All posts by Archaeology World Team

DENMARK, EUROPE, WORLD

Last meal of a man mummified in a bog reconstructed after 2400 years

Last meal of a man mummified in a bog reconstructed after 2400 years

The Tollund Man is one of the most famous ‘bog bodies’ ever discovered in northern Europe. Even though the 30- to 40-year-old human was buried in a bog more than 2,400 years ago, the acidic peat has mummified his body to a remarkable degree, preserving his hair, brain, skin, nails, and intestines – even the leather noose around his neck.

Last meal of a man mummified in a bog reconstructed after 2400 years
A close-up of Tollund Man’s face.

Despite all the evidence, we still don’t really know why he was killed. An updated analysis of the man’s gut has now revealed all the contents of his last meal, and it’s looking more and more like he was some sort of human sacrifice.

Roughly a day before the Tollund Man was hung and buried in the bog, researchers say he ate porridge, containing barley, flax, and seeds from plants and weeds.

That’s similar to what scientists found in the early 1950s when the body was first unearthed in what is now modern Denmark. But unlike past analyses, this one has also noticed a few new ingredients, like the fatty proteins of fish as well as remnants of threshing waste, which comes from separating grain.

That’s an intriguing discovery, as a recent analysis of another bog body, known as the Grauballe Man, has also turned up a surprisingly large quantity of threshing waste not noticed before.

The Grauballe Man was also killed and buried in an acidic bog, and the similar contents of his last meal to the Tollund Man’s last meal may indicate a ritual of sorts.

Tollund Man on display at Museum Silkeborg.

While other bog bodies appear to have eaten porridge or bread with a side of meat or berries, threshing waste and an abundance of seeds might indicate a special occasion. Either that, or these ingredients were simply added for flavor or nutrition.

“Although the meal may reflect ordinary Iron Age fare, the inclusion of threshing waste could possibly relate to ritual practices,” the authors write.

This isn’t the first time the Tollund Man or the Grauballe Man have been suspected victims of sacrifice.

While other bog bodies found might have fallen dead or drowned in the peat by accident, the way the Tollund Man was killed and then carefully buried, with his eyes and mouth closed shut and his body in a fetal position, has some scientists thinking he was a sacrifice to the gods.

Considering that the Tollund Man was buried near a place where Iron Age people used to dig for peat, it’s possible his body represented a form of gratitude for the land.

Some Roman historian accounts from the time have even written about similar human sacrifices in northwestern Europe, although these were often biased reports that might have stretched the truth about certain tribes.

The remarkably preserved face of Tollund Man.

Apart from the way in which the Tollund Man was buried, his gut is one of the juiciest clues we have. Further research will be needed to determine whether other bog bodies also ate meals containing threshing waste or seeds, or if these were, in fact, special ingredients given to humans before they were sacrificed.

The Tollund Man may be long dead, but his mystery continues to live on.

ASIA, INDIA, WORLD

Millet bread and pulse dough from early Iron Age South India: Charred food lumps as culinary indicators

Millet bread and pulse dough from early Iron Age South India: Charred food lumps as culinary indicators

Prof.  Jennifer Bates and her coworkers, Kelly Wilcox Black and Prof. Kathleen Morrison, published a new archaeobotanical article, “Millet Bread and Pulse Dough from Early Iron Age South India: Charred Food Lumps as Culinary Indicators, ” in the Journal of Archaeological Science (Vol.137).

Jennifer is a former Postdoc in the Penn Paleoecology Lab, now an Assistant Professor at Seoul National University, Kelly is a PhD student at the University of Chicago, completing her dissertation. Kathleen is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In the paper, the authors explore charred lumps from the site of Kadebakele, in southern India, where they have excavated for several years with the support of the Archaeological Survey of India and colleagues.

Millet bread and pulse dough from early Iron Age South India: Charred food lumps as culinary indicators

The site dates from around 2,300 BCE to CE 1600 or so, but these data are from the Early Iron Age, about 800 BC. Charred lumps are usually seen as not identifiable, but using high-quality imaging, they were able to show that (some of) these are charred remains of dough or batter; these would have been used to make bread-like dishes.

Comparing the data with experimental studies done by another lab group, they identified two kinds of food lumps, along with cattle dung lumps (likely fuel). 

They found a dough made primarily from millets that match the experimental results of “flatbreads” most closely. Millet flatbreads are still made in this region.

There was also a batter made primarily from pulses (beans, lentils, etc.). This highlights the great importance of pulses in the diet, something is also seen in the overall botanical assemblage.

As far as we know, there hasn’t been any previous understanding of how these foods might have been prepared, and this paper is the first glimpse at food making in South Asian prehistory. 

The work contributes to our understanding of cooking, diet, and daily life in the South Indian Iron Age, a period without historical documents, and also establishes the value of a data source previously assumed to be too difficult to study on a routine basis (that is, without using SEM).

Professor Bates, Ms Wilcox Black and Professor Morrison argue that work like this allows archaeologists to move beyond “taxa lists” (lists of plants and animals used — you could think of these as possible ‘ingredients’) to approach issues of culinary practice (combinations of ingredients as well as techniques).

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Another “Erased” Black Cemetery Identified in Florida

Another “Erased” Black Cemetery Identified in Florida

An unmarked African American cemetery with hundreds of graves has been found at the site of a downtown office building in Clearwater, Fla. It’s at least the fourth abandoned African American cemetery rediscovered in recent years in Florida. The finds are forcing communities to come to terms with their history and racist policies that targeted Black neighbourhoods.

Barbara Sorey-Love has experienced some of that history firsthand. She was born in the basement of Clearwater’s hospital 69 years ago and grew up in Clearwater Heights, a neighbourhood that no longer exists.

“Back then we were called coloured,” she says. “That’s where the coloured mothers and children were housed.”

Another “Erased” Black Cemetery Identified in Florida
Archaeologists work to uncover graves at the former site of the Zion cemetery found underneath the Robles Park Village housing complex in Tampa, Fla. Another unmarked African-American cemetery with hundreds of graves has been found at the site of a downtown office building in Clearwater, Fla.

Several years ago, Sorey-Love helped form the Clearwater Heights Reunion Committee, a group of people who grew up in the neighbourhood before it became a victim of urban renewal. The group began asking questions about the old St. Matthews cemetery. It was closed in the mid-1950s and sold to developers who were supposed to move the graves to a new location.

Using ground-penetrating radar and later by excavating, archaeologists found something many residents had suspected — most of the graves had never been moved. Sorey-Love recently visited the excavation site, now an office building’s parking lot.

“I went over and looked in the burial site,” she says. “And it was like the skeleton was looking up at me saying, ‘Thank God you found me.'”

Archaeologists believe several hundred people may be buried under the parking lot and a building that now stands on the site. It’s not the only African American cemetery recently rediscovered in Clearwater. A little over a mile away, an investigation has found dozens of graves at the site of a now shuttered public school. In both cases, community members are working with local officials to decide what to do next.

And it’s not just happening in Clearwater. Just across the bay in Tampa, investigations conducted by the Tampa Bay Times helped uncover at least two more African American cemeteries that were abandoned and built over. Some of the graves are under the parking lot at Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays. Hundreds more were found at the site of a public housing complex.

In all these cases, Black residents were told the graves had been relocated.

“There were bodies still there and a large number of them,” says Antoinette Jackson, chair of the anthropology department at the University of South Florida says. “That caught everybody’s attention.”

The cemeteries were all closed in the 1950s, as cities around Florida’s Tampa Bay began to grow rapidly in the post-war era. Property that had been developed and used by the Black community was taken for other uses and neighbourhoods were wiped out by interstate exchanges. Jackson says the cemeteries were deliberately forgotten.

“Oftentimes,” she says, “we don’t use the word lost or abandoned. We are really saying erased, physically erased from the landscape for other purposes.”

In Clearwater, city council records from the mid-1950s show officials discussed using road improvements as an “inducement to confine Negro home building and purchasing to the existing area.”

Jeff Moates, with the Florida Public Archaeology Network, worked on the cemetery investigation in Clearwater. He says assessments levied by the city were “used as a tactic to kind of isolate the African American community. There were certain policies that further marginalized an already marginalized group of people.”

The land was used for a new shopping centre. The city paid the developers to move the graves to a new location. But, with the discovery of hundreds of graves still on the site, Clearwater officials are facing tough decisions. The company that now owns the property says it received assurances that the graves had been moved.

At a recent meeting, city councilman Mark Bunker said he was struck by what he saw in the archaeological report.

“We weren’t on the commission at that time,” he says, “but, the city does have some responsibility in dealing with this.”

Another councilman said he wasn’t sure the city should be held responsible for something done nearly 70 years ago. Meanwhile, investigations will continue on the site. The rediscovery of lost or erased Black cemeteries raises many issues, including who’s liable for righting past wrongs. A task force created by the state legislature will soon issue a report with recommendations for local and state officials.

University of South Florida anthropologist Antoinette Jackson recently helped create the Black cemetery network, a website and organization linking African American cemeteries that are being rediscovered and investigated around the country. The idea, she says is “to put a face and stories and people and communities on the map and in the public domain.”

A bill is also in the works in Congress that would create an African American Burial Grounds Network under the direction of the National Park Service.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

5 Ice Age Mammoths Discovered Near Busy Road in England

5 Ice Age Mammoths Discovered Near Busy Road in England

Experts who unearthed a 200,000-year-old mammoth graveyard say it is “one of Britain’s biggest Ice Age discoveries in recent years”. Archaeologists found the remains of five animals, including two adults, two juveniles, and an infant, at a quarry near Swindon.

5 Ice Age Mammoths Discovered Near Busy Road in England
The remains of at least five Ice Age mammoths were found at the quarry

The dig began after two keen fossil hunters spotted a Neanderthal hand axe.

Officials from the archaeological organisation DigVentures said that what they went on to find was “exceptional”.

The remains belong to a species of Steppe mammoth, an ancestor of the Woolly mammoth.

Close to the mammoth remains, the team also found a number of stone tools made by Neanderthals.

A research team led by archaeologists from DigVentures discovered “surprisingly well-preserved” evidence at the site

DigVentures began the excavations after being alerted to the site by Sally and Neville Hollingworth, from Swindon.

Ms Hollingworth said: “We were originally hoping to find marine fossils, and finding something so significant instead has been a real thrill.

“Even better than that is seeing it turn into a major archaeological excavation

“We couldn’t be more pleased that something we’ve discovered will be learned from and enjoyed by so many people.”

Excavations were carried out in 2019 and 2020 after Sally and Neville Hollingworth spotted the remains in 2017

Lisa Westcott Wilkins from DigVentures said: “Finding mammoth bones is always extraordinary, but finding ones that are so old and well preserved, and in such close proximity to Neanderthal stone tools is exceptional.”

Other discoveries at the site include delicate beetle wings and fragile freshwater snail shells as well as stone tools.

Research is ongoing to understand why so many mammoths were found in one place, and whether they were hunted or scavenged by Neanderthals.

The team recovered bones including tusks, leg bones, ribs and vertebrae belonging to a species of Steppe mammoth

Duncan Wilson, Chief Executive of Historic England, said: “This represents one of Britain’s most significant Ice Age discoveries in recent years.

“The findings have enormous value for understanding the human occupation of Britain, and the delicate environmental evidence recovered will also help us understand it in the context of past climate change.”

The discoveries are explored in a new BBC documentary ‘Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard’, with Sir David Attenborough

It is believed the site dates back to between 210,000 to 220,000 years ago.

With sites from this period rarely so well-preserved, it is thought these new discoveries will help archaeologists, palaeontologists, and palaeoenvironmental scientists address big questions about Neanderthals, mammoths, and the impact of a rapidly changing climate on life in Ice Age Britain.

The discovery will be featured in a new BBC One documentary Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard which will be broadcast on 30 December.

Some of the bones are now being examined for evidence of butchery, and further work is being planned at the site
AFRICA, EGYPT, EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Egypt retrieves 36 smuggled artefacts from Spain

Egypt retrieves 36 smuggled artifacts from Spain

Pharaonic artefacts that were smuggled out of Egypt in 2014 were returned to the country on Monday. The 36 pieces were seized on arrival at Valencia, Spain, that year.

“This handover came as a result of effective judicial co-operation, and the result of concerted efforts between the Public Prosecution, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt in Spain,” read a prosecution statement posted on Facebook on Monday.

The repatriated items include busts made from limestone, marble and granite; bowls, vases, figurines and an ornate wooden box.

A collection of 36 ancient Egyptian artefacts that were just returned to Egypt 7 years after they were smuggled out of a port in Alexandria.

Prosecutors celebrated the return of the smuggled artefacts as a win for Egyptian-Spanish bilateral relations.

In their statement, they thanked Spain’s security officials for their commitment to preserving Egypt’s cultural heritage.

The artefacts were received by an Egyptian delegation including the country’s ambassador at a ceremony held at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid on Monday.

They had been taken there to be assessed before the Egyptian delegation was contacted to come and retrieve them.

Spanish and Egyptian officials attend a ceremony at Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum. The ceremony was held to mark the return of a group of smuggled artefacts from Spain to Egypt.

Investigations into the smuggling of these artefacts began in June 2014, the public prosecutor’s statement read.

It said that security officials had proved at the time that the smuggled items left the coastal Egyptian city of Alexandria before they were seized by Spanish officials at the port of Valencia in the same year.

Egypt repatriates 114 smuggled artefacts from France

The items had been hidden onboard a container ship and forged documents were submitted to Spanish authorities to facilitate the smuggling.

Since 2014, Egyptian prosecutors have been following up on the case with Spanish authorities, the statement, released on Monday, said.

This year, Spain’s judiciary ruled that the items should be returned to Egypt. Word was sent to Egyptian officials, who formed a delegation to retrieve them.

A collection of ancient Egyptian relics was seized by Spanish authorities at a port in Valencia in 2014. The items were smuggled out of Egypt in 2014 and returned in 2021.

Egyptian artefacts have long been smuggled overseas.

The practice increased markedly in the period that followed a popular uprising in 2011 that caused a wave of political instability and lapses in security. The country’s tourism ministry announced this year that in the past decade, Egyptian authorities had repatriated 30,000 artefacts.

They had reached France, Denmark, Belgium and the US, among many countries.

Several prominent Egyptologists have launched awareness campaigns to help Egypt to retrieve smuggled artefacts, many of which are sold at discreet auctions at some of the world’s foremost auction houses.

A haul of more than 5,000 artefacts housed at the Museum of the Bible, in Washington, DC, was returned to Egypt in January.

AFRICA, WORLD

Stone Age beads made from ostrich eggshells formed the earliest known social network

Stone Age beads made from ostrich eggshells formed the earliest known social network

Humans are social creatures, but little is known about when, how, and why different populations connected in the past. Answering these questions is crucial for interpreting the biological and cultural diversity that we see in human populations today. DNA is a powerful tool for studying genetic interactions between populations, but it can’t address any cultural exchanges within these ancient meetings.

Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have turned to an unexpected source of information—ostrich eggshell beads—to shed light on ancient social networks.

In a new study published in Nature, researchers Drs. Jennifer Miller and Yiming Wang report 50,000-years of population connection and isolation, driven by changing rainfall patterns, in southern and eastern Africa.

A string of modern ostrich eggshell beads from eastern Africa.

Ostrich eggshell beads: a window into the past

Ostrich eggshell (OES) beads are ideal artefacts for understanding ancient social relationships. They are the world’s oldest fully manufactured ornaments, meaning that instead of relying on an item’s natural size or shape, humans completely transformed the shells to produce beads.

This extensive shaping creates ample opportunities for variations in style. Because different cultures produced beads of different styles, the prehistoric accessories provide researchers with a way to trace cultural connections.

“It’s like following a trail of breadcrumbs,” says Miller, lead author of the study. “The beads are clues, scattered across time and space, just waiting to be noticed.”

To search for signs of population connectivity, Miller and Wang assembled the largest ever database of ostrich eggshell beads. It includes data from more than 1500 individual beads unearthed from 31 sites across southern and eastern Africa, encompassing the last 50,000 years. Gathering this data was a painstakingly slow process that took more than a decade. 

Climate change and social networks in the Stone Age

By comparing OES bead characteristics, such as total diameter, aperture diameter and shell thickness, Miller and Wang found that between 50,000 and 33,000 years ago, people in eastern and southern Africa were using nearly identical OES beads.

The finding suggests a long-distance social network spanning more than 3,000 km once connected people in the two regions. 

“The result is surprising, but the pattern is clear,” says Wang, co-corresponding author of the study. “Throughout the 50,000 years we examined, this is the only time period that the bead characteristics are the same.”

Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania, an important site in studies of human evolution, is experiencing drying and shorter, more irregular rainy reasons

This eastern-southern connection at 50-33,000 years ago is the oldest social network ever identified, and it coincides with a particularly wet period in eastern Africa. However, signs of the regional network disappear 33,000 years ago, likely triggered by a major shift in global climates.

Around the same time that the social network breaks down, eastern Africa experienced a dramatic reduction in precipitation as the tropical rain belt shifted southward. This increased rain in the large area connecting eastern and southern Africa (the Zambezi River catchment), periodically flooding riverbanks and perhaps creating a geographic barrier that disrupted regional social networks. 

“Through this combination of paleoenvironmental proxies, climate models, and archaeological data, we can see the connection between climate change and cultural behaviour,” says Wang.

Weaving a story with beads

Stone Age beads made from ostrich eggshells formed the earliest known social network
Digital microscope images of archaeological ostrich eggshell beads.

Together, the results of this working document a 50,000-year-long story about human connections, and the dramatic climate changes that drove people apart.

The data even provides new insight into variable social strategies between eastern and southern Africa by documenting different bead-use trajectories through time. These regional responses highlight the flexibility of human behaviour and show there’s more than one path to our species’ success. 

“These tiny beads have the power to reveal big stories about our past,” says Miller. “We encourage other researchers to build upon this database, and continue exploring the evidence for cultural connection in new regions.”

AFRICA, WORLD

Researchers discovered a 2 billion-year-old ancient nuclear reactor in Africa

Researchers discovered a 2 billion year old ancient nuclear reactor in Africa

The Oklo-reactor in Gabon, Africa is one of the most intriguing geological formations found on planet Earth. Here, naturally occurring fissile materials in two billion-year-old rocks have sustained a slow nuclear fission reaction like that found in a modern nuclear reactor.

Uranium-235 is a radioactive element with a half-life of 700 million years.

Traces of it are found in almost all rocks, especially magmatic rocks, and its decay is believed to be one of the sources of Earth’s inner heat. Because it decays over time at a constant rate, its concentration in the Earth’s crust is almost everywhere the same – except in Oklo.

The Oklo-Formation, a succession of sandstone and siltstone, was deposited two billion years ago by a large river. Microbial activity of the first lifeforms caused the element uranium, derived from weathered magmatic rocks, to become concentrated in certain layers of the sediments.

Later tectonic movements buried the layers deep underground.

Simplified geology of the Oklo-Okèlobondo natural nuclear reactors.

In 1972, chemical analysis showed an unusually low concentration of uranium-235 in the ore mined in the Oklo open pit mine. However, there were high concentrations of elements like caesium, curium, americium and even plutonium to be found. Such elements are formed today only in nuclear reactors, as the uranium decays during controlled nuclear fission.

When uranium-235 decays, it will emit three neutrons. If one of the emitted neutrons hits another uranium atom, this atom will also decay and a chain reaction will begin. In most rocks, there is either not enough uranium to sustain nuclear fission or it decays too fast to cause a chain reaction.

In the Oklo-reactor, two factors came together to sustain slow nuclear fission for hundreds of thousands of years. Weathering of magmatic rocks and bacterial activity concentrated the uranium enough to start a nuclear chain reaction. Then the water that infiltrated the formation along faults slowed down the emitted neutrons enough to sustain slow and stable nuclear fission. As the uranium decays, it forms other radioactive elements fueling the reactor.

Over time the Oklo-reactor has produced large quantities of toxic plutonium and caesium-isotopes, which have since decayed into stable and harmless barium. During this process, however, no harmful radioactivity has leaked into the environment.

As the planet warms due to our carbon emissions, burning oil and coal is no longer a sustainable way to meet humanity’s hunger for energy.

Many experts believe that nuclear energy could be a temporary solution until renewable energy sources are ready to meet the demand. Unfortunately, nuclear energy comes with radioactive waste.

A permanent repository for nuclear waste must contain toxic elements and radioactivity for at least 100,000 years. The problem is that we don’t know what materials to use for the containers to store the waste.

Steel will rust, concrete can leak and even glass is damaged by the emitted radiation. By studying the Oklo-reactor, scientists hope to find a way to safely dispose of nuclear waste as produced by modern reactors.

Research by a team of scientists of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D. C. and published in the journal PNAS has investigated how the Oklo-reactor was able to work so long and yet not pollute the environment. In rocks recovered from the Oklo mine, barium (the ‘trace’ left by the former radioactive elements) is not found evenly distributed but rather found in nests surrounded by a thin layer of ruthenium compounds.

Native ruthenium is a rare and inert metal often associated with ore of other elements. The scientists believe that the radioactive plutonium and caesium were encapsulated and safely isolated from the environment by a shell of ruthenium-compounds. If so, containers made of ruthenium alloys could be used to safely store radioactive waste for a very long time.

As the Oklo-reactor demonstrates, the ruthenium compounds remain stable even if exposed to radioactivity and corrosion by water over vast geological periods.

AFRICA, EGYPT, WORLD

Cosmic-Ray Muons Reveal Hidden Void in the Great Pyramid

Cosmic-Ray Muons Reveal Hidden Void in the Great Pyramid

Cosmic rays have revealed a hidden void inside the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, scientists said Thursday. They don’t know what’s in it or what it was built for, but it does not look like a secret burial chamber.

Cosmic-Ray Muons Reveal Hidden Void in the Great Pyramid
3D artistic view made by the ScanPyramids mission shows a hidden internal structure in Khufu’s Pyramid, the largest pyramid in Giza.

It’s shaped more like a 30-yard-long gallery or corridor, the international team of researchers reported in the journal Nature.

“We open the question to Egyptologists, architects and archaeologists: what could it be?” Hany Helal of Cairo University told reporters on a telephone briefing.

3D artistic view made by the ScanPyramids mission shows a hidden internal structure in Khufus Pyramid, the largest pyramid in Giza.

“We don’t know for the moment if it’s horizontal or inclined if it is made from one structure or several successive structures,” Mehdi Tayoubi, president of France’s Heritage Innovation Presentation (HIP) Institute, added.

“What we do know is that this void is there, that it is impressive, that it was not expected by any kind of theory.”

Rumours have abounded for centuries about hidden rooms in the pyramids at Giza. But it’s hard to get through the tons of stone blocks used to make the 455-foot-high great pyramid of Khufu (or Cheops.) Radar can’t do it well.

“A lot of people tried to dig some tunnels looking for chambers,” Tayoubi said. Tourists get in through the “robbers’ tunnel,” dug out centuries ago.

Visitors looking for mummies or treasure have been disappointed. The 4,500-year-old tomb was robbed millennia ago.

Yet archaeologists have long believed there is more to the inside than the three chambers, corridors and air shafts that have been discovered.

The international ScanPyramids team used special film plates to catch, over a period of months, particles called muons that are created when high-energy cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere.

They are few and far between — that’s why it took months — but they can pass through the stone and collect on the plates.

They produced a fuzzy image of some kind of open space above what’s known as the Grand Gallery of the pyramid.

“These results constitute a breakthrough for the understanding of Khufu’s Pyramid and its internal structure,” the researchers wrote. “While there is currently no information about the role of this void, these findings show how modern particle physics can shed new light on the world’s archaeological heritage.”

It’s the “first major inner structure found in the Great Pyramid since the 19th century,” the team added.

Muon imaging has also been used to peer inside Fukushima’s nuclear reactor, at archaeological sites near Rome and into the Teotihuacan Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico.

Now the question is how to get a better look at what’s in there, but that would require drilling.

Nonetheless, Jean-Baptiste Mouret of France’s national institute for computer science and applied mathematics is working to design a small drone that could explore the space if the team gets permission from the Egyptian government.

Last year, the same team used muon detection and infrared measurements to image some kind of corridor right above the entrance to the pyramid.