Category Archives: EUROPE

EUROPE, NORWAY, WORLD

Reconstruction Shows Teen Who Died in Norway 8,300 Years Ago

Reconstruction Shows Teen Who Died in Norway 8,300 Years Ago

About 8,300 years ago, a teenage boy with an unusual skull and short stature may have scampered along the rocky coast of what is now Norway, pausing to regain his balance as he clutched a fishing rod. Now, a new full-body reconstruction of the Stone Age teenager — nicknamed Vistegutten, Norwegian for “the boy from Viste” — is on display at the Hå Gamle Prestegard museum in southern Norway.

The boy’s reconstruction was a months-long project, but researchers have known about Vistegutten since 1907, when archaeologists found his remains in a Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, cave in Randaberg, along Norway’s western coast. 

A few things stand out about the 15-year-old boy: At 4 feet, 1 inch (1.25 meters) tall, he was short for his age, even by Mesolithic standards; a condition known as scaphocephaly meant that his skull had fused too early, forcing his head to grow backward instead of sideways; and he may have died alone, as his remains were found as if he had been leaning against a cave wall. 

“Either he was placed like this after his death, or he actually died in this position,” Oscar Nilsson, a forensic artist based in Sweden who created the boy’s likeness, told Live Science in an email. “This can give the impression of a lonely boy, waiting in vain for his friends and family to show up … but we know nothing about how he died.”

Reconstruction Shows Teen Who Died in Norway 8,300 Years Ago
The boy from Viste lived along the windy Norwegian coast, “so I worked quite a lot to make it look as if the wind blows in his hair and clothes,” Nilsson said.

Scaphocephaly occurs when the sagittal suture on the top of the skull fuses too early, giving the skull a ridged appearance. But “it is not associated with any developmental problems or intellectual disabilities,” Sean Dexter Denham, an osteologist at the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger in Norway who helped analyze the skeleton, told Live Science in an email. And while the boy’s unusual skull and short stature may have given him a unique appearance, his remains suggest he was well-fed and healthy. 

“The sheer volume of animal remains found at the site also attests to a plentiful food supply,” Denham said. The cave, which is about 30 feet (9 m) deep and 16 feet (5 m) wide, is filled with kitchen waste; ornaments, such as decorated bone pendants; and fishing tools, including hooks, harpoons and barbed bone points, suggesting that ancient “people lived, worked, cooked and slept at the Viste site,” Nilsson said. 

“The fishing hook that the reconstruction of the boy from Viste holds in his hand is a replica of one of these findings,” Nilsson noted. 

The preserved skull of Vistegutten, Norwegian for “the boy from Viste.”

To make the reconstruction, two computed tomography (CT) scans were taken of the skull, allowing Nilsson to create a 3D-printed plastic replica. Because he wasn’t sure about the boy’s facial tissue thickness, Nilsson relied on measurements of modern Northern European 15-year-old boys. “Of course, we don’t know how transferable these measurements are to someone who lived 8,000 years ago,” Nilsson said. “But it’s the best we can guess.”

He noticed that the forehead was “quite childish in appearance, rounded and projecting from the face a bit. This is most probably coming from the scaphocephaly,” Nilsson said, adding that the teenager also had a thin nasal ridge but a nose that was “rather broad at the lower parts.” 

The reconstruction depicts the boy from Viste wearing a necklace made of a broken shell and salmon vertebrae.

An analysis of the boy’s DNA showed that his skin tone, hair, and eye color “likely would be close to the other ‘Norwegian’ findings from the period,” including mostly brown eyes, dark hair, and intermediate skin tone, Nilsson added. 

He intended to give the teenager a subtle smile, “but as I got deeper into the project, I could not get rid of a feeling of a lonely boy,” Nilsson said. “I imagine him on his way to the sea (which at his time was extremely near the cave) to catch some fish. It is very windy in this part of Norway, so I worked quite a lot to make it look as if the wind blows in his hair and clothes.”

The teenager’s skeletal remains were found inside a cave used by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. It’s unclear if the boy died there or if he was placed in the cave after death.

Stone Age wardrobe

The boy’s clothes are made by Helena Gjaerum, a Sweden-based independent archaeologist who uses prehistoric techniques for tanning leather. “Oscar wanted a summer outfit and that the boy would be barefoot, standing on the beach,” Gjaerum told Live Science in an email. “Therefore, a tunic was decided from the beginning.”

She made the tunic from de-haired and fat-tanned elk skin, and put two bark-tanned salmon skins around his waist. A bag that hangs off his belt was sewn from deerskin. All of these animals’ remains were found at the archaeological site. To add to the authenticity, “The suit is sewn with both sinew thread and leather straps,” Gjaerum explained. “It is smeared with ash and grease to look believable.”

The boy’s necklace was crafted from salmon vertebrae and a broken seashell. His remains are “one of the oldest skeletons ever found in Norway,” Kristine Orestad Sørgaard, an archaeologist at the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger who helped Nilsson understand the archaeological context, told Live Science in an email. “It’s a great reminder that people in the past were very much like us, despite living in a world very different from our own.”

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

An unlucky medieval woman underwent at least two skull surgeries in Longobard Italy

An unlucky medieval woman underwent at least two skull surgeries in Longobard Italy

An unlucky medieval woman underwent at least two skull surgeries in Longobard Italy

A detailed examination of the skull of a woman who lived at the medieval settlement of Castel Trosino in central Italy more than 1,300 years ago revealed that this middle-aged woman had undergone not once, but at least twice, invasive surgical procedures.

Macroscopic, microscopic, and computed tomography analyses of a skull found near Ascoli Piceno revealed signs of at least two surgical operations.

The study, published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, was carried out by an international and multidisciplinary team coordinated by Sapienza University in Rome.

A new international study, coordinated by Sapienza in collaboration with Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, the Universities of Aix-Marseille and Caen in France and University of Washington, reveals the existence of drillings in the skull of a Longobard woman, found in the cemetery of Castel Trosino, near Ascoli Piceno, central Italy.

Macroscopic, microscopic and computed tomography (CT) analyses revealed signs of at least two operations performed on the skull, including a cross-shaped surgery, shortly before the woman’s death.

Furthermore, thanks to a new high-resolution biochemical investigation method applied to one of the preserved teeth, specific changes in the woman’s diet and mobility from early life to adulthood were reconstructed.

This allowed the researchers to identify changes in her diet and environment throughout her life and to highlight the care and interest provided to her by the community.

“We found,” says Ileana Micarelli of the University of Cambridge, a former postdoctoral fellow at Sapienza and first author of the study, “that the woman had survived several surgeries, having undergone long-term surgical therapy, which consisted of a series of successive drillings.”

Molding and casting process of skull CT1953 which included evidence of medieval brain surgery. Photo: https://doi.org/10.1002/oa.3202

“The last surgery”, concludes Giorgio Manzi of the Department of Environmental Biology, “appears to have taken place shortly before the individual’s death.

There are no lesions suggesting the presence of trauma, tumours, congenital diseases or other pathologies. Moreover, although it is intriguing to consider the possibility of a ritual or judicial motive, no osteological or historical evidence supports such hypotheses.”

The specific surgical techniques used involved the scraping of bone from the cranium as part of trepanation, a medical treatment. This type of treatment was discussed in European medieval literature, and some records date back even further.

However, this is the first time that scientists have been able to prove that an Early Medieval skull was subjected to these dangerous procedures.

The discovery of the rare evidence of a drilling operation paves the way for future studies on the reasons and methods of treatment, as well as the caring role of the community towards the sick during the Middle Ages.

The medieval cemetery at Castel Trosino, known as the Longobard Necropolis, was first excavated in the nineteenth century. Only 19 skulls were discovered in good enough condition to be examined.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and other researchers have continued to examine these Early Medieval Period remain in order to learn as much as they can about the health, physical characteristics, and lifestyles of the people who lived in central Italy between 568 and 774 AD when the necropolis was in use.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Lasers reveal ruins of 5th-century fortress in Spanish forest

Lasers reveal ruins of the 5th-century fortress in the Spanish forest

Lasers reveal ruins of the 5th-century fortress in the Spanish forest
An image from lidar scans reveals the vast scale of the early medieval fortress beneath the forest at Castro Valente in Spain’s northwestern Galicia region.

Archaeologists in Spain got the surprise of a lifetime when they discovered the ruins of a powerful fifth-century fortress surrounded by a huge defensive wall in a dense forest, instead of the Iron Age fort they had been looking for, they reported in a new study. 

The team found the stronghold on a hilltop in northwestern Spain by using lidar — light detection and ranging — to peer beneath a forest covering the ruins. This technique, which bounces hundreds of thousands of laser pulses every second off the landscape from an aircraft flying overhead, revealed an early medieval fortress covering about 25 acres (10 hectares), with 30 towers and a defensive wall about three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) long.

The fortress seems to have been built in the first half of the fifth century A.D., possibly on top of an earlier Iron Age hilltop fort, to defend against Germanic invaders after Roman control of the region had collapsed, study author Mário Fernández-Pereiro, an archaeologist at University College London and the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), told Live Science.

The site, called Castro Valente (“Brave Fort”), is in the Galicia region’s Padrón district, about 16 miles (16 km) southwest of the city of Santiago de Compostela. 

Hilltop fortress

Archaeologists first thought the ruins at Castro Valente were from a Celtic hilltop fort built sometime between the ninth and second centuries B.C., but they found construction techniques not used at that time.

Locals thought Castro Valente had been built after the about ninth century B.C. by a Celtic people, called the “Callaeci” in Latin, who lived in Galicia at that time.

Another Celtic tribe, called the Astures, lived to the east in what’s now the Spanish region of Asturias, while others, called the Lusitani, lived to the south in what’s now Portugal.

Until they were subsumed by the expanding Roman Empire in the first century B.C., the Callaeci and the Astures formed the “Castro culture” of fortified hilltop settlements — and modern-day Galicia is filled with their ruins, according to the December 2022 study, published in Cuadernos de Arqueología de la Universidad de Navarra (Archaeological Journal of the University of Navarra).

When Fernández-Pereiro and José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo, also a USC archaeologist and co-author of the study, began researching the site, they also thought Castro Valente was a fortified Celtic settlement. But they soon found evidence that the buried structure was much larger than they expected and that parts of it were built with methods not used in the Iron Age.

The archaeological excavations “continued to provide data that point us towards a time of post-Roman occupation, presumably in the first half of the 5th century,” Fernánandez-Pereiro said in an email.

Germanic invaders

Archaeologists now think the ruins are from a fortress built after the collapse of Roman rule in the region in the fifth century A.D. to defend local people from Germanic invaders.

The fortress’s layout, construction and fragments of pottery found there suggest it was built after the Roman Empire lost control of the region in about the early fifth century A.D., when Spain was overrun by Germanic invaders. Galicia fell to the Suevi people (also spelled Suebi), who originated in the Elbe River region of what’s now Germany and the Czech Republic, and the fortress seems to have been built by local people for their defense at that time, Fernández-Pereiro said.

“We understand that the local powers of Galicia needed a tool to reaffirm and control the territory in the midst of this transition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages,” he said. 

But the fortress seems to have been abandoned roughly 200 years later, possibly because it was no longer needed, Fernández-Pereiro said. Future research may reveal more about it, as well as protect it from development, such as forest roads and wind farms. The team plans to regularly update their Facebook page, CastelosnoAire, as research progresses.

Ken Dark, an archaeologist at King’s College London who wasn’t involved in the study, told Live Science that the fifth-century Castro Valente site seemed to be based on the reuse of a Celtic fort — something that was also seen in Britain after the collapse of Roman rule.

In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., many Britons from what are now Wales and Cornwall fled the Anglo-Saxon invasion by immigrating to Galicia, alongside the more famous migration of Britons to what’s now known as Brittany in western France, he said.

“It is fascinating to find a site like this in a region strongly associated with Britain during Late Antiquity,” Dark said.

CREDIT TO: livescience.com

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

1,800-Year-Old Sanctuary to Mithras discovered in Spain

1,800-Year-Old Sanctuary to Mithras discovered in Spain

1,800-Year-Old Sanctuary to Mithras discovered in Spain

Archaeologists excavating at Villa del Mitra in Cabra, Spain, have uncovered a sanctuary dedicated to the god Mithras, along with the remains of ritual banquets.

Mithraism rose to prominence as a cult religion that became popular in the Roman Empire in the late 1st century AD. Worship was a Romanised form of the Indo-Iranian god Mithra.

In Roman Empire during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, this deity was honored as the patron of loyalty to the emperor.

The Villa del Mitra, located within the Roman city of Licabrum, dates from the first century AD. The villa was named after a Mitra de Cabra sculpture discovered in situ in the second century AD, depicting Mithras sacrificing a bull (a symbol of death and resurrection).

Archaeologists from the University of Málaga, the Carlos III University of Madrid, and the University of Córdoba have, in the most recent excavations, uncovered the remains of a Mithraic sanctuary dating to the second century AD, with a second phase of construction from the end of the third century AD.

The sanctuary is a rectangular room located to the southwest of the Domus, measuring 7.2 by 2.5 meters (24 by 8 feet). It has a narrow entrance, that descends several steps leading into the sanctuary that has two flanking stone benches. On the right is a small water tank measuring 1.70 by 0.65 meters.

The research team believes that these benches were used by worshipers who sat to perform rituals and feasts in Mithras’ honor. The walls have fragments of Roman bricks, one of which has two holes or niches which would likely have held a tauroctony sculpture.

The floor is covered in a dark burnt layer that, upon closer inspection, revealed fragments of pigs, birds, and rabbits, indicating evidence of cooking during the ritual banquets.

The villa was originally excavated between 1972 and 1973, during which time a courtyard with a pond and several adjacent rooms with mosaic flooring was found.

Later excavations in 1981 uncovered the remains of a hypocaust, or subfloor heating system, as well as coins depicting Philip the Arab, Diocletian, and Valentinian II.

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

A former Spanish disco-pub confirmed as lost medieval Synagogue

A former Spanish disco-pub confirmed as lost medieval Synagogue

In the Andalucian city of Utrera, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a 14th-century synagogue.

The discovery, made public on Tuesday, elevates the 14th-century structure to a rare group of medieval synagogues that have survived the years following Spain’s Jews were exiled in 1492.

Only 4 surviving synagogues in Spain after 1492 were known (two in Toledo, one in Segovia, and one in Cordoba).

For seven centuries the synagogue had been used later converted into a church, a hospital, and everything from a house for abandoned children to a restaurant and disco pub.

Over 400 years ago, there were references to the lost temple. “In that place, there were only foreign and Jewish people… who had their synagogue where the Hospital de la Misericordia now stands,” wrote local priest, historian, and poet Rodrigo Caro of Utrera in his 1604 history of the city.

The Utrera City Council decided to buy the building in 2016. However, the purchase price caused controversy. Critics questioned whether the purchase price was worth it, considering there was no hard evidence that the synagogue had ever been at that site.

A former Spanish disco-pub confirmed as lost medieval Synagogue

There were no maps or official records describing the synagogue of medieval Utrera because Jewish communities in pre-expulsion Spain had a great deal of autonomy, including their own law courts and taxation systems.

Furthermore, even if the hospital was built over the synagogue, nothing of the original might have survived. Expulsions of Jews were frequently accompanied by violent pogroms, and unrestrained development in the twentieth century destroyed much of Utrera’s medieval city.

Regardless of objections, the city went ahead with the acquisition and ordered an archaeological investigation of the structure in November 2021.

They were able to confirm Caro’s story by identifying the synagogue’s prayer hall, the perimeter bench, and the Hechal, the Sephardic term for the ark of the Torah, the small chamber or niche where the scripture scrolls were kept.

Archaeologist Miguel Ángel de Dios told journalists that “the first thing to confirm is the presence of the prayer room” following years of analysis of the building’s walls and floor.

“The fundamental elements of the synagogue, such as the entrance hall,” he said, “or the perimeter benches that have emerged in this survey, now confirm that we are indeed in the prayer hall.”

Archaeologist Miguel Ángel de Dios and the team now hope to identify the pulpit and a bath used for rituals.

EUROPE, ROMANIA, WORLD

3,000-year-old human skeleton found in Romanian archaeological site

3,000-year-old human skeleton found in Romanian archaeological site

A 3,000-year-old human skeleton was recently discovered at an archaeological excavation site in the village of Drăguşeni, Botoşani county.

3,000-year-old human skeleton found in Romanian archaeological site
3,000-year-old human skeleton found in Romanian archaeological site

The skeleton dates back to the beginning of the Bronze Age and to the Yamnaya culture, and was identified after exploring a large tumulus in Drăguşeni, according to Adela Kovacs, the head of the archaeology section of the Botoşani County Museum.

“The research in Drăguşeni focused on several periods and multiple sites. We carried out surface research in the area starting in 2018. During a field visit with colleagues from the Institute of Archaeology in Iași, we identified the remains of two large, flattened tumuli, burial monuments, that were becoming increasingly damaged due to agriculture, and we recently decided to study them.

We primarily focused on recovering scientific information and documenting the remains, and so far we have identified only one skeleton.

The skeleton dates back to the beginning of the Bronze Age and the Yamnaya culture, which is not well known in Botoșani county,” Adela Kovacs told Agerpres.

The digging in Drăguşeni was carried out by a team composed of archaeologists from the Botoșani County Museum, in partnership with archaeologists and anthropologists from the Archaeological Institute of Iași, as well the University of Opava and the Silesian Museum in the Czech Republic.

Specialists say that the skeleton “provides very valuable information with regards to the funerary rituals practiced at that time,” and note that “the skeleton bears traces of red ochre, a substance that was placed on the deceased, in the head and in the leg areas, to emphasize a ritual related to rebirth, blood, and the afterlife.

“The body’s position is curled. Initially, it was placed on its back, with the knees brought to the chest, suggesting a fetal position. This baby position represents the return to earth through a future birth,” ” said the head of the archaeology section of the Botoșani County Museum.

According to Kovacs, the entire Botoșani county has numerous tumuli. “The Drăgușeni area in particular was preferred by certain prehistoric communities when it came to burying those who were their leaders, probably, because these tumuli are funerary prestige elements.

The fact that a certain community dug the grave and built these tombs and covered them with actual artificial hills probably signaled to other populations the fact that those buried were top leaders or important people of the community,” she explained.

The skeleton was dug out, lifted, and transferred to Iași, where, following an analysis, anthropologists will determine its exact age, sex, diet, or other anthropological elements.

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Unique Golden Glass Image Unearthed in Rome

Unique Golden Glass Image Unearthed in Rome

A spear, helmet, proud profile – after hundreds of years a refined artifact of ancient Rome representing the personification of the Eternal City has come to light from excavation work for the Metro C subway line.

The iconographic theme is already well-known, but it is the first and only representation found so far on golden glass.

 “Golden glass is already a very rare finding, but this has no comparison” according to preliminary findings, Simona Morretta, archaeologist of the special superintendency of Rome, explained to ANSA.

“No golden glass with the personification of the city of Rome had ever been found before”.

 The expert said its execution is “extraordinarily refined”.

Originally, it was at the bottom of a cup, “a particular object that was often used as a gift”.

The person using the cup could in this way look at the image at the bottom while drinking.

“We don’t know whether it was really used to contain something or as a decorative object, but certainly putting an image at the bottom reflects that idea”.

The artifact experienced different lives before: “It was a precious object – she went on to explain – and it wasn’t thrown away after it broke or got damaged. But given that a glass cup could not be repaired, the bottom was ‘cut off’ and perhaps it was exhibited on furniture or hung on a wall”.

The finding did not belong to the military facility found during the excavation, which was abandoned in the middle of the third century, and subsequently ‘razed’, the walls were cut and debris was thrown inside to be covered by earth.

The piece of glass emerged under layers of earth and has a later date.

“From an initial study, it looks like the artifact is from the start of the fourth century”, added the archaeologist.

It will now have another life and will be showcased in a “display case in the station-museum of the Porta Metronia subway”, she concluded.

EUROPE, PORTUGAL, WORLD

Neanderthals Enjoyed Seaside Crab Roasts in Portugal

Neanderthals Enjoyed Seaside Crab Roasts in Portugal

Neanderthals Enjoyed Seaside Crab Roasts in Portugal

Scientists studying archaeological remains at Gruta da Figueira Brava, Portugal, discovered that Neanderthals were harvesting shellfish to eat – including brown crabs, where they preferred larger specimens and cooked them in fires. Archeologists say this disproves the idea that eating marine foods gave early modern humans’ brains the competitive advantage.

In a cave just south of Lisbon, archeological deposits conceal a Paleolithic dinner menu. As well as stone tools and charcoal, the site of Gruta de Figueira Brava contains rich deposits of shells and bones with much to tell us about the Neanderthals that lived there – especially about their meals.

A study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology shows that 90,000 years ago, these Neanderthals were cooking and eating crabs.

“At the end of the Last Interglacial, Neanderthals regularly harvested large brown crabs,” said Dr Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA), lead author of the study.

“They were taking them in pools of the nearby rocky coast, targeting adult animals with an average carapace width of 16cm. The animals were brought whole to the cave, where they were roasted on coals and then eaten.”

Catching crabs in Paleolithic Portugal

A wide variety of shellfish remains were found in the archeological remains Nabais and her colleagues studied, but the shellfish in the undisturbed Paleolithic deposits are overwhelmingly represented by brown crabs. Their size was estimated by calculating the size of the carapace relative to the crabs’ pincers, which preserve better than other parts of the crab, so are more likely to survive to be found by scientists.

The archeologists assessed the breakage on the shells, looked for butchery or percussion marks, and determined whether the crabs had been exposed to high heat.

Nabais and her colleagues found that the crabs were mostly large adults which would yield about 200g of meat. By studying the patterns of damage on the shells and claws, they ruled out the involvement of other predators: there were no carnivore or rodent marks, and the patterns of breakage didn’t reflect predation by birds. Crabs are evasive, but Neanderthals could have harvested brown crabs of this size from low tide pools in the summer.

Accumulations of shellfish which are caused by hominins are identified by their association with stone tools and other hominin-made features like hearths, surface modifications like the burns found on approximately 8% of the crab shells, and evidence of intentional fractures; the fracture patterns on the crabs at Gruta de Figueira Brava suggested they’d been broken open for access to the meat. The expectation is also that larger individuals will be overrepresented, as at Gruta de Figueira Brava, reflecting hominins choosing animals which offer more meat.

Shellfish on the menu

The evidence indicated to Nabais and her colleagues that Neanderthals weren’t just harvesting the crabs, they were roasting them. The black burns on the shells, compared to studies of other mollusks heated at specific temperatures, showed that the crabs were heated at about 300-500 degrees Celsius, typical for cooking.

“Our results add an extra nail to the coffin of the obsolete notion that Neanderthals were primitive cave dwellers who could barely scrape a living off scavenged big-game carcasses,” said Nabais. “Together with the associated evidence for the large-scale consumption of limpets, mussels, clams, and a range of fish, our data falsify the notion that marine foods played a major role in the emergence of putatively superior cognitive abilities among early modern human populations of sub-Saharan Africa.”

The authors cautioned that it was impossible to know why Neanderthals chose to harvest crabs or whether they attached any significance to consuming crabs, but whatever their reasons eating the crabs would have offered meaningful nutritional benefits.

“The notion of the Neanderthals as top-level carnivores living off large herbivores of the steppe-tundra is extremely biased,” said Nabais. “Such views may well apply to some extent to the Neanderthal populations of Ice Age Europe’s periglacial belt, but not to those living in the southern peninsulas — and these southern peninsulas are where most of the continent’s humans lived all through the Paleolithic, before, during and after the Neanderthals.”