Medieval Woman’s Burial in Switzerland Yields Gold Brooch
An excavation of a 7th Century grave site in Switzerland has thrown up a “spectacular” kind of jewellery and afforded valuable insight into medieval society.
A golden brooch was found among other valuable artefacts at the Basel burial site.
The 15 graves belonged to wealthy people of that time who were buried in their finery. The most significant find was a golden robe brooch belonging to a woman aged about 20 at her death.
The woman was also buried with a treasure trove of other jewellery, including 160 pearls, an amber pendant and a belt with an iron buckle and a silver-inlaid tongue.
Other graves revealed high society occupants adorned with highly crafted ornaments.
The archaeological site in Basel, northwest Switzerland, has been excavated over a number of years. In the summer, the body of a warrior was uncovered with a significant head injury caused by a sword blow.
The latest graves were discovered when workers were laying new heating pipes in the city.
“It appears to be a hotspot, a special place where particularly wealthy people were buried,” said Basel cantonal archaeologist Guido Lassau.
Excavations will resume in January and plans are being made to display the finds in a public exhibition.
Ancient barn conversion with steam room found at Roman villa in Rutland
The bathing suite at the Roman villa in Rutland.
If you thought barn conversions were a relatively recent development for the property-owning classes, you’d be wrong – probably by 16 or 17 centuries.
Archaeologists at the site of a Roman villa complex in the east Midlands have discovered that its wealthy owners converted an agricultural timber barn into a dwelling featuring a bathing suite with a hot steam room, a warm room and a cold plunge pool.
Fresh evidence of the villa owners’ lavish lifestyle comes two years after a family found fragments of ancient pottery on a ramble through farmland in Rutland. Archaeologists from the University of Leicester, in partnership with Historic England and Rutland county council, later unearthed a rare mosaic depicting Homer’s Iliad.
The finding – now protected by the government – was described as “the most exciting Roman mosaic discovery in the UK in the last century”.
Work at the villa site.
Now the same team has unveiled further discoveries at the site, including the conversion of a barn the size of a small church.
The barn was supported by large timber posts and may have had two storeys. It was converted to stone in the third or fourth century, with one end becoming a dwelling with many floors, and the other retained for agricultural or craft work.
The main feature of the dwelling was a Roman-style bath suite with sophisticated underfloor heating and heating ducts built into the walls. A tank outside the building may have been used to collect water from the roof.
The team also revisited the area of the mosaic which was thought to be laid in a dining room, known as a triclinium, within the main villa building. They discovered fragments of polished marble, broken stone columns and painted wall plaster that hint at grand decoration.
The dining room had been built as an extension to the main villa, suggesting that the owners wanted a special area for feasting as they gazed over the Iliad mosaic.
A newly found mosaic at the site.
The new excavations also revealed additional mosaics in the corridors leading to the dining room, including one with a kaleidoscopic geometric design.
John Thomas, the deputy director of the University of Leicester archaeological service, said: “It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this Roman villa complex to our understanding of life in late Roman Britain.
While previous excavations of individual buildings, or smaller-scale villas, have given us a snapshot, this discovery in Rutland is much more complete and provides a clearer picture of the whole complex.
“The aim of this year’s work has been to investigate other buildings within the overall villa complex to provide context to the Trojan war mosaic. While that is a wonderful, eye-catching discovery, we will be able to learn much more about why it was here, and who might have commissioned it, by learning about the villa as a whole.”
Duncan Wilson, Historic England’s chief executive, said the site had “posed many questions about life in Roman Britain”. Its significance would become clearer as the evidence was examined over the next few years by specialists, he added.
How Did Humans Boil Water Before the Invention of Pots?
On a blustery day in October, Andrew Langley and 13 other graduate students headed to the woods to learn to boil water. They were allowed no obvious cooking vessels: no pots, no pans, no bowls, no cups, no containers at all. But they did bring deer hides, which Langley had carefully procured from deer farms. They were to boil water the Paleolithic way.
Langley is a doctoral student in archaeology at the University of York, and he studies how prehistoric humans cooked without pottery. Ceramics are a relatively recent invention in the long arc of human history.
Pottery shards appear in the archaeological record only 20,000 years ago, first in China and then many millennia later in the Near East and Europe. Metal cookware is an even more recent innovation. For tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before all this, our ancestors were building fires and using heat to make food tastier, safer, and easier to digest. The invention of cooking, anthropologists have argued, helped make humans human.
It’s easy to imagine how prehistoric people could have roasted their food. It’s much harder to imagine how they could have boiled it without pottery. But that’s what Langley, who was helping lead a class of master’s students in archaeology, set out to attempt that October morning. Their boiling experiment was part of a course, and it took place at the York Experimental Archaeological Research Centre, a lakeside grove where researchers try to re-create the prehistoric by hafting arrowheads and weaving baskets out of reeds—and, in this case, boiling water. The students were divided into groups of two or three, and they set out on this extremely simple yet daunting task.
A couple of groups dug pits, filling them with coals and then lining them with either wet clay or deer hide. Others poured water into birch bark or pig stomachs (procured from a Chinese supermarket).
One group hung a deer hide from a tree and started heating small rocks in a fire—a technique inspired by the discovery of fire-cracked rocks in Paleolithic sites. These rocks had split and changed in distinct ways that suggested repeated heating and cooling. Archaeologists think that these stones were heated in fires and then dropped into water for cooking.
But you can’t use just any old rocks for boiling. “The stones are the most tricky part,” Langley says. Wet stones, such as those that have been sitting in a river bed, will explode when the water inside turns into steam. So will stones with air trapped inside them. “Things like granite and basalt are very good,” he says. For safety reasons, Langley provided the students with massage stones that he knew would not explode. Still, the students had to heat the stones gradually to make sure that they did not crack at all. They ended up slowly nudging the stones into the fire over the course of 10 to 15 minutes. Using multiple stones, they were able to get the water inside the deer hide to boil.
Another group was also attempting to boil water inside a deer hide hung directly over a fire—a technique admittedly less grounded in physical evidence from archaeological sites. In 2015, John Speth, a retired anthropologist at the University of Michigan, wrote a paper pointing out that you can actually boil water in a plastic water bottle.
The paper, he was happy to explain to me, was inspired by watching the reality show Survivorman, in which the outdoor expert Les Stroud boils water in a plastic bottle, with his son. Speth quickly found YouTube videos and other evidence of people heating water in paper cups, coconut shells, bamboo tubes, wooden bowls, and even leaves. It turns out that as long as the cooking container is filled with water, it does not get hot enough to ignite.
But when Speth began talking with other archaeologists about this, he found that they had rarely thought about Paleolithic humans boiling water this way, using seemingly flimsy and flammable containers long before the introduction of pottery.
However, ethnographers in the 19th and 20 centuries documented the Celts, Assiniboin, Cree, Ojibwa, and Blackfeet cooking without stones in birch bark, hides, and animal stomachs. These organic materials would have rotted, of course, leaving no artefacts for archaeologists to study. Speth wondered if humans could have boiled liquids this way long before the evidence showed up in the archaeological record.
One group of students decided to put this method to the test. They hoisted their water-filled deer hide directly over a fire, and they planned to let it go as long as the hide stayed intact. The hair on the outside singed, but the skin itself held up just fine. So the students waited and waited and waited. Four hours later, the hide was still intact. It did get very hard, but neither sprung a leak nor burned.
The students tried to boil water in a deer hide directly over a fire.
The water reached 60 degrees Celsius, or 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but it did not come to a boil. And the deer hide definitely added some extra flavour, if you will, to the water. “If you stuck your head over it while it was cooking, you could smell it,” says Christopher Lance, one of the students. They were, I was disappointed to learn, not allowed to drink the hide-boiled water for food-safety reasons.
The students are now writing up the results of their different pot-less boiling techniques. And Speth was incredibly pleased to hear that a group of students decided to put his idea of wet cooking without hot stones to the test.
It’s extremely speculative, he admitted. But archaeology always has to deal with the problem of an incomplete record, and certain types of evidence (i.e., anything that will rot) are always going to be more incomplete than others. It’s about considering the things we see and also the things we don’t see. “If nobody asked the question,” Speth said, “nobody would even think it’s worth thinking about.”
Researchers Revisit Circumstances of Ötzi the Iceman’s Death
A reconstruction of Ötzi on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in the city of Bolzano in South Tyrol, Italy.
The ancient, mummified body of Ötzi the Iceman was found decades ago by hikers in the high Alps — but how did it get there? A new study questions the prevailing story of Ötzi’s death more than 5,000 years ago, suggesting that Ötzi did not die in the gully where he was found. Rather, his remains may have been carried there by the periodic thawing of the ice that surrounded his body.
And researchers propose that other prehistoric people who died in icy, mountainous regions could have been preserved by the same process.
“I think the possibility now is perhaps a bit larger” of finding another prehistoric body, archaeologist Lars Pilø told Live Science. “It’s not so large that I can promise there will be a body in the next decade, but I think that there’s definitely a chance.”
Pilø is the lead author of the new study, published Nov. 7 in the journal Holocene, which takes a fresh look at evidence from Ötzi.
He also leads the Secrets of the Ice project, which is associated with Norway’s Innlandet County Council and the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo; it studies the archaeology of glaciers and ice patches, many of which are now melting and revealing frozen troves of ancient artefacts.
The iceman cometh
The remains of Ötzi, who’s named after the Ötztal Alps where he was found, were discovered on Sept. 19, 1991, by German tourists in an Alpine pass between Italy and Austria.
The hikers first thought they’d found the preserved body of a modern mountaineer, but investigations later determined that Ötzi died about 5,300 years ago.
According to the Secrets of the Ice website, the generally accepted story of Ötzi’s death comes from investigations by archaeologist Konrad Spindler of the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Spindler found that Ötzi had probably been murdered: an arrowhead was embedded in his shoulder, and a deep cut in his hand appeared to be a defensive wound suffered while warding off a blow. He also noted that Ötzi’s backpack, bow and arrow quiver were damaged, which Spindler proposed was a sign of combat.
But Pilø and his colleagues argue that the damage to Ötzi’s equipment was probably caused by the pressure of the ice that surrounded them.
“There’s definitely been a conflict,” he said. “But what we say is that the damage to the artefacts is more easily explained by natural processes.”
Ötzi’s remains were found in a gully, marked here on the lower right with a black arrow, near the Tisenjoch pass in the Ötztal Alps along the border with Italy and Austria.
Otzi’s remains were found at a height of 10,530 feet (3,210 meters) at the place marked with a black circle. An axe that’s thought to have belonged to him was found lower down the slope, at the place marked with a black square.
The site where Otzi’s remains were found, marked here with a red dot, was excavated by scientists from Austria’s University of Innsbruck in 1992.
Ozti’s upper body was found partially resting on the half-submerged rock on the left of this photograph, where one of the scientific team is resting his green boot.
Several artefacts were found near Ötzi’s remains, including this quiver with arrows. They’re damaged, which was interpreted as a sign of conflict, but the new study proposes it might have been caused by the pressure of the ice.
Alpine death
The most significant proposal in the new study is that Ötzi didn’t die at the bottom of the gully where he was found, but rather that his body was carried there as the ice thawed and refroze over several summers.
Early investigations proposed that Ötzi was killed in the gully in the fall season and that his body was protected there from the crushing pressure of a glacier above.
But analysis of the food in Ötzi’s intestine suggests instead that he died in the spring or early summer when the gully would have been filled with ice, Pilø said.
In the new study, the authors propose that Ötzi died somewhere on the surface of a stationary ice patch — not a moving glacier — and that his remains and artefacts were carried into the gully by the periodic thawing and refreezing of the ice.
That means the body and artefacts were exposed at times and may have been submerged in melted ice water, but they nonetheless stood the test of time for thousands of years. So, it’s likely that other long-dead bodies may have been preserved in the same way, he said.
Archaeologist Andreas Putzer of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano in Italy, where Ötzi’s body and artefacts are on display, said that closer investigation of the mummy could confirm if it had indeed been exposed to glacial meltwater over time.
“A mummy submerged in water would lose its epidermis [skin], hair, and nails,” Putzer, who was not involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email. “Normally this happens to bodies of drowned persons.” Pathological research could determine if the remains were ever submerged in melted ice water, as the new study proposes, or if they were continually frozen in ice, he said.
Borgund: The Lost Viking Village Uncovered with 45,000 Artifacts Hidden in a Basement
In 1953, a parcel of land located close to the Borgund church on the west coast of Norway was going to be cleared, and a lot of debris ended up being discovered during the process. Fortunately, some people were able to identify the “debris” for what it actually was—items from the Norwegian Middle Ages.
This picture shows the excavation in 1954. The Borgund fjord can be seen in the background. The site was excavated also in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as smaller excavations more recently. In total there have been 31 archaeological field seasons at Borgund.
An excavation was carried out the following summer. Archaeologists unearthed a large number of artefacts. The majority of them were put in a basement archive. After that, not much more transpired.
Now, some seven decades later, experts have begun the exhaustive work of analyzing the 45,000 objects that have been kept in storage for the purpose of gaining insight into a thousand-year-old Norwegian town with a shocking lack of historical knowledge. Medieval Borgund is mentioned in a few written sources, where it is referred to as one of the “little towns” (smaa kapstader) in Norway.
Professor Gitte Hansen, an archaeologist at the University Museum of Bergen, recently gave an interview with Science Norway in which she discussed what researchers have discovered about Borgund thus far. Danish archaeologist Gitte Hansen detailed that the construction of Borgund most likely took place at some point during the Viking Age.
“The story of Borgund begins sometime in the 900s or 1000s. Fast forward a few hundred years and this was the largest town along the coast of Norway between Trondheim and Bergen. Activity in Borgund may have been at its most extensive in the 13th century. In 1349, the Black Death comes to Norway. Then the climate gets colder. Towards the end of the 14th century, the town of Borgund slowly disappeared from history. In the end, it disappeared completely and was forgotten.” – Science Norway reports.
Professor Hansen is currently researching the artefacts in collaboration with researchers from Germany, Finland, Iceland, and the United States. The project has previously received financial support from the Research Council of Norway and contributions from several other research institutions in Norway.
Researchers specializing in different areas, such as textiles and the old Norse language, have been brought together to form a team. Scientists are able to gain knowledge about the clothing worn during the Viking Age by analyzing textiles that were discovered in Borgund.
The museum basement has drawers upon drawers with remains of textiles from perhaps a thousand years ago. They can tell us more about what kind of clothes people in Norway wore during the Viking Age and the Middle Ages.
Shoe soles, pieces of cloth, slag (the by-product of smelting ores and used metals), and potsherds were among the priceless artefacts discovered by the archaeology team led by Asbjørn Herteig during excavations of the long-lost Viking village of Borgund.
According to Professor Hansen, these artefacts can tell a great deal about how Vikings lived on a day-to-day basis. A significant number of the Viking artefacts are still well-preserved and may be scrutinized in great detail. The basement may contain as many as 250 separate pieces of clothing and other textiles.
“A Borgund garment from the Viking Age can be made up of as many as eight different textiles,” Professor Hansen explained.
According to Science Norway, in the remains of Borgund down in the basement under the museum in Bergen, researchers are now discovering ceramics from almost all of Europe. “We see a lot of English, German and French tableware,” Hansen says.
People who lived in Borgund may have been in Lübeck, Paris, and London. From here they may have brought back art, music, and perhaps inspiration for costumes. The town of Borgund was probably at its richest in the 13th century.
“Pots and tableware made of ceramic and soapstone from Borgund are such exciting finds that we have a research fellow in the process of specializing only in this,” Hansen says. “We hope to learn something about eating habits and dining etiquette here on the outskirts of Europe by looking at how people made and served food and drink.”
The study of the Borgund artefacts has already produced results and Professor Hanse says “there are many indications that people here had direct or indirect contact with people across large parts of Europe.”
In addition, researchers have found evidence that inhabitants of the Viking village of Borgund enjoyed eating fish. For the people of Borgund, fishing was essential.
It is still unknown, though, whether they transported fish to the German Hanseatic League in Bergen or exchanged fish with other regions of Norway and Europe.
Scientists found “a lot of fishing gear. This suggests that people in Borgund themselves may have fished a lot. A rich cod fishery in the Borgundfjord may have been very important for them,” Hansen says.
We might infer from the ironwork remnants that the forgotten town in Western Norway had a strong foundation. Perhaps blacksmiths played a particularly significant role in this town.
And why exactly did Asbjørn Herteig and his associates discover a significant amount of waste materials from shoemakers? Up to 340 shoe fragments can provide information on shoe style and the preferred types of leather used for shoes throughout the Viking Age.
Some of the archaeological staff in Borgund.
Our knowledge of Borgund from the historians’ written sources is rather limited. Because of this, the role of archaeologists and other researchers in this specific project is crucial.
There is, however, one significant historical source. It is a royal decree from 1384 which obliges the farmers of Sunnmøre to buy their goods in the market town of Borgund (kaupstaden Borgund).
“This is how we know that Borgund was considered a town at the time,” Professor Hansen says. “This order can also be interpreted as Borgund struggling to keep going as a trading place in the years after the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century.” And then the city was forgotten.
A 2,000-year-old theatre found 25 metres below Pompeii ruins revealed
Herculaneum, like its neighbouring city of Pompeii, was buried under volcanic ash and pumice during the tragic event 2,000 years ago. Now found below the modern-day town of Ercolano, the city was rediscovered by chance in 1709 during the digging of a well.
Tunnels were soon added at the site by treasure hunters, and some artefacts were removed but now, 200 years later, TV cameras explored the area during Channel 5’s “Pompeii: The New Revelations”.
Historian Dan Snow detailed how an incredible discovery was made.
He said earlier this month: “In 1709, a well was dug in this town that had grown up on the coast eight miles north of Pompeii.
“The workers started to pull up slabs of beautiful marble.
Dan Snow explored the ancient city
Dan Snow headed down the well
“A French aristocrat, Emmanuel d’Elbeuf, was building a mansion nearby, so he was in the market for marble.
Quite quickly he realised this must have been a Roman theatre
Dan Snow
“He decided to cut out the middleman and bought the well for himself.
“First a worker, and then d’Elbeuf himself were strapped into slings and lowered 15 metres down the well.”
Mr Snow went on to detail how an ancient Roman theatre was uncovered, in a remarkable breakthrough.
He added: “At the bottom, he discovered this cavity and he started crawling around and found broken bits of marble and statues.
“Quite quickly he realised this must have been a Roman theatre, it could only be a theatre from the lost town of Herculaneum that the Roman authors had talked about.
A series of tunnels have been dug
“A group of convicts were sent down here and told to tunnel through and mine it for treasure.
“They’ve left us with this warren of tunnels that they hacked out.
“Luckily, they didn’t take all the murals, they left some here, you can still see some of the beautiful Roman paintings.”
Mr Snow explored the theatre, detailing how key features could still be made out today,
He continued: “Look at that, it’s been underground ever since that invasion in 79AD, the colours still perfect.
A theatre was uncovered
Dan Snow said it could have housed 2,500 people
“Look up there on the arches, just beautiful, they stripped whatever they could find.
“Slowly, these convicts hollowed out more and more of this structure, until they’d uncovered pretty large parts of the theatre.
“They revealed the stage, the steps to the auditorium and some of the rows of seats – in total would have accommodated up to 2,500 people.
“This is where the people of Herculaneum would have sat side-by-side, watching the action on the stage below. (video link below)
“It’s a Roman theatre buried under 25 metres of volcanic rock.”
Although it was smaller than Pompeii, Herculaneum was a wealthier town. It was a popular seaside retreat for the Roman elite, which is reflected in the extraordinary density of grand and luxurious houses with a marble finish.
Famous buildings of the ancient city include the Villa of the Papyri and the so-called boat houses in which the skeletal remains of at least 300 people were found.
Archaeology breakthrough: Bombshell discovery unearths third-century human mountains’
The discovery was made near Rome, as researchers came across the remains of a man that would have been classed as a giant when he lived in the third century A.D.
It represents an incredibly rare find – as today gigantism affects about three people in a million worldwide.
The condition begins in childhood, when a malfunctioning pituitary gland causes abnormal growth.
Two partial skeletons, one from Poland and another from Egypt, had previously been identified as “probable” cases of gigantism, but the Roman specimen is thought to be the first clear case from the ancient past, study leader Simona Minozzi, a paleopathologist at Italy’s University of Pisa said.
The figure stood at about 6ft 8 inches, classed as a giant in third century A.D when the average height for a man was 5ft 5 inches.
The unusual skeleton was found in 1991 during an excavation at a necropolis in Fidenae (map), a territory indirectly managed by Rome.
At the time, the Archaeological Superintendence of Rome, which led the project, noted that the man’s tomb was abnormally long. It was only during a later anthropological examination, though, that the bones too were found to be unusual. Shortly thereafter, they were sent to Minozzi’s group for further analysis.
Archaeology news: The researchers found a ‘human mountain’
The figure has gigantism according to the study
o find out if the skeleton had gigantism, the team examined the bones and found evidence of skull damage consistent with a pituitary tumor, which disrupts the pituitary gland, causing it to overproduce human growth hormone.
Other findings — such as disproportionately long limbs and evidence that the bones were still growing even in early adulthood — support the gigantism diagnosis, according to the study, published October 2 2012 in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
His early demise — likely between the age of 16 and 20 — might also point to gigantism, which is associated with cardiovascular disease and respiratory problems, said Minozzi, who emphasized that the cause of death remains unknown.
A statue of Maximinus Thrax
Charlotte Roberts, an archaeologist at Durham University, said she was “certainly convinced with the diagnosis” of gigantism in 2012, but that she’d like to know more.
She said: “You can’t just study the disease, you have to look at the wider impact of how people functioned in society, and whether they were treated any differently.”
She added that one thing researchers to know is that the second-century A.D. emperor Maximinus Thrax was described in the literature as a “human mountain.”
Archaeologists have found other remains that could have been giants
Minozzi noted, though, that imperial Roman high society “developed a pronounced taste for entertainers with evident physical malformations, such as hunchbacks and dwarfs — so we can assume that even a giant generated enough interest and curiosity”.
Roberts also highlighted how the find has been useful in learning about gigantism.
She said: “Normally a doctor will be looking at a patient with a disease over short-term span.
“We’ve been able to look at skeletons from archaeological sites that are thousands of years old. You can start to look at trends of how diseases have changed in frequency over time.”
Archaeology breakthrough: Scientists discover chilling ‘nest’ of ancient humans in the cave
The discovery was made in a cave in France, which contained the remains of prehistoric hunter-gatherers who died some 30,000 years ago. First discovered 20 years ago, the Grotte de Cussac cave is located in the southwest of the country. Frequented by members of the Gravettian culture of the European Upper Paleolithic, the finding shed fresh light on the burial rituals of Paleolithic humans.
The group left evidence scattered across the continent of Europe, appearing around 33,000 years ago. Particularly notable for its prolific cave art “Venus” figurines portraying voluptuous female figures and elaborate burial rituals, the culture has become famous among archaeologists.
Researchers studied the cave and published their study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here, an international team analysed the cave remains using photographs and 3D rendering.
Archaeology: France’s Lascaux cave and a crouched ancient skeleton found in Britain pictured
French cave: Grotte de Cussac cave is located in the southwest of the country.
They concluded that the site provided a “unique” setting for the dead in the Paleolithic. Previous papers had reported the presence of human remains inside the cave.
However, the newest study is the first to provide a detailed description of all of them and a comprehensive analysis of the mortuary behaviours that led to the particular distribution of the bones.
Contact with the cave’s surfaces is prohibited, forcing researchers to use indirect examination techniques. The researchers reported that the cave contained two areas of human remains.
Ancient humans: The Carnac Neolithic standing stones in western France erected by pre-Celtic people
The first included the skeleton of a young adult male in a shallow depression that was once a bear nest, as well as the fragmentary remains of at least two other individuals spread across two other former bear nests.
Deeper in the cave, the second area, containing the remains of at least three individuals—two adults and an adolescent—in hollows along a wall, which appeared to be sorted largely by lower and upper anatomy.
Some of the bones and underlying sediments featured a red pigment that the researchers have linked to the remains.
Stone Henge: Members of the Shakti Sings choir sing during the winter solstice, 2018
Ancient cemetery: A burial place in the ancient neolithic ruins of Aratane in Mauritania
Many of the burials were similar to traits discovered in other Gravettian sites. But the authors of the paper say a handful of characteristics appear unique to this ancient culture.
For example, the researchers said the remains were found much further inside the cave than is typical and are associated with abundant rock art— an unusual feature for Gravettian burial sites — with the cave containing more than 800 engravings.
“These human remains are located deep in the cave, which is a unique finding for this period—all previously known Gravettian burials are located in open-air sites, rock shelters, or cave entrances,” Sacha Kacki, with the French National Center for Scientific Research, told Newsweek.
Ancient humans: Neanderthals are our closest ancient human relatives
He added: “The Grotte de Cussac is not only a burial place, but also a decorated cave. It is quite rare that Gravettian human remains are found close to (cave) art, and the Grotte de Cussac is the first discovered cave where the mortuary rites and the art are very likely contemporaneous.”
According to the authors, the findings shed new light on the burial practices of Gravettian hunter-gatherers, providing evidence of significant social complexity during the Upper Paleolithic (roughly 50,000 to 12,000 years ago.)
Mr Kacki said: “Most of the human remains in Cussac are disarticulated due to human manipulations of bones or body parts after or during decomposition.
Stonehenge: Archaeologists believe the structure was built between 3000 and 2000 BC
“Although post-mortem manipulations of human remains have been previously documented for other Gravettian sites, some types of manipulations at Cussac are unknown elsewhere, including the removal of crania and the deliberate commingling of the remains of several individuals.
“These observations indicate diverse and complex mortuary behaviours during the Gravettian, which provides a window onto the social complexity of human groups from the Upper Paleolithic.”
