Aztec House and Floating Gardens Discovered Under Mexico City
Archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of a dwelling that was built up to 800 years ago during the Aztec Empire in the Centro neighbourhood of Mexico City, Mexico, during works to modernize the area.
Excavated walls of the Aztec house, and one of the funerary vessels.
The centuries-old abode was discovered by archaeologists and construction workers ahead of an initiative to update electrical power substations.
The dwelling is believed to date from the late Postclassic period (A.D. 1200 to 1521) and would have been located on the border of two neighbourhoods in the city of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, according to a statement from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). It spans over 4,300 square feet (400 square meters), or about half the size of a baseball diamond.
During the Late Postclassic, the area that is now being excavated was a residential and agricultural centre, and archaeologists at the site also found the remains of channels and a jetty (a platform where boats stop to load or unload) used in the Aztec chinampa method of farming.
The chinampa technique involved growing crops on small areas of artificial land (sometimes referred to as floating gardens) on shallow lake beds.
Archaeologists found more Aztec artefacts in the residential area of the excavations. Under the Aztec building’s thick adobe floors, the excavation team found a pair of funerary vessels that contain the bone remains of infants, as well as several burials associated with an offering of censers (vessels in which incense is burned), whorls (a spinning machine or spindle) and spinning tools.
The researchers also unearthed a stone statue that stands just over 23.5 inches (60 centimetres) tall. The statue, also from the late Postclassic period, depicts a man wearing a loincloth who looks as if he is throwing something.
Archaeologists believe that the statue may have been unfinished, as it lacks polish on the body, and they speculated that it may have been hidden at the time of Spanish intervention in the Aztec Empire, which began around A.D. 1521 according to the statement.
Investigations into the remains of the dwelling also show evidence of saddlery and ceramic workshop, which existed on the site in the colonial era of the 16th and 17th centuries.
During the 19th century, it’s possible that part of this site was used as public baths, archaeologist Alicia Bracamontes Cruz, who is involved with the excavation, said in the statement.
Researchers uncovered remnants of these baths, including bathroom tile floors and a drainage system. It’s likely that wealthy people used these baths, according to descriptions in the chronicles of José María Marroquí, a 19th-century Mexican physician and historian.
Archaeological work is expected to continue in the area as a pipeline bank is constructed to go inside the new substation.
Miniature Bible the Size of a Coin Found in UK Library Storage
A tiny Bible that can only be read with a magnifying glass is among thousands of mysterious treasures rediscovered at a Leeds library during the lockdown. The 1911 miniature replica of the 16th century ‘chained Bible’ is about the size of a £2 coin but contains both the Old and New testaments printed on 876 gossamer-thin India paper pages.
Librarians said the origins of the bible, which measures 1.9in (50mm) by 1.3in (35mm), are a mystery.
Rhian Isaac, special collections senior librarian at Leeds City Library, said the book was billed as the smallest Bible in the world when it was printed, although this was almost certainly not true.
Asked where it came from, she said: ‘We don’t know. It’s a bit of a mystery, really. A lot of items in our collection were either bought over time or might have been donated.
‘We’ve done quite a lot of work during the lockdown on cataloguing our rare books and special collections.
‘Before that, hardly any of these books had ever been seen by anyone or ever been found, really.’
Librarians said the origins of the bible, which measures 1.9in (50mm) by 1.3in (35mm), are a mystery. It can only be read with a magnifying glass
Ms Isaac said the Bible’s origins were a mystery because it only resurfaced when library staff decided to do a comprehensive survey during the Covid lockdowns.
More than 3,000 new items have been catalogued, including some dating back to the 15th century.
Among them was a copy of Nouveau Cours de Mathematique, by Bernard Forest de Bélidor (1725) and Oliver Twiss — a rip-off version of Oliver Twist which was printed by the creators of the Penny Dreadfuls.
The great Victorian novelist was so angered by the plagiarised works that he went to court to have them banned. But the judge in the case ruled that ‘no person who had ever seen the original could imagine the other to be anything else than a counterfeit’.
Also among the discoveries was a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, dating to 1497. Oddly, however, the Leeds City Library copy has the outline of a key pressed into it, suggesting one was hidden inside the book.
Librarians are now hoping the tiny Bible and other items found will be cherished by all visitors and not just academics and researchers.
A miniature Bible in a man’s palm.
Ms Isaac said the Bible’s origins were a mystery because it only resurfaced when library staff decided to do a comprehensive survey during the Covid lockdowns
‘It’s a massive thing for us,’ Ms Isaac said. ‘Now people can come in and find them and look at them.’
She said anyone can come in and ask to see the tiny Bible.
‘We ask people to get in touch and we can bring them out for people to see. You don’t have to be an academic or a researcher.
‘If you’re just interested, we can get them out for you and you can come and read them in our beautiful Grade II-listed building, which is a wonderful place to come and do some studying,’ Ms Isaac added.
‘We would rather these books were used and read. That’s what they were made for and that’s what we encourage people to come in and do, instead of locking them away.
‘They belong to everyone in Leeds. We’re just the guardians of them, really.’
Ms Isaac said a visitor may even come in with a clue to where the Bible came from.
An ancient Egyptian mummy forgotten in storage turns out to be a sacred bird often sacrificed to Thoth
An ancient Egyptian bird mummy, long forgotten in storage and mislabeled as a hawk, is finally getting its due now that researchers have digitally peered inside its wrappings.
Carol Ann Barsody and Frederic Gleach examine the over 1,500-year-old mummy bird.
The 1,500-year-old mummy, scientists learned, is not a hawk but likely a sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopica) — a wading bird with stilt-like legs and a long curved beak that the ancient Egyptians often sacrificed to Thoth, the god of the moon, reckoning, learning and writing.
“Not only was this once a living creature that people of the day may have enjoyed watching stroll through the water,” Carol Ann Barsody, a master’s student in archaeology at Cornell University, who spearheaded the project, said in a statement. “It also was, and is, something sacred, something religious.”
Cornell University has no record of the mummy’s arrival into its collections. Barsody initially suspected that the mummy arrived as part of an 1884 freight of objects, which included the human mummy Penpi, a Thebian scribe. However, after doing further research, she discovered that no other Egyptian artefacts arrived with Penpi.
Barsody now believes the mummy to have been part of a 1930 donation by Cornell alumnus John Randolph, but she is still playing detective to determine the mummy’s true origins.
Barsody worked at Cornell as an employee at the Center for Technology licensing and, while pursuing her degree in archaeology, became interested in the mummy as a case study for how technology could be used to unwrap the mystery.
Barsody decided to learn all she could about the mummy without disturbing the animal inside. Along with Frederic Gleach, a senior lecturer and curator of Cornell’s Anthropology Collections, she took the mummy to the College of Veterinary Medicine where the lightweight 2-pound (942 grams) mummy underwent a CT scan in order to determine that it was, in fact, a bird.
The scan revealed that a leg had been fractured prior to the mummification process and that feathers and soft tissue were still preserved. They were also able to discern that the bird’s broken beak had occurred post mummification.
The pair then consulted Vanya Rohwer, the curator of Birds and Mammals at the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates who identified the remains as those of an ibis. This wasn’t too surprising, as ibises in ancient Egypt were bred in large numbers due to their popularity, particularly in their use as offerings.
Initially, this particular mummy perplexed the team because of the way the ancient Egyptians had prepared the bird. When examining the CT scan, they were unable to see how the bird had been folded into its current shape. It was only when using the museum’s collection of study skins and skeletons, carefully copying the bird’s shape by fitting pieces together, that they were able to conclude that the ibis’s head had been twisted around and bent back against its body.
The sternum and ribcage had also been removed — a practice that isn’t common among bird mummifications.
The ibis was a bird that originated in Africa and was venerated not only in ancient Egypt but also in Greece and Rome, according to AviBirds. Thoth was regularly depicted as having a human body and the long-beaked head of a bird. Millions of ibises have been found in Egyptian necropolises, according to a 2019 study published by the journal Plos One.
Currently, Barsody is working with Jack Defay, an electrical and computer engineering student at Cornell, to scan the mummy in order to construct a virtual 3D model of the bird.
This bird has “had multiple lives,” Barsody said. “I look at what I’m doing as another form of extending its incredible life.”
Barsody will soon launch a website, www.birdmummy.com, which will focus on using the mummy in order to increase the museum’s educational outreach. She also plans to open an exhibition of the bird, its 3D model and a hologram at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell in October.
Ancient DNA Sheds New Light on the Biblical Philistines
An international team, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the Leon Levy Expedition, retrieved and analyzed, for the first time, genome-wide data from people who lived during the Bronze and Iron Ages (~3,600-2,800 years ago) in the ancient port city of Ashkelon, one of the core Philistine cities during the Iron Age. The team found that a European-derived ancestry was introduced in Ashkelon around the time of the Philistines’ estimated arrival, suggesting that ancestors of the Philistines migrated across the Mediterranean, reaching Ashkelon by the early Iron Age.
Excavation of the Philistine cemetery at Ashkelon.
This European-related genetic component was subsequently diluted by the local Levantine gene pool over the succeeding centuries, suggesting intensive admixture between local and foreign populations. These genetic results, published in Science Advances, are a critical step toward understanding the long-disputed origins of the Philistines.
The Philistines are famous for their appearance in the Hebrew Bible as the arch-enemies of the Israelites. However, the ancient texts tell little about the Philistine origins other than a later memory that the Philistines came from “Caphtor” (a Bronze Age name for Crete; Amos 9:7). More than a century ago, Egyptologists proposed that a group called the Peleset in texts of the late twelfth century BCE were the same as the Biblical Philistines.
The Egyptians claimed that the Peleset traveled from the “the islands,” attacking what is today Cyprus and the Turkish and Syrian coasts, finally attempting to invade Egypt. These hieroglyphic inscriptions were the first indication that the search for the origins of the Philistines should be focused on the late second millennium BCE. From 1985-to 2016, the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, a project of the Harvard Semitic Museum, took up the search for the origin of the Philistines at Ashkelon, one of the five “Philistine” cities according to the Hebrew Bible. Led by its founder, the late Lawrence E. Stager, and then by Daniel M. Master, and author of the study and director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, the team found substantial changes in ways of life during the 12th century BCE which they connected to the arrival of the Philistines.
Many scholars, however, argued that these cultural changes were merely the result of trade or a local imitation of foreign styles and not the result of a substantial movement of people.
This new study represents the culmination of more than thirty years of archaeological work and of genetic research utilizing state-of-the-art technologies, concluding that the advent of the Philistines in the southern Levant involved a movement of people from the west during the Bronze to Iron Age transition.
An infant burial at the Philistine cemetery at Ashkelon.
Genetic discontinuity between the Bronze and Iron Age people of Ashkelon
The researchers successfully recovered genomic data from the remains of 10 individuals who lived in Ashkelon during the Bronze and Iron Ages.
This data allowed the team to compare the DNA of the Bronze and Iron Age people of Ashkelon to determine how they were related.
The researchers found that individuals across all time periods derived most of their ancestry from the local Levantine gene pool, but that individuals who lived in early Iron Age Ashkelon had a European derived ancestral component that was not present in their Bronze Age predecessors.
“This genetic distinction is due to European-related gene flow introduced in Ashkelon during either the end of the Bronze Age or the beginning of the Iron Age. This timing is in accord with estimates of the Philistine’s arrival to the coast of the Levant, based on archaeological and textual records,” explains Michal Feldman of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, leading author of the study.
“While our modeling suggests a southern European gene pool as a plausible source, future sampling could identify more precisely the populations introducing the European-related component to Ashkelon.”
Transient impact of the “European related” gene flow
In analyzing later Iron Age individuals from Ashkelon, the researchers found that the European-related component could no longer be traced.
“Within no more than two centuries, this genetic footprint introduced during the early Iron Age is no longer detectable and seems to be diluted by a local Levantine related gene pool,” states Choongwon Jeong of the Max Planck Institute of the Science of Human History, one of the corresponding authors of the study.
“While, according to ancient texts, the people of Ashkelon in the first millennium BCE remained ‘Philistines’ to their neighbors, the distinctiveness of their genetic makeup was no longer clear, perhaps due to intermarriage with Levantine groups around them,” notes Master.
“This data begins to fill a temporal gap in the genetic map of the southern Levant,” explains Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, senior author of the study.
“At the same time, by the zoomed-in comparative analysis of the Ashkelon genetic time transect, we find that the unique cultural features in the early Iron Age are mirrored by a distinct genetic composition of the early Iron Age people.”
The earliest evidence of the Maya divination calendar was discovered in an ancient temple
Archaeologists in Guatemala have discovered the oldest evidence of the Maya calendar on record: two mural fragments that, when pieced together, reveal a notation known as “7 deer,” a new study finds.
The two mural fragments with the 7 Deer day-sign and partial hieroglyphic text, among a total of 249 fragments of painted plaster and painted masonry blocks collected during archaeological excavations of the Ixbalamque context.
The two “7 deer” fragments date to between 300 B.C. and 200 B.C., according to radiocarbon dating done by the research team. This early date indicates that this Maya divination calendar, which was also used by other pre-Columbian cultures in Mesoamerica, such as the Aztecs, has been in continuous use for at least 2,300 years, as it is still followed today by modern Maya, the researchers said. (Notably, this is not the Long Count calendar that some people used to suggest the world was going to end in 2012.)
“It’s the one calendar that survives all the conquests and the civil war in Guatemala,” the latter of which was waged from 1960 to 1996, study first author David Stuart, the Schele professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. “The Maya of today in many communities have kept it as a way of connecting to their ideas of fate and how people relate to the world around them. It’s not a revival. It’s actually preservation of the calendar.”
The researchers found the mural fragments at the archaeological site of San Bartolo, northeast of the ancient Maya city of Tikal. Stuart was part of the team that discovered San Bartolo in 2001. “It’s in the remote jungles of northern Guatemala” and famous for its Maya murals dating to the Late Preclassic period (400 B.C. to A.D. 200), he said.
A reconstruction of San Bartolo at the phase when the 7 deer day-sign mural fragments were created.
The murals at San Bartolo are in a massive complex known as Las Pinturas, which the Maya built over hundreds of years. Every so often, the Maya would build over an old complex, constructing larger and more impressive structures. As a result, Las Pinturas is layered like an onion. If archaeologists tunnel into its inner layers, they can find earlier structures and murals, Stuart said.
The researchers collected ancient organic material, such as charcoal, within the layer where the mural fragments were discovered. By radiocarbon-dating these fragments, they could estimate when the murals were created.
However, these murals weren’t in one piece. In total, the team discovered about 7,000 fragments from various murals. Of this colossal collection, the team analyzed 11 wall fragments, discovered between 2002 and 2012, with radiocarbon dating. These included the two pieces that formed the “7 deer” notation, which includes a glyph, or image of a deer under the Maya symbol for the number seven (a horizontal line with two dots over it).
These fragments with the 7 deer day-sign dated to between 300 B.C. and 200 B.C.
The second dot over the line (top) is missing but is thought to be the number 7.
Mural fragments on masonry blocks from the Ixbalamque structure. It dates to the same time period as the 7 deer fragments but depicts the image of the Late Preclassic period Maya maize god.
Four Maya calendars
The Maya had four calendars, as “they were very interested in timekeeping,” Stuart said. “They had very elaborate and elegant ways of tracking time.”
One is the sacred divination calendar, or Tzolk’in, from which this “7 deer” notation originates. This calendar has 260 days consisting of a combination of 13 numbers and 20 days that have different signs (like deer).
The 260 days don’t make up a year, however. Rather, it’s a cycle similar to the seven-day week. The notation “7 deer” doesn’t give you a date; it doesn’t tell you the season or year in which something happened. “It’s like saying Napoleon invaded Russia on a Wednesday,” Marcello Canuto, director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Live Science.
Today, the 260-day cycle in the Tzolk’in calendar is used for soothsaying and ceremonial record-keeping, Stuart said. “There are date keepers, as they’re called, in Guatemala today,” Stuart said. “If you said the day is 7 deer, they would go, ‘Oh yeah, 7 deer, that means this, this and this.'”
An illustration showing the detail of the 7 deer day sign found at San Bartolo, Guatemala.
The other Maya calendars are the Haab’, a solar calendar that lasts 365 days but doesn’t account for a leap year; a lunar calendar; and the Long Count calendar, which tracks major time cycles and caused a lot of brouhahas when some people (mistakenly) thought it was foretelling the end of the world in 2012, Live Science previously reported.
“[I remember] all that nonsense back in 2012 about the end of a cycle,” Stuart said. “Everyone was saying, ‘It’s the end of the calendar.’ But no, they didn’t understand there was yet another cycle after that.”
There are other calendar notations that might be older than the newly described 7-deer finding, but these artifacts are challenging to date because they were carved into stone (which does not hold any radioactive carbon that can be dated). Moreover, these carved stones were possibly moved around, meaning a date from the site might not reflect the date of these calendars, Stuart said. For instance, a proposed Tzolk’in calendar found in Oaxaca Valley, Mexico has dates ranging from 700 B.C. to 100 B.C., according to several studies.
When these four types of calendars are taken into account, this “7 deer” notation is the “earliest evidence of any Maya calendar, possibly [the] earliest securely dated evidence anywhere in Mesoamerica,” Stuart said.
Surprising deer
The archaeologists were surprised to find the deer glyph. Later Maya Tzolk’in notations almost always write out the word for deer rather than drawing a glyph of the animal, Stuart said. In effect, these fragments might be evidence of an early stage of Maya script, he said.
“We speculate a little bit in the article that it may be that this is an early phase of the writing system where they haven’t quite established the norms that we’re used to,” Stuart said. He added that it’s unclear where in Mesoamerica this calendrical system began.
These two lines of evidence help tie everything together, Canuto noted. “The text seems to suggest something really archaic, and then the radiocarbon and the context of the dating seems to support that,” he said.
The study is “meticulously done,” Walter Witschey, a retired research professor of anthropology and geography at Longwood University in Virginia and a research fellow at the Middle American Research Institute, told Live Science in an email. The finding is “evidence for the earliest known calendar notation from the Maya region,” he said.
Ancient ritual bloodletting may have been performed at carvings found in Mexico
Archaeologists in southern Mexico have discovered 30 carvings depicting capital I-shaped ballcourts cut into rocks. These carvings may have been used in ceremonies involving water and “ritual bloodletting,” new research finds.
The image at the top shows one of the ballcourt carvings, its edges have been highlighted in the photo to make it easier to see. The image below shows a ballcourt at the site of Monte Alban, it is of a similar design to the carved ballcourt.
The carvings, in the ancient settlement of Quiechapa, are badly weathered, but small features in a few cases can be made out, such as one carving that appears to show a bench on the ballcourt.
“Ballgames were of great significance to people throughout ancient Mesoamerica,” study researcher Alex Elvis Badillo, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Systems at Indiana State University, wrote in an article published Jan. 11 in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.
The shape of the ballcourts changed over time, and the rules of the ballgame are not known and may also have changed. The ballgame was played at least as early as 3,600 years ago, involved a rubber ball and two opposing sides, and was played from what is now the American Southwest, in Arizona and New Mexico, to as far south as Colombia in South America, Live Science previously reported. Much is still unknown about the ballgame but it appears to have held some level of religious and ceremonial importance scholars believe.
It’s unclear when exactly these carvings were crafted. Quiechapa dates back at least 2,300 years and possibly earlier, and people in southern Mexico began using I-shaped ballcourts around 2,100 years ago, Badillo told Live Science in an email, adding that “I think it is logical to suggest that these carvings would have been made sometime after [100 B.C.], however, it is hard to say when these carvings were made.”
The researchers found the 30 carvings in natural rock outcrops at two sites in the area. “This is the highest density in which this type of ballcourt representation occurs throughout Mesoamerica,” Badillo wrote in the study.
The biggest carving is 13.4 inches (34.1 centimeters) long while the shortest is 3.1 inches (8 cm) long, Badillo said. The archaeological team documented the carvings using structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry. In this system, photos were taken of the carvings from different angles and uploaded to a computer program, which used the images and an algorithm to create a virtual, 3D representation of the carvings.
This image shows one of the ballcourt carvings after the photogrammetry process.
Bloodletting rituals
It’s not clear what the carvings were used for, but the researchers suggested that ancient Mesoamericans may have used them for rituals. The Spanish priest Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (lived 1581 to 1639), who lived in what is now Mexico following Spain’s conquest of the area in the 16th century, “describes certain rituals during which a [Mesoamerican] priest would have people spill blood into small cavities that they had made in stone,” Badillo wrote in the study, noting that those cavities could include the ballcourt carvings.
“The idea that water and blood are considered sacred and are symbols that are central to Mesoamerican cosmology is well established in the [scholarly] literature,” Badillo wrote in the paper.
“These seemingly inert stone carvings in Quiechapa’s landscape may have been part of deeply meaningful and active social performances that included ritual bloodletting for many possible purposes, including maintaining balance and agricultural fertility, marking important moments in time, or fomenting intra- and inter-community bonds,” Badillo wrote.
However, he cautioned that until more evidence is found, archaeologists can’t be certain that rituals were performed at these carvings.
Badillo presented the findings at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) annual meeting held in Chicago from March 30 to April 3. The ballcourt carving surveys were carried out as part of the Quiechapa Archaeological Project (PAQuie).
3-D Photogrammetry Reveals 1,000-Year-Old Etchings in Alabama
Deep in a damp cave in northern Alabama, archaeologists have made a giant discovery. On a subterranean ceiling just half a meter high, researchers have uncovered the largest cave art discovered in North America: intricate etchings of humanlike figures and a serpent, carved by Native Americans more than 1000 years ago.
A humanlike figure was carved into the ceiling of 19th Unnamed Cave in Alabama (left), which archaeologists outlined virtually to make clearer (right).
“It’s exemplary and important work,” says Carla Klehm, an archaeologist at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (UAF).
Although the U.S. Southwest is famous for petroglyphs carved into canyons and cliff faces, much of the southeast’s rock art is hidden underground in caves. “Forty years ago, no one would have thought the southeast had much cave art,” says Thomas Pluckhahn, an archaeologist at the University of South Florida who wasn’t involved with the paper. But over the past few decades, archaeologists including the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Jan Simek have shown that’s not the case.
Simek first visited the 19th Unnamed Cave—called that in scientific papers so as to protect its precise location on private land—in the 1990s. In its cool, damp depths where no external light filters in, the flashlights of Simek and his colleagues revealed faint impressions on the ceiling depicting birds, snakes, wasps, and overlapping patterns of lines. The art resembled designs found on pottery in the southeast from the Woodland period, between 1000 B.C.E. and 1000 C.E.
The ceiling of the cave descends to just over half a meter high where the glyphs are located, so the researchers had to lie on their backs to see most of the images, Simek explains. There’s no place to stand and see the entire ceiling, he says.
Photographer Stephen Alvarez lights up the 19th Unnamed Cave in order to photograph its ceiling.
To get a more complete picture of the art, Simek revisited the cave in 2017 with Stephen Alvarez, a photographer and founder of the nonprofit Ancient Art Archive, which documents ancient rock art around the world and shares it online via virtual reality. Alvarez wanted to use a new technique called 3D photogrammetry to create a realistic 3D model of the cave—and see whether they could uncover additional images that had gone unobserved in the tight space.
The researchers climbed down into the cave and used a tripod to start taking photos. Over a period of 2 months, they took nearly 16,000 overlappings, and high-resolution images. Next, they stitched the photos together, using computer software to align the images in 3D space; researchers could then manipulate the resulting model using virtual reality software, Alvarez explains. “We could light the space any way we wanted and drop the floor away” to virtually step back and see the entire ceiling, he says.
As the researchers manipulated their images to make the drawings more visible, five huge glyphs that were previously too large and faint to be seen came into relief. They included three humanlike beings dressed in regal garments, a swirling figure with a rattlesnake like tail, and a long serpent with scales.
The images, likely made by etching into fresh mud on the damp ceiling, are undated. Charcoal fragments and wood smoke streaks on the cave walls, perhaps from the artists’ torches, date to the first millennium.
The Woodland Native Americans who lived in the area at that time resided in village settlements, built large earthen mounds for religious worship, and traded extensively across the south, east, and midwest. Their descendants remained in the region for centuries; but by the late 1800s, many had been forced west under the fledgling U.S. government’s policies of Native American removal.
The newly described figures share characteristics with other rock art formations in the southeast, like cliff drawings at Alabama’s Painted Bluff, and also in the Southwest, like the humanlike pictographs in Canyonlands National Park.
The figures are also similar to those found on Woodland-style pottery. Though the exact meaning of the glyphs is unclear, caves like the one in which they were found were often linked to the underworld, the researchers say.
While completing the work, the authors consulted with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose tribal homeland includes the area where the cave is located.
Creating the glyphs required “an extraordinary degree of artistic skill” says UAF George Sabo. But much about the artists remains a mystery. “Who were they in their communities?” he wonders.
Though the cave’s location is undisclosed to protect the art from vandals, the team created a video from its model so anyone can explore it virtually. Klehm is excited to see 3D photogrammetry continue to reveal hidden art at other sites—and make it accessible. “[This] can help us see things that we can’t see, to go beyond what the human eye is used to looking for,” she says.
New research reveals how the black rat colonized Europe in the Roman and Medieval periods
New ancient DNA analysis has shed light on how the black rat, blamed for spreading Black Death, dispersed across Europe – revealing that the rodent colonized the continent on two occasions in the Roman and Medieval periods.
Archaeological black rat mandible.
The study – led by the University of York along with the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute – is the first ancient genetic study of the species (Rattus rattus), often known as the ship rat.
By analyzing DNA from ancient black rat remains found at archaeological sites spanning the 1st to the 17th centuries in Europe and North Africa, the researchers have pieced together a new understanding of how rat populations dispersed following the ebbs and flows of human trade, urbanism, and empires.
Disappearance
The study shows that the black rat colonized Europe at least twice, once with the Roman expansion and then again in the Medieval period – matching up with archaeological evidence for a decline or even disappearance of rats after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The authors of the study say this was likely related to the break-up of the Roman economic system, though climatic change and the 6th Century Justinianic Plague may have played a role too. When towns and long-range trade re-emerged in the Medieval period, so too did a new wave of black rats.
The black rat is one of three rodent species, along with the house mouse (Mus musculus) and the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), to have become globally distributed as a result of its ability to live around humans by taking advantage of food and transportation.
Competition
Black rats were widespread across Europe until at least the 18th century, before their population declined, most likely as a result of competition with the newly arrived brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), the now dominant rat species in temperate Europe.
Dr. David Orton from the Department of Archaeology said: “We’ve long known that the spread of rats is linked to human events, and we suspected that Roman expansion brought them north into Europe.
“But one remarkable result of our study is quite how much of a single event this seems to have been: all of our Roman rat bones from England to Serbia form a single group in genetic terms.”
“When rats reappear in the Medieval period we see a completely different genetic signature – but again all of our samples from England to Hungary to Finland all group together. We couldn’t have hoped for clearer evidence of repeated colonization of Europe.”
Signature
Alex Jamieson, a co-author at the University of Oxford, said “The modern dominance of brown rats has obscured the fascinating history of black rats in Europe. Generating genetic signatures of these ancient black rats reveals how closely black rat and human population dynamics mirror each other.”
He Yu, the co-author from the Max Planck Institute, said “This study is a great showcase of how the genetic background of human commensal species, like the black rat, could reflect historical or economic events. And more attention should be paid to these often neglected small animals.”
Flourish
The study could also be used to provide information about human movement across continents, the researchers say.
Dr. Orton added: “Our results show how human-commensal species like the black rat, animals which flourish around human settlements, can act as ideal proxies for human historical processes”.
The research was a collaboration between York and partners including Oxford, the Max Planck Institute, and researchers in over 20 countries.
