Digital Reconstruction Depicts Face of “Jericho Skull”

A famous, 9,000-year-old human skull discovered near the biblical city of Jericho now has a new face, thanks to efforts by a multi-national team of researchers.

The so-called Jericho Skull — one of seven unearthed by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon in 1953 and currently housed in the British Museum in London — was found covered in plaster and with shells for eyes, apparently in an attempt to make it look more lifelike.

This prehistoric design was “the first facial reconstruction in the world,” Brazilian graphics expert Cícero Moraes, the leader of the project, told Live Science in an email.

In 2016, the British Museum released precise measurements of the Jericho Skull, based on a micro-computed tomography, or micro-CT — effectively a very detailed X-ray scan. The measurements were then used to create a virtual 3D model of the skull, and the model was used to make an initial facial approximation.

But the new approximation, published online on Dec. 22 in the journal OrtogOnline, uses different techniques to determine how the face may have looked, and goes further by artistically adding head and facial hair. 

Although the skull was initially thought to be female, later observations determined it belonged to a male individual, Moraes said, so the new approximation shows the face of a dark-haired man in his 30s or 40s. (Based on how a lesion on the skull has healed, archaeologists suggest he was “middle-aged” by today’s standards when he died.)

An unusual feature of the British Museum’s Jericho Skull is that the cranium, or upper skull, is significantly larger than average, Moraes said. 

In addition, the skull seems to have been artificially elongated when the man was very young, probably by tightly binding it; some of the other plastered skulls found by Kenyon also show signs of this, but the reason isn’t known.

Jericho skulls

Jericho, now a Palestinian city in the West Bank, is thought to be one of the oldest settlements in the world. 

It appears in the biblical Book of Joshua as the first Canaanite city attacked by the Israelites after they crossed the Jordan River in about 1400 B.C. According to the biblical story, Jericho’s walls collapsed after Joshua ordered the Israelites to circle the city for seven days while carrying the Ark of the Covenant, and then to blow their trumpets and shout.

But archaeological research has failed to find any evidence of this event, and it’s now thought to be Judean propaganda, according to historians writing in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (Eerdmans, 2000).

Archaeologists have determined, however, that Jericho has been continually inhabited for about 11,000 years; and in 1953 Kenyon excavated seven skulls at a site near the ancient city.

Each had been encased in plaster, and the spaces inside the skulls were packed with earth. They also had cowrie seashells placed over their eye sockets, and some had traces of brown paint.

Kenyon speculated that the skulls might be portraits of some of Jericho’s earliest inhabitants; but more than 50 plastered skulls from about the same period have since been found throughout the region, and it’s now thought they are relics of a funerary practice, according to a study by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a professor emerita of Art and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. 

New approximation

Moraes said he’s been unable to find many details of the 2016 facial approximation, but it seems to have used what’s known as the Manchester method, which has been developed since 1977 and is based on forensic analyses. 

It is now widely used for facial approximations, especially of the victims of crimes.

The latest approximation, however, used a different approach, which is based on anatomical deformation and statistical projections derived from computed tomography (CT) scans— thousands of X-ray scans knitted together to create a 3D image — of living people, he said.

The techniques are also used to plan plastic surgeries and in the manufacturing of prostheses (artificial body parts), but neither were used in the 2016 study, he said.

“I wouldn’t say ours is an update, it’s just a different approach,” he said. But “there is greater structural, anatomical and statistical coherence.” 

Moraes hopes to carry out digital approximations of other plastered skulls from the region, but so far only the precise measurements of the Jericho Skull in the British Museum have been published. “There is a lot of mystery around this material,” Moraes said. “Thanks to new technologies we are discovering new things about the pieces, but there is still a lot to be studied.”

16th-Century Ship Discovered in England

Much of the wooden hull of a rare Elizabethan-era ship has been found in a flooded quarry in southeast England, hundreds of yards from the nearest coast.

Few vessels from this time have survived, so an analysis of the find may shed new light on a key period in seafaring, when the country rapidly expanded its trading links throughout Europe through its control of the English Channel.

“To find a late-16th-century ship preserved in the sediment of a quarry was an unexpected but very welcome find indeed,” said Andrea Hamel, a marine archaeologist for Wessex Archaeology, which investigated the discovery on behalf of Historic England, a government agency dedicated to historical preservation. 

“The ship has the potential to tell us so much about a period where we have little surviving evidence of shipbuilding, but yet was such a great period of change in ship construction and seafaring,” she said in a statement from Wessex Archaeology.

The remains of the ship were found in April in a flooded quarry being dredged for gravel on the Dungeness headland in Kent, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of London.

Workers from the quarry firm CEMEX reported the discovery to local government officials, who then contacted Historic England to arrange specialist support and emergency funding to recover the remains, according to the statement. 

Moving coastline

The quarry site now lies about 1,000 feet (300 meters) from the nearest coast, but archaeologists think that the site formed part of the coastline in the 16th century and that the ship may have been abandoned there after it was wrecked on the rocky headland or discarded after it was no longer seaworthy.

The vessel has not been identified, but dendrochronological analysis of more than 100 timbers from the hull — based on the patterns of tree growth rings — show it was built from trees of English oak (Quercus robur) felled between 1558 and 1580.

According to the Wessex Archaeology researchers, that date estimate places the ship during a transitional period in shipbuilding in northern Europe, when the traditional “clinker” construction of overlapping hull planks was replaced by the stronger but heavier “carvel” construction developed in the Mediterranean, which used flush hull planks nailed to an internal frame.

The remains of the ship found at Dungeness had this newer carvel type of construction, and its introduction led to much heavier ships than had been built before, including those that would explore the Atlantic coastline of the New World in later decades, the researchers said.

Rare find

Wood quickly rots away in both air and water, and it usually lasts only a few years unless it is protected by an anaerobic layer of sediment — that is, a layer that protects it from oxygen. That means the wrecks of very few old wooden ships have survived to be found. And in the case of the Dungeness ship, the remaining hull timbers may have been covered by an anaerobic layer of silt beneath the floor of the quarry lake.

“The remains of this ship are really significant, helping us to understand not only the vessel itself but the wider landscape of shipbuilding and trade in this dynamic period,” Antony Firth, head of marine heritage strategy at Historic England, said in the statement.

Using laser scanning and digital photographs, archaeologists are documenting what’s left of the ship, and when the analysis is finished, the timbers will be carefully reburied in the quarry lake so they can continue to be protected by the silt layer. 

A Little Girl From London Finds a 700,000-Year-old Ancient Bear Tooth

Etta, from Hackney in London, made her discovery while on a family holiday on 22 July on Norfolk beach at West Runton.

While she was looking down she found something that she thought it was a fossilised bit of wood so she put it in her pocket, and when they got back to the car park they showed it to a fossil expert and she fell off her chair.

“She said, ‘People search for 20 years and don’t find anything this good’ and told them it was a bear tooth.”

The nine-year-old, and her sisters aged seven and five, “really got into fossils” after attending a Norfolk Wildlife Trust fossil hunting course earlier in the year, their mother Thea Ferner explained.

Etta has loaned the tooth, which is about 9cm long (3in) from tip to root, to Norfolk Museums Service geologist David Waterhouse after meeting him at a fossil identification event at Cromer Museum.

“To find a perfect massive bear canine is a first for me in 16 years working here,” the senior curator of natural history said.

“We normally find lots of deer fossils, for example, but as you go up the food chain, you find fewer and fewer carnivores like the bear.”

He has identified it as an ancestor of the common brown bear.

Dr Waterhouse said “more extreme weather” is speeding up coastal erosion, which is “a double-edged sword – people’s homes and livelihoods are at risk, but it also means that amazing finds such as the Happisburgh footprints are being discovered”.

Norfolk’s Deep History Coast is a 22-mile (35km) stretch of coastline between Weybourne and Cart Gap.

Some of the more spectacular discoveries include the oldest archaeological site in northern Europe at Happisburgh, where 800,000-year-old human footprints were revealed in 2013. West Runton is also home to the oldest and largest fossilised mammoth ever found in the UK.

They are being unearthed in the Cromer Forest Bed geological layer, which at West Runton is 600,000 to 700,000 years old, said Dr Waterhouse.

The discoveries have pushed back archaeologists’ understanding of life by hundreds of thousands of years – and they have kept coming over the past 10 years, Dr Waterhouse explained.

These revealed the climate would have been like modern Poland’s, with similar summers but much colder winters than today.

“All these little nuances are building up to this rich picture of what animals and plants were thriving 700,000 years ago,” he said.

The earliest humans were Homo antecessor or Pioneer Man and they migrated across a landmass known as Dogger Land, which joined the British coast to present-day Germany and the Netherlands.

Dr Waterhouse said humans were still “a rare species… but everything was just right in Norfolk” for them, from wildfowl, game, shellfish “and crucially flint” to turn into sharp tools.

The nine-year-old said she planned to keep on fossil hunting.

A rare Elizabethan ship discovered at quarry 300 meters from the coast

In April 2022, a team from CEMEX unexpectedly uncovered the remains of a rare Elizabethan-era ship, while dredging for aggregates at a quarry on the Dungeness headland, in Kent.

Found some 300 metres from the coast, the discovery stumped the quarry team, who contacted our experts to study the remains. Recognising the significance of this extraordinary discovery, Kent County Council enlisted specialist support and emergency funding from Historic England.  

The story of this rare Elizabethan ship will feature on Digging for Britain on BBC2 at 8pm on 1 January 2023. 

Very few English-built 16th-century vessels survive, making this a rare discovery from what was a fascinating period in the history of seafaring.

The late 16th-century was a period of great expansion of trade, with the English Channel serving as a major route on Europe’s Atlantic seaboard.

Although the ship remains unidentified, it represents an era when English vessels and ports played an important role in this busy traffic.   

Above: Archaeologist records the ship’s remains on-site (Left). The hull of the 16th-century ship remains at the quarry (Right).

Over 100 timbers from the ship’s hull were recovered, with dendrochronological analysis, funded by Historic England, dating the timbers that built the ship to between 1558 and 1580 and confirming it was made of English oak.

This places the ship at a transitional period in Northern European ship construction. When ships are believed to have moved from a traditional clinker construction (as seen in Viking vessels) to frame-first-built ships (as recorded here), where the internal framing is built first and flush-laid planking is later added to the frames to create a smooth outer hull.

This technique is similar to what was used on the Mary Rose, built between 1509 and 1511, and the ships that would explore and settle along the Atlantic coastlines of the New World.  

Above: Archaeologist records the ship’s remains on-site.

Andrea Hamel, Marine Archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, said: “To find a late 16th-century ship preserved in the sediment of a quarry was an unexpected but very welcome find indeed.

The ship has the potential to tell us so much about a period where we have little surviving evidence of shipbuilding but yet was such a great period of change in ship construction and seafaring.” 

Although uncovered 300 metres from the sea in what is today a quarry, experts believe the site would have once been on the coastline, and that the ship either wrecked on the shingle headland or was discarded at the end of its useful life. Its discovery presents a fascinating opportunity to understand the development of the coast, ports and shipping of this stretch of the Kent coast. 

Antony Firth, Head of Marine Heritage Strategy at Historic England, said: “The remains of this ship are really significant, helping us to understand not only the vessel itself but the wider landscape of shipbuilding and trade in this dynamic period.

CEMEX staff deserve our thanks for recognising that this unexpected discovery is something special and for seeking archaeological assistance.

Historic England has been very pleased to support the emergency work by Kent County Council and Wessex Archaeology, and to see the results shared in the new season of Digging for Britain.” 

Our archaeologists have recorded the ship using laser scanning and digital photography. Once our work is complete the timbers will be reburied in the quarry lake where they were uncovered so that the silt can continue to preserve the remains. 

2,000-year-old Roman road discovered in England, archaeologists believe

A potentially 2,000-year-old Roman road was uncovered in Worcestershire, England a few weeks ago during routine waterworks, Metro reported on Tuesday.

The stretch of road that was uncovered is 10 meters long and 2.9 meters wide.

Although the exact dating of the road is unclear, it was constructed with large stones that were a typical design used by the Romans, and similar roads have only been discovered in Rome and Pompeii.

The exact location of the road has not been publicized, but Metro reported that it was found in a field near a river where a Roman-era villa complex was found four years ago.

What kind of testing is being done on the road?

Further investigation is underway to try and discover the exact origin of the road and when it dates back to.

Archaeologist Aidan Smyth told Metro that all the evidence seems to point to the road being Roman, but that investigators are keeping their minds open.

“If it turns out to be medieval then it could still be considered to be nationally significant as nothing similar has been found in Britain to date,” he said.

“If it is a first-century Roman feature, it is the only one of its kind to be found in Britain to date. There’s not really anything like this medieval either.”

Aidan Smyth

Part of the road was dug up and sent to be tested by optically stimulated luminescence testing which will tell researchers when the sediments were last exposed to sunlight.

The area where the road was found is believed to be near what was the Roman city of Vertis, and the area has produced a lot of Roman archaeology over the years.

Early medieval female burial site is ‘most significant ever discovered’ in UK

Find dating from about 650AD in Northamptonshire includes jewelled necklace and changed archaeologists’ view of the period

Archaeologists don’t often bounce with excitement, but the Museum of London archaeology team could hardly contain themselves on Tuesday as they unveiled an “exhilarating” discovery made on the last day of an otherwise barren dig in the spring.

“This is the most significant early medieval female burial ever discovered in Britain,” said the leader of the dig, Levente Bence Balázs, almost skipping with elation. “It is an archaeologist’s dream to find something like this.”

“I was looking through a suspected rubbish pit when I saw teeth,” Balázs added, his voice catching with emotion at the memory. “Then two gold items appeared out of the earth and glinted at me.

These artefacts haven’t seen the light of day for 1,300 years, and to be the first person to see them is indescribable. But even then, we didn’t know quite how special this find was going to be.”

What Balázs had found was a woman buried between 630 and 670 AD – a woman buried in a bed alongside an extraordinary, 30-piece necklace of intricately-wrought gold, garnets and semi-precious stones. It is, by a country mile, the richest necklace of its type ever uncovered in Britain and reveals craftsmanship unparalleled in the early medieval period.

Also buried with the woman was a large, elaborately decorated cross, buried face down, another unique and mysterious feature of the grave’s secrets, and featuring highly unusual depictions of a human face in delicate silver with blue glass eyes. Two pots were buried alongside her, also unique in that they still contain a mysterious residue yet to be analysed.

“This is a find of international importance. This discovery has nudged the course of history, and the impact will get stronger as we investigate this find more deeply,” said Balázs.

“These mysterious discoveries pose so many more questions than they answer. There’s so much still to discover about what we’ve found and what it means.”

So much about the dig in April was inauspicious. The small, isolated Northamptonshire village of Harpole, whose name means “filthy pool”, was previously only known for its annual scarecrow festival and its proximity to arguably one of the worst motorway service stations in the UK.

There were no ancient churches near the dig or other burial sites. But thanks to the practice of developer-funded archeology, the Vistry Group housebuilders commissioned a search of the area they were building on.

“I’ve worked for Vistry for 19 years and so I’ve had a lot of interaction with archaeologists,” said Daniel Oliver, Vistry’s regional technical director. “I’m used to Simon [Mortimer, archaeology consultant for the RPS group] ringing me up in great excitement about pot shards.” Beside him, Mortimer visibly stiffens in protest, and Oliver quickly adds: “Pot shards are very exciting, of course.”

“On the day the team discovered the Harpole treasure, I had five missed calls from Simon on my phone,” said Oliver. “I knew then that this was about more than pot shards. Exciting as pot shards are.”

The woman – and it is a woman, even though only the crowns of her teeth remain – was almost certainly an early Christian leader of significant personal wealth, both an abbess and a princess, perhaps. Lyn Blackmore, Museum of London archeology team specialist, said: “Women have been found buried alongside swords, but men have never been found buried alongside necklaces.” Experts agree she must have been one of the first women in Britain ever to reach a high position in the church.

Devout as she clearly was, her grave is evidence of a shifting era when pagan and Christian beliefs were still in flux. “This is a fascinating burial of combined iconography: the burial bling has a distinctly pagan flavour, but the grave is also heavily vested in Christian iconography,” said Mortimer.

Vistry has waived its rights to the treasure, which now belongs to the state. The team hope it will be displayed locally, once their conservation work is complete – a painstaking endeavour that will take another two years at least.

Oliver is cagey about where the actual dig site is. It hasn’t been built over but, equally, it hasn’t been marked. “We don’t want people coming with metal detectors,” he said. “That would be a bit much.”

4,000-Year-Old Toolkit Found Near Stonehenge Was Used for Goldwork, New Study Finds

Archaeologists determined that an ancient toolkit found near Stonehenge was used to make a variety of gold objects.

According to new research published in the journal Antiquity, microscopic residue on the surface of the tools is ancient gold, revealing these stone-and-copper-alloy items were used as hammers and anvils, and to smooth the objects being crafted.

“This is a really exciting finding for our project,” said Rachel Crellin, lead author and archaeologist at the University of Leicester, in a statement. “What our work has revealed is the humble stone toolkit that was used to make gold objects thousands of years ago.”

Originally excavated in 1801, the toolkit was found in the Upton Lovell G2a burial which is thought to date to the Bronze Age, around 1850–1700 BCE. Marked by an earthen mound near Stonehenge, initial investigations revealed two individuals and a wide assortment of grave goods.

One figure was placed sitting upright, with her head close to the top of the barrow, and buried with a fine shale arm ring and a necklace of polished shale beads. The other figure was wearing a ceremonial cloak, with pierced bone points as a necklace, thought to be a specialized costume.

Early speculation referred to the cloaked figure as a ‘Shaman’ who had special ritual significance, or an important and skilled craftsman. Now, researchers have discovered that the toolkit was used to make objects in which a core material—like jet, shale, amber, wood, or copper—was covered and decorated with a layer of gold sheet.

Processes in which the objects are thought to have been used involve making rib-and-furrow decorations, producing perforations, fitting the core object with the sheet-gold, and smoothing and polishing the finished objects.

Some of the tools were already ancient, making them thousands of years old by the time they were reused. There was even a complete battle axe, which was repurposed for metalworking.

“Such battle axes were far from the only smooth stones that could have been selected for these purposes,” the paper explains. “In intentionally repurposing these objects, their histories rubbed off on the materials they worked.”

Researchers used a scanning electron microscope as well as an energy dispersive spectrometer to confirm their findings. The gold residue is present on five artifacts, where they found gold flecks on the surface as well as characteristic wear traces from the goldworking process.

The team additionally suggest that the bone points from the ‘shaman’s costume’ could have been used for goldworking.

“By exploring the use of materials through a technique called microwear analysis, that determines microscopic marks on objects, [we can] better understand how they were made and used,” said Oliver Harris, coauthor and University of Leicester archaeologist, in an email to ARTnews. “We have shown how the central stone is to the process of making gold, and how stones with certain properties and histories were preferentially selected to be part of this practice.”

According to the paper, “there is far more complexity here, in relations, histories, gestures and processes, than could ever be captured under the label ‘shaman’, ‘metalworker’ or ‘goldsmith’ … [our] analysis suggests that goldworking may be different from other forms of metal production and may not, from a Bronze Age perspective, have been considered to be a metal at all, but rather something with its own relational properties that were quite different from those that entwined copper and tin.”

The toolkit and associated finds are currently on view at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes.