’ve ever watched a crime show on TV, you know that DNA can get everywhere. Organisms constantly shed DNA in hair, skin cells, sweat, saliva, and so on.”
Last week, lead author Lisa-Marie Shillito, Blong and a team from the University of Newcastle published their answer in the journal Science Advances: yes, the faeces were almost certainly produced by humans.
The researchers came to their conclusion by studying the lipid biomarkers of 21 coprolite samples. These biomarkers are especially helpful because they are unlikely to contaminate nearby samples, per the New York Times.
Taking the two pieces of evidence together—the presence of lipid biomarkers associated with humans and the presence of human DNA—the team was able to confirm 13 coprolites as human samples. (Other samples in the studied batch came from a panther and a lynx, according to Gizmodo.)
Katelyn McDonough, a Texas A&M University archaeology Ph.D. candidate not involved in the research, tells Gizmodo that the use of faecal biomarkers is an exciting approach.
“This study both advances and showcases the faecal biomarker approach and makes a good case for the use of this method in tandem with DNA analysis in the future,” says McDonough.
According to the Times, the makeup of the Paisley Cave dung can also provide clues to their diet. For instance, the coprolite samples showed that early humans ate seeds, plants and rodents in addition to the occasional mammoth.
“The question of when and how people first settled the Americas has been a subject of intense debate,” Lisa-Marie Shillito says in a University of Newcastle statement. “By using a different approach, we have been able to demonstrate that there were pre-Clovis populations present in the area of the Great Basin and resolve this debate once and for all.”
Still, there’s much more to learn. Shillito tells the Times that further studies like this one will help illuminate the origins of Homo sapiens in the Americas.
“We’ll get a more detailed idea of exactly how people were moving around across the continent, and what they were doing in the environment, rather than just thinking about when they got there,” says Shillito.
In a controversial study published just last week, University of Exeter archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean published more evidence of pre-Clovis populations. Ardelean and his team used radiocarbon dating to show that stone artefacts found in Mexico’s Chiquihuite cave were possibly more than 26,000 years old, as Brian Handwerk reports for Smithsonian magazine.
Borgund: The Lost Viking Village Uncovered with 45,000 Artifacts Hidden in a Basement
In 1953, a parcel of land located close to the Borgund church on the west coast of Norway was going to be cleared, and a lot of debris ended up being discovered during the process. Fortunately, some people were able to identify the “debris” for what it actually was—items from the Norwegian Middle Ages.
This picture shows the excavation in 1954. The Borgund fjord can be seen in the background. The site was excavated also in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as smaller excavations more recently. In total there have been 31 archaeological field seasons at Borgund.
An excavation was carried out the following summer. Archaeologists unearthed a large number of artefacts. The majority of them were put in a basement archive. After that, not much more transpired.
Now, some seven decades later, experts have begun the exhaustive work of analyzing the 45,000 objects that have been kept in storage for the purpose of gaining insight into a thousand-year-old Norwegian town with a shocking lack of historical knowledge. Medieval Borgund is mentioned in a few written sources, where it is referred to as one of the “little towns” (smaa kapstader) in Norway.
Professor Gitte Hansen, an archaeologist at the University Museum of Bergen, recently gave an interview with Science Norway in which she discussed what researchers have discovered about Borgund thus far. Danish archaeologist Gitte Hansen detailed that the construction of Borgund most likely took place at some point during the Viking Age.
“The story of Borgund begins sometime in the 900s or 1000s. Fast forward a few hundred years and this was the largest town along the coast of Norway between Trondheim and Bergen. Activity in Borgund may have been at its most extensive in the 13th century. In 1349, the Black Death comes to Norway. Then the climate gets colder. Towards the end of the 14th century, the town of Borgund slowly disappeared from history. In the end, it disappeared completely and was forgotten.” – Science Norway reports.
Professor Hansen is currently researching the artefacts in collaboration with researchers from Germany, Finland, Iceland, and the United States. The project has previously received financial support from the Research Council of Norway and contributions from several other research institutions in Norway.
Researchers specializing in different areas, such as textiles and the old Norse language, have been brought together to form a team. Scientists are able to gain knowledge about the clothing worn during the Viking Age by analyzing textiles that were discovered in Borgund.
The museum basement has drawers upon drawers with remains of textiles from perhaps a thousand years ago. They can tell us more about what kind of clothes people in Norway wore during the Viking Age and the Middle Ages.
Shoe soles, pieces of cloth, slag (the by-product of smelting ores and used metals), and potsherds were among the priceless artefacts discovered by the archaeology team led by Asbjørn Herteig during excavations of the long-lost Viking village of Borgund.
According to Professor Hansen, these artefacts can tell a great deal about how Vikings lived on a day-to-day basis. A significant number of the Viking artefacts are still well-preserved and may be scrutinized in great detail. The basement may contain as many as 250 separate pieces of clothing and other textiles.
“A Borgund garment from the Viking Age can be made up of as many as eight different textiles,” Professor Hansen explained.
According to Science Norway, in the remains of Borgund down in the basement under the museum in Bergen, researchers are now discovering ceramics from almost all of Europe. “We see a lot of English, German and French tableware,” Hansen says.
People who lived in Borgund may have been in Lübeck, Paris, and London. From here they may have brought back art, music, and perhaps inspiration for costumes. The town of Borgund was probably at its richest in the 13th century.
“Pots and tableware made of ceramic and soapstone from Borgund are such exciting finds that we have a research fellow in the process of specializing only in this,” Hansen says. “We hope to learn something about eating habits and dining etiquette here on the outskirts of Europe by looking at how people made and served food and drink.”
The study of the Borgund artefacts has already produced results and Professor Hanse says “there are many indications that people here had direct or indirect contact with people across large parts of Europe.”
In addition, researchers have found evidence that inhabitants of the Viking village of Borgund enjoyed eating fish. For the people of Borgund, fishing was essential.
It is still unknown, though, whether they transported fish to the German Hanseatic League in Bergen or exchanged fish with other regions of Norway and Europe.
Scientists found “a lot of fishing gear. This suggests that people in Borgund themselves may have fished a lot. A rich cod fishery in the Borgundfjord may have been very important for them,” Hansen says.
We might infer from the ironwork remnants that the forgotten town in Western Norway had a strong foundation. Perhaps blacksmiths played a particularly significant role in this town.
And why exactly did Asbjørn Herteig and his associates discover a significant amount of waste materials from shoemakers? Up to 340 shoe fragments can provide information on shoe style and the preferred types of leather used for shoes throughout the Viking Age.
Some of the archaeological staff in Borgund.
Our knowledge of Borgund from the historians’ written sources is rather limited. Because of this, the role of archaeologists and other researchers in this specific project is crucial.
There is, however, one significant historical source. It is a royal decree from 1384 which obliges the farmers of Sunnmøre to buy their goods in the market town of Borgund (kaupstaden Borgund).
“This is how we know that Borgund was considered a town at the time,” Professor Hansen says. “This order can also be interpreted as Borgund struggling to keep going as a trading place in the years after the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century.” And then the city was forgotten.
The demise of the dodo epitomizes humanity’s record as a destructive force on delicate island life. Likewise, on the island of Madagascar, gorilla-sized lemurs, 3-meter tall elephant birds, and pygmy hippos went the way of the dodo following the arrival of humans within the last millennia.
Excavation at Ankatoke, near Tampolove in Southwest Madagascar.
But the factors behind the disappearance of these animals are not as well-known as in the case of the dodo, and there is intense debate about what caused the extinction of megafauna the world over.
Now, a new study in Scientific Reports suggests that, while humans had a hand in the extinction of these creatures, hunting alone wasn’t the main cause.
While past studies have reported the butchery of endemic animals at least 2,000 years ago, the present study correlates the disappearance of endemic megafauna around 1,000 years ago with a sharp increase in introduced species and human-driven landscape change.
To understand the disappearance of Madagascar’s large animals, Hixon et al. excavated three coastal ponds and a cave from the southwest of the island and radiocarbon dated the remains of extinct megafauna, introduced animals, and other signs of human activity.
The researchers found that Madagascar’s megafauna had endured several dry periods over the last 6,000 years, relocating as needed when local water resources were scarce.
Signs of human activity, including modified bones and shells, began appearing within the past 2,000 years.
Around 1,000 years ago, however, the researchers identified a drastic increase in charcoal and the bones of domesticated species, such as zebu cattle and dogs. The timing of these human-caused changes corresponds with the disappearance of megafauna.
“Our results suggest that occupation and alteration of space, through the burning of forests for introduced grazing species, drove the extinction of large animals on the island, rather than the mere presence of hunters,” says Sean Hixon, lead author of the paper.
In recent years, the debate over the causes of megafauna extinctions has largely focused on past climate change and overhunting by recent human arrivals.
The new study suggests that while both of these may have been stress factors in Madagascar, they weren’t the ultimate cause of megafauna extinctions.
The article underscores that hunting isn’t the only way, or perhaps even the main way, that humans impact other species. In order to protect biodiversity, it is equally important to consider how human activities affect animal habitats and mobility.
The researchers hope that future studies will explore paleontological and archaeological deposits in other areas of the island to form a better understanding of when humans first arrived in Madagascar and how they interacted with their environment.
