Category Archives: WORLD

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

1,000-year-old coin among finds in Cork archaeological dig

1,000-year-old coin among finds in Cork archaeological dig

The discovery of the coins has fuelled speculation that a castle may have stood on this site much earlier than expected

A close-up of the coin was found during excavations at Carrignacurra Castle in Cork.

Two silver coins, one almost 1,000-year-old, and a tax token which was later used as a board game piece during the Middle Ages have been unearthed during archaeological excavations as part of the multi-million restoration of a landmark tower house.

The discovery of the coins by archaeologist Tony Miller, who is excavating the medieval Carrignacurra castle near Inchigeela in Cork, has fuelled speculation that a castle may have stood on this site much earlier than expected.

The ‘jeton’ or chequer piece, used for accounting and later as gaming pieces, has been unearthed following excavations at Carrignacurra Castle in Cork.

The ‘jeton’ or chequer piece, used for accounting and later as gaming pieces, has been unearthed following excavations at Carrignacurra Castle in Cork.

The tower house, which dates from around 1570, was one of three such tower houses built by the O’Learys. It is the only one left standing.

It was built on a high rock outcrop to defend an important ford on the river Lee, and was originally the seat of the O’Leary family before it was captured by the O’Sullivan clan and eventually fell derelict.

Its most recent owners made a start on renovations but abandoned the work before it was finished.

American owners

The imposing protected structure was bought last year by an American couple, Shawn and Tom Carlson, both pilots, who embarked on an ambitious €2m restoration project.

Ms Carlson, née O’Leary, is a direct descendant of Cornelius Ó Laoghaire, who fled to America in 1773 after he fatally shot the sheriff, Morris, to avenge the death of his brother, Art Ó Laoghaire who was immortalised by his widow, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, in the epic Irish lament, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire.

The Carlsons hosted a site visit of around 75 people who were in the Lee Valley this month to attend the O’Leary clan gathering.

Mr Miller, who briefed them on the archaeological finds, told the Irish Examiner that his excavations have been concentrated around the tower base and the ground floor.

“During the excavation of the ground floor, a cobbled floor was uncovered in one corner as well as a rectangular base for storage bins or a workbench against the northern wall,” he said.

Pipes and pottery

He has unearthed clay pipes, one of which was made in Bristol, leading to speculation that it could have been left by Cromwellian troops when Roger Boyle knocked the castle under orders from Cromwell, as well as a small amount of domestic pottery dating from around the 16th century, animal bones, mostly pig bones, a small bone bead and lead musket balls, mostly unused, with evidence that they were being made on site.

But among the most interesting finds were two silver coins — one known as a groat featuring Henry 111 and dated to 1270, and the other featuring Edward IV, dating from the 1470s.

A musket and pistol ball with a small ingot of lead was found during excavations at Carrignacurra Castle in Cork.

A musket and pistol ball with a small ingot of lead was found during excavations at Carrignacurra Castle in Cork.

Mr Miller said this coin was uncovered at a level near bedrock at the very foot of the castle and is a century older than the generally accepted date of the tower house.

But he said the most unusual find was an exchequer piece or ‘jeton’, made in Bavaria around 1620, which was commonly used for calculating taxes, and which was later used as a board game piece in the Middle Ages equivalent of draughts.

The token carries a motto with a religious reference meant to keep the user honest. One of the clay pipes, dated to the first half of the 17th century. It dates from a time when tobacco was expensive and therefore features a small bowl.

One of the clay pipes, dated to the first half of the 17th century. It dates from a time when tobacco was expensive and therefore features a small bowl.

Only a handful of these tokens have ever been found in Ireland. They are usually found in Britain nearer to London.

The finds feature in one of Cork County Council’s latest heritage books.

Mr Miller said further excavations will be undertaken on what is presumed to be a medieval ramp and wall on the south side of the castle, as well as carbon dating remnants of basket weave used to create the vault on the interior of the structure.

EUROPE, TURKEY, WORLD

Unusual Burials Unearthed in Turkey’s Ancient Port of Anemurium

Unusual Burials Unearthed in Turkey’s Ancient Port of Anemurium

Skeletons of four humans, one of which is a baby, have been found in an area which is believed to be a colonnaded street, during the excavations in the ancient port city “Anemurium” in the southern province of Mersin. The team was excited by the fact that the baby skeleton was buried in an amphora.

Excavation, research and restoration works continue throughout the year in the ancient city of Anemurium, located on an area of approximately 600 decares on the Mediterranean coast in the Anamur district by a team of academics and students from many different universities under the chairmanship of Professor Mehmet Tekocak.

The archaeologists have been recently working in an area, which is not a necropolis area and is thought to be a colonnaded street. They first reached the skeleton of a baby, which was carefully placed in an amphora, and then the skeleton of three individuals who are considered to be the baby’s family.

“At the moment, we are working in the area we call the colonnaded street. But during the previous and this year’s excavations, we found many human skeletons in this area. Now we found four individuals buried directly in the ground. But what is interesting for us is that although it is not the necropolis area of the ancient city of Anemurium, many human skeletons are found here,” said Tekocak.

Tekocak stated that the buried baby was in a broken commercial amphora. “What is interesting for us is that this is the first time we have encountered this situation in the region, and it is likely that a newborn baby died before long and its body was buried in a commercial amphora.

In other words, an amphora, left as a gift in the tombs and used in trade in ancient times, was the first time used as a baby grave in the ancient city of Anemurium.

Adult individuals were very carelessly buried directly in the ground. But they created a very special area for the baby. Babies and children always received special attention in ancient times. The love for a child, which is still valid today, somehow continues in the world of the dead,” he said.

Noting that due to the fact that they found skeletons on a street area, they had different thoughts, Tekocak said, “Maybe there was a church structure here that is not known in the literature and these burials were made in its garden.

Last year, we identified eight individuals in a single underground chamber tomb in the necropolis area. We found seven individuals in the area we are currently working this year.

In other words, here we are faced with seven human skeletons, five of which are adults, one is a baby, and the other is a child. Unfortunately, we have not encountered such a situation in the vaulted tombs of the Roman period in the necropolis area of the city.

Already in ancient times, these tombs must have been robbed. We have encountered such burials almost every year since 2018 in the ancient Anemurium.”

EUROPE, SPAIN, WORLD

Ancient Glass Plate From Spain Shows a Beardless Jesus

Ancient Glass Plate From Spain Shows a Beardless Jesus

Ancient Glass Plate From Spain Shows a Beardless Jesus
The plate, which is on display in the archaeology museum in Linares in Andalusia, is one of the earliest representations of Christ

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.

Reconstruction of images on the plate

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.

ASIA, ISRAEL, WORLD

The Discovery of Jesus Christ’s Childhood Home

The Discovery of Jesus Christ’s Childhood Home

The 1st-century house at the Sisters of Nazareth site. It may have been the childhood home of Jesus Christ.

An English archaeologist may have just made one of the most intriguing discoveries of the last two millennia: the childhood home of Jesus Christ.

Ken Dark, an archaeologist at the England’s University of Reading, has published his findings in a new book, The Sisters of Nazareth Convent: A Roman-Period, Byzantine, and Crusader Site in Central Nazareth.

The story begins with a dig by non-archaeologists: nuns who, in 1881, happened upon an ancient cistern while building the Sisters of Nazareth convent, but didn’t know what they had stumbled upon. Dark describes it as “one of the first examples of an archaeological project directed by a woman.”

“In many ways, they were way ahead of their time,” Dark told Artnet News. “They conducted a perfectly reasonable rescue excavation or salvage excavation.”

Records from their exploration, as well as another, by a Jesuit priest in the mid-20th century, were key to Dark’s research. The site had otherwise long languished, ignored by scholars, he said.

The location was home to several structures and uses over two millennia, Dark said, all of which are essential for his conclusion.

First, there was a 1st-century building, partly cut out of rock, that may have been a dwelling. The site was then used as a quarry, and then for a tomb. Later, it was home to a cave church, possibly one mentioned by the pilgrim Egeria, who wrote an account of her travels to the Holy Land in about AD 380.

Later, a Byzantine church was built on the ground above. Dark suspects it may be the previously lost Church of the Nutrition, which was built to commemorate the place where Christ was raised and was mentioned by Irish abbott and historian Adomnán in his book De Locis Sanctis (Concerning Sacred Places) in the late 7th century.

The 1st-century house at the Sisters of Nazareth site.

The church burned down around the year 1200 and was not in religious use until the Sisters of Nazareth began to build their convent there in the 1880s.

“The Byzantine church Sisters of Nazareth seems as though it was almost certainly the building described by Adomnán,” Dark said. “It was very large, very elaborately decorated, and probably from the 5th century.

“It overlay a crypt, which is also described in his book. In the crypt, just as he says, there are two Roman-period tombs, and between them, there’s a house—and that house, Adomnán says, is the place where Jesus was brought up.

“So, we found the church, we found the crypt, we found the house.”

Is it a slam dunk? Dark is quick to say no. But, he said, people historically much closer to Jesus felt it was: “I can be confident that it’s the house that the Byzantines believed, and was probably believed in the 4th century, to be Jesus’s childhood home.”

Dark was hardly out to uncover what he may have found.

“Primarily, I was there to look at the emergence of the Byzantine pilgrimage centre of Nazareth,” he said. “To have found the Sisters of Nazareth in itself seemed to be an amazing discovery.”

He hardly expected to find a 1st-century house, and possibly such an interesting one, underneath.

“So,” he said, “it comes as a bit of a surprise.”

EUROPE, GERMANY, WORLD

Genome Study Offers Clues to Anglo-Saxon Migration

Genome Study Offers Clues to Anglo-Saxon Migration

The Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield has played a key role in the largest genetic study to date of Early Medieval Europe. 

The study has been conducted by an interdisciplinary team that consisted of more than 70 geneticists and archaeologists, led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the University of Central Lancashire, with the help and expertise of the University’s Archaeogenetics Research Group.

The team has examined, in detail, one of the largest population transformations in the post-Roman world.

Genome Study Offers Clues to Anglo-Saxon Migration
Grave goods from inhumation grave 3532 at Issendorf cemetery.

Following their analysis of more than 400 individuals from ancient Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, the research has shown that there was a large-scale stream of migration from the Continental North Sea region into Eastern England during the Anglo-Saxon period, starting around 1500 years ago.

Almost 500 years after the Romans left, early historians like the Venerable Bede wrote about the Angles and Saxons and their migrations to Britain. But over the last century, views of what happened became polarised amongst historians and archaeologists. Was there really a large-scale migration from the Continent, or was it more of conquest by a small warrior elite?

The new genetic results now show that three-quarters of the Early Medieval population in Eastern England was comprised of migrants whose ancestors originated from Continental regions bordering the North Sea. What is more, as analysis of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA by Huddersfield specialist Dr Maria Pala demonstrated, the immigrants were made up as much of women as men – in other words, whole families were involved.

Migrants intermarried with the local population, but with variation from place to place

These families interbred with the existing population of Britain, but this integration varied enormously from region to region. For example, at West Heslerton, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in North Yorkshire excavated over several decades by Professor Dominic Powlesland, most ancestries were from the Continent, whereas at the contemporary post-Roman site of Worth Matravers in Dorset, excavated by Bob Kenyon and Lilian Ladle, there was almost none.

However, most of the Anglo-Saxon sites in eastern and southern England fell somewhere in between. Dr Ceiridwen Edwards, who runs the Ancient DNA Facility at Huddersfield, studied the site of Apple Down in Sussex.

This cemetery had almost 50 per cent of Continental ancestry but, unusually, there were distinct burial styles for people with local and immigrant ancestry, which suggests some level of social separation, at least at this site.

“With 278 ancient genomes from England and hundreds more from Europe, we have now gained really fascinating insights into population-scale and individual histories during post-Roman times,” explains PhD researcher Joscha Gretzinger, who led the study with Dr Stephan Schiffels at the Max Planck Institute and Professor Duncan Sayer at UCLan.

Also, at the same time, the Anglo-Saxons were far from being the only people to shape the ancestry of the English. The team estimated that the present-day English derive only around 40 per cent of their DNA from these medieval Continental ancestors.

Director of the Evolutionary Genomics Research Centre, Professor Martin Richards, leads the Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield and says this research has only been made possible due to a huge advance in ancient DNA sequencing technologies.

“Resolving the question of the English settlements has been a dream of mine since I first started working in archaeogenetics three decades ago,” said Professor Richards. “It has now finally become possible because of the incredible strides in ancient DNA sequencing technologies that have been made in the last few years.”

The work at Huddersfield was funded as part of a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme awarded to Professor Richards and Dr Maria Pala, and a Leverhulme Trust Project Grant awarded to Dr Ceiridwen Edwards.

This open access work was published in Nature on 21 September 2022 titled ‘The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool’. Further discussion of this research will be available in a special issue of the Current Archaeology magazine in print on 6 October. 

NEW ZEALAND, WORLD

19th-Century Artifacts Found in New Zealand

19th-Century Artifacts Found in New Zealand

An intact shoe, a Chilean peso from 1853 and even a former vegetable plot have been unearthed in one of the biggest archaeological digs in New Zealand.

19th-Century Artifacts Found in New Zealand
A Chilean peso dating from 1853 was one of the thousands of old items found under a central Christchurch rebuild site.

Archaeologists have been working for three months to unearth hidden treasures beneath the site of the planned Te Kaha arena, which stretches over three blocks in central Christchurch.

They have found thousands of 19th-century items, which have filled 170 boxes, including remnants of brick chimney places, a former potato bed, earthenware drainage pipes and old rubbish pits.

Principal archaeologist Clara Watson said the finds would give fresh insight into how Christchurch people lived in the 19th century.

A clay pipe discovered beneath the site for the planned Te Kaha arena site in central Christchurch.

“They are really well-preserved archaeological features that we would not normally find,” she said.

“We’ve discovered landscaping features, drainpipes for gardens, garden rows and house pilings. A lot of the time we don’t find these sorts of things as they’re usually wiped out.”

She said the rubbish pits contained ornate clay pipes, bottles and ceramic toothpaste and cold cream pots.

“This would be one of the biggest archaeological digs in New Zealand.

A ceramic pot of cold cream was one of thousands of items discovered.

“I just feel really privileged to run a project this large. I am really excited for when we get back to the office and go through everything we have found and pull out those stories.”

The three blocks were largely residential in the 19th century. Watson said they chose to investigate sites that were largely undisturbed and mainly used for car parking since the original 19th-century home was demolished.

The size of the site meant they could compare how different people lived in different periods of Christchurch history.

A ceramic pot of cherry-flavoured toothpaste was also unearthed.

The finds are the latest to be discovered beneath rebuild sites in central Christchurch. In March, hundreds of leather shoes, an ornate clay pipe and intact gin bottles were discovered beneath the site of the planned new Court Theatre.

The treasure trove uncovered beneath a layer of gravel on the corner of Gloucester and Colombo streets included metal belt buckles, soda water bottles, marbles, grocery store tokens, and shards of decorative plates.

In June, an intact chamber pot, an ornate salad oil bottle, and century-old “Frozen Charlotte” porcelain dolls were during an archaeological dig on an empty site on the corner of Tuam St and Oxford Tce.

Historical relics from the 1850s were found under the Christchurch city centre site. Thousands of historical relics have been discovered beneath a central Christchurch site after sitting undisturbed for 170 years.

The archaeologists also found brick foundations, numerous Victorian rubbish pits, hundreds of intact glass bottles, and a corrugated fence line.

The Chilean peso discovered on the Te Kaha arena site was a mystery, Watson said.

“We have no idea how that has ended up in Christchurch.”

Many intact bottles were unearthed on the site.
NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Second Ancient Native American Canoe Discovered in Wisconsin

Second Ancient Native American Canoe Discovered in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologists, alongside partners from Wisconsin’s Native Nations, recovered a 3,000-year-old dugout canoe from Lake Mendota in Madison today, less than one year after their recovery of a 1,200-year-old canoe that drew international attention in November 2021.

Second Ancient Native American Canoe Discovered in Wisconsin

Radiocarbon dating performed on the latest canoe places it in 1000 B.C., making it the oldest ever discovered in the Great Lakes region by roughly 1,000 years.

The 3,000-year-old dugout canoe is carved from a single piece of white oak and measures approximately 14.5 feet in length. It was initially located by Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen during a recreational dive in May of this year.

Discussions about recovering it from the lakebed began immediately following the discovery, in collaboration with Wisconsin’s Native Nations.

It was found in the same area the first canoe was discovered, suggesting that the location of Lake Mendota’s shoreline may have changed over time and could have once been much lower, according to Dr. James Skibo, Wisconsin Historical Society state archaeologist.

“Finding an additional historically significant canoe in Lake Mendota is truly incredible and unlocks invaluable research and educational opportunities to explore the technological, cultural, and stylistic changes that occurred in dugout canoe design over 3,000 years,” said Skibo.

“Since it was located within 100 yards of where the first canoe was found at the bottom of a drop-off in the lakebed, the find has prompted us to research fluctuating water levels and ancient shorelines to explore the possibility that the canoes were near what is now submerged village sites.”

Although it is likely that water transportation dates back to the arrival of Native peoples in this region, this discovery provides the earliest direct evidence.

The 3,000-year-old canoe helps to tell a complete story of the continuum of Native life in Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region. Members from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Bad River Tribe were present at the canoe recovery.

“The recovery of this canoe built by our ancestors gives further physical proof that Native people have occupied Teejop (Four Lakes) for millennia, that our ancestral lands are here and we had a developed society of transportation, trade and commerce,” said Ho-Chunk President Marlon WhiteEagle.

“Every person that harvested and constructed this caašgegu (white oak) into a canoe put a piece of themselves into it. By preserving this canoe, we are honouring those that came before us. We appreciate our partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society, working together to preserve part of not only our ancestors’ history but our state’s history.”

Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists, along with skilled volunteers, conducted the excavation and recovery efforts.

The canoe was hand-excavated in preparation for today’s recovery mission and then securely transported to the State Archive Preservation Facility in Madison for preservation and storage.

It will be cleaned and cared for by Tribal members and Society staff before being hand-lowered into a large preservation vat also containing the 1,200-year-old canoe discovered in 2021. Together the canoes will undergo a two-year preservation process that will conclude with freeze-drying to remove any remaining water.

“I was amazed when a 1,200-year-old canoe was uncovered last year, but this discovery of a canoe dating back to 1000 B.C. is just extraordinary,” said Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers. “This incredible finding provides an opportunity for us to work in concert with Tribal Nations to not only study but celebrate the history of the Indigenous people who’ve called this land home since long before Wisconsin became a state, and I look forward to learning more about this artefact’s origins.”

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

17 people found in a medieval well in England were victims of an antisemitic massacre, DNA reveals

17 people found in a medieval well in England were victims of an antisemitic massacre, DNA reveals

The remains of at least 17 people killed in the medieval period were found in 2004 during excavations to build a shopping centre in the English city of Norwich.

The remains of 17 people, mainly children, found in 2004 during a construction project in Norwich, England, are probably those of medieval Jews massacred for their religion, according to a new study.

Genetic analysis of the remains indicates the dead were all Ashkenazi Jews — that is, the descendants of Jews who had established communities in northern Europe, mainly in what is now Germany and France, during the early medieval period. (Many Ashkenzai later moved from these regions to eastern Europe, after the 11th to 13th centuries.)  And other research suggests the dead people in Norwich were murdered during an antisemitic massacre in the city in 1190, by crusaders who had pledged to campaign against Muslims in Jerusalem.

The study gave researchers a rare opportunity to analyze Jewish remains — religious laws usually prohibit disturbing Jewish graves — and reveal that a “genetic bottleneck” among Ashkenazi Jews probably happened centuries earlier than thought.

And the findings finally offer a solution to the mystery of just who the people were and why they were murdered.

“They weren’t known to be Jewish when they were unearthed,” Mark Thomas, a professor of human evolutionary genetics at University College London, told Live Science. “The only reason we strongly believe they were Jewish is that we did the genetic analysis.”

Thomas is one of the senior authors of a study published Aug. 30 in the journal Current Biology that describes the latest research into the remains. The first bones were found in 2004 during excavations for the construction of a shopping centre in Norwich. The discovery led to a full archaeological investigation of the site, which resulted in the unearthing of a medieval well that held the commingled remains of at least 17 people.

For a while, the remains were stored by the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service. But following growing suspicions the victims might have been Jewish, based on historical accounts of antisemitic massacres, they were reburied in 2013 in a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Norwich, BBC News reported. Anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University, used the remains to create reconstructions of two of the victims’ faces.

Many of the victims of the massacre were children. This face of a young child was digitally reconstructed from an analysis of their remains.
Massacres of Jews were unfortunately common in mostly Christian medieval Europe. This face of a man was virtually reconstructed from his remains in the well at Norwich.

Christians massacre Jews

Initial radiocarbon dating indicated the bones were from the 11th or 12th centuries, study senior author Ian Barnes, an evolutionary geneticist at the Natural History Museum in London, told Live Science. Scientists initially believed the remains came from victims of an epidemic outbreak of disease or a mass famine, and that the bodies had therefore been disposed of quickly, he said.

But the latest research suggests they all had similar genetic ancestry to today’s Ashkenazi Jews. And historical research links their murders to a massacre of Jews in Norwich in 1190 by crusaders that was described by a chronicler of the times, a churchman called Ralph de Diceto.

“Many of those who were hastening to Jerusalem determined first to rise against the Jews before they invaded the Saracens [a term medieval Christians used for Muslims],” Diceto wrote in his Imagines Historiarum(opens in new tab), which was published in about 1200. “Accordingly, on 6th February [in 1190 AD] all the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered; some had taken refuge in the castle.”

Medieval Norwich had been home to a thriving community of Jews since 1137, many of whom lived near the well where the victims were found, BBC News reported; and the latest study reported the historical finding that they were likely to be descended from Ashkenazi Jews from Rouen in Normandy who were invited to settle in England by William the Conqueror after 1066, supposedly so he could obtain their taxes in coins rather than in the agricultural goods usually given as taxes in his new kingdom.   

Research suggests the people were killed in a medieval massacre of Jews in the city, and that their bodies were thrown down this well.
Scientists initially thought the dead may have been victims of an epidemic outbreak of disease or famine, but the latest research suggests they were Ashkenazi Jews.

The researchers now think the 17 people found in the well were victims of this outbreak of violence, perpetrated on Jews who lived in medieval England by crusaders pledged to campaign in the Holy Land of what’s now Israel.

During the First Crusade, Christian armies conquered Jerusalem in 1099 after defeating the city’s Muslim rulers; and several more crusades were launched from Europe to the Holy Land in the years that followed, the last of which ended in the 1290s.

Such antisemitic massacres were relatively common in England and other parts of Europe in the medieval period, according to Britannica(opens in new tab); and the massacre of Jews at Norwich in 1190 was brutal. At least 11 children were among the victims found in the well, and three of the victims were sisters — one aged between 5 and 10 years, another aged between 10 and 15 years, and a young adult. Barnes said that the people found in the well seem to have been dead before they were thrown into it, as there was no sign that any of them tried to break their fall. 

Genetic bottleneck

The researchers were able to conduct a full genomic analysis of the DNA from six of the individuals found in the well.

There’s no “genetic test” to determine whether a person is Jewish or not, but analysis of the genomes of those six people shows they shared the same genetic ancestry as many Ashkenazi Jews living today, which suggests they were also Ashkenazi Jews, Thomas said.

The modern Ashkenazi population has a greater-than-usual incidence of certain genetic disorders, such as Tay-Sachs disease and some hereditary cancers, he said; and the genetics of four of the people in the well in Norwich showed the same frequency of such disorders, although there’s only a very limited number of victims from which to draw such conclusions.

The cause of these disorders was thought to be a “genetic bottleneck” probably caused by a drop in the population between about 600 and 800 years ago, he said. But their frequency in the victims meant the genetic bottleneck must have happened much earlier, possibly as early as the late stages of the Western Roman Empire from the fifth century, he said.

The findings are important not only because of the historical questions about the remains but also because there is so little historical genetic data about modern Jewish populations and the particular genetic disorders they face.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a flood of ancient Ashkenazi or Jewish genomes in the future, but I think that where more data does become available, it will be probably through a similar route to what we’ve done,” he said. 

“That is, they identify human remains where there is no evidence to suggest that they are Jewish or anything else, and then somebody does the genetic work and gets an indication that they are,” he said.