Bronze Age cemetery discovered in West Bank village – Middle East Monitor
On April 6, the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery of a prehistoric cemetery dating back to the Bronze Age in the Hindaza region near Bethlehem.
The Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery of a Bronze Age cemetery in Hindaza area, east of the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem on 6 April 2020
IMAN AT-TITI Director of the Antiquities Department of the Governorate of Bethlehem “The discovery of this cemetery is one of the most important in this region.
During the Bronze Age, some accessories were buried together with the deceased, in the belief that they could be used in the afterlife.
The metal that was commonly used at that time was bronze. We can see here some of the daggers and metal weapons that were commonly used in that period.
The findings also include a number of jars, and large and small bowls.”
The team of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has carefully documented all the archaeological materials found in the cemetery, including jars, daggers and bones, which will increase the scientific and historical heritage of this region.
Regarding the excavation methods used and the material found, Iman At-Titi, director of the Department of Antiquities of the Governorate of Bethlehem, explains IMAN AT-TITI Director of the Antiquities Department of the Governorate of Bethlehem.
“As archaeologists, we study more than one material… like ceramics, for example.
Pottery in the Bronze Age has several particular characteristics, related to the components of the mixture or the method of manufacture, or even its origin.
According to the data available to us, we can estimate the dating of ceramics.
There are materials for which we can also use methods such as Carbon 14, which is used to determine the archaeological age of ancient objects.”
The discovery of this Bronze Age cemetery is an important archaeological discovery, which brings to light a very ancient period in the history of the Region.
The mystery of unique 2,100-year-old human clay head – with a ram’s skull inside
According to a report in The Siberian Times, a team of researchers led by Natalia Polosmak of the Russian Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography and Konstantin Kuper of the Institute of Nuclear Physics used fluoroscopy to examine a head-shaped sculpture crafted by the Tagar culture more than 2,000 years ago.
The clay head, which resembles a young man, was discovered among about 15 sets of cremated human remains in a Shestakovsky burial mound in eastern Siberia in 1968. X-rays made of the artifact at the time revealed a small skull within the sculpture.
The Martynov brothers noted in 1971 that “there are skull bones and a narrow hollow space which, however, does not correspond to the inner size of the human skull but is much smaller,’ Then – and later – opening the clay head was deemed impossible since it would destroy this ancient relic.
‘It was suggested that there was a human skull inside. It was of course quite surprising to see instead a sheep’s skull.’
Four decades later scientists returned to this man’s mystery from the Tagar culture, renowned for his elaborate funeral rites, e.g. the use of large pit crypts containing some 200 bodies which were set ablaze. As scientist Dr. Elga Vadetskaya had observed, the heads of the dead were covered in clay, moulding a new face on the skull, and often covering the clay face with gypsum. So the expectation was – in deploying new technology on the man’s death mask – that the bones inside, though small fragments, would be human.
But they were not.
The research was led by Professor Natalya Polosmak, from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, and Dr. Konstantin Kuper, of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, both in Novosibirsk, and part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The man ‘could have got lost in the taiga, drowned, or disappeared in alien lands’.
‘I had been working with Natalya Polosmak on other research, and she suggested checking this head because they could not simply look inside – and were puzzled,’ explained Dr. Kuper. ‘It was suggested that there was a human skull inside. It was of course quite surprising to see instead a sheep’s skull.’
But…why?
What made these ancient people fill human remains with a ram’s remains?
In the article for the magazine Science First Hand Professor Polosmak offers two options but also acknowledges that ‘as this is the only such case so far, any explanations of this phenomenon will undoubtedly contain, alongside the elements of uniqueness, elements of chance’. She believes the Tagar people ‘may have buried in this extraordinary manner a man whose body had not been found’.
Professor Anatoly Martynov unearthed the head in 1968 in Khakassia.
She surmises that the man ‘could have got lost in the taiga, drowned, or disappeared in alien lands’. For this reason, he was ‘replaced with his double – the animal in which his soul was embodied’ and in this was sent to the afterlife alongside the remains of his fellow humans.
‘This must have been the only way to ensure the after-death life of a person who had not returned home.
‘Archaeologists know a number of such burials, referred to as cenotaphs, which have no human remains but may contain a symbolic replacement. As the latter, an animal could have been used.’ Her other theory for the ‘false burial’ is that it may have been done to give the man ‘a chance to have a fresh start, a new life in a new status.
Clay head prepared for fluoroscopy at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, SB RAS.
‘Instead of a living man whose death was staged for some reason, an animal – a sheep in human disguise – was offered.’
One thing is clear: for ancient people the ram had a great significance.
‘What does the sheep’s skull hidden under the clay covers depicting a man’s face tell us? What is it, an accident? Or was the animal the main hero of ancient history?
‘The latter hypothesis seems justified. A ram (sheep) is among the most worshipped animals of old times. Initially, the Egyptian god Khnum was depicted as a ram (later, as a man with the head of a ram).’
Remains of 200 mummified bodies found in one of the Tagar burial mounds at Belaya Gora.
A third version has been proposed by Dr. Vadetskaya in her book ‘The Ancient Yenisei Masks from Siberia’ after studying elaborate burial rites of ancient people during this Tesinsk period. Her work was based on the research of other archaeologists but also had fascinating input from forensic experts. She believed the burial rite had two stages – the first of which was putting the dead body in a ‘stone box’ which then went into a shallow grave or under a pile of stones for several years. The main goal was partial mummification – the skin and tissues decomposed, but tendons and the spinal cord persisted.
Then the skeleton was taken away intact and was tied by small branches. The skull was trepanned and the rest of the brain was removed. Then the skeleton was turned into a kind of ‘doll’ – it was wrapped around with grass and sheathed with pieces of leather and birch bark. Then, according to Dr. Vadetskaya, they reconstructed ‘the face’ on the skull. The nose hole, eyes socket, and mouth were filled with clay, then the clay was put onto the skull and the ‘face’ was moulded though without necessarily much facial resemblance to the deceased.
Often this clay face was covered with a thin layer of gypsum and painted with ornaments. She suspected that these masked mummies went back to their families pending their second, bigger funeral. This might have been for some years: there is evidence that gypsum was repaired and repainted.
Faces molded on the skulls were often covered with a thin gypsum layer painted with ornaments.
She wrote: ‘For some mummies, the wait was too long. The decomposed, so only the heads were left to be buried. ‘In some cases, even the head did not survive. Then they had to recreate the whole image of the deceased one.’
She believed that this was the case with the mysterious human sheep skull. The ram remains were used to replace the real human skull of this ‘mummy doll’ lost or destroyed during the decades between the two funeral rites. According to Vadetskaya, a large pit was dug for these ‘Big’ funerals. A log house was erected and covered with birch bark and fabrics. Many such human remains were put inside, and the log house was with the remains of dead were ignited. The log house was partly burned down and often the roof collapsed. The pit-crypt burial was then covered with turf and earth and formed a mound.
In this particular case, there were relatively few human remains – no more than 15, yet in others, the number could rise into the hundreds.
So – there are three main theories.
Perhaps future scientists will gain access to more elaborate technology to examine this death mask and unlock more secrets about this extraordinary find.
Israeli Archaeologists Solve Mystery of Prehistoric Stone Balls
For any man-made spherical object of stone petrospheres or spheroids are two archeological terms. Such, mostly prehistoric objects, were found intricately carved and painted, indicating they were deemed important to ancient people as far back as two million years ago.
The balls of stone were discovered in East Africa and throughout Eurasia from the Middle East to China and India, but their purpose had baffled specialists, until now, that is.
Qesem cave ( “magic” cave in Hebrew) is a Lower Paleolithic archaeological site located 12 km (7.46 miles) east of Tel Aviv in Israel that was occupied by early humans between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Burned animal bones from Qesem Cave, Israel.
The evidence of selective game hunting, butchery, and transport of animals has been identified by archeologists back to the cave where meat is cooked and exchanged among the group, but until now a curious collection of petrospheres, which perplexed archaeologists, until now.
In a new study published in PLOS ONE last week, an international team of archeologists led by an archaeologist at the University of Tel Aviv, Ella Assaf, suggesting these enigmatic artifacts were used to break the bones of large animals so that the nutritious marrow could be harvested from within.
This early butchering technique underlines how an “elegant technological solution” allowed hominins to increase their calorific intake over hundreds of thousands of years. This, in turn, helped to develop diverse societies.
According to a report in Haaretz, it wasn’t just the spheres’ “purpose” that remained obscure, but their presence in the cave was considered “anachronistic” (from an alternative time period) because similar spherical artifacts are normally found at much older sites.
The team of researchers analyzed 30 spherical stone artifacts recovered from Qesem Cave in the year 2000. Since then Tel Aviv University archaeologists Avi Gopher and Ran Barkai have uncovered what the new paper describes as “a treasure trove,” including hundreds of thousands of flint tools and animal bones, as well as 13 hominin teeth.
Example of ancient hominin teeth from the Qesem Cave, Israel.
A Magical Cave of Archaeological Mysteries
It is currently unknown who the cave dwellers were, or where they had come from, but these particular distant ancestors of ours were “relatively ahead of their time” going by these stone bone smashing tools.
An archaeologist uses a reproduction of a shaped ball to crack open an animal bone
However, a faction of the world’s archaeologists will be reading this article with more than a modicum of skepticism, for it was this very cave and one of the archaeologists that attracted a lot of negative media attention in December 2010 when reports suggested Israeli and Spanish archaeologists had found “the earliest evidence yet of modern humans.”
However, according to Nature, the whole story received a backlash from the blogosphere that quickly pointed out how the media coverage had inaccurately reflected the details of the scientific report.
Where this “rewriting of the history of human evolution” went wrong was that most of the initial reports were based on a Tel Aviv University press release about a paper published in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
It was written by Israeli and Spanish scientists and detailed the discovery in Qesem Cave, of eight teeth dating to between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago.
Were these teeth among the oldest “significant early human remains” found anywhere in southwest Asia, the scientists asked. And if they were indeed Homo sapiens teeth, then modern humans were living in the Levant as early as 400,000 years ago, when most archaeologists maintain we were still hunting in Africa.
Archaeological Controversy at the Magic Cave
The specific wording of the original paper was scientifically safe and the scientists admitted that the teeth “cannot be conclusively identified as belonging to a particular species of human, whether Homo sapiens – the first modern humans – Neanderthals, or other humans.”
But the wording of the paper’s press release, and many of the subsequent articles, leaned on the eye-grabbing headline idea that Homo sapiens might have lived in the Levant almost half a million years ago, challenging mainstream archaeology and anthropology.
Science bloggers Carl Zimmer and Brian Switek instantly responded to the articles promoting this revolutionary history, which they described as “hype”, and they pointed out to the public all the discrepancies between the original paper and the media coverage, which was a downright horrific show of Fake News.
However, when Nature spoke to archaeologist Avi Gopher from Tel Aviv University, who co-authored the paper, and asked him if the teeth he found in Qesem Cave “really provide evidence that Homo sapiens did not evolve in Africa;” instead of rejecting the idea, he said “We don’t know. What I can say is that they definitely leave all options open.”
Scientists Reveal a Perfectly Preserved 18,000-year-old Puppy Discovered Frozen in Russia
An ancient dog finds in Russia in the Far East that he lived a glorious eighteen thousand years ago. It was found last year in a frozen mud near the city of Yakutsk in Siberia and has been given the affectionate name of “Dogor”.
Researchers carefully cleaned the specimen to reveal it was still mostly covered in fur
More surprising is that it is unusually good with intact fur, skin, whiskers, and eyelashes. It might look just like a sleeping old dog to the casual viewer!
The Russian Wolfhound, also known as the Borzoi breed, is a special dog of tremendous speed, known for the rather remote appearance, associated with Russia.
A quick online search showed that in Russia other dogs mixed wolves with hundreds of massive beast dogs that have been domesticated by patient owners. The owners insist these dogs are half-wolf; whether they’ve been genetically proven to be so is another matter.
That is what scientists believe they have found buried deep in the ice in the Far East reaches of Siberia; an almost perfectly preserved specimen that even retains its fur.
As yet, experts have not determined whether the animal is dog or wolf, but that riddle, they say, is half the fun of the quest. One thing is for sure, it looks like a puppy and perhaps is an evolutionary cross between wolf and dog.
The prehistoric puppy’s teeth, nose, the fur are all incredibly intact.
A piece of the puppy’s bone was immediately shipped off to Stockholm’s Centre for Paleogenetics to determine just what scientists were looking at.
They have determined the animal is 18,000 years old and is preserved perfectly, thanks to the ice in which it was buried.
The pup still has its whiskers, eyelashes, and nose intact.
“We have now generated a nearly complete genome sequence from it and normally when you have two-fold coverage genome, which is what we have, you should be able to relatively easily say whether it’s a dog or a wolf, but we still can’t say, and that makes it even more interesting,” said Love Dalen, professor of evolutionary genetics at the centre.
Whatever the animal’s true ancestry turns out to be, the remains now have a name that applies in either case: Dogor, which is Yakutian for a friend.
Dogor remains are now kept at a private facility, the Northern World Museum. Museum director Nikolai Androsov said, at Dogor’s unveiling to the media, “this puppy has all its limbs…even whiskers.
The nose is visible. There are teeth. We can determine due to some data that it is male” he said at the presentation of Dogor at Yakutsk’s famed Mammoth Museum, which specializes in ancient remains and specimens.
How the prehistoric puppy perished is so far unknown, although scientists do know he was just eight weeks old. Researchers will no doubt continue testing to learn all they can about the fascinating creature.
Russia’s the Far East has provided many incredible finds and animal remains for scientists who study ancient animals in recent years.
Buried deep within Siberia’s permafrost, remains of woolly mammoths, canines and other prehistoric animals are being discovered whenever the ice melts. Mammoth tusk hunters are oftentimes the ones who discover them.
Who knows? One day Dogor the prehistoric puppy may become part of a Russian children’s story, or the basis of a movie. He has already joined other furry, famous canines in getting worldwide attention.
Massive Stones Unearthed in Shogun’s Garden in Central Japan
Eight massive stones, including one that weighs nearly ten tons, have been unearthed in the garden at Muromachi-dono, the so-called Flower Palace built by the Ashikaga Shogunate in A.D. 1381.
A massive stone is unearthed in the garden of the former residence of the Ashikaga Shogunate during the Muromachi Period (1336-1573).
The largest stone is nearly 3 meters long and one of eight, seven of which are situated around the site of a pond in the former residence of the Ashikaga Shogunate.
On April 10 the Kyoto City Center for Archeological Research announced the findings. The Kyoto site of the Kamigyo Ward is called Muromachi-dono, also known as “Hana no Gosho” (Flower Palace).
The unearthed stones, which are unusually huge compared with those found at other garden sites of ruling elites, were undoubtedly intended to show off the great power wielded by the shogun and his family, Expert Said.
In 1381 the complex was completed at the request of the Third Shogun of Ashikaga Shogunate, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), and used as his and his successors’ residence and headquarters.
The site is estimated to have spanned around 7,600 tsubo, or about half the size of the massive Tokyo Dome in the capital’s Bunkyo Ward. One tsubo is equivalent to about 3.3 square meters.
The residence is also depicted in “Uesugi Rakuchu-Rakugai Zu” (Scenes in and Around the Capital), a national treasure. Kyoto in those days was the capital of Japan.
The eight stones were found in the southeastern part of the site and are deemed an especially important discovery.
They measure between 95 centimeters and 2.7 meters. Seven of them were situated close to each other.
The institute believes the stones were placed during the rule of the eighth Muromachi shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-1490), who also involved in constructing Kyoto’s fabulous Ginkakuji Temple (Silver Pavilion), based on an analysis of earthenware excavated from stratum in which they lay.
The residence is believed to have comprised a group of buildings in the north and a garden that centers around a pond in the south.
During the excavation, researchers also found that the pond stretched at least 45 meters north to south and about 60 meters east to west.
“Ashikaga Yoshimasa until now hadn’t been held in particularly high regard for his political skills because he triggered the Onin War (1467-1477), which was followed by the Warring States period,” said Hisao Suzuki, a professor of archaeology and history of gardens at Kyoto Sangyo University.
“This discovery shows that he excelled at fostering culture and engineering technology.”
The excavation was carried out from January through April 9 ahead of the construction of a building.
Due to the new coronavirus outbreak, the excavation site will be backfilled, and no on-site briefing session for the public will be held.
Probable Roman shipwrecks unearthed at a Serbian coal mine
Uryadovy Courier reported that coal miners in Serbia recently dug up an unexpected surprise: three probable Roman-era ships, buried in the mud of an ancient riverbed for at least 1,300 years.
The largest is a flat-bottomed river vessel 15 meters long, which seems to have been built with Roman techniques. Two smaller boats, each carved out from a single tree trunk, match ancient descriptions of dugout boats used by Slavic groups to row across the Danube River and attack the Roman frontier.
The Kostolac surface mine lies near the ancient Roman city of Viminacium, once a provincial capital and the base for a squadron of Roman warships on the Danube River.
When the Roman Empire ruled most of Southern Europe, the Danube or one of its larger branches flowed across the land now occupied by the mine.
The three ships lay atop a 15-meter- (49-foot-) deep layer of gravel, buried under seven meters (23 feet) of silt and clay, which preserved them for centuries in remarkably good condition—or did until the miners’ earthmoving equipment dug into the steep slope to excavate for the mine.
“The [largest] ship was seriously damaged by the mining equipment,” archaeologist Miomir Korac, director of the Archaeological Institute and head of the Viminacium Science Project, told Ars in an email. “Approximately 35 percent to 40 percent of the ship was damaged.
But the archaeological team collected all the parts, and we should be able to reconstruct it almost in full.” With any luck, that reconstruction will help archaeologists understand when the three ships were built and how they came to rest in the riverbed.
Social distancing makes it hard to get a date
The large ship had a single deck with at least six pairs of oars, along with fittings for a type of triangular sail called a lateen sail. It would have carried a crew of 30 to 35 sailors, and apparently it had a lengthy career: traces of repairs to the hull suggest a ship with some miles under it. Iron nails and other iron fittings held the ship’s timbers and planks together, and they’ve survived for centuries thanks to the silt and clay that sealed the ship away from oxygen and microbes.
By contrast, the dugout longboats were much simpler craft. Korac described them as “rudimentary,” although one had carved decorations on its hull.
Although elements of the largest ship’s construction are Roman, Korac says those same shipbuilding techniques may also have been used by later Byzantine or medieval shipwrights. Without radiocarbon dating or geological analysis of the sediment layers at the site, it’s impossible to be entirely sure when the ships were built. Korac and his colleagues have sent wood samples from preserved oak trees buried nearby to a lab for analysis, but the COVID-19 pandemic has held everything up.
“Coronavirus is setting all actions now,” he told Ars.
But the odds are in favor of the Kostolac ship being Roman in origin. Historical documents don’t mention any ports or other navigation infrastructure in the area after Viminacium fell to invading groups in the 600s CE. If that’s the case, then these three ships, wrecked together in the former bed of the Danube, may record a snapshot of either commerce or conflict on the Roman frontier.
Fight, flight, or founder?
Given the site’s proximity to the Roman naval base at Viminacium, it’s tempting to imagine a battle on the Danube between a Roman warship and attacking Slavic fighters in dugout longboats. Historical sources don’t mention any river battles near Kostolac, but they do mention a couple of battles further upriver, near the Roman ports of Singidunum and Sirmium.
But while there’s no evidence to rule out the idea of dueling river warships in a fight to the death, there’s no evidence pointing to a battle, either. None of the vessels has any trace of fire or other combat damage, and nothing about the largest ship conclusively identifies it as a warship rather than an ordinary river transport. The ship’s crew left no personal belongings or artifacts aboard; there’s just the ship and its fittings, beautifully preserved but perfectly empty.
“The lack of finds prevents us from identifying the boat without further analyses,” Korac told Ars.
On the other hand, the dugout longboats, called monoxylons, were something like landing craft. “A monoxylon is not a combat ship. It is just a way to cross the river and invade on land,” Korac told Ars. “Facing larger ships, monoxylons could be easily defeated, as it is testified in sources from [the] 6th century mentioning a Roman fleet from Singidunum repelling barbarian attacks on the Roman Empire.”
Korac suggested one possible scenario for the shipwrecks: “The ships were either abandoned or evacuated. They did not sink suddenly with cargo,” he told Ars. “If these happened during the barbarian invasion and withdrawal of Roman troops, the ship could be abandoned and sunken in order not to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
For now, further excavations and analysis are on hold, but all three shipwrecks have been relocated to the nearby archaeological park.
The naturally Mummified remains of a Government official from the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) was Unearthed during Construction in central China Henan Province
A carefully conserved Chinese mummy, found in a tomb that is 300 years old, was almost instantly destroyed once archaeologists opened the coffin – it turned black within hours of the coffin being opened.
A well-preserved mummy identified as a government official from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912)—China’s last imperial dynasty before the creation of the Republic of China
The remains were uncovered on a construction site in a two-meter deep hole in the ground at Xiangcheng in Henan province, central China.
The individual was wearing extremely ornate clothing which indicates that he was a very high-ranking official from the early Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1912.
The Qing Dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China before the creation of the Republic of China and the present-day boundaries of China are largely based on the territory controlled by the Qing dynasty.
Scientists are perplexed as to how the individual’s remains had stayed so well preserved in the first place, as it was found alongside other tombs in which the remains were mere skeletons.
According to Dr. Lukas Nickel, a specialist in Chinese art and archaeology at SOAS, University of London, the preservation was not intentional but happened as a result of the natural conditions around the coffin, combined with the fact that the coffin was lacquered and covered in charcoal which would have prevented bacteria getting in.
“The Chinese did not do any treatment of the body to preserve it as known from ancient Egypt, for instance,” said Dr. Nickel. “They did, however, try to protect the body by putting it into massive coffins and stable tomb chambers.”
However, Professor Dong disagrees with this theory and believes that the man’s family used some materials to preserve the body.
In early China, the physical structure of the body was important to them and there was a belief that the dead person ‘lived on’ inside their tomb.
Once the tomb was opened, the natural process of decay started. Although the man’s face was almost normal when it was found, within hours the face, as well as the skin on the whole body, turned black and a foul smell emanating from the coffin.
“What is amazing is the way time seems to be catching up on the corpse, aging hundreds of years in a day,” said Historian Dong Hsiung.
Researchers are working quickly to preserve what is left of the quickly decaying mummy. It is hoped that by studying the individual, archaeologists will gain a better understanding of how the body had remained so well preserved for three centuries.
Turkish bombing damages 3,000-year-old temple in northern Syria
According to a monitoring group and the Syrian government, Turkish airstrikes against Kurdish forces have partially damaged the 3,000-year-old temple in northern Syria.
Cultural Heritage Initiatives of the American Schools of Oriental Research collaboration has been monitoring the destruction of monuments during the war in Syria.
The temple of Ain Dara, just south of Afrin, was “extremely damaged” according to the latest update of the group
The temple was built by a group of people known as the Aramaeans in the early first millennium B.C., after the collapse of the Hittite Empire, at a time when civilizations in the region were emerging from the Bronze Age and entering the Iron Age.
Ain Dara’s walls are made up of basalt orthostats — massive, slab-like architectural blocks — that are elaborately carved on the interior and exterior with geometric designs, floral patterns, mythical creatures and animals like lions.
The limestone pavings in the doorways between the temple’s chambers (the antecella and cella) were decorated with gigantic footprints, every 3 feet (0.9 meters) in length.
Some biblical scholars have argued that the temple’s layout and decorations resemble descriptions of King Solomon’s fabled temple in scripture.
Pictures of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights shows the archaeological area of Ain Dara, parts of which were destroyed by shelling of the Turkish warplanes on the area located south of the city of Afrin.
Photos taken after the airstrike show that a large portion of Ain Dara is now covered in rubble.
“The airstrike hit in the area of the doorway between the antecella and cella, causing heavy damage to the central and southeastern portions of the building,” ASOR representatives wrote in the update. “Many of the orthostats, which were already fragile due to decades of exposure to weathering, have been blasted into fragments.
“The limestone pavings of the antecella and cella have also been badly damaged,” the ASOR report added. “Metal fragments, including a piece that may be a stabilizing fin from the bomb or missile used in the attack, were recovered in the area. The satellite imagery reveals that the rest of the mound was unharmed by the airstrike.”
The independent Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is monitoring the war, also posted pictures of the site saying the ruins were “destroyed by shelling of the Turkish warplanes.”
The Syrian government’s antiquities department issued a call for international pressure on Turkey “to prevent the targeting of archaeological and cultural sites” in Afrin.
Turkey has led an assault on the Syrian Kurdish enclave Afrin, according to the Associated Press.
The city is held by the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish militia known as the YPG, which Turkey considers a terrorist group and a threat to its security; the United States has considered the YPG an ally in the fight against ISIS, Reuters reported.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 55 civilians had been killed since the offensive, dubbed operation “Olive Branch,” began, Agence France-Presse reported.
