Archaeologists from Edinburgh have discovered more than 100 Iron Age settlements in southwest Scotland that date from the time of Roman occupation.
The team has been surveying an area north of Hadrian’s Wall to better understand the impact of Rome’s rule on the lives of indigenous people.
Researchers explored nearly 600 square miles around Burnswark hillfort, Dumfries-shire, where Roman legions campaigned as the Empire expanded northwards.
Previous archaeological research on the terrain between Hadrian’s Wall and the Empire’s more northerly frontier at the Antonine Wall had focused predominantly on the Roman perspective.
It had concentrated on the camps, forts, roads and walls that Rome’s empire built to control northern Britain – rather than sites associated with native tribes.
Immense firepower
The new study initially focused specifically on Burnswark – home to the greatest concentration of Roman projectiles ever found in Britain, and a testament to the firepower of Rome’s legions.
The research team went on to scour an area of 580 square miles beyond the hillfort, using the latest laser-scanning technology.
Although much of the area had been studied before, researchers found 134 previously unrecorded Iron Age settlements — bringing the total number known in the region to more than 700.
The survey’s discovery of so many small farmsteads is a significant finding, researchers say. Such settlements offer key insights into how the majority of the indigenous population would have lived.
Analysis showed sites were dispersed evenly across the landscape — with dense clusters in some places — suggesting a highly organised settlement pattern, researchers say.
Empire’s edge
Work on Hadrian’s Wall began in AD 122 and, for two decades, the defensive fortification between the Solway Firth and the River Tyne marked the northernmost border of the Roman empire.
In AD 142, having made further gains north, the Romans built a second defensive line called the Antonine Wall between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde.
A few decades later, however, this second wall was abandoned with the Empire drawing its frontier back south to Hadrian’s Wall.
The findings of this latest study by the University of Edinburgh, Historic Environment Scotland and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre have been published in the journal, Antiquity.
The study is part of a wider project called Beyond Walls, which is seeking to shed light on ancient sites, stretching from Durham in the south to the fringes of the Scottish Highlands in the north.
Exciting prospect
Study author Dr Manuel Fernández-Götz, of the University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology, said: “This is one of the most exciting regions of the Roman Empire, as it represented its northernmost frontier.
“The land we now know as Scotland was one of the very few areas in Western Europe over which the Roman army never managed to establish full control”.
Fellow author Dr Dave Cowley of Historic Environment Scotland said: “The discovery of so many previously unknown sites helps us to reconstruct settlement patterns.
“Individually, they are very much routine, but cumulatively they help us understand the landscape within which the indigenous population lived.”
Archaeologists discover passageways in 3,000-year-old Peruvian temple
Archaeologists have excavated a network of passageways under a 3,000-year-old temple in the Peruvian Andes. Chavin de Huantar temple was once a religious and administrative hub for people across the region, Reuters reported.
Archaeologists work on the new discovery in the Peruvian Andes in Ancash
Found earlier this month, the passageways have features believed to have been built earlier than the temple’s labyrinthine galleries, according to an archaeologist at Stanford University.
John Rick, who was involved in the discovery, said: “It’s a passageway, but it’s very different. It’s a different form of construction. It has features from earlier periods that we’ve never seen in passageways.”
At least 35 underground passageways, which sit 3,200m above sea level, have been found over several years, connecting with each other.
They were built between 1,200 and 200 years BC in the foothills of the Andes.
Chavin de Huantar, declared a World Heritage Site in 1985, was the inspiration and name of the operation carried out when the Peruvian armed forces built a network of tunnels to rescue 72 people taken hostage by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) rebel group at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima in 1997.
The archaeological site of Chavin de Huantar, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, is seen some 155 miles (250 km) north of Lima on July 18, 2008.
It comes as archaeologists uncovered an “unprecedented” network of lost cities in the Amazon that shed light on how ancient civilisations constructed vast urban landscapes while living alongside nature.
Researchers used lidar technology, dubbed “lasers in the sky”, to scan through the tropical forest canopy, and examine sites found in the savannah forest of southwest Amazonia.
They uncovered a wide range of intricate settlements that have laid hidden under thick tree canopies for centuries in the Llanos de Mojos savannah forest in Bolivia.
The findings, described in the journal Nature on Wednesday, shed light on cities built by the Casarabe communities between AD500 and AD1400.
Heiko Prumers, an archaeologist and study co-author from the German Archaeological Institute, said the complexity of the settlements was “mind-blowing”.
The site features an unprecedented array of elaborate and intricate structures “unlike any previously discovered” in the region, including 5m high terraces covering 22 hectares – the equivalent of 30 football pitches – and 21m tall conical pyramids, say the scientists, including Jose Iriarte from the University of Exeter in the UK.
Researchers examined six areas within a 4,500 sq km region of the Llanos de Mojos, in the Bolivian Amazon, that belonged to the Casarabe culture.
They also found a vast network of reservoirs, causeways, and checkpoints, spanning several kilometres at the site.
1,000-Year-Old Aztatlán Burials Uncovered in Coastal Mexico
The space where the exploration is carried out corresponds to a natural mound in an area of estuaries, whose surface was used to establish occupation. To date, an Aztatlán-style pipe and three complete vessels have been found, although fragmented, as well as bone, remains from burials, until now unique in this port.
Findings of the Aztatlán culture.
Mazatlán, Sinaloa.- A new archaeological site of the Aztatlán culture with burials of unique characteristics has been discovered in the urban area of the port of this Sinaloa city, during the paving and infrastructure construction works, in the northern extension of the Avenida del Dolphin.
From May 16 to 28, the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, through specialists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), carried out the archaeological salvage. The site was found by workers when a pipe ruptured exposing human remains; After the corresponding expert opinion and since they were ancient vestiges, the INAH was called to rescue them.
The space, where the works are carried out, corresponds to a natural mound, located in an area of estuaries, whose surface was used in pre-Hispanic times to establish an occupation, on a high point to avoid flooding, while taking advantage of the ecosystem, reports archaeologist Víctor Joel Santos Ramírez, coordinator of the salvage.
Santos Ramírez, a researcher at the INAH Sinaloa Center, details that the surface of the mound was covered with rammed shell debris, to build perishable constructions on top and under this floor the human burials were placed, one of them accompanied by an excellently made Aztatlán-style glass: “In Mazatlan, a burial of these characteristics had not been found: under a shell floor and accompanied by fine ceramics, since burials inside pots are common in the region,” explains the archaeologist.
Archaeological salvage in Mazatlan Sinaloa.
This characteristic makes the finding relevant for the archaeology of the region, for which the INAH is seeking an agreement with the Mazatlan City Council, in order to protect the site as an archaeological reserve and resume excavation work in the near future, Santos Ramírez reported.
As of May 27, at the site, which is being explored by the archaeologist Paola Martínez Delgadillo, in charge of the fieldwork, and the restoration technician, Eduardo Núñez Montesinos, coordinated by the archaeologist Víctor Joel Santos Ramírez, an Aztatlán style pipe and three complete vessels, although fragmented, among which the glass stands out; in addition to the human bone remains in a poor state of conservation, due to the natural characteristics of the Mazatlán soil.
Aztatlán style glass of excellent billing.
The pottery found is of excellent technical quality, located in the Acaponeta phase (900-1100/1200 AD), reports Santos Ramírez.
The settlement was part of a broad culture that, according to research by Alfonso Grave Tirado, also an archaeologist from the INAH Sinaloa Center, a scholar of this region, developed from the year 900 AD, a date that coincides with the time of the greatest social development. , economic and political of southern Sinaloa and northern Nayarit, known in the archaeological literature as Horizonte Aztatlán.
The archaeologist comments that surely this is not the only pre-Hispanic site and that it is very likely that evidence of an important ancient settlement, still unknown, is found throughout this area.
According to Víctor Joel Santos Ramírez, there have been few archaeological sites registered in the port of Mazatlan -no more than 10-, since most have disappeared due to the growth of the urban sprawl and unfortunately, authorities are rarely notified. ; this case is the exception since the INAH was notified, the archaeologists have received the support of personnel from the Comprehensive Port Administration and the contractor company, as well as from the Mazatlán City Council to carry out the research work.
The excavation is carried out systematically, although it is very difficult due to the depth and hardness of the soil, it is estimated that the work will conclude this weekend with just an approximation of the site, concludes the archaeologist.
Mississippian Period Cave Art Tells A Tale From 6,500 Years Ago
On a cold winter’s day in 1980, a group of recreational cavers entered a narrow, wet stream passage south of Knoxville, Tennessee. They navigated a slippery mud slope and a tight keyhole through the cave wall, trudged through the stream itself, ducked through another keyhole and climbed more mud. Eventually, they entered a high and relatively dry passage deep in the cave’s “dark zone” – beyond the reach of external light.
Human figure from Mud Glyph Cave with raised right hand and Chunkey game piece in left hand. Alan Cressler
On the walls around them, they began to see lines and figures traced into remnant mud banks laid down long ago when the stream flowed at this higher level. No modern or historic graffiti marred the surfaces. They saw images of animals, people and transformational characters blending human characteristics with those of birds, and those of snakes with mammals.
Ancient cave art has long been one of the most compelling of all artefacts from the human past, fascinating both to scientists and to the public at large. Its visual expressions resonate across the ages as if the ancients speak to us from deep in time. And this group of cavers in 1980 had happened upon the first ancient cave art site in North America.
Since then archaeologists like me have discovered dozens more of these cave art sites in the Southeast. We’ve been able to learn details about when cave art first appeared in the region, when it was most frequently produced and what it might have been used for. We have also learned a great deal by working with the living descendants of the cave art makers, the present-day Native American peoples of the Southeast, about what cave art means and how important it was and is to Indigenous communities.
From the outside, these caves betray no hint of the ancient art that might be inside. Alan Cressler
Cave art in America?
Few people think of North America when they think about ancient cave art. A century before the Tennessee cavers made their own discovery, the world’s first modern discovery of cave art was made in 1879, at Altamira in northern Spain. The scientific establishment of the day immediately denied the authenticity of the site.
Subsequent discoveries served to authenticate this and other ancient sites. As the earliest expressions of human creativity, some perhaps 40,000 years old, European palaeolithic cave art is now justifiably famous worldwide.
But similar cave art had never been found anywhere in North America, although Native American rock art outside of caves has been recorded since Europeans arrived. Artwork deep under the ground was unknown in 1980, and the Southeast was an unlikely place to find it given how much archaeology had been done there since the colonial period.
Nevertheless, the Tennessee cavers recognized that they were seeing something extraordinary and brought archaeologist Charles Faulkner to the cave. He initiated a research project there, naming the site Mud Glyph Cave. His archaeological work showed that the art was from the Mississippian culture, some 800 years old, and depicted imagery characteristic of ancient Native American religious beliefs. Many of those beliefs are still held by the descendants of Mississippian peoples: the modern Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Coushatta, Muscogee, Seminole and Yuchi, among others.
After the Mud Glyph Cave discovery, archaeologists here at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville initiated systematic cave surveys. Today, we have catalogued 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. There are also a few sites known in Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.
What did they depict?
There are three forms of southeastern cave art.
Mud glyphs are drawings traced into pliable mud surfaces preserved in caves, like those from Mud Glyph Cave.
Petroglyphs are drawings incised directly into the limestone of the cave walls.
Pictographs are paintings, usually made with charcoal-based pigments, placed on the cave walls.
Sometimes, more than one technique is found in the same cave, and none of the methods seems to appear earlier or later in time that the others.
Archaic Period pictograph of a hunter and prey dated to 6,500 years ago. Alan Cressler
Some southeastern cave art is quite ancient. The oldest cave art sites date to some 6,500 years ago, during the Archaic Period (10,000-1000 B.C.). These early sites are rare and seem to be clustered on the modern Kentucky-Tennessee state line. The imagery was simple and often abstract, although representational pictures do exist.
Woodland Period petroglyph of a box-shaped human-like creature with a long neck and u-shaped head. Alan Cressler
Cave art sites increase in number over time. The Woodland Period (1000 B.C. – A.D. 1000) saw more common and more widespread art production. Abstract art was still abundant and less worldly. Probably more spiritual subject matter was common. During the Woodland, conflations between humans and animals, like “bird-humans,” made their first appearance.
The Mississippian Period (A.D. 1000-1500) is the last precontact phase in the Southeast before Europeans arrived, and this was when much of the dark-zone cave art was produced. The subject matter is clearly religious and includes spirit people and animals that do not exist in the natural world. There is also strong evidence that Mississippian art caves were compositions, with images organized through the cave passages in systematic ways to suggest stories or narratives told through their locations and relations.
Mississippian Period pictograph showing an animal with talons for feet, a blunt forehead and long snout, with a long curving tail over the back. Alan Cressler
Cave art continued into the modern era
In recent years, researchers have realized that cave art has strong connections to the historic tribes that occupied the Southeast at the time of the European invasion.
In several caves in Alabama and Tennessee, mid-19th-century inscriptions were written on cave walls in Cherokee Syllabary. This writing system was invented by the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah between 1800 and 1824 and was quickly adopted as the tribe’s primary means of written expression.
On a cave wall in Alabama, an 1828 Cherokee syllabary inscription relating to a stickball ceremony. Alan Cressler
Cherokee archaeologists, historians and language experts have joined forces with nonnative archaeologists like me to document and translate these cave writings. As it turns out, they refer to various important religious ceremonies and spiritual concepts that emphasize the sacred nature of caves, their isolation and their connection to powerful spirits. These texts reflect similar religious ideas to those represented by graphic images in earlier, precontact time periods.
Based on all the rediscoveries researchers have made since Mud Glyph Cave was first explored more than four decades ago, cave art in the Southeast was created over a long period of time. These artists worked in ancient times when ancestral Native Americans lived by foraging in the rich natural landscapes of the Southeast all the way through to the historic period just before the Trail of Tears saw the forced removal of indigenous people east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.
As surveys continue, researchers uncover more dark cave sites every year – in fact, four new caves were found in the first half of 2021. With each new discovery, the tradition is beginning to approach the richness and diversity of the Paleolithic art of Europe, where 350 sites are currently known. That archaeologists were unaware of the dark-zone cave art of the American Southeast even 40 years ago demonstrates the kinds of new discoveries that can be made even in regions that have been explored for centuries.
The 330-million-year-old fossil tree that’s stood the test of time
The fossil tree on the Museum’s east lawn is thought to have been in its current position since the 1970s, but it’s been part of the collection since 1873. A large petrified tree that lived around 330 million years ago has been towering over visitors to the Museum for over 130 years, making it one of the longest-serving exhibits.
A Scottish tree
Craigleith Quarry was once the largest and most productive of Edinburgh’s quarries. The sandstone extracted in its 300 years of operation can be seen in the city’s historical architecture, including Edinburgh Castle. The quarry was infilled in 1995.
But the site is also well-known for its fossil trees, the first of which was discovered in 1826. The trunk that now resides on the Museum’s east lawn was uncovered in 1873, and found approximately 56 metres below the surface.
The fossil tree, Pityswithamii, lived during the Carboniferous Period, which lasted from around 359 to 299 million years ago. Many of the coal beds that Britain came to rely on formed at this time, made up of plants like P. withamii.
When the fossil tree was alive it’s thought that it would have had fern-like fronds that were similar to this example of Sphenopteris foliage
The specimen was originally thought to be an ancient conifer but was eventually determined to be a type of seed fern (pteridosperm). In life, it would have featured large, fern-like fronds sprouting from the crown of its towering trunk and would have used seeds for reproduction. Seed ferns are an extinct group and their unique collection of characteristics is not seen in plants today.
Despite its London home, the tree’s Scottish origins weren’t forgotten. In 1986 the MP for Edinburgh West contacted the Museum to enquire about returning the large specimen to Edinburgh to put it on public display. The Museum declined this request but noted that another Carboniferous trunk from Craigleith Quarry was already on public display at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. At 10.5 metres long, it is Scotland’s largest plant fossil.
A long-standing exhibit
The trunk has been housed in the Museum’s gardens for over 130 years, although it hasn’t always been in the same spot. The tree arrived at the Museum in six large pieces with numerous smaller fragments, and originally the trunk was displayed lying on its side. The section of the specimen on display today towers over visitors at six metres tall, but with all the pieces laid out together, it measured around 12 metres.
The fallen fossil tree after sustaining bomb damage during an air raid in 1940
The wood is petrified, meaning that it has been turned to stone. For petrified wood to form, organic material is replaced by minerals – in this case, iron and calcium carbonates – while the plant retains its original shape and structure. This fossilisation process has increased the weight of the specimen’s trunk to around three times that of normal wood. Its exact weight isn’t known but is estimated at around 11 tonnes.
The tree stood upright in 1887, but only the large pieces were assembled. It remained standing until November 1940, when it was knocked down and broken into several pieces by an air raid bomb.
The tree has since been moved further from Exhibition Road, which lies to the east of the Waterhouse building. It’s thought this happened in the 1970s when the Palaeontology wing was being built.
The petrified tree is thought to have been moved to its current position during the construction of the Palaeontology wing, seen here on completion in 1977
How to clean petrified wood
The fossil tree’s condition is assessed yearly, but in the summer of 2019 Museum conservators gave the specimen its most intensive clean in over 15 years.
Working from inside their own scaffolding ‘treehouse’, the team had to move quickly so the tree wasn’t screened off from visitors for too long. Ultimately it took four full days of work, plus a few early mornings to clean it from top to bottom.
Conservators Lu Allington-Jones and Cheryl Lynn start work cleaning the fossil tree, hidden inside their treehouse
Senior Conservator Lu Allington-Jones says, ‘It was like being in our own private treehouse. We could hear the public talking outside it, but no one knew we were there or what we were doing.
‘It was challenging because no one seems to know when the tree was last cleaned, so we didn’t know how long it would take and we had a really small window.’
As they were dealing with a specimen displayed outdoors, the conservators faced challenges they wouldn’t normally encounter. Bird droppings had to be cleaned off using water and cotton swabs, algae were removed with soft brushes and ethanol, and moss and lichens were picked off with plastic and wooden picks.
Plants can cause a lot of damage to stone as their roots grow on the surface. This can cause flaking and cracks. Additionally, the water that plants retained on the surface of the stone can cause further damage when it freezes and expands in winter. A concrete-like material that is thought to have been used to fill gaps in the 1970s had started to crack, so the team had to strengthen it.
The conservators were also accompanied by a seemingly angry tube web spider (Segestria senoculata) and multiple plane tree bug nymphs (Arocatus longiceps), which are usually found in the plane trees that grow at the edges of the Museum’s lawn.
Algae, lichen and moss were just some of the unique challenges of working on the fossil tree
The team will continue to keep an eye on the tree’s condition. Lu says, ‘We’re going to leave the specimen open to the elements – we don’t want to add any coatings that might deteriorate. But we’ll take photos so we can monitor its condition in the future.’
Fossil trees in Hintze Hall
The specimen on the east lawn isn’t the only fossil tree displayed at the Museum. In Hintze Hall, four fossil tree specimens are also on show.
You can see fossil trees from four different geological periods in the Museum’s Hintze Hall
The trees are from four different geologic time periods, ranging from a Devonian specimen that is 385 million years old to a tree that is 25-56 million years old.
These four trees grew in vastly different climates and atmospheres, and their preserved structures can provide clues about the ancient environments they lived in. The Museum’s palaeobotany collection of fossil plants, algae and fungi spans 3.5 billion years of Earth’s history. Scientists can use these specimens, including fossil trees, to chart historic climate change and make predictions about the future of our planet.
Man destroys $5m in ancient artefacts in museum row with girlfriend
A man “mad at his girl” broke into The Dallas Museum of Art in Texas and destroyed three Greek artefacts, estimated to be worth up to $5 million and faces years in jail.
A man destroyed these Greek artefacts (Dallas Museum of Art) at the Dallas Museum of Art.
The destructive attacks follow a similar incident last week when an Italian man dressed as an elderly woman attempted to destroy the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
A Destructive Artifact Rampage
The Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, Agustin Arteaga, told The New York Times that “three ancient Greek artefacts dating back to the 5th and 6th centuries BC were seriously damaged.”
Brian Hernandez, 21, was arrested on Thursday and put into the Dallas County jail with a bond set at $100,000. Hernandez used a metal chair to break into the museum on Wednesday night and reports say he unleashed a “destructive rampage”.
Once inside the museum Hernandez broke into a display case and shattered a 6th century BC Greek amphora (clay vessel) dating to 450 BC. According to HypeBeast police said this item alone was worth “about $5m dollars,” but other reports say $1m dollars.
Hernandez also smashed a 6th century BC clay bowl estimated to be worth about $100,000, and a ceramic Caddo effigy bottle valued at about $10,000.
Two of the items that were damaged at the Dallas Museum of Art — a black-figure panel amphora, left, and a red-figure pyxis and lid, right — are ancient ceramics from Greece. (Dallas Museum of Art )
When Being Mad Hurts History
When the museum security guards saw the CCTV camera feeds and realized what was happening, they quickly apprehended the unarmed Hernandez. Charged “with criminal mischief” amounting to more than $300,000, according to an article in Greek Reporter, police said 21-year-old Brian Hernandez broke into the institution at 10 pm PT on Wednesday night because “he was mad at his girl.”
On Thursday, Hernandez was slammed up in the Dallas County jail with a bail bond set at $100,000. Only time will tell if his criminal mischief charge will get him five years or life in prison.
At times like this, we can choose to focus on the losses or the wins. In this case, the perpetrator smashed 3 Greek artefacts, but it could have been a lot worse because the Dallas Art Museum holds many unique ancient crafts from around the world which have no estimated worth, for they are culturally priceless.
While He Got Greece, He Missed Africa and America
The Museum’s Arts of Africa department looks after the famous Senufo helmet mask. This Game of Thrones-esq headgear was worn by leaders of the powerful male-only Komo society.
Responsible for maintaining social and spiritual harmony in Senufo villages in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Burkina Faso, the mask was worn at funerals, initiations, harvest celebrations, and secret rituals.
Recent CT scans revealed “unexpected materials” both beneath the surface of the mask and within the attached animal horns. The scientists said these secret artefacts “empowered the mask.”
Closer to home, the criminal also missed 200 ancient and contemporary works of art in the first major exhibition dedicated to the art and culture of ancient Mississippian people.
Although their vast earthen mounds are most often associated with giants, visiting foreign cultures, and other pseudo-historical narratives, the much misunderstood Mississippian peoples formed one of the first societies in North America. So while three Greek artefacts were destroyed, we can be thankful thousands of other pieces were left untouched.
The Senufo helmet mask is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. (Dallas Museum of Art )
When Adults Throw Uncontrollable Tantrums
All of us have thrown tantrums and destroyed objects. However, for most of us, this occurred before turning six and the violence was restricted to Lego castles and dolls’ dresses. Why then do some adults destroy whatever they want, whenever they spin out emotionally? While you might race to find a solution in the IQ score of the vandal, or accuse them of behaving like spoiled, impudent children, the reality is much more complicated. Quite interesting too.
In a 2017 research paper titled ‘ Design as Means of Countering Vandalism, Sokolov sought design solutions for protecting aesthetically valuable objects against vandals.
The main goal of culture, according to Sokolov, is the harmonious development of society. Vandalism goes directly against this, and the researcher proposed that there are two distinguished forms of vandalism: “meaningless and meaningful.”
Meaningful And Mindful Vandalism
Meaningful vandalism is when objects with aesthetic or cultural value are targeted and generally “do not have a pronounced goal.” On the other hand, mindless vandalism, which includes littering, is a violation of physical and spiritual ecology.
Meaningful and meaningless vandals have different goals, but Brian Hernandez belongs to the meaningful vandal group, which destroys the “values” of other cultures through “different emotional motivations, but with no clearly defined goals.” This diagnosis became clear when Hernandez told Dallas police his prime reason for smashing millions of dollars of history was: “I was mad at my girl.”
Newly Identified Inscription Names Ancient Greek Students
Experts in the UK have discovered that an ancient Greek marble slab which had spent more than a century in storage is inscribed with the names of graduates of the Ephebic College, an elite military academy that prepared young Athenian men for adulthood, British broadcaster ITV reported on Thursday.
“On seeing it we realized that this was not a copy of an already known inscription, but it was a completely unique new discovery which had been in the storerooms of the [National Museum of Scotland] for a very long time, since the 1880s, and it listed a group of young men who called themselves co-ephebes or co-cadets and friends,” Dr Peter Liddel, a professor of Greek history and epigraphy at the University of Manchester, told ITV.
“It turned out to be a list of the cadets for one particular year during the period 41-54 AD, the reign of Claudius, and it gives us new names, names we’d never come across before in ancient Greek, and it also gives us among the earliest evidence for non-citizens taking part in the ephebate in this period,” added Liddel, who led the team that made the discovery.
Similar to a “graduate school yearbook,” the marble slab would probably have been displayed in the college and was intended to “create a sense of camaraderie and comradeship among this group of people who had been through a rigorous training program together and felt like they were part of a cohort,” Liddel told ITV.
Containing the names of 31 young men who made it through the rite of passage, the marble slab dates to the first century AD and is believed to offer valuable insight into Athenian society at the time.
Magellan’s Strange Encounter With the 10-Foot Giants of Patagonia
You may have heard of the mythical, gigantic former inhabitants who wandered the wastes of Patagonia… The vision of a faraway land, inhabited by towering giants, has captured an enchanted European imagination for many years. But was Patagonia really the home to these larger-than-life folk, or was it no more than a myth spread by fantasists…?
The first mention of the giants, supposedly twice the height of the normal human being, appeared in the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Ferdinand Magellan’s travels.
This official record reported that Magellan’s crew got more than they bargained for during their circumnavigation of the globe in the 1520s.
Pigafetta details a dancing and leaping giant on the shores of Argentina. Not one to take all the glory for himself, Magellan selflessly sent a poor crew member over to the gallivanting giant to make contact…
The giant was reportedly very friendly, and so colossally tall that the Europeans only reached his waist. Magellan named them ‘patagones’, and many believe this to have come from the Portuguese word ‘pata’, meaning ‘foot’.
Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)
“Here, have this bread, so as not to eat me instead.
The so-called giants left huge, gaping footprints in the snow because of the large guanaco-skin moccasins they wore on their feet. Patagonia may thus mean ‘land of the bigfoot’, which unsurprisingly contributed to the rumours and mythologisation of the Patagonian giants. One other suggestion, however, is that Magellan took the name from the giant Patagón, a prominent character in the sixteenth-century Spanish chivalric romance Primaleón, which Magellan had more than likely read.
Spanish explorers of the day often took inspiration from a recent good read; indeed, ‘California’ came from a mythical island of the same name in another Spanish romance, Las Sergas de Esplandián). Magellan captured two of these giants to take back to Spain with him, but they sadly died on the homeward voyage.
Then a century on, in 1628, Sir Francis Drake’s nephew detailed his uncle’s circumnavigation in The World Encompassed and mentioned once more the legendary giant-dwellers of Patagonia… Drake the nephew suggested that, though the native people were far taller than any Europeans the crew had seen, perhaps Magellan’s crew had exaggerated the size of the Patagones, thinking it unlikely that anyone would ever go back to Patagonia to check, and indulging their friends and family by spinning a good yarn…
You can spot the gigantic Patagones on this contemporary map (not to scale)
But then in 1615, the Dutch circumnavigators Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire found graves containing human bones on the Patagonian shores… bones of beings which appeared to be ten or eleven feet tall…
Later on in 1766, Captain John Byron (grandfather to the poet) also circumnavigated the world and the story spread that the crew had encountered enormous, nine-foot giants.
Rumors flew furiously around Europe, and the line between fact and fiction grew increasingly blurred… There were bitter disputes between French and British scientists, the former believing that the latter were supporting the case for the existence of giants as a smokescreen, hiding what the French feared most: that British sailors were not really embarking on a giant-hunt in Patagonia, but rather scoping it out as an entry point to attack French territories in the New World.
It was in 1767 that the romantic vision of Patagonia as a wilderness hiding giants started to fade. French explorer Louis de Bougainville reported that the tallest Patagonian he came across was only 5ft 9in, and then, in 1773, the official account of the Byron voyage emerged… in reality, the so-called “giants” were only four inches taller than the most sky-scraping crew members.
The Tehuelche people
The Patagones is now thought to have been member of the indigenous Tehuelche tribe, a Mapudungun word meaning ‘Fierce People’. They are known to have been taller than the average European (who measured in at roughly five feet), and in all likelihood were the real Goliaths of Patagonia myth and legend.
