Category Archives: WORLD

EUROPE, SWEDEN, WORLD

Stunning 3D image recreates real Stone Age woman

Stunning 3D image recreates real Stone Age woman

A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden.

Although her likeness is new — it debuted last month in an exhibit about ancient people at Västernorrlands Museum — researchers have known about this woman’s existence for nearly a century. During the construction of a road in the hamlet of Lagmansören in 1923, workers found her skeletal remains buried next to the remains of a child, likely a 7-year-old boy.

“With our eyes and perhaps in all times, you tend to think that this is a mother and son,” said Oscar Nilsson, the Sweden-based forensic artist who spent 350 hours creating the lifelike model.

“They could be. Or they could be siblings: sister and brother. They could be relatives, or they could just be tribe friends. We don’t know, because the DNA was not that well preserved to establish this relationship.”

But as Nilsson molded the woman’s posture and sculpted her face, he pretended that she was near her son who was scampering ahead of her. “She’s looking with the mother’s eyes — both with love and a bit of discipline,” Nilsson told Live Science. This stern but tender gaze looks as if she’s on the cusp of calling out to the boy, telling him to be careful.

Stunning 3D image recreates real Stone Age woman
This reconstruction is based on the remains of a Neolithic woman who lived about 4,000 years ago in what is now Sweden.

The Neolithic woman and youngster were interred in a cist grave, a burial built with long, flat stones in the shape of a coffin. The woman died in her late 20s or early 30s, and at 4 feet, 11 inches (150 centimetres) in height, “she was not a very tall person,” even for the Neolithic period, Nilsson said.

The woman’s remains didn’t show any signs of malnutrition, injury or diseases, although it’s possible that she died of an illness that didn’t leave a mark on her remains, Nilsson said.

“She seems to have had a good life,” he said. She ate land-based food, an examination of the isotopes (different versions of elements) in her teeth revealed, which was odd given that her grave was found near a fish-filled river near the coast, he said.

When Nilsson received the commission to reconstruct the woman two years ago, he scanned her skull and made a copy of it with a plastic 3D printer. As with other reconstructions he’s created, including those of an ancient Wari queen from what is now Peru and a Stone Age man whose head was found on a spike, Nilsson had to take into account the ancient individual’s sex, age, weight and ethnicity — factors that can influence the person’s facial tissue thickness and general appearance. But because the woman’s DNA was too degraded, he wasn’t sure about her genetic background, hair or eye colour.

So Nilsson took an educated guess about her appearance. There were three large migration waves into ancient Scandinavia: During the first, hunter-gatherers with dark skin who tended to have blue eyes arrived between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago; the second wave included pale-skinned, dark-haired and brown-eyed farmers from further south who moved north about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago when this woman was alive; and the third wave included the Yamnaya (also spelled Yamna) culture from modern-day Ukraine, who were a bit darker-skinned than the farmers and brought the art of metal making with them when they arrived about 3,500 years ago, making them the first Bronze Age culture in the region, Nilsson said.

Based on this information, Nilsson gave the woman brown hair and eyes, and light skin like the farmers’. Even so, the woman wasn’t necessarily a full-time farmer; she likely participated in a mix of hunting and gathering as well as agricultural practices, he said.

“We can’t say for sure whether she was living a nomadic life if she was living the life of the early farmers; it’s impossible to say,” Nilsson said. “But we have chosen to make the safest interpretation, which is she was both because, of course, there was a transition period of many hundreds of years when they left the old way of living.”

The Neolithic woman’s reconstructed clothes were made from deer, moose and elk, while her boots were made from reindeer, beaver and fox.

Fancy furs, Stone Age style

In the reconstruction, the woman from Lagmansören is dressed head to toe in fur and leather. This is the work of Helena Gjaerum, a Sweden-based independent archaeologist who uses Stone Age techniques for tanning leather. 

Before dressing the model, Gjaerum studied the ancient climate, landscape, vegetation and animal life of Neolithic Lagmansören. Based on what she uncovered, she designed the woman’s clothes out of deer, moose and elk and the shoes out of reindeer, beaver and fox. The woman likely stuffed hay inside the shoes for padding, noted Gjaerum, who took inspiration from clothing worn by Indigenous Americans and Indigenous Siberians, as well as the leather clothing of Özti the Iceman mummy, who lived about 5,300 years ago in the Italian Alps.

Preparing the clothes entailed hours of labour. Gjaerum, who acquired real animal remains, scraped the flesh off the skins and then put them in a river — a method that helps loosen the fur from the skin. Next, she scraped off the fur and slathered on a solution made of moose brain, a fatty mixture that bonds with skin fibres. Without this mixture, the skin would stiffen and could easily rot if it got wet, she said.

The next several steps involved massaging, boiling, stretching and smoking the skins and then finally designing the clothing. Gjaerum’s young son, who was about the same height as the Stone Age woman, served as a helpful model, Gjaerum said.

She made the clothing as comfortable and practical as possible — for instance, by not putting a seam at the top of the shoulder, where water might seep in during rainy weather.

Often, modern people think of Stone Age humans as primitive, dressed in ugly, toga-like furs as in “The Far Side” comics. But Gjaerum challenged that perception. “I think it would be crazy to think she’d have primitive clothes,” Gjaerum told Live Science. “I wanted to make her dress like you could dress today” because you are both Homo sapiens.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Burnt seeds show people used tobacco 12,000 years ago

Burnt seeds show people used tobacco 12,000 years ago

Four charred tobacco plant seeds found in an ancient Utah fireplace suggest early Americans may have been using the plant 12,300 years ago. The finding makes the first known use of tobacco some 9,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Burnt seeds show people used tobacco 12,000 years ago
Archaeologists found the seeds in the Great Salt Lake Desert

Researchers believe hunter-gatherers in the Great Salt Lake Desert may have sucked or smoked wads of the plant.

Until now, the earliest evidence of tobacco use was a 3,300-year-old smoking pipe discovered in Alabama.

Archaeologists discovered the millimetre-wide seeds at the Wishbone site, an ancient camp in the desert in what is now northern Utah.

There, they found the remnants of an ancient hearth that was surrounded by bone and stone artefacts. These included duck bones, stone tools, and a spear-tip bearing the remains of blood from a mammoth or an early form of an elephant.

The charred remains of one of the tobacco plant seeds

Their findings suggest the native American hunter-gatherers may have consumed the tobacco while cooking or toolmaking, the scientists say in a paper published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The tobacco plant is native to the Americas and contains the psychoactive addictive substance nicotine.

Tobacco was widely cultivated and dispersed around the world following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas at the end of the 15th Century.

“The tobacco seeds were a big surprise. They are incredibly small and rare to be preserved,” Daron Duke of the Far Western Anthropological Research Group told the New Scientist.

“This suggests that people learned the intoxicant properties of tobacco relatively early in their time here rather than only with domestication and agriculture thousands of years later.”

Today, the Great Salt Lake Desert is a large dry lake. But 12,300 years ago, the camp would have been on a vast marshland.

“We know very little about their culture,” Mr Duke said of the hunter-gatherers. “The thing that intrigues me the most about this find is the social window it gives to a simple activity in an undocumented past. My imagination runs wild.”

MEXICO, NORTH AMERICA, WORLD

The largest Aztec temple was decorated with over 100 starfish

The largest Aztec temple was decorated with over 100 starfish

Aztec priests at Tenochtitlán offered a whole galaxy of starfish to the war god Huitzilopochtli 700 years ago, along with a trove of other objects from the distant edges of the Aztec Empire. Archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) recently unearthed the offering on the site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, in what is now Mexico City.

This imprint preserves details of the internal structure of the starfish, as well as its overall shape. It’s one of 164 starfish recently unearthed at the Templo Mayor site in Mexico City.

Ahuizotl, coast to coast

The offering included 164 starfish from a species called Nidorella armata, known less formally as the chocolate chip starfish because it’s mostly the colour of cookie dough, but it has dark spots. (It shares the nickname with the other chocolate chip sea star, Protoreaster nodosus, which provides an excellent argument in favour of scientific names.) Nidorella armata lives along the Pacific coastline from Mexico south to Peru, where it hangs out on shallow-water reefs of rock and coral.

For Tenochtitlán, the nearest source of chocolate chip starfish would have been nearly 300 kilometres away from the Aztec capital. Chunks of coral found in the same offering came from about the same distance away but in roughly the opposite direction—the western end of the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, these items came from the farthest eastern and western edges of the Aztec Empire, places that the Aztec ruler Ahuizotl had only recently conquered.

Ahuizotl took the throne in 1486, and he jumped straight into two major projects: renovating the capital, including the Templo Mayor, and expanding the borders of his empire. His campaigns nearly doubled the size of the Aztec Empire, stretching Aztec rule west to the Pacific coast of Mexico and southeast to Guatemala. All that conquest meant that the Aztecs could easily bring starfish from the Pacific and corals from the Gulf of Mexico, along with an assortment of marine shells (and even pufferfish) to Tenochtitlán to lay before their gods.

Conquistadors ruin everything

Back in the capital, Ahuizotl ordered the reconstruction of large parts of the city. His efforts included expanding the Templo Mayor, which in Aztec terms meant building a new, bigger outer layer over the top of the previous temple. (The prior construction was often ritually “killed” before the new one could be consecrated.) That’s convenient for modern archaeologists, who can date each layer of construction at the Templo Mayor.

The oldest part of the temple dates to around 1325, when a group of people called the Mexica migrated into the area surrounding what is now Mexico City. There, according to Mexica lore, their leaders saw an eagle perched on a prickly pear and eating a snake; it was the sign their priests had told them to expect from Huitzilopochtli, and it’s an image you might recognize from the modern Mexican flag. At the site, the Mexica built a city called Tenochtitlán, and from there, they ruled the Aztec Empire.

Huitzilopochtli shared the Templo Mayor with the rain and farming god Tlaloc; each god had his own shrine at the top of the pyramid, reached by separate staircases. Ahuizotl’s expansion, where archaeologists found the starfish offering, is the sixth layer of the Templo Mayor. Only one more layer would be added before the temple’s destruction.

Ahuizotl was the eighth ruler of the Aztec Empire and the last to rule before the Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernán Cortés, arrived and changed everything. Cortés arrived during the reign of Ahuizotl’s nephew, Moctezuma II, who died fighting the invaders. Moctezuma’s brother, who took the throne next, died of smallpox, a disease brought by the Spaniards. The throne passed to Ahuizotl’s son, Cuauhtémoc, who surrendered to Cortés in 1521, only to be tortured for the whereabouts of mostly nonexistent gold and silver. Cortés had Cuauhtémoc, the last ruler of the Aztec Empire, executed in 1525.

Seashells for the war god

By the time Ahuizotl’s son died, Cortés had already destroyed the Templo Mayor and had begun building a Christian cathedral in its place. Archaeologists rediscovered the buried remains of the temple in the 20th century, and they soon found that most of the seventh and final layer was too demolished to learn much from. The last well-preserved layer of the temple was the one Ahuizotl ordered built-in 1487. And that’s where archaeologists discovered the galaxy of starfish that the Aztec priests had once offered to Huitzilopochtli.

The offering had been placed in a round building called the Cuauhxicalco, which might have been where the remains of rulers like Ahuizotl were cremated. It’s in a part of the temple usually associated with Huitzilopochtli, based on historical descriptions and other archaeological finds, so archaeologists suggest that the starfish and other items were probably offerings to the war god.

Along with the starfish, seashells, and pufferfish, the offering included a resin figurine and a female jaguar holding an atlatl (a type of spear-thrower) in one claw.

This find is not the first time archaeologists working at the Templo Mayor site have found starfish among the offerings, but it’s the largest collection unearthed so far. And many of the starfish are larger than their modern descendants because global warming and centuries of harvesting by humans have caused the species to evolve toward a smaller body size.

One starfish, in particular, left behind a fossil-like imprint of not only its shape but its internal structures.

“It was, perhaps, one of the first stars that the Mexica priests placed in the offering, so when receiving the weight of the jaguar and all the elements, it sank into what is believed to be a layer of fibre below it, preserving the mark of its internal structure,” explained INAH in a press release. “This situation is unusual since the remains of the other 163 stars are scattered, due to the natural loss of their organic matter.”

Side note: What’s in a name?

If the name Ahuizotl sounds familiar to you and you’re not a student of Aztec history, you’re probably a My Little Pony fan or a tabletop RPG player. The Aztec ruler took his name from the name of a mythical creature that lived near lakes and in swamps. Reportedly, the creature looked a bit like a dog, except with monkey-like hands (including one at the end of its tail) and spiky fur. It also reportedly killed one of Cortés’ soldiers.

Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder both feature swamp-dwelling creatures called Ahuizotl, which bear a passing resemblance to the creature of Mexica legend. And a recurring villain in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was a dog-like, spiky-furred character named Ahuizotl. Now you know.

And knowing, after all, is half the battle.

WORLD

How The Human Face Might Look In 100,000 Years

How The Human Face Might Look In 100,000 Years

According to reports, scientists have succeeded in creating the image of the future’s human face, and we now know what our species will probably look like in the near future.

But how much has our face changed since humans appeared on Earth?

Humankind’s ‘face’ has changed considerably in the last two million years. But this change hasn’t stopped. According to researchers, our face is still in the transformation process and will continue to evolve to better respond to new needs.

Scientists believe that while some facial functions will remain the same, others will have to adapt and evolve to new realities and conditions of the future.

Facial expressions changed and went from intimidating to being more harmonious to get along and to be able to live with others.

Moreover, in facial terms, the human face evolved into the most expressive species on Earth.

But the question that has bothered experts is what will be the face of the future? According to international experts, there are already some indications to solve the enigma.

One of the significant changes is directly associated with the brain’s size and related to its evolution, which allowed us to have more expressive possibilities because we are social, cooperative beings, and we need those characteristics.

However, as in the old dilemma of what came first; the egg or the chicken, it is unknown precisely if we are expressive because we have a brain that allows us to be it or our brain became better equipped because of our expressiveness.

Furthermore, the fact that the face is so familiar among humans, as anyone who sees a face knows its as a face, doesn’t mean that this is a characteristic that is prevalent in nature.

According to Penny Spikins, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the York University, “Our eyes are very close together and look forward, human dental arches are disproportionately small in relation to the rest of the body, and we have smaller teeth. That is, the physical characteristics of our face are unusual in nature,”

What you eat will shape your face, kind of…

David Perrett, a researcher at the University of Saint Andrews and author of the book “In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction,” explains that the diet is changing, which also affects the shape of the face.

Our faces have changed a lot from the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees some 6 to 7 million years ago.

The main indicators include a reduced brow crest, flattened forehead, less pronounced muzzle, and chin.

Our oldest ancestors were the opposite of that description: pronounced forehead, prominent muzzle, and powerful chin.

“The basic form of the human face emerged about two million years ago, and the changes, since then, have accentuated the gradual reduction of factions,” says Erik Trinkaus, a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington.

Young, forever?

If the human skull continues to evolve, scientists expect it to reach a juvenilization in terms of cranial proportions, which would lead to a smaller face, with proportionally larger eye orbits, a chin of smaller dimensions, and a more globular and developed cranial vault.

That would be expected if a process is known as “neoteny” occurs, which means that people would actually retain their juvenile appearance upon reaching adult age.

Smaller Face, bigger cranium, the face of the future?

Scientists believe that the face of the future will look something like this.
Designer Lamm’s depiction of how the human face might look in 100,000 years.

In other words, the man of the future, argue experts, will most likely have a smaller face and bigger cranium compared to people today.

However, for this evolution to occur, scientists say that a change would be necessary for the female pelvis, whose birth canal is already extremely narrow, the reason why many babies are born premature, having to mature postnatally, which imposes some limitations.

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

The 2,400-Year-Old Giant Clay Vase Discovered in Peru You Probably Never Heard About

The 2,400-Year-Old Giant Clay Vase Discovered in Peru You Probably Never Heard About

On October 27, 1966, the Regional Museum of Ica discovered a unique object of unseen proportions; a massive granary bowl, until then the largest pre-Hispanic pot found in Peru.

The fired clay vessel dimensions were 2 meters in diameter, 2.8 meters in height, and sections of 5 cm on the walls and 12 cm at the base.

Inside and at different levels, archaeologists found seeds of beans, Pallares, yucca, lucuma, and guavas. No remains of stoves were found in the vicinity, the reason why archaeologists believe that the giant clay pot was transported in the distant past, approximately 2,400 years ago, from another place to where it was eventually discovered.

The giant clay pot was discovered in the Paracas region of Peru, in the Pisco Valley.

Unique, enduring, and of unusual proportions, its discovery raised numerous questions. To this date, little or no information about the massive clay pot or other similar artefacts has been made available, forcing us to extrapolate more about if it was found in the region.

Paracas, Ica, Nazca

the above subtitle mentions three names that, if you know anything about Peru’s ancient history, then they should ring a bell.

The Paracas culture was an ancient Andean culture that was edited in present-day Peru some 2,100 years ago, developing an extensive knowledge of irrigation, water management, textile production, and ceramic artefacts. More importantly, they are famous for artificial cranial deformation, by which the heads of infants and babies were elongated and deformed, producing unique, long skulls.

A collage of the Nazca lines.

Ica is an area in southern Peru that was inhabited by various ancient cultures throughout history. Home to the Museo Reginal the Ica, Ica is home to a treasure trove of history.

It was in Ica Peru where in the 1960s, a man called Javier Cabrera introduced the world to the so-called Ica Stones, a controversial collection of andesite stones, allegedly found in the Ica province bearing illustrations of dinosaurs, humanoid figurines, and what many have interpreted as evidence of advanced technology.

Today, these artefacts have been tagged as a modern hoax and discredited. archaeologist Ken Feder commented on the stones: “The Ica Stones are not the most sophisticated of the archaeological hoaxes discussed in this book, but they certainly rank up there as the most preposterous.”

Nazca is perhaps the most famous. Home to the famous Nazca lines, this region is perhaps one of the most famous in Peru. The Nazca Lines are a group of massive geoglyphs carved into the Nazca desert in southern Peru. Likely created around 500 BC, the massive lines cover a combined length of  1,300 km (808 mi), and the group covers an area of about 50 square kilometres (19 sq mi).

The Clay Pot

The massive clay pot was discovered in 1966.

Its massive size is unusual, and although it may give rise to conspiracies given the fact it was located not far from the Nazca Lines, the Ica region, and the so-called Paracas skulls, the contents of the clay pot, and the material it was built from can tell us much about its purpose.

For starters, the Regional Ica Museum clearly describes the clay pot as a granary jar; an object inside which ancient people would store seeds or food. It is the biggest one found in Peru, but it isn’t necessarily the only one. Dating back 2,400 years, the massive pot was crafted around 400 BC. If we look at the division introduced by Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello, the massive clay pot was made during the Paracas Necropolis period, which lasted from around 500 BC to around 200 AD.

The Paracas-Necropolis period got its name from the fact that its rectangular cemeteries, discovered in Warikayan, were divided into several compartments or underground chambers, which to Tello reassembled a “city of the dead” (necropolis). Each large chamber allegedly would have been owned by a specific family or clan, which buried their ancestors for many generations.

Whether the clay vase originated from Warikayan, which was a large ancient settlement, or from a nearby settlement remains an unanswered question. Since objects of similar proportions have not been found in the region, archaeologists believe that the ancient clay container was brought to where it was eventually found in the distant past, perhaps as a trade or a gift from neighbouring settlements.

We do know that before it was abandoned, it was used by the ancients to store food. We know it was produced of fire clay. Its unusual size suggests that whoever built it wanted to store large amounts of material inside.

It likely held seeds or food and was covered and may have been buried beneath the ground, covered by a top. Burying the clay vase into the surface and storing food inside it may have helped preserve the food for longer periods of time, protecting it from higher temperatures above the surface.

The giant Ica Clay Vase is one of the more interesting yet lesser known artefacts, part of the history of a region where mighty ancient cultures developed, evolved, and eventually disappeared.

It proves that there is more to the region than the Ica Stones, the Nazca Lines, and the strange Paracas Skulls. It also tells us that incredible artefacts may remain buried beneath our feet, hidden from history buried for thousands of years, waiting to be excavated and restored to their former glory.

ENGLAND, EUROPE, WORLD

1,500-Year-Old Silver Site Uncovered in England

1,500-Year-Old Silver Site Uncovered in England

An abandoned mausoleum and silver extraction taking place on an industrial scale at a Roman site in rural Kent has left archaeologists with a 1500-year-old mystery.

Silver extraction on an industrial scale

Archaeologists working on an excavation at Grange Farm, near Gillingham, discovered 15 kilograms of litharge – a material associated with the extraction of silver from other metals. This is the largest amount ever found on a British Roman site and greatly exceeds the amount that archaeologists would normally expect to find on a rural settlement such as that at Grange Farm, suggesting that the refining of silver was taking place on an industrial scale.

However, the excavation team did not unearth any signs of the infrastructure that could have supported the size of operation required to produce this amount of material.

The excavation and subsequent research, which was led by Pre-Construct Archaeology (PCA) and involved archaeologists from Newcastle University, revealed a rectangular building that would have been built from timber and divided internally by three aisles. This type of multi-function ‘aisled’ building was fairly common in Roman Britain and would have been used both as a house and a place for crafts.

However, although the archaeologists found evidence of small-scale metalworking at one end of the building, it was not at a level that would have produced the amount of litharge discovered.

The team was confronted with another mystery when they also uncovered a stone mausoleum – a grand funerary monument usually found at Roman villas, not aisled buildings.

Dating to the late 3rd century or early 4th century AD, this was the height of a two-storey building and would have been visible from the nearby river Medway.  Inside, the mausoleum had a ‘tesselated’ floor of plain red mosaic tiles which was very unusual for mausoleums in Roman Britain, say the archaeologists.

Inside the ruins of the mausoleum, the archaeologists found a lead-lined coffin containing the body of an elderly lady. Isotopic analysis of the lady’s teeth suggests she was probably local, while radiocarbon dating suggests she was buried around the same time the mausoleum was built. Although it wasn’t unheard of for people to be buried in lead caskets in Roman Britain, it wasn’t a widespread practice. The discovery was also unusual because the team did not find any evidence that the lady had been buried with any personal items or grave goods, which was common at that time.  

1,500-Year-Old Silver Site Uncovered in England
Archaeologists unearth the lead-lined coffin. Image courtesy of Pre-Construct Archaeology (PCA).

Dr James Gerrard, Senior Lecturer in Roman Archaeology, said: “There are so many mysteries surrounding the discoveries at Grange Farm. Although we know that the economy during the late Roman empire was based on silver and gold, whose production was heavily controlled by the state, we don’t know why silver was being refined in such huge quantities at Grange Farm – which was only a small rural settlement. It may have been that the site’s proximity to the river was an important factor, or it could have been that the work was being done illegally, out of the Empire’s sight.

“Additionally, we have very few clues as to who the elderly lady was. It’s clear she was someone important with significant status in the community, because to be buried in a lead coffin in a substantial monument like the mausoleum requires resources – both in terms of money and labour.”

Anglo Saxon discoveries

By the fifth and sixth centuries, Grange Farm appears to have fallen out of use as a permanently-occupied settlement, so the team were surprised when the excavation also unearthed a number of early Anglo-Saxon items including two spear heads and ornate brooch. Spears were usually used as part of Anglo-Saxon burial practices but there was no evidence to suggest that Grange Farm was being used either as a settlement or burial site at that time.

One of the Anglo-Saxon spearheads was discovered at Grange Farm. Image courtesy of Pre-Construct Archaeology (PCA).

“The brooch is a very unusual find – stylistically it is closer to southern Scandinavia and is one of only a handful of similar brooches found in Britain,” added Dr Gerrard. “Both the spears and brooch are unusual and high-status objects on an otherwise unassuming rural site.

“The mausoleum wasn’t in use at this time, and in fact it appears that the grave of the elderly lady was disturbed in later years – possibly by early medieval graverobbers or relic hunters.”

As well as the litharge and the mysteries surrounding the mausoleum and the elderly lady in the lead-lined coffin, the team of archaeologists also found 453 Roman coins, more than 20,000 fragments of pottery and 8,000 animal bones.

Complex sequence of activity over centuries

The excavation, which took place before the start of a new housing development on the site, is the subject of a new book, ‘By the Medway Marsh’, written by Dr Gerrard, and published by PCA. It details the excavation and the history of the site, from late-Iron Age, its transition and growth under the Romans, and what happened to it during Medieval times.

“The site at Grange Farm has given us a fascinating mystery and an extensive and complex sequence of activity covering the entire Roman period right through to early Anglo-Saxon – and beyond,” added Dr Gerrard. “But that’s just one phase of the story of this place. Everything we found – and what is happening to the site now – is evidence of the economic pull of the Medway and the area’s changing development.”

Victoria Ridgeway, Director and Head of Post-Excavation, Pre-Construct Archaeology, added: “In some ways the excavations at Grange Farm typify much of the work undertaken by commercial archaeological contractors like PCA, in that the sites’ boundaries were determined by the extent of new development, in this case for housing. But, whilst we knew the area had been important during the medieval period, we were less prepared for the extraordinary range of Roman and Anglo-Saxon finds we encountered.

“This book, in common with others in a series of monographs produced by PCA, is the culmination of several years of work, involving many specialists from different fields of research. We are grateful to the support provided by James Gerrard and the department at Newcastle University. This project has provided a welcome opportunity for collaboration between the ‘academic’ and ‘commercial’ aspects of the archaeological world.”

EUROPE, FRANCE, WORLD

Medieval Burials Uncovered at the Cathedral of Notre Dame

Medieval Burials Uncovered at the Cathedral of Notre Dame

The lead sarcophagus is thought to hold a 14th-century digniatary.

Several tombs and a leaden sarcophagus likely dating from the 14th century has been uncovered by archaeologists at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris following its devastating 2019 fire.

The burial sites “of remarkable scientific quality” were unearthed during preparatory work for rebuilding the ancient church’s spire at the central spot where the transept crosses the nave, the culture ministry announced late Monday.

Among the tombs was the “completely preserved, human-shaped sarcophagus made of lead”.

It is thought the coffin was made for a senior dignitary in the 1300s—the century following the cathedral’s construction.

As well as the tombs, elements of painted sculptures were found just beneath the current floor level of the cathedral, identified as parts of the original 13th-century rood screen—an architectural element separating the altar area from the nave.

During a visit by AFP on Tuesday, archaeologists were delicately cleaning and excavating the sculptures emerging from the ground, including a pair of carved hands.

The bust of a bearded man and some sculpted vegetables, with traces of paint still visible, had been removed. The team has already used a mini endoscopic camera to peek inside the sarcophagus, which appeared to be warped by the weight of the earth and stones.

Archaeologists are racing to finish their work before reconstruction resumes at the end of the month.
The bust of a bearded man has also been excavated, part of an ancient screen.
Notre Dame was struck by a devastating fire in 2019.

“You can glimpse pieces of fabric, hair and above all a pillow of leaves on top of the head, a well-known phenomenon when religious leaders were buried,” said Christophe Besnier, the lead archaeologist.

“The fact that these plant elements are still inside means the body is in a very good state of conservation,” he added.

Its discovery will help improve our understanding of funeral practices in the Middle Ages, added Dominique Garcia of the National Institute of Archaeological Research.

The discoveries were made as reconstruction teams prepared to install huge scaffolding to rebuild the spire, and needed to check the stability of the ground.

In the process, they discovered an underground heating system from the 19th century, with the sarcophagus lying among its brick pipes.

Despite the excitement of the find, the clock is ticking for the archaeologists.

They have been given until March 25 to finish their work before the reconstruction project resumes—in order to keep to a planned reopening of the cathedral in 2024.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Ancient Mysteries Of Chicago: Is The Puzzling Waubansee Stone A Neglected Pre-Columbian Artifact?

Ancient Mysteries Of Chicago: Is The Puzzling Waubansee Stone A Neglected Pre-Columbian Artifact?

One of the most fascinating and obscure artefacts in North America is tucked away in a Chicago museum. The Waubansee Stone is a huge glacial erratic granite boulder with a larger-than-life head sculpted upon its upper surface. The expertly fashioned relief carving shows the face of a man with a chin beard, depicted with his mouth open and eyes closed. On the top of the stone, just above the head, is a large drop-shaped bowl that once emptied through the head and out of the mout xxx , xxx vea,,00h, over the lower lip, to another drainage spout below the man’s goatee. There are also two connecting holes on either side of the boulder, presumably used as a line anchorage for a sea vessel. 

The mysterious Waubansee Stone is a glacial rock that has first mentions in records from the first Fort Dearborn (1803-1812). This carved rock is speculated to predate European settlers to the Americas or could have been carved by a soldier at the fort.

All holes and drainage spouts are currently plugged with putty or other additions, suggesting there is no interest in a modern restoration. The mysterious face carving and associated cavities have given rise to speculation about its origins, including one theory that the stone was carved by prehistoric Mediterranean seafarers who used the 3,000-pound  boulder as a mooring stone.

Ancient Mysteries Of Chicago: Is The Puzzling Waubansee Stone A Neglected Pre-Columbian Artifact?
A closer view of the face carved on the Waubansee Stone shows the hole in the mouth where the liquid was designed to flow from the bowl on top.

Originally standing around 8 feet in height, the Waubansee Stone has mentioned in the first Fort Dearborn accounts as being located just beyond the stockade walls, along the shore of the Chicago River. Chicagoua (or Chicagou) was a local Indian word for the native garlic plant Allium Tricoccum, not an onion plant, that grew profusely along the banks of the Chicago River. 

When the first fort was built in 1803, the Potawatomi Indians of southern Lake Michigan had been trading with white people for well over a century but were becoming increasingly hostile to the number of new settlers coming into the region and staking a claim on their land. President Jefferson, who was very interested in the Indiana Territory (the Indiana Territory included Illinois lands from 1800-1809), was anxious about its security. 

He felt that an American military outpost should be established to protect the new frontier. He selected the mouth of the Chicago River as the site for a new fort. At that time there were several fur traders and their Indian wives living in the region. The fort was named after General Henry Dearborn, Secretary of War. It was built on the south side of the Chicago River where Michigan Avenue now crosses at Wacker Drive. 

Skirmishes with the Potawatomi were on the rise, reaching a crescendo in 1812 when settlers and soldiers were massacred at the first Fort Dearborn (1803-1812) was burned to the ground by the enraged Indians. 

The second Fort Dearborn was rebuilt in 1816-1817 and the Waubansee Stone was presumably reduced in size to be dragged into the fort’s parade grounds where it remained until the fort was dismantled. After that, the stone passed from collector to collector until it found a permanent home at the Fort Dearborn exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society.

The Waubansee Stone is on display in the Fort Dearborn exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society.

Historian Henry H. Hurlbut (1813-1890) developed the generally accepted theory about the stone’s origin in 1881, unsupported by any records or documentation. His belief, admittedly based on no evidence, has the stone being carved in the early 1800s by an unnamed soldier stationed at the original Fort Dearborn. Its face was supposedly fashioned after a friendly Native American Potawatomi Chieftain named Wabansee [1], and this appointed name stuck. 

Hurlbut had only hearsay on which to base his observations, including the presumption that the Indians used the upper recess as a mortar to grind their corn. This accepted explanation has come under fire from several angles. For starters, the recess was intentionally plugged after the Indians supposedly used it, so it would have been an ineffective mortar because the corn would have drained through the mouth. Also, why would a frontier soldier, who was probably suspicious of the Potawatomi in the first place, spend many months to carve the likeness of their tribal leader? Aside from the fact that granite is one of the hardest stones to sculpt, the face is clearly the work of a master stone-cutter who must have devoted a considerable amount of time and labour to the job—hardly in keeping with the strenuous daily tasks of a common frontier soldier. Finally, Native Americans were not known to have grown goatees, nor did they ever carve in granite. But if not Hurlbut’s anonymous soldier or an Indian sculptor, then who crafted the mysterious features on the Waubansee Stone?

With more source material than Hurlbut had at his disposal, yet with an uncertain date and a possible grisly usage, fragments of evidence can be pieced together using various historians to arrive near the truth. 

An article in the Chicago Tribune dated September 22nd, 1903 clearly illustrates the two opposing viewpoints clashing over the stone’s origin:

“The second school of historians and antiquarians is convinced that the so-called Waubansee Stone dates back hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years before even Father Marquette first visited the site of Chicago in 1673. They see in the tall boulder, with its deeply top, a sacrificial altar on which perhaps the mound builders of prehistoric America offered even human sacrifices, and they are ready to believe that the face carved on one side of the stone is a representation of an ancient idol—one of the far off gods to whom that mythical people poured libations and offered the sacrificial blood of animals. However that may be, there is no question of doubt that in the early days of Fort Dearborn, as far back as we have any record, that identical stone, practically the same as it is today, lay near the stockade of old Fort Dearborn.”

The diffusionist theory of the Waubansee Stone describes it as a sacrificial altar for ancient Celtic and Phoenician traders in the millennium before Christ.

All historians agree that the Mississippian Culture performed animal and human sacrifices high atop their platform mounds, but where this practice originated is unknown. The Aztec or Toltec people from Mexico may have influenced them, or perhaps an earlier seafaring people notorious for infant sacrifices were responsible. It is well known that the Phoenicians (and their Celtic allies) travelled across the ocean to “the Farthest Land” known as Antilla. The precise location of Antilla was a closely guarded secret because it contained the most valuable commodity to the Bronze Age people—copper. 

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the richest natural deposit of pure copper in the world. It may seem a long way to go for metal, but in the Bronze Age, copper was more prized than gold or silver since it was the primary alloy used in weapon and tool production. With profit as a clear motive for their journey, it makes sense that the Phoenicians would travel very far to export copper. It also makes sense that the Phoenicians would spread their religious practices with their voyages. An integral element of the Phoenician religion was infant sacrifice to appease pagan gods and win favour for whatever activity was at hand. At the height of Phoenician power—lasting a thousand years from 1,200 BCE until the Second Punic War—babies were taken to an outdoor sacred site, called a Tophet, where a young child was placed in a carved depression on an altar and had its’ throat slit. 

Both the Celts and Phoenicians were known to sacrifice infant children of their enemies or barter with their trading partners to acquire a baby for this heinous ritual. In the case of the Waubansee Stone, the sacrificial blood would flow through the sculpture into the Chicago River as an offering to the water gods, thus ensuring a safe passage. The stone’s hideous purpose is evident in the closed eyes, an unusual style elsewhere, but recurring in surviving Phoenician art used for infant sacrifices. Moreover, the face depicts a chin beard, a personal grooming style of male Phoenicians. 

The mouth of the Chicago River was a necessary transition stop before entering the narrow river network leading into the Mississippi and then down to the Gulf of Mexico. Ships would need to be reconfigured from open water safety to narrow river defense. Oars and shields would replace conspicuous sails. After arriving at the mouth of the Chicago River, the ancient explorers may have settled for a brief time, sailed onward, been killed off, or possibly assimilated with the native population. There was likely a small Tophet temple at this strategic crossroad of lake and river, which thousands of years later would grow up to be the third-largest city in the United States.

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

[1] Waubonsie, {Wah-bahn-see} a Potawatomi Chief.

Chief Waubansee Portrait: 1848

Waubonsie (1760-1848) was a leader of the Potawatomi Native American people. His name has been spelled in a variety of ways, including Waubansee, Wah-bahn-se, Waubonsee, Waabaanizii in the contemporary Ojibwe language, and Wabanzi in the contemporary Potawatomi language (meaning “He Causes Paleness” in both languages)

Waubansee was a chief who supported the British in the War of 1812. In 1814 he signed the Treaty of Greenville by which Potawatomi allegiance was transferred to the United States.  In a series of treaties signed by Waubansee, Potawatomi lands around Lake Michigan were sold.  

In 1835 Waubansee visited Washington, D.C., to sign the treaty which sold the last of the tribal lands and to accept land west of the Mississippi River. During this visit, his portrait was painted by Charles Bird King (1785-1862). The Potawatomi Nation moved to Kansas in the 1840s and settled in what is now Waubansee County, just east of Topeka. Waubansee’s portrait illustrates the Native American attraction to military costume. Coats,hats, and swords were often presented as gifts to prominent chiefs. Additionally, Waubansee wears a Presidential Peace Medal and large trade silver earrings.