“Unprecedented” Phoenician necropolis found in southern Spain

A 4th or 5th-century B.C Phoenician necropolis has been found at Osuna in Southern Spain. A well-preserved underground limestone vault necropolis, where the Phoenicians living in the Iberian peninsula buried their dead, was discovered during water utility upgrades.

Council workers have found a well-preserved necropolis from the Phoenician era with at least eight subterranean limestone burial vaults and a staircase.

Archaeologists said the “unprecedented” Phoenician-Carthaginian cemetery. Such sites are normally found in coastal areas rather than so far inland, they say.

It is a unique find because the only comparable necropolises that have been unearthed so far are coastal, dotting the area around the ancient Phoenician colony of Cádiz. Osuna is inland, about 55 miles east of Seville.

Preliminary surveys have so far turned up eight burial vaults as well as staircases and areas that are thought to have served as atriums. These were elite graves, and unprecedented in what would have been practically the hinterlands of Phoenician Spain.

The lead archaeologist, Mario Delgado, described the discovery as very significant and very unexpected. “To find a necropolis from the Phoenician and Carthaginian era with these characteristics – with eight well tombs, atriums, and staircase access – you’d have to look to Sardinia or even Carthage itself,” he said.

“We thought we might find remains from the imperial Roman age, which would be more in keeping with the surroundings, so we were surprised when we found these structures carved from the rock – hypogea [subterranean vaults] – perfectly preserved beneath the Roman levels.”

Rosario Andújar, the mayor of Osuna, said the find had already prompted a re-examination of the area’s history.

The mayor said that while more research needed to be done, the luxurious nature of the necropolis suggested it had been built for those at “the highest level” of the social hierarchy.

Excavation work is currently underway in order to reach the ground levels of a possible atrium, officials said.

The Phoenicians were amongst the greatest Mediterranean traders from approximately 1,500 to 600 BC. Based on archaeological remains, the consensus now is that colonisation began around 800, when settlements were founded along the south coast of the peninsula.

They settled in southern Spain, not long after the founding of Phoenicia’s greatest colony, Carthage.

They set to work exploiting the region’s rich and untapped deposits of tin, gold, and silver and expanding their trade networks.

The trade of metals and consumer goods (fish, textiles) made the Phoenician settlements of what is now Andalusia enormously prosperous.

Archaeologists believe that the rich tombs found on the coast were built for the shipping dynasties that ran Phoenician commerce.

The Spanish town of Osuna came to the spotlight when it became the location for parts of the fifth season of the HBO series, Game of Thrones.

Neanderthals, and humans co-existed in Europe for over 2,000 years: Study

Neanderthals and humans lived alongside each other in France and northern Spain for up to 2,900 years, modelling research suggested Thursday, giving them plenty of time to potentially learn from or even breed with each other.

While the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, did not provide evidence that humans directly interacted with Neanderthals around 42,000 years ago, previous genetic research has shown that they must have at some point.

Research by Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo, who won the medicine Nobel prize last week, helped reveal that people of European descent—and almost everyone worldwide—have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.

Igor Djakovic, a Ph.D. student at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the new study, said we know that humans and Neanderthals “met and integrated into Europe, but we have no idea in which specific regions this actually happened.”

Exactly when this happened has also proved elusive, though previous fossil evidence has suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals walked the Earth at the same time for thousands of years.

To find out more, the Leiden-led team looked at radiocarbon dating for 56 artifacts—28 each for Neanderthals and humans—from 17 sites across France and northern Spain.

The artifacts included bones as well as distinctive stone knives thought to have been made by some of the last Neanderthals in the region.

The researchers then used Bayesian modeling to narrow down the potential date ranges.

‘Never really went extinct’

Then they used optimal linear estimation, a new modeling technique they adapted from biological conservation sciences, to get the best estimate for when the region’s last Neanderthals lived.

Djakovic said the “underlying assumption” of this technique is that we are unlikely to ever discover the first or last members of an extinct species.

“For example, we’ll never find the last woolly rhino,” he told AFP, adding that “our understanding is always broken up into fragments.”

The modeling found that Neanderthals in the region went extinct between 40,870 and 40,457 years ago, while modern humans first appeared around 42,500 years ago.

This means the two species lived alongside each other in the region for between 1,400 and 2,900 years, the study said.

During this time there are indications of a great “diffusion of ideas” by both humans and Neanderthals, Djakovic said.

The period is “associated with substantial transformations in the way that people are producing material culture,” such as tools and ornaments, he said.

There was also a “quite severe” change in the artifacts produced by Neanderthals, which started to look much more like those made by humans, he added.

Given the changes in culture and the evidence in our own genes, the new timeline could further bolster a leading theory for the end of the Neanderthals: mating with humans.

Breeding with the larger human population could have meant that, over time, Neanderthals were “effectively swallowed into our gene pool,” Djakovic said.

“When you combine that with what we know now—that most people living on Earth have Neanderthal DNA—you could make the argument that they never really went extinct, in a certain sense.”

Neanderthals seem to have been carnivores

A new study published on October 17, 2022, in the journal PNAS, led by a CNRS researcher, uses zinc isotope analysis for the first time to determine the place of Neanderthals in the food chain. The results obtained suggest that they would indeed have been carnivores.

Were Neanderthals carnivores? Scientists have not yet decided on the question. If certain studies of dental calculus of individuals coming from the Iberian peninsula could suggest that they were large consumers of plants, other research carried out on non-Iberian sites seemed rather indicate an almost exclusive consumption of meat.

Thanks to new analytical techniques applied to a molar from an individual of this species, researchers 1  have demonstrated that the Neanderthals at the Gabasa site in Spain seemed to be carnivores.

Until then, to try to define an individual’s place in the food chain, scientists generally had to extract proteins and analyze the isotopes of nitrogen present in the collagen of bones. 

However, this method is often only applicable in temperate environments, and rarely on samples over 50,000 years old. When these conditions are not met, the analysis of nitrogen isotopes is very complex, if not impossible. This was particularly the case for the molar from the Gabasa site, studied here.

Faced with these constraints, Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at the CNRS, and her colleagues have this time analyzed the isotopic ratios of zinc contained in dental enamel, a mineral resistant to all forms of degradation. This is the first time this method has been used to try to identify the diet of a Neanderthal.

The lower the proportions of zinc isotopes in the bones, the more likely they are to belong to a carnivore.

This measurement was also carried out on animal bones from the same period and geographical area, both on carnivores such as the lynx or the wolf, and on herbivores such as the rabbit or the chamois. As a result, the Neanderthal to whom this Gabasa tooth belonged would have been carnivorous and did not consume the blood of its prey.

According to broken bones found at the site and isotopic data, this individual would also have eaten the bone marrow of its prey, without consuming the bones. 

Other chemical tracers show that he was weaned before he was two years old. Analyzes also show that he would probably have died where he had lived as a child.

Compared to previous techniques, this new method, by analyzing zinc isotopes, makes it possible to better distinguish omnivores from carnivores. 

The scientists hope to reproduce the experiment on other individuals, coming from other sites to confirm their conclusions, in particular on the Payre site where new research has begun.

Bibliography

A Neandertal dietary conundrum: new insights provided by tooth enamel Zn isotopes from Gabasa, Spain . Klervia Jaouen, Vanessa Villalba Mouco, Geoff M. Smith, Manuel Trost, Jennifer Leichliter, Tina Lüdecke, Pauline Méjean, Stéphanie Mandrou, Jérôme Chmeleff, Danaé Guiserix, Nicolas Bourgon, Fernanda Blasco, Jéssica Mendes Cardoso, Camille Duquenoy, Zineb Moubtahij, Domingo C. Salazar Garcia, Michael Richards, Thomas Tütken, Jean Jacques Hublin, Pilar Utrilla, and Lourdes Montes, PNAS , October 17, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109315119

Ancient Glass Plate From Spain Shows a Beardless Jesus

Our perception of what certain biblical or historical characters look like is based simply on what has been written and passed down. However, just like religion, history can be very controversial as when hard evidence is missing, it all must come down to cultural beliefs.

Almost 3 billion people worship Jesus Christ around the world, so as this is such an impactful character in the lives of many, we should know what he looks like.

Within the bible or other texts from the biblical era, there isn’t much description based on the appearance of Jesus, which seems quite strange based on his importance.

Churches have been ancient schools for over a thousand years and this is where all historical and world knowledge would be kept. Not only in the form of texts, but through different religious murals and other forms of art.

Scholars say that based on this sort of evidence that has been passed on from generations, society has built the appearance of Jesus and we move it down further with each generation.

Robert Cargill, assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa and editor of Biblical Archaeology Review mentioned that humanity never really knew what Jesus looked like:

“We don’t know what [Jesus] looked like, but if all of the things that we do know about him are true, he was a Palestinian Jewish man living in Galilee in the first century, So he would have looked like a Palestinian Jewish man of the first century. He would have looked like a Jewish Galilean.” (Quote by Robert Cargill)

However, from ruins had risen a piece of evidence that potentially shows information that has been lost throughout history and goes against everything said by scholars in religious studies.

Archaeologists outside the southern Spanish city of Linares had discovered a glass plate believed to have been used to hold Eucharistic bread. An image is represented on the plate with Jesus Christ and two of his apostles believed to be Peter and Paul.

Archaeologists working as part of the FORVM MMX Yacimiento group believe that this is the earliest depiction of Jesus Christ.

Coins and ceramic items found at the site appear to confirm that they coincided with the rule of Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor, who ruled from 306 to 337. Interestingly enough, because Christianity was persecuted at the time, the figure of Jesus Christ was presented often in the form of a fish.

The plate was found in pieces, but archaeologists were able to find 80% of the pieces and assemble them back together.

An interesting aspect of its depiction of Christ is that he is shown without a beard. There haven’t been many pieces of evidence to show that Jesus Christ actually didn’t have a beard. Based on Robert Cargill’s description of Jesus Christ, he looked like a first-century Jewish Galilean who mostly wore beards.

A newspaper report from ABC mentioned the biblical scene that is represented in the plate:

“The scene takes place in the celestial orb, framed between two palm trees, which in Christian iconography represent immortality, the afterlife, and heaven, among other things,” (Quote from ABC News)

This piece of evidence challenges what has been believed and all other depictions of Jesus Christ that have been created since the 4th century. Only time and the future efforts of archaeologists may bring similar evidence to reinforce the belief in this depiction of Jesus Christ.

Huge Megalithic 7,000-Year-Old Site Dolmen Of Guadalperal Emerges From Dry Lake In Spain

This summer’s hot weather has been extremely troublesome in many European countries. Spain suffered the worst drought in decades. An unexpected side-effect of the warm weather has been discovering unknown archaeological sites.

One of them is a mysterious megalithic monument that emerged from the parched lake bed of the Valdecañas reservoir in western Spain.

Nicknamed the Spanish Stonehenge, the site is officially known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal.

Constructed around 5,000 B.C., the circular monument was likely enclosed. Consisting of a large domed boulder supported by hundreds of vertically-placed rocks, known as menhir, the site offers valuable knowledge into the history of Spain’s megalithic builders.

German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier first discovered Dolmen of Guadalperal in 1926, but the area was flooded in 1963 in a rural development project under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.

Since then, it has only become fully visible four times. “It currently sits fully exposed in one corner of the Valdecanas reservoir, in the central province of Caceres, where authorities say the water level has dropped to 28% of capacity,” Reuters reported.

“It’s a surprise, it’s a rare opportunity to be able to access it,” said archaeologist Enrique Cedillo from Madrid’s Complutense University, one of the experts racing to study the circle before it gets submerged again.

Although there are many dolmens in Europe, historians and archaeologists still struggle to learn more about the monuments’ builders.

As reported by AncientPages.com just a few days ago, scientists in Spain came across a huge megalithic complex of 500 stones.  Archaeologists say the prehistoric site could be one of the largest of its kind in Europe.

The remarkable ancient site is located in the Huelva province in Southern Spain on the border with Portugal, near the Guadiana River.

Spanning some 600 hectares (1,500 acres), the land had been earmarked for an avocado plantation. Who built the Huelva megalithic complex remains undetermined at the moment.

Another intriguing megalithic site in Spain is Dolmen de Soto, a unique millennia-old underground structure that remains a puzzling enigma.

The recent megalithic site will be secured remains an open question, but it’s possible the Guadalperal stones may be moved to a museum or elsewhere on dry land.

As reported by Reuters, “their presence is also good news for Ruben Argentas, who owns a small boat tours business. “The dolmen emerges, and the dolmen tourism begins,” he told Reuters after a busy day spent shuttling tourists to the site and back.

But there is no silver lining for local farmers.

“There hasn’t been enough rain since the spring… There is no water for the livestock and we have to transport it in,” said Jose Manuel Comendador. Another, Rufino Guinea, said his sweet pepper crop had been ravaged.

Climate change has left the Iberian peninsula at its driest in 1,200 years, and winter rains are expected to diminish further, a study published by the Nature Geoscience journal showed.”

Massive Roman Phallus Relief Carving Uncovered in Spain

A large Roman-era relief carving of a phallus was uncovered by archaeologists excavating in Nueva Carteya, Córdoba, Spain, earlier this month, according to an announcement by the area’s local history museum.

At more than one-and-a-half feet long, it could be the largest preserved Roman phallus carving, according to archaeologists.

The phallic carving was found at the base of a building within a fortified enclosure at the archaeological site El Higuerón. The site was originally an Iberian settlement occupied in the 4th century BCE until 206 BCE, when the Romans conquered the region.

El Higuerón was initially excavated in 1966 and again in 1968 and is considered one of the benchmarks of Iberian culture in the Córdoba province. Current excavations are overseen by the Museo Histórico Local de Nueva Carteya, which announced the finding of the phallic relief.

In ancient Roman culture, the fascinus was a depiction of the divine phallus used to invoke masculine generative power. Ancient Romans believed that it provided good fortune and protection.

Phallic depictions can be found among Roman sculptures, mosaics, frescoes, and pendants. The ancient Roman city Pompeii, for example, is loaded with graffiti and carvings of phallic imagery.

One of the largest concentrations of phallic symbols, however, is at Hadrian’s Wall in England. There, along the wall corridor and at military installations, are 59 identified penis etchings.

Additionally, during this season the team discovered the base of an Iberian-era wall in the western part of the site. It contained a Roman limestone floor and structural remains from the Roman and medieval periods.

Massive Prehistoric Complex, with More than 500 Standing Stones, Found in Southern Spain

A massive megalithic complex of more than 500 standing stones has been discovered in southern Spain that could be one of the largest in Europe, archaeologists have said.

The stones were discovered on a plot of land in Huelva, a province flanking the southernmost part of Spain’s border with Portugal, near the Guadiana River.

Spanning about 600 hectares (1,500 acres), the land had been earmarked for an avocado plantation. Before granting the permit the regional authorities requested a survey in light of the site’s possible archaeological significance. The survey revealed the presence of the stones.

“This is the biggest and most diverse collection of standing stones grouped together in the Iberian peninsula,” said José Antonio Linares, a researcher at Huelva University and one of the project’s three directors.

It was probable that the oldest standing stones at the La Torre-La Janera site were erected during the second half of the sixth or fifth millennium BC, he said. “It is a major megalithic site in Europe.”

At the site, they found a large number of various types of megaliths, including standing stones, dolmens, mounds, coffin-like stone boxes called cists, and enclosures.

“Standing stones were the most common finding, with 526 of them still standing or lying on the ground,” said the researchers in an article published in Trabajos de Prehistoria, a prehistoric archaeology journal. The height of the stones was between one and three metres.

At the Carnac megalithic site in northwest France, there are about 3,000 standing stones.

One of the most striking things was finding such diverse megalithic elements grouped together in one location and discovering how well preserved they were, said Primitiva Bueno, co-director of the project and a prehistory professor at Alcalá University, near Madrid.

“Finding alignments and dolmens on one site is not very common. Here you find everything all together – alignments, cromlechs and dolmens – and that is very striking,” she said, hailing the site’s “excellent conservation”.

An alignment is a linear arrangement of upright standing stones along a common axis, while a cromlech is a stone circle, and a dolmen is a type of megalithic tomb usually made of two or more standing stones with a large flat capstone on top.

Most of the menhirs were grouped into 26 alignments and two cromlechs, both located on hilltops with a clear view to the east for viewing the sunrise during the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes, the researchers said.

Many of the stones are buried deep in the earth. They will need to be carefully excavated.

The work is scheduled to run until 2026, but “between this year’s campaign and the start of next year’s, there will be a part of the site that can be visited”, Bueno said.

Evidence of Third-Century A.D. Tsunami Uncovered in Spain

In the 1970s, two Roman inscriptions — dated from 245 to 253 AD — were discovered in Écija (known in ancient Roman times as Astigi), a city in Spain’s southern province of Seville. The writings on the tablets suggest that the emperor at the time had exempted the Roman province of Baetica (roughly the equivalent of modern-day Andalusia, a region of southern Spain) from taxes. But the inscriptions failed to explain why, and the reason has remained a mystery for decades.

In a new study published in Natural Science in Archaeology, a team of European and U.S. scientists and researchers say they have finally found an explanation. The article, A Third Century AD Extreme Wave Event Identified in a Collapse Facies of a Public Building in the Roman City of Hispalis (Seville, Spain), provides a surprising answer: A gigantic tsunami that began in the Bay of Cadiz crashed into the land, causing numerous coastal settlements to be abandoned and engulfing everything its path, including the city of Seville, located 45 miles inland from the sea.

The discovery was made following the excavation and study of a public building from the Roman era, destroyed during what researchers now believe was a massive tidal wave event. The building once stood in what is now the Patio de Banderas public square in Seville, adjacent to the capital city’s main cathedral.

The report, authored by experts from universities in Spain, France, Germany, and the U.S. describes how, in 400 BC, the Atlantic Ocean had created a large lagoon, known in antiquity as Lacus Ligustinus, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River.

The lake was fed by three river corridors, one of which led directly to Hispalis. The river was large enough that medium-sized ships could use it to transport minerals, oil, wine, and other goods as far inland as Alcalá del Río, roughly 10 miles past Seville. It is estimated that the Port of Seville was quite large, even at that time, stretching over a kilometer in length and moving some 18,000 tons of merchandise per year.

Between 2009 and 2014, a team of archaeologists excavated the Patio de Banderas site. “Impressive urban stratigraphy dated between the ninth century BC and the thirteenth century AD,” the report reads. “From all these findings, a very well-preserved Roman public building […] stands out. The building [was] constructed in opus africanum [a form of Roman brick masonry] during the Late Republic (60 to 30 BC).” It was organized around a central courtyard, with a gallery of columns at its southern end. Experts identified the site as a commercial and administrative space associated with the Hispalis river port.

Analyzing the ruins at the Patio de Banderas, the first team of archaeologists to study the site concluded that the ancient building had been repaired several times under the Flavian Dynasty (late 1st century AD), but especially between the years 200 and 225 AD, when there was “widespread collapse of the architectural remains [and] most of the southern walls appear to have been displaced from their original position [by an external force], always in the same direction, toward the northwest.” At the time, the archaeologists ruled out a tsunami for two main reasons: because the site is 22 feet above sea level, and because the distance between Híspalis and the Lacus Ligustinus was almost 25 miles in Roman times (now it’s more than 45 miles). In other words, for a tsunami to destroy the building, it would have had to be bigger than any on record — the mother of all tsunamis.

The authors of the new report ―Mario Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, José N. Pérez-Asensio, Francisco José Martín Peinado, Enrique García Vargas, Miguel Ángel Tabales, Antonio Rodríguez Ramírez, Eduardo Mayoral Alfaro and Paul Goldberg ― were not satisfied with the first team’s findings. They believed that an opinion based on a visual analysis of the site “was not enough,” so they undertook a multidisciplinary study that combined macro- and microscale methods and techniques.

They used carbon-14 dating, micromorphology, mineralogy, geochemistry, micropaleontology, ultraviolet fluorescence microscopy, accelerator mass spectrometry, radiocarbon calibration, and ceramic and materials science, among other techniques, to re-examine the site and search for new answers.

The team of researchers began to analyze “a microlaminated deposit, alternating sandy and silty beds, and with abundant fresh-fragmented shell,” as well as brick columns, several calcarenite ashlars, plaster and paint, a fluted column, fragmented marble from different Mediterranean quarries, an inscription, and a complete marble votive relief, typical of the Cult of Isis. What was especially striking about the site, the team discovered, was that “the materials [did] not belong to the building excavated at the Patio de Banderas, since it was constructed with different materials (mainly limestone and brick) and different techniques.” Rather, these exogenous architectural elements had been chemically transformed by a “highly energetic event,” which transported them to the Patio de Banderas, where they were trapped inside the building due to flooding from the tsunami.

The report calculates that the flooding occurred between the years 197 and 225.

Among the objects excavated at the site was an inscription reading “IIAVRHERACLAE / PATETFILFBAR AVR HERACLAE/ PAT ET FIL / F BAR.” The artefact was originally fabricated in a ceramics workshop owned by Roman emperors Septimius Severus, Antonino Caracalla, and Geta, which once stood on the banks of the Guadalquivir River.

The inscription references Aurelii Heraclae, the family of freedmen who managed the workshop between 197 and 207 AD — the same period from which the other artefacts found on the site date.

The study thus concludes that “the Patio de Banderas deposit was generated during an extreme wave event,” and that the building acted as a trap for the artefacts transported inland by the tsunami. “With the data, we actually have, and considering the distance at this point from the coast in Roman times [about 25 miles], and also taking into account the distance from this point to the coast in Roman times [about 40 kilometres], we affirm that the most probable origin of the deposit identified is the combined action of an energetic storm, which might have produced waves and currents in the Lacus Ligustinus energetic enough to transport estuary and marine fauna, together with extreme rainfall and flooding from the Guadalquivir River.”

These new findings suggest an answer to the mystery posed by the inscriptions found in Écija that indicate Baetica’s status as prouincia immunis — a province exempt from taxes. As the authors of the Patio de Banderas study note, this status was most commonly granted in the aftermath of natural disasters. Like, as an example, a tsunami.