Archaeologists have made a detailed three-dimensional model of the surviving timbers of the hull using laser scans and digital photography.
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.
Analysis shows that the ship was built from trees felled in the late 16th century, a transitional time for shipbuilding and seagoing trade.
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.
The ship was built in the “carvel” style of flush planks nailed to an internal frame, which made stronger but heavier ships than those built in the traditional “clinker” style of overlapping planks.
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.
The hull timbers were found in April in a flooded quarry being dredged for gravel. The quarry is now half a mile from the sea, but it is thought to have been on the coast 400 years ago.
When the archaeological analysis is complete, the timbers will be reburied in the flooded quarry so that they will be protected by a layer of silt.
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.
High-Tech Tools Offer a Glimpse Into a Medieval Reliquary
An interdisciplinary research team led by the Leibniz Center for Archeology (LEIZA) has revealed the secret of a gold-plated pendant that was found in 2008 in a medieval rubbish pit in the old town of Mainz.
Thanks to non-destructive investigations at the research neutron source Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (FRM II) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the researchers were able to locate the smallest bone splinters inside the object, which are probably relics.
The restored reliquary. Outside it is decorated with images of Jesus and Mary.
Analysis of the tomography and Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis (PGAA) with neutrons revealed five individual packets made of silk and linen – bone splinters were packed in each. “Neutron non-destructive testing was particularly helpful because we couldn’t just open the trailer and look inside.
The object and above all the locking mechanism are severely damaged by centuries of corrosion, and opening it would mean destroying it irrevocably,” explains restorer Matthias Heinzel from LEIZA.
During the restoration, Heinzel discovered a cord fragment in the suspension eyelet which, on closer examination, was identified as silk. “This is the first evidence that such pendants may have been worn around the neck on a silk cord.
Using neutron tomography at the TUM, we were also able to measure the thread thickness and thread spacing of the textiles on the inside,” adds the restorer.
Neutron analysis makes organic substances visible
In 500 hours of work, Heinzel freed the found object from corrosion deposits. Initial investigations showed that the pendant, which is about six centimeters high and wide and one centimeter thick, was probably a storage container for relics.
Since the organic content of the object was not recognizable on the first X-ray images, the investigation using neutrons from the FRM II was used: Dr. Burkhard Schillinger from TUM conducted the ANTARES instrument performed a neutron tomography, which made the individual textile packages with the bone splinters inside visible. Unlike X-rays, the neutrons can penetrate metals and make organic substances visible.
The researchers determined individual elements of the sample by using neutrons to excite them to emit characteristic gamma radiation during the PGAA.
“It is not possible to find out whether the bones belong to saints and which saints the bone splinters can be assigned to. A strip of parchment with the name of the saint is usually attached to a relic parcel. In this case, unfortunately, we cannot see it.
As an archaeological research institute of the Leibniz Association, we see it as our task to preserve the historical authenticity of the object for posterity in the best possible way and use the modern possibilities of non-destructive examination at the Technical University of Munich,” explains Heinzel.
Only three other reliquaries of this type, called phylactery, are known so far. Phylacterium translates from Greek as means of preservation or protection. Their owners wore them on their bodies, usually around their necks.
On the outside, the gilded copper pendant is enameled with images of Jesus, the four evangelists, Mary and four female saints.
The researchers date it to the late 12th century and assign it to a workshop in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony. The find is in the possession of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage, Directorate of State Archeology Mainz and can be viewed until further notice in the medieval exhibition “AUREA MAGONTIA – Mainz in the Middle Ages” of the State Museum Mainz.
20,000-year-old cave painting ‘dots’ are the earliest written language, study claims. But not everyone agrees.
A 21,500-year-old cave painting depicting an aurochs, an extinct cattle species, in the Lascaux caves in France. Notice the four dots (within the digital yellow circle), which may have had a special meaning for ice age peoples.
At least 20,000 years ago, humans living in Europe created striking cave paintings of animals that they paired with curious signs: lines, dots and Y-shaped symbols. These marks, which are well known to researchers, might relate to the seasonal behavior of prey animals, making the signs the first known writing in the history of humankind, a new study claims.
Although Paleolithic cave art is better known for its graceful horses and ghostly handprints, there are thousands of nonfigurative or abstract marks that researchers have begun studying only in the past few decades. In a study published Jan. 5 in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal, a team of scholars suggests that these seemingly abstract dots and lines, when positioned near animal imagery, actually represent a sophisticated writing system that explains early humans’ understanding of the mating and birthing seasons of important local species.
Other researchers, however, are not convinced by the study’s interpretations of these human-made marks.
Melanie Chang, a paleoanthropologist at Portland State University who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that she agrees with the researchers’ assessment that “Upper Palaeolithic people had the cognitive capacity to write and to keep records of the time.” However, she cautioned that the researchers’ “hypotheses are not well-supported by their results, and they also do not address alternative interpretations of the marks they analyzed.”
This image of an 17,000-year-old engraved salmon, from Pindal cave in Asturias, Spain, has three lines placed within.
What do the painted marks mean?
Early humans in Europe were hunter-gatherers who ate a lot of meat from species such as horses, deer and bison. When those animals came together seasonally in herds, they would have been vulnerable to slaughter by humans.
“It follows that knowledge of the timing of migrations, mating and birthing would be a central concern to Upper Paleolithic behaviour,” study first author Bennett Bacon, an independent researcher and furniture conservator based in London, and colleagues wrote in their study.
Looking at the total number of marks — either dots or lines — found in sequences across hundreds of caves, the researchers discovered that none of the series contained more than 13 marks, consistent with the 13 lunar months in each year.
“We hypothesize that sequences are conveying information about their associated animal taxa in units of months,” they wrote, noting that spring, “with its obvious signals of the end of winter and corresponding faunal migrations to breeding grounds, would have provided an obvious, if regionally differing, point of origin for the lunar calendar.”
An annotated image of a roughly 23,000-year-old painting showing four dots associated with a red ochre drawing of an aurochs in La Pasiega cave in Cantabria, Spain.
The researchers’ statistical analysis of more than 800 sequences of marks associated with animals supports their idea — they found strong correlations between the number of marks and the lunar months in which the specific animal is known to mate.
Taking their hypothesis a step further, Bacon and colleagues focused on a Y-shaped sign that they think refers to a particular event in an animal’s life cycle. The similar statistical analysis supports their conclusion that the placement of the Y-shaped sign within a series of marks signals an animal species’ birthing season.
“The ability to assign abstract signs to phenomena in the world,” they wrote, “to record past events and predict future events, was a profound intellectual achievement.”
Writing or proto-writing?
But is this the earliest known writing? Bacon and colleagues demur, suggesting that “it is best described as a proto-writing system, an intermediary step between a simpler notation/convention and full-blown writing.”
April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in this study, told Live Science by email that “any study that explores non-figurative signs in more detail is welcome, but I think there are a number of assumptions being made here that have yet to be proven.” Nowell questioned the Y sign, in particular. “The majority of animals considered in this study are quadrupeds, and humans normally squat giving birth,” she said. “If this sign is supposed to be iconic of the birth process, it is not obvious to me.”
Chang, the paleoanthropologist who is also an equestrian and horse owner, posed two alternative explanations for the Y sign. In some cases, it could represent the edge of the brachiocephalic muscle, a prominent landmark on a horse’s neck. “In other cases,” she said, “it is possible that what they recorded as Y’s represent what modern horsepeople refer to as ‘primitive markings’ such as leg bars that are associated with wild-type horse colors, or they may represent hair patterns, or other anatomical features.”
Study co-author Robert Kentridge, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email that one of the strengths of their study is that they “have formally tested Ben [Bacon’s] hypotheses about the meaning of the Y-sign’s position in sequences of marks and the lengths of sequences of dots and lines and shown that these do convey meaning, indeed meaning that would be important in the lives of Palaeolithic hunters.”
In summarizing their conclusions, Bacon and colleagues wrote that they have “proposed the existence of a notational system associated with an unambiguous animal subject relating to biologically significant events” and that this allows them “for the first time to understand a Palaeolithic notational system in its entirety.”
Nonfigurative signs dating to 15,000 years ago that hunter-gatherers drew in black manganese and red ochre in Niaux Cave in the French Pyrenees.
A decade ago, however, Nowell and then-graduate student Genevieve von Petzinger co-created a database of dozens of signs and repeating motifs from more than 200 caves in southern France and Spain. Von Petzinger’s thesis detailed patterns of cave wall symbols across time and space in order to better understand what these signs meant for ice age people.
“There are at least 32 different recurring signs,” Nowell explained. “The authors have chosen to study three of them in a very specific context.”
But the authors defended their decision to focus on the trio.
“It seemed sensible to focus first on the most common markings associated with figurative images,” study co-author Paul Pettitt, a professor of archaeology at Durham University, told Live Science in an email. “Simple dots and lines are by far the most common. Of the more elaborate signs, the Y sign is the most common.”
The researchers plan to expand on their work. “We are analyzing other signs,” Bacon told Live Science in an email. “Rather than searching for the meaning of individual signs, what we are looking for is the linguistic and cognitive bases that underpin the ‘writing’ system.”
Nowell agreed with the study authors that the symbols were likely not randomly chosen and that it is possible the lines and dots represent numbers. Even if the authors are correct, she noted, that leaves 90% of the signs without any known meaning.
“There is still a lot about graphic communication in the Paleolithic that we do not understand,” Nowell said.
3000 years old wooden wishing well discovered in Germany
In the town of Germering, in the Germany state of Bavaria, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a well-preserved Bronze Age wooden well filled with ritual deposits.
People may have sunk jewelry and ceramics as offerings in the special water spring, similar to how coins are still thrown into so-called wishing wells today, according to the archaeologists.
The area of today’s town of Germering in Upper Bavaria was a settlement area early on. Numerous finds from prehistory and early history bear witness to this.
Many new ones have been added since the beginning of 2021: In the run-up to construction work, numerous traces of settlements from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages were discovered on an excavation area of around seven hectares.
This also includes the remains of wells that were used by people of different eras to supply water. But one of the wells discovered on the site differed significantly from the others, reports the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BlfD).
This wooden water point is dated to be more than 3000 years old and, at around five meters (16.4 feet), reached particularly deep into the ground compared to others.
“It is extremely rare for a well to survive more than 3,000 years so well. Its wooden walls have been completely preserved at the bottom and are still partly damp from the groundwater. This also explains the good condition of the finds made from organic materials, which are now being examined more closely. We hope this will provide us with more information about the everyday life of the settlers of the time,” adds Dr. Jochen Haberstroh, a responsible archaeologist at the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments.
Medieval pottery from well fill.
The team of archaeologists discovered in what was once the base of the fountain: 26 bronze clothing pins, a bracelet, two metal spirals, a mounted animal tooth, amber beads and more than 70 ceramic vessels.
The archaeologists emphasize that this filling makes this well fundamentally different from the others on the excavation site.
These expensive items, which were typically discovered in Middle Bronze Age graves, were not items for everyday use (1800-1200 B.C.). The state they were in when discovered at the bottom of the well suggests they were carefully lowered into the water rather than dropped or thrown.
“Even today, fountains have something magical about them for many people. They drop coins in the hope that their wishes will be granted. We cannot exactly explain what motives our ancestors 3000 years ago made to offer jewelry and other valuable gifts. But it can be assumed that they were intended as sacrifices for a good harvest,” explains Mathias Pfeil from the BlfD.
Among other things, the archaeologists discovered numerous bronze clothing pins at the bottom of the well.
There may also be a clue in the unusual features of the well: “The depth of this well shows that it was used at a time when the groundwater level had dropped considerably, which indicates a long drought and certainly poor harvest yields.
One can possibly see a reason why the people who lived here at that time sacrificed part of their possessions to their gods in this well,” says Marcus Guckenbiehl, city archaeologist and archivist of Germering.
Archaeologists have been working in advance of construction work for a letter distribution center on the site where the well has now been discovered since the beginning of 2021.
The excavations are among the largest area excavations in Bavaria this year. In the meantime, scientists have documented approximately 13,500 archaeological finds, primarily from the Bronze Age and early Middle Ages.
Some of the discoveries are currently being examined and conserved at the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation.
A Little Girl From London Finds a 700,000-Year-old Ancient Bear Tooth
Eagle-eyed Etta spotted the bear tooth on a family holiday – and experts were blown away by the discovery. BBC
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.
Etta initially thought the tooth was a piece of ancient wood, but it has since been confirmed as a bear’s tooth. BBC
“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.
About 1km (0.6 miles) of West Runton beach has been excavated by Norfolk Museums Service experts. BBC
“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”.
The Norfolk landscape 700,000 years ago would have had hyenas, lions, deer and mammoths. BBC
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.
About 1km (0.6 miles) of West Runton beach has been excavated by Norfolk Museums Service experts. BBC
“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 Mysterious Partially Submerged Structure in Ireland is a Prehistoric Tomb, New Research Finds
The Carraig á Mhaistin stone structure at Rostellan on the eastern shore of Cork Harbour, Ireland.
The tomb-like Carraig á Mhaistin stone structure, uncovered in Ireland’s Cork Harbour years ago, is now believed to be a megalithic dolmen.
Previously, experts have been unsure whether it was prehistoric or a 19th-century “folly.”
New research conducted by archaeologist Michael Gibbons indicated that the monument is in fact a megalithic dolmen.
A small chamber on the west side of an unknown cairn, a man-made stone stack marking a burial mound, measures 82 feet long by 15 feet wide. The cairn was previously concealed due to rising sea levels.
This is significant, as portal and court tombs “occasionally have intact long cairns which are both intended to provide structural support to the chamber itself, and to enhance visual presence in the landscape”, Gibbons told the Irish Examiner.
He believes that the cairn could extend well below the surface, “partially entombed in estuarine mud”.
It is unclear exactly when sea levels in the area rose, but they are believed to have been stable for the last 2,000 years.
There is only one other intertidal portal tomb on the island, and the Carraig á Mhaistin dolmen is one of three intertidal tombs in the country.
Among Irish folklore, portal tombs or dolmens were often known as Diarmuid and Gráinne’s bed—a final resting place for the fugitive couple who were pursued by Gráinne’s husband Fionn mac Cumhaill.
Many of these structures were built close to the coast; however, due to movement in the Atlantic ocean, many have not survived, including Sherkin Island’s sole megalithic tomb on Slievemore townland.
The Carraig á Mhaistin has not been previously included in the state’s survey of megalithic tombs in Ireland, conducted Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin more than forty years ago, due to doubt surrounding its age.
New study investigates the development of the Scandinavian gene pool over the latest 2000 years
A new study resolves the complex relations between geography, ancestry, and gene flow in Scandinavia – encompassing the Roman Age, the Viking Age, and later periods.
Researchers investigated a 2,000-year genetic transect through Scandinavia spanning the Iron Age to the present, based on 48 new and 249 published ancient genomes and genotypes from 16,638 modern individuals.
A surprising increase of variation during the Viking period indicates that gene flow into Scandinavia was especially intense during this period.
An international study coordinated from Stockholm and Reykjavik investigates the development of the Scandinavian gene pool over the latest 2000 years. In this effort the scientists relied on historic and prehistoric genomes, and from material excavated in Scandinavia.
These ancient genomes were compared with genomic data from 16,638 contemporary Scandinavians. As the geographical origin and the datings were known for all these individuals, it was possible to resolve the development of the gene pool to a level never realised previously.
Archaeological excavation at Sandby Borg.
Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela at the Centre for Palaeogenetics*, who analyzed all the data and extracted some of the ancient DNA used in the study, explains: “With this level of resolution we not only confirm the Viking Age migration.
We are also able to trace it to the east Baltic region, the British-Irish Isles and southern Europe. But not all parts of Scandinavia received the same amounts of gene flow from these areas. For example, while British-Irish ancestry became widespread in Scandinavia the eastern-Baltic ancestry mainly reached Gotland and central Sweden.”
The gene pool bounced back after the Viking period
Another new discovery in this study was what happened to the gene pool after the Viking period. The scientists were surprised to find that it bounced back in the direction of what it looked like before the Viking period migration.
Professor Anders Götherström at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, who is a senior scientist on the study, is intrigued: “Interestingly, the non-local ancestry peaks during the Viking period while being lower before and after.
The drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that the Viking-period migrants got less children, or somehow contributed proportionally less to the gene pool than the people who were already in Scandinavia.”
Yet a new discovery was the history of the northern Scandinavian gene pool. There is a genetic component in northern Scandinavia that is rare in central and western Europe, and scientists were able to track this component in northern Scandinavia through the latest 1000 years.
Underwater excavations of the ship Kronan.
Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela comments, “We suspected that there was a chronology to the northern Scandinavian gene pool, and it did indeed prove that a more recent influx of Uralic ancestry into Scandinavia define much of the northern gene pool. But if it is recent, it is comparatively so. For example, we know that this Uralic ancestry was present in northern Scandinavia as early as during the late Viking period”.
Based on well-known Swedish archaeological sites
The study is based on a number of well-known Swedish archaeological sites. For example, there are genomes from the 17th century warship Kronan, from the Viking and Vendel period boat burials in the lake Mälaren Valley, and from the migration period ring fortress Sandby borg on Öland.
Anders Götherström conclude: “We were working on a number of smaller studies on different archaeological sites. And at some point it just made sense to combine them into a larger study on the development of the Scandinavian gene pool.
The study, published today in Cell, is an international effort with several collaborators, but it was led by Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela and Professor Anders Götherstörm at Stockholm University, and Professor Agnar Helgason, and Kristjáan Moore at deCODE in Reykavijk.
The article “The genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present” is published in Cell.
The facial reconstruction of the Cittiglio murder victim, who was killed sometime between the 11th and the 13th centuries in what seems to have been a surprise attack.
More than 700 years ago, a medieval “case of raw violence” ended a young man’s life with four sword blows to the head, according to a new study of the medieval “cold case.”
The brutality of the wounds suggests the murder may have been “a case of overkill,” study lead author Chiara Tesi, an anthropologist at the University of Insubria’s Center for Osteoarchaeology and Paleopathology in Italy, told Live Science. Tesi and her colleagues analyzed the victim’s skeletal remains with modern forensic techniques, including computed tomography (CT) — three-dimensional X-ray scans — and precision digital microscopy of the skull injuries.
“The individual was probably taken by surprise by the attacker” and was unable to properly protect his head, she said in an email. After initially attacking the victim from the front, the murderer seems to have chased the man as he turned, likely trying to escape, as the deepest wounds were inflicted from behind, according to a study published in the December issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Brutal murder
Archaeologists discovered the victim’s skeleton in 2006 at the church of San Biagio in Cittiglio, a small town in Italy’s northern Varese province.
The oldest parts of the church are thought to date from the eighth century A.D., but the battered skeleton was found in a tomb in an atrium built near the entrance in the 11th century; radiocarbon dating indicates the victim was buried there before A.D. 1260.
The new study suggests the victim was a man who was between 19 and 24 years old when he was murdered. A study of the excavation published in 2008(opens in new tab) in the Fasti Online journal noted some of his injuries, but Tesi said the new study has revealed further injuries and the sequence of the murder.
She said the young man likely blocked or dodged the assailant’s initial attack, though the first blow still caused a shallow lesion on the top of the skull.
As he turned away to escape, however, “the victim was then hit in rapid succession by two other strikes, one affecting the auricle [ear] region and the other the nuchal [back of the neck] region,” she said. “At the end, probably exhausted and face down, he was finally hit by a last blow to the back of the head that caused immediate death.” This “evident overkill” suggested there may have been a complex motive for the murder, Tesi said; such a frenzied attack appeared to show the attacker was determined to finish his deadly job.
The latest study found the murder victim was probably killed by four sword blows to the head; the first caused a slight wound, but the others seem to have killed him as he was trying to escape the attack.
Medieval remains
The new study shows that the injuries were all caused by the same bladed weapon — probably a steel sword — while the position of the wounds suggest the injuries were inflicted by a single assailant, she said.
The researchers scoured historical records in an attempt to determine the victim’s identity, but “we didn’t find anything,” Tesi said.
His prominent burial, however, suggests he may have been a member of the powerful De Citillio family that had originally established the church.
A healed wound on the victim’s forehead suggests that he had experience in warfare; while features of his right shoulder blade were probably caused by “the habitual practice of archery and the use of a bow from an early age,” Tesi said — possibly a sign that he had often gone hunting for sport.
To examine how the sword blows impacted by the victim’s now-decomposed soft tissues, the researchers created a reconstruction of the victim’s face. “We tested wound formation by placing a blade on the reconstructed head and replicating the blows received by the subject,” she said.
The reconstruction helped assess the severity of the injuries.
“They’re using the head as a way of showing these multiple wounds to the skull,” Caroline Wilkinson(opens in new tab), the director of the Face Lab(opens in new tab) at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom, told Live Science. “It’s really interesting — a good use of forensic techniques to look at trauma to the head, and how those wounds have been caused.”
Wilkinson was not involved in the new study but has worked on reconstructing the faces of some of the victims of a medieval massacre of Jews in the English city of Norwich. Facial depictions “can create a personal narrative around human remains, rather than just looking at specimens in a glass box,” she said.
Tesi also believes that the reconstruction can help people relate to the victim.
“Seeing the face and eyes of a young man is definitely more emotional than simply looking at a skull,” she said.
