All posts by Archaeology World Team

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Red paint on the 1,000-year-old gold mask from Peru contains human blood proteins

Red paint on 1,000-year-old gold mask from Peru contains human blood proteins

Thirty years ago, archaeologists excavated the tomb of an elite 40–50-year-old man from the Sicán culture of Peru, a society that predated the Incas. The man’s seated, the upside-down skeleton was painted bright red, as was the gold mask covering his detached skull.

Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research have analyzed the paint, finding that, in addition to a red pigment, it contains human blood and bird egg proteins.

The Sicán was a prominent culture that existed from the ninth to 14th centuries along the northern coast of modern Peru.

During the Middle Sicán Period (about 900–1,100 A.D.), metallurgists produced a dazzling array of gold objects, many of which were buried in tombs of the elite class. In the early 1990s, a team of archaeologists and conservators led by Izumi Shimada excavated a tomb where an elite man’s seated skeleton was painted red and placed upside down at the centre of the chamber.

The skeletons of two young women were arranged nearby in birthing and modifying poses, and two crouching children’s skeletons were placed at a higher level.

Among the many gold artefacts found in the tomb was a red-painted gold mask, which covered the face of the man’s detached skull. At the time, scientists identified the red pigment in the paint as cinnabar, but Luciana de Costa Carvalho, James McCullagh and colleagues wondered what the Sicán people had used in the paint mix as a binding material, which had kept the paint layer attached to the metal surface of the mask for 1,000 years.

To find out, the researchers analyzed a small sample of the mask’s red paint. Fourier transform-infrared spectroscopy revealed that the sample contained proteins, so the team conducted a proteomic analysis using tandem mass spectrometry.

Red paint on 1,000-year-old gold mask from Peru contains human blood proteins
A red paint sample taken from a 1,000-year-old mask excavated from a Sicán tomb in Peru contains human blood and bird egg proteins, in addition to a red pigment.

They identified six proteins from human blood in the red paint, including serum albumin and immunoglobulin G (a type of human serum antibody). Other proteins, such as ovalbumin, came from egg whites. Because the proteins were highly degraded, the researchers couldn’t identify the exact species of bird’s egg used to make the paint, but a likely candidate is the Muscovy duck.

The identification of human blood proteins supports the hypothesis that the arrangement of the skeletons was related to a desired “rebirth” of the deceased Sicán leader, with the blood-containing paint that coated the man’s skeleton and face mask potentially symbolizing his “life force,” the researchers say.

The authors do not acknowledge any funding sources.

The abstract that accompanies this article is available here.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people.

The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News.

ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most-read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research.

As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

ASIA, CHINA, WORLD

Amazingly Preserved Mummies in China Yield New Clues to Bronze Age Life

Amazingly Preserved Mummies in China Yield New Clues to Bronze Age Life

According to a Gizmodo report, an international team of researchers has analyzed the genomes of some of the oldest of the naturally preserved mummies from northwest China’s Xiaohe cemetery, which is located in the desert sands of the Tarim Basin. 

An aerial view of the Xiaohe cemetery in the Tarim Basin.

The remains, which date from 2,000 BCE to around 200 CE, are confounding for their remarkable state of preservation, luxurious clothing, and their burial in boat coffins among miles and miles of sand dunes, far from any sea.

The Tarim Basin mummies do not resemble modern inhabitants of the region, leading different groups of researchers to posit that they may have hailed from near the Black Sea, or been related to a group hailing from the Iranian Plateau.

Recently, an international team of researchers analyzed the genomes of some of the earliest mummies from the Tarim Basin.

They found that the people buried there did not migrate from the Black Sea steppes, Iran, or anywhere else—rather, the analysis suggests that they were direct descents of the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), a human population widespread during the Pleistocene that is now mostly represented in genetic fragments in some populations’ genomes. The team’s research was published today in Nature.

Amazingly Preserved Mummies in China Yield New Clues to Bronze Age Life
A Tarim Basin woman mummified in Xiaohe, still with her hair and hat from life.

“Archaeogeneticists have long searched for Holocene ANE populations in order to better understand the genetic history of Inner Eurasia.

We have found one in the most unexpected place,” said Choongwon Jeong, a co-author of the study and a geneticist at Seoul National University, in a Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology press release.

Being direct descendants of the Ancient North Eurasians, the people of the Tarim Basin didn’t mix with other populations in the vicinity. And there were plenty. 

The team compared the mummies’ genetics with those of a neighbouring group from the Dzungarian Basin, also called the Junggar Basin. Those 13 individuals descended from a combination of local populations and Western steppe herders linked to a different group, the Yamnaya.

Chao Ning, study author and an archaeologist at Peking University, said in the same release: “These findings add to our understanding of the eastward dispersal of Yamnaya ancestry and the scenarios under which admixture occurred when they first met the populations of Inner Asia.”

Looking at the mummies’ teeth revealed milk proteins, indicating that the population may have been pastoral dairy farmers. But they used millet from East Asia and medicinal plants from Central Asia, indicating that though there was not a mix of genes, there certainly was a sharing of goods across cultures.

Excavation of burial M75 at the Xiaohe cemetery.

“At present, we are unable to determine when precisely the Xiaohe groups acquired their distinctive cultural elements,” said Christina Warinner, co-author of the paper and an anthropologist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“It appears that they had already learned to farm, herd, and dairy before moving into the Tarim Basin because we found that the founding population was already consuming dairy products. It is unknown where they lived before moving into the Tarim Basin, but their genetic profile and those of their admixed neighbours suggests that they were local to the general region.”

Though the Tarim Basin individuals were not genetically diverse, they were “culturally cosmopolitan,” Warinner said in an email to Gizmodo. They had fantastically woven clothing, beads and other decorative wares, and diversity of foodstuffs.

“Our findings of the Tarim mummies have raised numerous questions about the nature of Bronze Age population contact, trade, and interaction,” Warinner said. “We don’t have the answers yet, but we hope that continued archaeological research on the Xiaohe archaeological culture will begin to shed light on these topics.”

Some of the individuals look as if they died recently, with hair still on their heads, dyed clothing, and cashmere hats. And yet, it’s their genetic codes, invisible to the eye, that are revealing so much more about who these people were.

WORLD

Evidence of Prehistoric Humans Found on the Falkland Islands

Evidence of Prehistoric Humans Found on the Falkland Islands

The enigmatic, now-extinct Falkland Islands wolf had human visitors on the remote archipelago up to 1,070 years ago. The find suggests that Indigenous people could have originally brought the foxlike creatures, also known as the warrah, to the islands.

Scientists have debated how the Falkland Islands wolf (illustrated) first journeyed to the remote archipelago. Indigenous people arrived on the Falkland Islands up to 1,070 years ago, raising the possibility that the animal hitchhiked with humans, a new study finds.

Scientists have debated how the islands’ only land mammal journeyed to the region: by a long-ago land bridge or with people. But little evidence of a human presence before Europeans arrived in 1690 had been found.

Now, traces of ancient fires and hunting show that Indigenous people arrived on the Falkland Islands centuries prior to Europeans, researchers report October 27 in Science Advances.

The Yaghan people — historically fire-wielding seafarers who kept foxes as companions — may have been the visitors.

Abrupt spikes in charcoal levels in sediments offer “telltale signs of human arrival” from 1,070 to 620 years ago on New Island, says Kit Hamley, a paleoecologist and archaeologist at the University of Maine in Orono.

Those spikes mirror later traces of Europeans’ fires around 250 years ago.

And massive piles of sea lion and penguin bones imply hunting by humans from 745 to 600 years ago, Hamley says. Before being hunted to extinction by Europeans in 1875, the Falkland Islands wolf (Dusicyon australis) also consumed marine predators such as sea lions and penguins, nitrogen levels in two warrah bones and one tooth show.  

Evidence of Prehistoric Humans Found on the Falkland Islands
A tooth and bones from a now-extinct Falkland Islands wolf (skull shown) revealed clues about the animal’s diet. Nitrogen levels show that the foxlike creature consumed seals and penguins.

The researchers newly dated that tooth and found it to be from 3,860 years ago. That vastly predates the fire-and-bone-pile evidence, leaving a gap “between when the warrah arrives, and when we can definitively say people were there,” Hamley says.

But Indigenous people’s presence up to 1,070 years ago raises new questions about whether the warrah hitchhiked there with earlier human visitors, Hamley says.

Next, Hamley and colleagues plan to partner with the few remaining Yaghan communities in Tierra del Fuego in Argentina to piece together “parts of the story that have been lost or taken away.”

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

Industrial-Sized Tannery Detected at Medieval Abbey in England

Industrial-Sized Tannery Detected at Medieval Abbey in England

It is Britain’s biggest and most famous monastic ruin and one that conjures up bucolic images of peace, reflection and very little noise apart, perhaps, from the occasional waft of Gregorian chanting.

In reality, archaeologists have revealed, Fountains Abbey near Ripon was as busy, noisy and industrialised as anywhere in 12th- and 13th-century Britain.

The National Trust has announced the discovery of the foundations of a medieval tannery at the abbey, part of a world heritage site. Experts were astonished.

The purpose of a long, bowling alley-type extension close to the River Skell had long puzzled archaeologists.

This really is a wonderful discovery, it is very important,” said Mark Newman, a trust archaeologist.

Fountains are probably the most investigated Cistercian abbey in Britain, “so when you discover a major building on this scale, that was completely unknown … you don’t get many of those in a career.

Industrial-Sized Tannery Detected at Medieval Abbey in England
Radar image highlighting the two substantial buildings found by the bank of the River Skell.

Newman said many assumed there was nothing more to be discovered about Fountains but one puzzle had always been what a long, bowling alley-type extension, close to the River Skell, was used for.

Ground-penetrating radar has made discoveries of previously unknown monastic buildings, including one 16 metres wide and 32 metres long. They have lined pits and tanks around them. These and the close proximity to water have led to the firm conclusion that it is the remains of a tannery, a place for producing materials for clothing, belts, bedding and book bindings.

It is the scale of the tannery and how close it is to the monks that have further surprised archaeologists. “A tannery of this size, spanning such a large area of the site, reveals an operation on an industrial scale,” said Newman.

Illustration of man sorting skins after drying.

A medieval tannery was a horrible place. Animal skins and hides would first have hooves and horns removed before they were washed to remove dung, dirt and blood. Fat, hair and flesh were then removed, usually by being submerged into a lime or urine solution and being scraped with knives.

Newman said the noise, activity and stench of tanneries had led to an assumption it would be sited much further away from monks and their worship. “We see now that the tannery was much closer and a far cry from the idea of a quiet, tranquil abbey community,” he said.

Newman said people would have been astonished at the number of people who lived and worked so industriously at Fountains, with Cistercian monks being “the first ones to apply themselves to these industrial scales of living and managing the landscape”.

He said the findings also showed the importance of lay brothers at the site. Lay brothers were not literate, like the monks, and were often recruited to do more physical jobs. That left monks more time to study, pray and worship.

The lay brothers, considered “separate but equal” to monks, were provided with weatherproof animal skin capes for outdoor work and slept under sheepskins. “Fountains recruited hundreds of lay brothers in its early decades, all of whom needed to be equipped this way,” said Newman. “This tannery provided the means for that.”

He said though he was taken aback by the scale of the operations that had been discovered, it all made sense. The monks at Fountains were, by necessity, “pioneering farmers and land managers on an industrial scale”.

The radar research was carried out with partners including the University of Bradford. Chris Gaffney, a professor of archaeological sciences, said the technology provided “stunning, unexpected and intriguing glimpses” into life at the abbey.

The trust said it was the largest tannery discovered at a monastic site in Britain and was being seen as a kind of “missing link” in the history of the abbey, which operated from the early 12th century to 1539 and the dissolution of the monasteries.

“It is so easy with a place like Fountains to think this is exactly as the monks saw it,” said Newman. “What we are finding is that there is a whole unrecognised history.”

GUATEMALA, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

A private collector is returning a Mayan artefact to Guatemala

A private collector is returning a Mayan artefact to Guatemala

A private collector has returned a Mayan artefact to Guatemala after it was initially slated for auction in 2019. The stone fragment depicts a bird headdress belonging to an ancient ruler of Piedras Negras, the capital of a Mayan kingdom that flourished between the 4th century BC and 9th century AD and is located in what’s now northwestern Guatemala.

A private collector is returning a Mayan artefact to Guatemala
The artefact disappeared from the Mayan site of Piedras Negras in the 1960s

Hundreds of Mayan artefacts were discovered along train construction routes in Mexico.

The object was likely looted from a Mayan archaeological site in the 1960s and eventually ended up in the hands of a prominent Los Angeles art dealer, the Los Angeles Times reported.

From there, it was bought by another art dealer in Paris and ultimately acquired by private collectors Manichak and Jean Aurance, according to the newspaper. Then in 2019, it was included as part of an auction of pre-Columbian artefacts in Paris, estimated to fetch $27,000 to $39,000.

Guatemala and Mexico objected to some of the items in the auction being put up for sale, arguing that they had been stolen and demanding their return.

Though the auction continued mostly as planned, the carving of the bird headdress was withdrawn from the sale after Guatemala was able to prove its provenance with drawings and pictures dating back to its discovery in 1899, a spokesperson for UNESCO wrote in an email to CNN.

Negotiations took place between Guatemala, the French government, UNESCO and the private collector, the spokesperson said, and the collector ultimately decided to return the artefact to Guatemala. On Monday, UNESCO held a ceremony to mark the return.

The artefact disappeared from the Mayan site of Piedras Negras in the 1960s

“The voluntary handover of this fragment of a Mayan stela to its homeland in Guatemala showcases the evolution of the international environment in favour of the return of emblematic cultural objects and artefacts to their homelands under UNESCO’s guidance over the last 50 years,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.

“It also shows the importance of the UNESCO 1970 Convention in fighting the illicit trafficking of cultural objects. This success story has been possible thanks to international cooperation and a private collector’s goodwill; it is a model for others to follow.”

The artefact will soon be sent to the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Guatemala City where visitors will be able to view it and learn about its history, according to UNESCO.

The stone carving’s return to Guatemala comes at a time of wider reckoning for museums, galleries and other institutions.

In recent years, several such institutions have taken steps to repatriate historical objects to their places of origin — Cambridge University is set to return a Benin bronze looted during British colonial rule to Nigeria this week, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced earlier this year it was returning three treasures of African art to Nigeria as well.

Meanwhile, the pressure on museums continues to mount — Cambodia recently began pushing the Met to review the provenance of a number of items, asserting that they were looted from the country’s ancient sites during decades of war and tumult.

EUROPE, SLOVAKIA, WORLD

Man finds ancient grave and remains while digging the foundation for the garage

Man finds ancient grave and remains while digging foundation for garage

The Slovak Spectator reports that a man digging a foundation for a new garage in western Slovakia alerted the authorities when he discovered human remains. Further investigation revealed a grave containing the bones of two women.

Man finds ancient grave and remains while digging foundation for garage
A grave containing two female skeletons was uncovered by archaeologists in the town of Gbely, Trnava Region, in early October 2021.

A man was digging the foundations for his new garage in the town of Gbely, western Slovakia when he discovered a human skull. He immediately reported it to the police.

Upon further inspection, the police and an anthropologist came across another skull. They discovered that the remains were older than half a century so they informed the Regional Monuments Board (KPÚ) Trnava about the discovery in early October.

The area in the town of Gbely where two female skeletons were uncovered.

Archaeologists and other experts have dated the discovered grave, using radiocarbon analysis, to 421-541 CE. This period is also known as the Migration Period.

Pathological change

They found two women, aged 20-25 and 25-40, in the grave. Both were placed in an upright position on their backs with their heads facing west and their feet pointed east.

“An interesting pathological change was found on one skeleton,” said the KPÚ archaeologist Matúš Sládok. “The coccyx stood significantly asymmetrically.”

He added that this may be due to a post-traumatic condition that results in the coccyx growing into the sacrum following a strong hit during a fall, for example.

Grave robbery

In the Migration Period, the Quadi, Huns, Heruli, Lombards, and perhaps other tribes such as the Goths and Rugians inhabited the territory of what is now western Slovakia.

Sládok noted that a few graves with several individuals buried in each of them were found in the past and were attributed to the Lombards. Some of these known burial sites in western Slovakia are located in Devínska Nová Ves, Rusovce, Šamorín, and Gáň.

The Lombards lived in the area in the years 488-560/568, which is why experts think the recently uncovered grave was dug in the years 488-541.

READ ALSO: IN 1980, WHILE CLEANING OUT HER GARAGE, A WOMAN FOUND THE HIDDEN MUMMIES

Moreover, during the Migration Period, grave robbery was common, and the absence of any personal objects found in the Gbely grave, including jewellery, suggests this grave was robbed too, the archaeologist said, further supporting his argument by noting that the upper part of one skeleton was damaged.

Housing estate

This recent discovery is the first of its kind in Gbely, and experts are convinced there are more graves to be uncovered as human bones were found in several places on the plot. Bones had been found in the area before, but they were not archaeologically recorded.

“The findings of daub and ceramic shards from vessels from different periods of prehistory and Roman times suggest there was also a housing estate or several housing estates in the locality,” added Sládok.

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

Blackened mummy cake found intact 79 years after WWII air raid

Blackened mummy cake found intact 79 years after WWII air raid

A cake baked 79 years ago has been found in the Old Town district of the city of Lübeck, which is located near the coast of northern Germany, according to a Live Science report.

Blackened mummy cake found intact 79 years after WWII air raid
A 79-year-old nutcake lies on a table in the workshop of the Department of Archaeology for the Hanseatic City of Lübeck Historic Monuments Protection Authority.

Though the charred delicacy hasn’t been edible for a very, very long time, it’s still recognizable as a cake, representatives of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck said in a statement.

The cake’s overall shape, nut fillings, details in the sugar icing decorations and even its wax-paper wrappings remained intact after the pastry was burned into a crisp, cake-shaped charcoal briquette during a World War II air raid.

Archaeologists have previously discovered the burnt remains of long-ago meals, but they rarely find food that’s a whole and well-preserved as this cake was, according to the statement. It offers a glimpse into a dark moment in Germany’s history and illuminates the fragility of life during wartime, Lübeck representatives said. 

On the night of March 28, 1942 (and into the early morning hours of March 29), the British Royal Air Force bombed Lübeck, a historic city and a nonmilitary target, in retaliation for the Nazi blitz of Coventry, England, in 1940, said Dirk Rieger, head of the Department of Archaeology for the Hanseatic City of Lübeck Historic Monuments Protection Authority.

The nut-filled cake had recently been unwrapped when the bombs landed, and all of the building’s stories collapsed into the cellar, Rieger told Live Science. Somehow, the cake escaped being crushed, and the intense heat of the flames rapidly scorched and carbonized the confection amid the wreckage.

Founded in 1143, Lübeck is one of the best-preserved medieval urban sites in northern Europe, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which added Lübeck to its World Heritage List of protected sites in 1987.

From 1230 until 1535, Lübeck — a port city on the Baltic Sea — served as the capital of an international merchants’ organization known as the Hanseatic League, and much of the city’s extraordinary medieval architecture remains intact to this day, UNESCO says.

Artefacts and other remains deep underneath the buildings, in Lübeck’s sediments, are also exceptionally well preserved, Rieger said. 

Restorer Sylvia Morgenstern cleans the preserved nutcake with a brush and vacuum cleaner.

“The subsoil is made of clay, so the preservation for organic material is awesome,” he explained. “You dig down like 7 meters [23 feet], and you are in the 1100s.

We have every single feature of urban and mercantile activity throughout eight or nine centuries, which is absolutely unique in the way it’s been preserved.” 

To date, more than 4 million objects have been recovered from excavations around Lübeck — “everything from tiny children’s shoes to whole medieval ships,” Rieger said. 

Workers found the cake in April during infrastructure work in Lübeck’s Old Town district, “close to the town hall and the main market area,” Rieger said. In the ruined parts of the city that the British had bombed, “the town left the cellars within the soil and built new houses on top of them,” he said. Because of Lübeck’s important historic status, archaeologists supervise all of the city’s construction work.

Experts were already present when the workers opened the cellar and discovered the blackened cake, along with plates, knives, spoons and vinyl records that included Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” according to the statement.

Scientists brought the cake to the city’s restoration laboratory, where conservators carefully cleaned it with delicate picks, brushes and vacuums, and then collected samples to identify the nutty filling, Rieger said. But their work to preserve the rare carbonized confection has just begun.

Bombs that the British Royal Air Force dropped on Lübeck contained incendiary chemicals, such as phosphorus, and the archaeologists need to make sure that there are no traces of such materials on the cake that could react when exposed to chemicals used in the preservation of valuable artefacts.

“This cake is like a window into 80 years ago,” Rieger said, and the view is bittersweet. When the cake is finally ready for public display and people can peer through that window, “they will hopefully see not only the destruction of the war but also the joy that people had,” he added.

“Because this was a family celebration, they listened to music, they wanted to have a nice cup of tea, they wanted to have this cake. It’s a very intimate situation that was immediately destroyed by this war.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

Archaeologists Map Nearly 500 Mesoamerican Sites and See Distinct Design Patterns

Archaeologists Map Nearly 500 Mesoamerican Sites and See Distinct Design Patterns

Gizmodo reports that lidar technology was used to create 3-D maps of some 30,000 square miles of Mexico, revealing more than 475 archaeological sites dating from 1400 B.C. to A.D. 1000.

A lidar image of the sites of San Lorenzo (left) and Aguada Fénix (right) show striking similarities, with a long rectangular platform and 20 edge platforms.

The 478 sites included in the new research were inhabited from around 1400 BCE to 1000 CE, and the way they were constructed appears to be linked to cosmologies important to the communities that lived there.

Settlements that align with nearby mountain peaks or the Sun’s arc across the sky suggest there may have been symbolic importance to the orientation of the architecture.

The team categorized the sites into five distinct types of architectural arrangements, which they think might correspond to different time periods and indicate more egalitarian societies.

All the sites had rectangular or square features, which the archaeologists say may have been inspired by the famous Olmec site of San Lorenzo, which had a central rectangular space that was likely used as a public plaza. The team’s survey and analysis were published today in Nature Human Behavior.

“The main point of this study is the discovery of nearly 500 standardized complexes across a broad area, many of them having rectangular shapes,” wrote lead author Takeshi Inomata, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to Gizmodo. “Until three years ago, we had no idea about the presence of such complexes. They really force us to rethink what was happening during this period.

The team used an aerial scanning technology called lidar to map hidden structures at these sites. With lidar, archaeologists can get precision measurements of ground elevation change, even through dense tree coverage, thanks to lasers that penetrate the surface and then bounce back to a detector.

Lidar is “revolutionary for archaeology,” Robert Rosensweig, an archaeologist at the University of Albany-SUNY who didn’t work on the recent paper, wrote in an accompanying News & Views article for Nature

“The study foreshadows the future for archaeology as lidar reveals ancient architecture at an unprecedented scale that will reach into remote and heavily vegetated regions the world over,” Rosensweig added.

In 2020, Inomata and his colleagues reported their discovery of the monumental site of Aguada Fénix using lidar imaging. Now, they’ve looked at 2,000 years of architecture in the region through aerial lidar surveys.

A lidar-based illustration of the site Buenavista, which appears to be aligned with the sunrise on certain days of the year.

The people who designed these settlements are broadly called the Olmec and Maya, though there are better, more specific names for communities that fall under those labels, such as the Chontal-speaking residents of eastern Tabasco and the Zoke-speaking people of western Tabasco and Veracruz.

The Olmec site maps are particularly handy; the centre of San Lorenzo is the oldest capital in the area (it’s the home of those colossal heads you might be familiar with), and as such, archaeologists believe it may have set the standard for how to layout a settlement.

But San Lorenzo was well known already; part of the value of this new research is highlighting the structures of smaller settlements. “Although this part of Mexico is fairly open and populated, most of those sites were not known before,” Inomata added. “They were literally hiding in plain sight.”

Together, the nearly 500 sites give archaeologists a sense of how communities in the area are organized. Inomata said the research impacts are two-fold: One, archaeologists now have a better idea as to the development of monumental building projects in the region over time. Two, based on the site layouts, it appears that communities didn’t have a highly stratified social hierarchy.

READ ALSO: LIDAR REVEALS NETWORK OF ANCIENT VILLAGES IN BRAZIL’S RAINFOREST

“Traditionally, archaeologists thought large constructions were done by hierarchical societies with elites and rulers,” Inomata said. “But we now see that those large and standardized spaces could be built by people without pronounced inequality.” That determination is in part based on the lack of large permanent residences at many of the sites.

The archaeological team’s next steps are to visit the sites in person, to verify that the patterns represented from the air are the reality on the ground. That’s an extremely important step, as evidenced by a situation in 2016 in which a teenager thought he found a lost city in satellite imagery, only for archaeologists to disagree, saying it was probably a fallow maize field.

So far, only about 20% of the sites the team surveyed have been studied on the ground. While those ground survey results are promising, more data needs to be collected for researchers to know the extent of architectural similarities and differences in the region.