Category Archives: WORLD

EUROPE, POLAND, WORLD

Well Preserved 2,000 Year Old Settlement Found Hidden Under Dense Forest In Northern Poland

Well Preserved 2,000 Year Old Settlement Found Hidden Under Dense Forest In Northern Poland

Archeologists found in almost 2,000 years an entirely untouched old village, the only village of its kind in Europe. The magnificent discovery in northern Poland  revealed farming land complete with boundary strips, homesteads, buildings, and even roads.

Well Preserved 2,000 Year Old Settlement Found Hidden Under Dense Forest In Northern Poland
The archeologists from Toruń made the stunning discovery in northern Poland using Aerial Laser Scanning which revealed an entire estate hidden in the heavily forested region

Hidden in dense forests in the Bory Tucholskie region, the area is one of the least explored by archeologists.

Archeologist Mateusz Sosnowski from the NCU (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Institute of Archeology in Toruń told PAP: “When it comes to research, it was virgin territory.

The discovery revealed farming land complete with boundary strips, homesteads, buildings, and even roads.

“It was a great surprise to discover they’re not only individual elements of a former settlement, but also its surroundings: fields surrounding the hamlet, traces of single homesteads and even tracts connecting them probable with other settlements.”

The remains come from the first centuries of the modern era, Sosnowski and fellow researchers who made the discovery, Jerzy Czerniec, believe.

Archeologist Mateusz Sosnowski from the NCU (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Institute of Archeology in Toruń said:  “When it comes to research, it was virgin territory. We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It’s unique!” Mateusz Sosnowski

Sosnowski explained that the discovery is unique because archeologists usually only discover individual elements of settlements or other constructions leftover from the activities of ancient people.

Such discoveries usually occur during the building of houses or roads and the digs are rescue efforts. As a result, research is limited to a small area.

In such cases, there is also not usually an opportunity to search more widely to see whether there are other remains or interesting artefacts in the vicinity.

Sosnowski explained: “Here we have an entirely different situation.

“We have tracked down unknown traces of an ancient Bory Tucholskie settlement. It’s not a matter of one house or a fragment of a settlement.

“We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It’s unique!”

The remains come from the first century of the modern era, researchers believe.

The archeologists discovered the find using Aerial Laser Scanning (ALS), a tool ever more frequently used by researchers.

As part of a project aimed at creating anti-flood defences among other things, the whole of Poland was covered. ALS enables a very thorough inspection of territory, even if it is overgrown with forest and the differences in height are invisible to the naked eye, as was the case in Bory Tucholskie.

The settlement together with its surrounding fields covers an area of over 170 hectares and the fields are surprisingly regular.

Sosnowski said: “Their shape brings to mind the three-field system of farming, known in Poland only from the middle ages. Was it already in use several hundred years earlier? we hope our research will answer that question.”

ANTARCTICA, WORLD

Scientist Unearths a Colony of Mummified Penguins in Antarctica

Scientist Unearths a Colony of Mummified Penguins in Antarctica

Steven Emslie was finishing a season in January 2016 of researching Penguin colonies near the Antarctica-based Italian station Zucchelli. With the austral Summer quickly coming to a close and all planned work completed, Dr. Emslie, an ornithologist at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, did what any good scientist would do with a few extra days in the Antarctic: He went exploring.

On a rocky cape along the Scott Coast, he heard talk of penguin guano, but he knew no active colonies there. Curious, he arranged and searched around for a helicopter flight to the area and had a look around.

“Because over a hundred years ago Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton had visited the region and had not written about any penguins on this particular site, I did not expect to see anything because they were writing about the penguins often when they saw them,” he said.

And yet, Dr. Emslie immediately knew he had stumbled upon something intriguing when he arrived. “There were pebbles everywhere,” he recalled.

While pebbles are an everyday find on other continents, it is rare to spot them in abundance on dry land in Antarctica. A key exception is found in Adélie penguin colonies, as the birds collect the small stones from the beaches to build their nests.

The pebbles had been gathered together into nests and recently been dispersed a bit by the weather. Then Dr. Emslie saw the guano. There was a lot of dried penguin waste creating iconic white stains on the nearby rocks. Then he found the penguin corpses.

Due to the warming climate, the ice preserving the penguin corpses melted away and revealed the bodies of penguins from an ancient colony.

With feathers still intact and flesh having barely decayed, Dr. Emslie was stunned.

“I remember thinking, wow, a penguin colony that even Shackleton didn’t know about,” he said.

The shock gave way to further curiosity and led him to wonder what could possibly have befallen the colony. Fascinated, he collected some remains and took them back for carbon-dating analysis to work out when the birds had died.

With dates of death that ranged from 800 to 5,000 years ago, Dr. Emslie immediately realized that the guano, feathers, bones, and pebbles had all been locked in place under layers of ice for centuries and that the “freshly dead” penguins were in fact recently defrosted mummies that had been swallowed by advancing snowfields long ago.

Scott and Shackleton could be forgiven for not spotting this colony as it had been entirely hidden from view when the explorers had been in the region.

A mummified Adélie penguin chick, discovered under melted ice in Antarctica.

The find paints a picture of a site that, after experiencing periodic Adélie penguin occupation over thousands of years, saw that occupation come to an abrupt end approximately 800 years ago.

Dr. Emslie speculates in the journal Geology. where he reported his findings in mid-September, that cooling temperatures drove a type of sea ice to form along the coast that persisted well into summer months. Known as “fast ice” because it “fastens” to the coastline, this sea ice makes it very difficult for penguins to gain access to beaches and prevents them from colonizing places where it occurs.

He said he thought the ice forced the colony to be abandoned but also suggested that warming temperatures might change things in the years ahead.

With Antarctic ice melting and sea levels rising, established penguin colonies are being forced to disperse to new places. Dr. Emslie suggests that the penguins could then return to sites like this one.

“They need pebbles for their nests, so they are going to find all the pebbles that are already on the land at this site very attractive,” he said. “I would not be surprised to see them make this place their home again in the near future.”

Other penguin experts agree.

“We always thought Adélie penguins carried a strong impulse to return to the nesting sites they were born at year after year but, as several catastrophic ice collapses have shown us recently, they are actually pretty adaptable,” said David Ainley, a penguin ecologist at H.T. Harvey & Associates, an ecological consulting firm.

“We’ve seen that Adélies will roam the coast in small flocks and, if they find a promising-looking site like this one, they will make it their home,” he said.

EUROPE, NORWAY, WORLD

Archaeologist Discovered Viking Ship Found Under the Ground in Norway

Archaeologist Discovered Viking Ship Found Under the Ground in Norway

Archaeologists in Norway using ground-penetrating radar have detected one of the largest Viking ship graves ever found. Archaeologists have found the outlines of a Viking ship buried not far from the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

The 65-foot long ship was covered over more than 1,000 years ago to serve as the final resting place of a prominent Viking king or queen. That makes it one of the largest Viking ship graves ever discovered.

An image generated by ground-penetrating radar reveals the outlines of a Viking ship within a burial mound.  Experts say intact Viking ship graves of this size are vanishingly uncommon. “I think we could talk about a hundred-year find,” says archaeologist Jan Bill, curator of Viking ships at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. “It’s quite spectacular from an archaeology perspective.”

An image generated by ground-penetrating radar reveals the outlines of a Viking ship within a burial mound.

The site where the ship grave was discovered is well-known. A burial mound 30 feet tall looms over the site, serving as a local landmark visible from the expressway just north of the Swedish border.

But archaeologists thought any archaeological remains in the nearby fields must have been destroyed by farmers’ plows in the late nineteenth century.

Then, this spring, officials from the surrounding county of Ostfold asked experts from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Research to survey the fields using a large ground-penetrating radar array.

The Viking ship was discovered by georadar at Jellestad next to the monumental Jell Mound in Ostfold.

They were able to scan the soil underneath almost 10 acres of farmland around the mound. Underneath, they found proof of 10 large graves and traces of a ship’s hull, hidden just 20 inches beneath the surface.

The ship burial forms a part of a larger mound cemetery and settlement site from the Iron Age next to the Jell Mound

Knut Paasche, head of the archaeology department at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Research and executive of the recent work at the site, estimates the ship was at least 65 feet long.

It appears to be well preserved, with clear outlines of the keel and the first few strakes, or lines of planking, visible in the radar scans. The ship would have been dragged onshore from the nearby Oslo fjord. At some point during the Viking Age, it was the final resting place of someone powerful.

“Ships like this functioned as a coffin,” says Paasche. “There was one king or queen or local chieftain on board.”

Whoever was buried in the ship was not alone. There are traces of at least 8 other burial mounds in the field, some almost 90 feet across. Three large longhouses—one 150 feet long—are also visible underneath the site’s soil, together with a half dozen smaller structures.

Archaeologists hope future unearthings will help date the mounds and the longhouses, which may have been built at different times. “We can not be sure the houses have the same age as the ship,” Paasche says.

Paasche plans to return to the site next spring to lead more sophisticated scans, including surveying the site with a magnetometer and perhaps digging test trenches to see what condition the ship’s remains are in.

If there is wood from the ship’s hull preserved beneath the ground, it could be used to date the find more decisively.

The chances of finding a king’s fortune are slim. Because they were so prominent in the landscape, many Viking Age burials were robbed centuries ago, long before they were leveled by Nineteenth-century farmers.

But “it would be very exciting to see if the burial is still intact,” says Bill. “If it is, it could be holding some very interesting finds.”

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

Giant 10-Million-Year-Old Fossil Tree in Peru Reveals Surprises About Ancient Past

Giant 10-Million-Year-Old Fossil Tree in Peru Reveals Surprises About Ancient Past

A lot has changed over those 10 million years to turn the area from a humid and diverse ecosystem into the more arid and sparse state that it’s in today – not least a shift in elevation from around 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) to 4,000 meters (13,124 feet).

It’s not entirely clear how ongoing climate change is going to affect the Central Andean Plateau and the neighbouring Amazon Basin in the coming years.

In Peru, the Central Andes (or Altiplano) researchers have found a giant tree, a fossil hidden in the plains, and the 10 million years of history that it reveals don’t quite match up with what we thought we know about the ancient climate.

Back when this tree died, a little more than halfway through the Neogene period, the South American climate was much more humid than had previously been thought, based on what this tree fossil reveals.

The researchers say it shows the importance of using plant fossils to work out how our planet’s climate has taken sharp turns in the past – and from that, how it might change again in the future.

“This tree and the hundreds of fossil wood, leaf, and pollen samples we collected on the expedition, reveal that when these plants were alive the ecosystem was more humid – even more humid than climate models of the past predicted,” says palaeobotanist Camila Martinez from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.

“There is probably no comparable modern ecosystem because temperatures were higher when these fossils were deposited 10 million years ago.”

A lot has changed over those 10 million years to turn the area from a humid and diverse ecosystem into the more arid and sparse state that it’s in today – not least a shift in elevation from around 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) to 4,000 metres (13,124 feet).

Recovered plant fossils that are a mere 5 million years old suggest the majority of the shift had already taken place by then. They show evidence of grasses, ferns, herbs, and shrubs, suggesting a puna-like ecosystem similar to today’s – rather than one that could have supported the growth of huge trees.

In the scale of Earth’s history, that’s a quick shift in a short space of time, caused by movements in the Earth’s lithosphere under South America over many millions of years.

“The fossil record in the region tells us two things: both the altitude and the vegetation changed dramatically over a relatively short period of time, supporting a hypothesis that suggests the tectonic uplift of this region occurred in rapid pulses,” says STRI palaeobotanist Carlos Jaramillo.

It’s not entirely clear how ongoing climate change is going to affect the Central Andean Plateau and the neighbouring Amazon Basin in the coming years, because of complicated feedback loops that might be triggered. But the new findings suggest that in the ancient past, at least, climate and altitude change occurred alongside one another.

The idea that the tectonic uplift helped to cause less rain and drying out of the region is almost the opposite of the conclusions that several other studies have come to.

In some ways, though, a lack of agreement between studies can be as useful as perfect harmony – the gaps show where experts might be getting their calculations wrong, and there are a lot of calculations to make to peer back through 10 million years of history.

“By the end of this century, changes in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will again approximate the conditions 10 million years ago,” says Martinez.

“Understanding the discrepancies between climate models and data based on the fossil record help us to elucidate the driving forces controlling the current climate of the Altiplano, and, ultimately, the climate across the South American continent.”

EUROPE, ITALY, WORLD

Archaeologists Discover Paintings of Ancient Egypt in a 2,000 Year Old Roman Villa in Pompeii

Archaeologists Discover Paintings of Ancient Egypt in a 2,000 Year Old Roman Villa in Pompeii

In Pompeji, a garden in a large ancient villa that housed incredible pictures of the River Nile, secrets could be found of the impact of ancient Egypt on the early Roman Empire.

Comprehensive sketches in the Casa dell’Efebo, one of the largest houses in the city before it was mostly destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, show a series of Nilotic murals with crocodiles, hippopotamuses, lotuses, and short-statured men fighting with wild beasts.

Caitlin Barrett from the Department of Classics at Cornell University said the drawings give the house a more cosmopolitan feel and outline how the Romans took a strong interest in ancient Egyptian culture such as religion.

Archaeologists Discover Paintings of Ancient Egypt in a 2,000 Year Old Villa in Pompeii
Representations of sexual activity, music and alcohol consumption are often central to these paintings
Egyptian fauna and flora, including crocodiles, hippopotamuses and lotuses are a common theme of the work

Barrett told the IBTUK: ‘The paintings from the Casa dell’ Efebo were created after Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire, but several generations after Augustus’ initial conquest of Egypt.

‘Some researchers have turned to explanations emphasizing religion: maybe paintings of Egyptian landscapes have to do with an interest in Egyptian gods. 

‘Others have interpreted these paintings as political statements: maybe this is about celebrating the conquest of Egypt. I suggest that instead of trying to apply a one-size-fits-all explanation, we should look at the context and individual choices.’

Barrett said: ‘Maybe paintings of Egyptian landscapes have to do with an interest in Egyptian gods’
Archaeologists also say the drawings could be about celebrating the conquest of Egypt
Barrett also argue the paintings could underline how the Romans interacted with the outside world, a form of globalization

While representations of sexual activity, music, and alcohol consumption are often central to these paintings. 

The research was compiled in the American Journal of Archaeology and also asserts that artifacts found around the garden of the house and the structure’s elaborate architecture such as water installations mimics the diverse nature of the Roman Empire. 

Barrett continued:  ‘In this particular assemblage, rather than solely trying to make some kind of statement about Isiac rituals or Roman politics, the owner of this house seems to be asserting a cosmopolitan identity as a citizen of the Empire. 

‘In Pompeian houses at this time, when people are representing faraway lands in domestic art, they are also trying to figure out what it means to them to be participants in the Roman Empire.’

The study says the paintings of the Nile in the Pompeian house provided the inhabitants with an opportunity to engage with shifting local and imperial Roman identities and to recreate a microcosm of the world they lived in.

‘People sometimes imagine phenomena like globalization to be creations of the modern world. In fact, if you look at the Roman Empire there are lots of parallels for some of the cross-cultural interactions that are also very much part of our own contemporary world’, the researcher concluded.  

Some of the pictures also show short-statured men fighting with wild beasts
Barrett said: ‘I suggest that instead of trying to apply a one-size-fits-all explanation, we should look at context and individual choices’
ASIA, RUSSIA, WORLD

Scythian Grave Unearthed in Southern Siberia

Scythian Grave Unearthed in Southern Siberia

A 2,500-year-old grave has been discovered in Siberia by archaeologists, with the remains of four people of ancient Tagar culture — two guerrillas including two warriors, a male and female  — and a stash of their metal weaponry.

Scythian Grave Unearthed in Southern Siberia
A man, two women and an infant were buried in this grave about 2,500 years ago in what is now Siberia.

The early Iron Age burial contained the skeletal remains of a Tagarian man, woman, infant, and older woman, as well as a slew of weapons and artifacts, including bronze daggers, knives, axes, bronze mirrors, and a miniature comb made from an animal horn, according to the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 

The Tagar culture, a part of the Scythian civilization (nomadic warriors who lived in what is now southern Siberia), often buried its dead with miniature versions of real-life objects, likely to symbolize possessions they thought were needed in the afterlife. In this case, however, the deceased was laid to rest with full-size objects, the archaeologists said. 

It’s not yet clear how these individuals died, but perhaps an illness caused their deaths, the archaeologists said.

A team from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography found the burial in the southern part of Khakassia, a region in Siberia, ahead of construction work on a railroad.

The finding is remarkable, given that grave robbers have looted most known Tagarian graves, Yuri Vitalievich Teterin, head of the excavation, said in a statement. (Of note, this culture is different than the fictional “Targaryen” dynasty from the TV drama “Game of Thrones.”)

The remains of the man and woman, who likely died in their 30s or 40s, were laid down on their backs, with large ceramic vessels next to each of them. The man also had two sets of weapons (two bronze daggers and two axes), and the woman had one set, according to the statement.

The woman’s weapons, including a long-handled instrument, perhaps a hatchet or battle ax, were an unusual find; the Tagarians often buried their women with weapons, but those were usually long-range weapons, such as arrowheads, noted Oleg Andreevich Mitko, a leader of the excavation and head of archaeology at Novosibirsk State University in Russia. 

Some of metal grave goods found in the group burial.

The infant’s remains were in bad shape, the archaeologists found.

An aerial view of the burial mount at the foot of Mount Aar-tag.

“The remains of a newborn baby, no more than a month old, were also found in the burial, but fragments of its skeleton were scattered throughout the grave, possibly as a result of the activity of rodents,” Olga Batanina, an anthropologist at the Paleodata laboratory of natural scientific methods in archeology, said in the statement. 

At the man and woman’s feet, lay the remains of an older woman of about 60 years of age; her body was positioned on her right side, with her knees bent. Next to her, archaeologists found a small ceramic vessel and a comb with broken teeth. 

It’s unclear how these people were related to one another, but a forthcoming DNA analysis may reveal whether they had family ties. 

The Tagar culture lasted for about 500 years, from about the eighth to the third centuries B.C.; its people were spread across the Minusinsk Basin, a landscape that is a mix of the steppe, forest-steppe, and foothills, according to the statement. 

The archaeologists have a busy schedule ahead of them. Survey work in 2019 revealed more than 10 archaeological sites, nine of which were directly in the railroad’s development zone. This excavation is just one of those sites. 

PERU, SOUTH AMERICA, WORLD

The shockingly unspoiled Peruvian tomb of the Lord of Sipan, Mochican Warrior Priest

The shockingly unspoiled Peruvian tomb of the Lord of Sipan, Mochican Warrior Priest


In 1987, at an archaeological site in Huaca Rajada near Sipán, on the north coast of Peru, an immense complex of unplundered Moche cultural tombs was uncovered. The most famous tombs were held by the Lord de Sipán, a Mochican warrior priest who, as in the area before, was buried amid the sparkling jewels.

Before discovering the famous Moche leader, archaeologists were met by a Guardian – the remains of a man with a copper helmet and a shield. He was buried in a seated position and his feet amputated to prevent him from leaving his seat. At the time, the researchers had no idea of the opulent riches that lay beyond the Guardian.

Eventually, excavators came upon a tomb, a 5m x 5m chamber, still sealed, with a wooden sarcophagus in the centre – the first of its type to be reported in the Americas. Within the coffin, lay the remains of a man dressed in full royal regalia, surrounded by a plethora of dedicatory offerings that were to accompany him in his afterlife.

An analysis of his regalia and iconographic depictions found in his tomb, suggests that this man was a high ranking Moche warrior-priest and a pre-eminent ruler of the Lambayeque valley. This mighty noble, who was probably viewed by his people as having god-like powers, became known as the Lord of Sipán.

The Lord of Sipán was aged 35-45 years old at the time of his death, and is known to have ruled the Lambayeque Valley in the late 3 rd century AD.

The elite leader was found adorned in gold, silver, and copper jewellery and ornaments, including an enormous crescent headdress with a plume of feathers, a face mask, several pectorals composed of hundreds of shell beads, necklaces, nose rings, ear rings, a gold and silver sceptre, banners of gilded metal sewn onto cotton cloth, and two backflaps, which are trapezoidal sheets of beaten gold that warriors wore attached to the back of their costumes.

The necklaces were made with beads of gold and silver in the shape of maní (peanuts), an important food staple for the Moche. There were ten kernels on the right side made of gold, signifying masculinity and the sun god, and ten kernels on the left side made of silver, to represent femininity and the moon god.

Also buried with the Lord of Sipán were many ceremonial utensils such as tropical sea shells, silver and gold rattles, knives, golden death-masks, gold bells showing a deity severing human heads, three other headdresses, and hundreds of beads. A total of 451 gold, silver, copper, textile, and feather objects were buried with the Lord of Sipán to accompany him in the afterlife.

As excavations progressed, archaeologists soon discovered that the Lord of Sipán was not alone. Buried with the warrior priest were six other people: three young women dressed in ceremonial clothes placed at the head and foot of his coffin (possibly wives or concubines who had apparently died sometime earlier), two robust males with amputated feet on the long sides (possibly warriors who were sacrificed to accompany their lord), and a child of about nine or ten years of age, placed at the head of his coffin.

The remains of a third male was later found on the roof of the burial chamber sitting in a niche overlooking the chamber. There was also a dog, which may have been the Lord of Sipan’s favorite pet, and two llamas, which were probably offerings.

The following year, in 1988, a second tomb was found and excavated near that of the Lord of Sipán, which contained an individual whom archaeologists concluded was also a Moche priest, second only in status to the Lord himself, surrounded by a Guardian and two women.

He was buried with numerous ritualistic objects, including a cup or bowl for collecting the blood of sacrificial victims, a metal crown adorned with an owl with its wings extended, and other items associated with worship of the moon. Around his neck he wore a made from small golden pendants with human faces that strike a variety of expressions.

Discoveries continued to emerge. Buried beneath 16 layers of the finest ornaments and clothing, archaeologists found a third tomb, which was slightly older than the other two.

The golden treasures and ornaments accompanying the deceased revealed that this individual was of the same or similar rank as the Lord of Sipán, and DNA analysis has shown that the two were related.  As a result, the archaeologists named this third individual ‘The Old Lord of Sipán’.

The Old Lord was accompanied by a young woman and a Guardian and, while his tomb was more subdued than that belonging to the Lord of Sipán, it contained the finest metalwork found at the site, including many pieces made of thin, hammered plates of gold, and gilded copper and alloys.  The ability to do this type of gold alloying was not discovered in Europe until centuries later.

Among the most precious relics were a tiny gold figurine holding a shield and club, wearing a turquoise inlaid shirt, an owl headdress, and moveable nose ornament, and a finely crafted necklace made up of golden spiders.

By 2007, a total of fourteen elite tombs had been found at Huaca Rajada and it seems quite clear that many more are still waiting to be found.

The goods found within them are so extensive that a large museum has been constructed which is entirely dedicated to highlighting this incredible discovery that sheds light on the culture, religion, and technology of the Moche civilization. The Royal Tombs Museum of Sipán was constructed in nearby Lambayeque to hold most of the artifacts and interpret the tombs.

NORTH AMERICA, U.S.A, WORLD

Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site

Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site

Builders stopped the backhoe during massive reconstruction efforts at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan when they uncovered something surprising just south of where the Twin Towers once stood.

At a depth of 22 metres (6.7 metres) below the current level on the street, in a pit that would become an underground security and parking complex, excavators found the mangled skeleton of a long-forgotten wooden ship.

A recent study found that the ship was actually constructed in 1773 or shortly after, on a small shipyard near Philadelphia, in the tree rings in those waterlogged shores. Moreover, the ship is made of the same type of white oaks used to construct parts of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed, according to the study published in the journal Tree-Ring Research.

The entire ship was scanned before its removal to create a precise record of where each of its pieces were originally found
Ship Found 20 Feet Below World Trade Center Site
Four years after a shipwreck was revealed at Ground Zero, a new report details how tree rings helped establish the origins of the wooden vessel.

Archaeologists had been on-site throughout the excavation of the World Trade Center’s Vehicular Security Center. They had found animal bones, ceramic dishes, bottles and dozens of shoes, but the excitement really kicked up when the 32-foot-long (9.75 m) partial hull of the ship emerged from the dirt.

The vessel was quickly excavated, to prevent damage from exposure to the air. Piece by piece, the delicate oak fragments were documented and taken out of the rotten-smelling mud.

The timbers were sent to the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, where they would be soaked in water to keep the wood from cracking and warping.

A few timbers were sent back to New York, just 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the World Trade Center, to the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. Researchers at the lab dried the fragments slowly in a cold room and cut thick slices of the wood to get a clear look at the tree rings.

A button found aboard the ship(left) , from the coat of a private in the British Army 52nd Regiment of Foot, which battled the American rebels. On the right the rings can be clearly seen in one of the beams

The team established that the trees used to build the ship — some of which had lived to be more than 100 years old — were mostly cut down around 1773. Then, to determine where the wood came from, the researchers had to find a match between the ring pattern in the timbers and a ring pattern in live trees and archaeological samples from a specific region.

“What makes the tree-ring patterns in a certain region look very similar, in general, is climate,” said the leader of the new study, Dario Martin-Benito, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

Regional ring patterns arise from local rain levels and temperatures, with wetter periods producing thicker rings and drier periods producing smaller rings, he said.

Martin-Benito and his colleagues at Columbia’s Tree Ring Lab narrowed their search to trees in the eastern United States, thanks to the keel of the ship, which contained hickory, a tree found only in eastern North America and eastern Asia. Otherwise, the researchers would have had much more difficulty in limiting their search, as oak is found all over the world. 

The ship’s signature pattern most closely matched with the rings found in old living trees and historic wood samples from the Philadelphia area, including a sample taken during an earlier study from Independence Hall, which was built between 1732 and 1756.

“We could see that at that time in Philadelphia, there were still a lot of old-growth forests, and [they were] being logged for shipbuilding and building Independence Hall,” Martin-Benito told Live Science.

“Philadelphia was one of the most — if not the most — important shipbuilding cities in the U.S. at the time. And they had plenty of wood so it made lots of sense that the wood could come from there.”

Historians still aren’t certain whether the ship sank accidently or if it was purposely submerged to become part of a landfill used to bulk up Lower Manhattan’s coastline. Oysters found fixed to the ship’s hull suggest it at least languished in the water for some time before being buried by layers of trash and dirt.

Previous investigations found that the vessel’s timbers had been damaged by burrowing holes of Lyrodus pedicellatus, a type of “shipworm” typically found in high-salinity, warm waters — a sign that the ship, at some point in its life, made a trip to the Caribbean, perhaps on a trading voyage. Martin-Benito speculated that the infestation might have been one of the reasons the ship met its demise just 20 or 30 years after it was built.

“I don’t know much about the life expectancy for boats, but that doesn’t seem like too long for something that would take so long to build,” Martin-Benito said.