Archaeologists have found seven pairs of Anglo-Saxon brooches in seven graves during an excavation in Gloucestershire
Archaeologists have found seven pairs of Anglo-Saxon saucer brooches, one pair in each of seven burials unearthed in an excavation in South West of England Gloucestershire.
The wonderful discovery was announced on Twitter by Cotswold Archeology.
At the site, the Cotswolds Archaeology team unearthed more than 70 Anglo-Saxon burials, some of which had luxurious grave goods. They are from the 5th or 6th centuries.
Seven pairs of gold-gilt plate (or saucer) brooches were found, in seven separate graves. Plate brooches such as these were decorative items, worn in pairs at the chest and used to fasten clothing.
(1/3) These beautiful #AngloSaxon disc brooches originate from a site that revealed features dating from the Iron Age through to the 3rd or 4th century and beyond. We carefully excavated over seventy Anglo Saxon burials, some containing high-status grave goods… #Archaeologypic.twitter.com/ou1fV8rDt3
— Cotswold Archaeology (@CotswoldArch) April 4, 2022
They’re known as saucer brooches after their shape: a circular central body with a raised rim.
They are made of gilded copper alloy and were relief-cast (cast from a single piece of sheet metal) with decorative motifs in geometric patterns.
The designs on cast saucer brooches are based on geometric motifs. The commonest design is the running spiral, so-called because each of the spirals is linked to the next and they run around the brooch, normally with a pellet in the center. The commonest number of spirals is five or six, but there are occasionally more.
Cast saucer brooches are similar to button brooches, with the upturned rim that gives them their name. They were worn in pairs, so in graves, it is normal to find two very similar, but not mould-identical, brooches together.
Anglo-Saxon saucer brooches.
The saucer brooches are still a high-status signifier for burials from this early period of Anglo-Saxon history in England, often found in tandem with other expensive pieces of jewelry.
Ranging in size from 20-70 mm in diameter, saucer brooches were worn in pairs across the chest to fasten garments. Their designs are more simple than, for example, the long square-headed brooches which were so large they offered much more space to create complex, highly sophisticated designs.
“Those we uncovered were either positioned one on each shoulder or two next to each other on the left shoulder with an associated clothing pin, giving a vivid impression of how they once looked on their wearers,” they wrote on their Cotswold Archeology Facebook page.
3,000-Year-Old leather Shoe discovered On A Beach In Kent, UK
A Bronze Age relic found on a Kent beach is believed to be the oldest shoe ever found in the United Kingdom. The shoe, made of leather, is 3,000 years old and was discovered by archaeologist Steve Tomlinson.
Tomlinson sent the shoe to an East Kilbride, Scotland unit for carbon dating even though he didn’t think it was particularly noteworthy when he first discovered it. He got a response stating the shoe was from the late Bronze Age five weeks later.
“The date they had given me was just astonishing. It’s incredible, and it’s so, so rare. Textiles like this don’t survive often, they have to be found in anaerobic conditions,” Tomlinson told Kent Online.
The shoe is potentially the oldest found in the British Isles, and is also thought to be the smallest Bronze Age shoe found in the world. The shoe is 15cm long, and it is thought that it was worn by a child aged two- to three years old.
Previously, the 2,000-year-old shoe discovered by archaeologists at the Somerset quarry in 2005 was thought to be the oldest in the United Kingdom.
The shoe after cleaning.
However, the discovery in Kent is even older – and is also potentially the smallest Bronze Age shoe ever found in the world,” Kent Online reports.
“I will certainly look forward to the future and what we can all learn from this incredible find. Finding something like that is quite extraordinary. It opens up history too; we just know nothing about these kinds of things,” Tomlinson said.
Now, additional research is being done to see what kind of animal the leather was made from and whether any DNA can be derived from the artifact.
The Bronze Age shoe is anticipated to go to the British Museum once all scientific investigations have been completed.
In Medieval burial ground, a rare embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ was discovered
Russian archaeologists have uncovered a rare embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ in a medieval burial ground.
46 graves have been dug up during excavations; one of them contained a woman who was buried with an embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ and John the Baptist and was between the ages of 16 and 25.
The discovery was made during the construction of the Moscow-Kazan highway, where archaeologists found an 8.6-acre medieval settlement and an associated Christian cemetery.
The iconography of Jesus Christ known as Deesis, which can be translated from Greek as “prayer” or “intercession,” is one of the most potent and prevalent images in Orthodox religious art.
The composition of the Deisis unites the three most important figures of Christianity. A tripartite icon of the Eastern Orthodox Church showing Christ usually enthroned between the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist.
Photo: Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The fabric is 12.1 cm long by 5.5 cm wide and is composed of two parts joined by a vertical seam made of a woven gold ribbon with a braided pattern.
The fabric’s lining did not survive, but a microscopic examination revealed birch bark remnants and needle punctures along the lower and upper edges.
In the center of the fabric is a frontal image of Jesus Christ making a blessing gesture, and to the right of him is John the Baptist praying. A second figure, probably Mary, was once on the left, but it has since disappeared, according to the inspection.
The archaeologists believe the embroidered fabric was once a dark silk samite headdress.
Similar examples include the embroidered crosses and faces of saints discovered in the Karoshsky burial ground in the Yaroslavl region, as well as the Ivorovsky necropolis near Staritsa that features an image of Michael the Archangel wielding a spear.
The first Roman fort with wooden defenses was discovered in Germany
The ancient Romans erected a fence topped with these wooden spikes in a effort to defend a silver mining operation that ultimately ran dry.
For the first time, archaeologists have discovered wooden defenses surrounding an ancient Roman military base. The fence topped with sharpened wooden stakes, akin to today’s barbed wire, is the kind of fortification known to have existed from ancient writings—including by Caesar—but no surviving examples had previously been found.
The intimidating defense measures are located in what is now the town of Bad Ems in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Excavations on the site began after a local hunter, Jürgen Eigenbrod, noticed faint markings on the ground in a field in 2016.
The differences in color in sections of the grain, it turned out, were caused by the remnants of ditches dug by the Romans.
Using geomagnetic prospecting, archaeologists have since discovered evidence of no fewer than 40 towers at the site, as well as a smaller camp, on opposite sides of the valley.
The area appears to have only served as a camp for a couple of years before burning down, reports Frankfurt’s Goethe University.
It appears that the ancient Romans were tunneling into the earth, searching for deposits of silver. At first, archaeologists believed that fire remains and melted slag were evidence that the Romans had set up a smelting works to process silver ore.
Hunter Jürgen Eigenbrod spotted these markings in a field in Germany, which turned out to be traces of an ancient Roman ditch.
But the writings of the ancient historian Tacitus reveal that the Roman governor Curtius Rufus’s efforts to mine silver in the area failed in the year 47 A.D. Expecting untold riches, the Romans had set up a heavily fortified base manned by military troops—which explains the barbed wire-like defenses, meant to deter sudden raids.
Unfortunately for them, a rich vein of the precious metal would not be unearthed in the area until millennia later, during archaeological excavations in 1897.
There was enough silver there that Romans could have continued mining operations for two centuries—if they had only kept digging.
The remains of the ancient fire, it would seem, came from a watch tower, not a profitable smelting works.
The ancient Romans erected a fence topped with these wooden spikes in a effort to defend a silver mining operation that ultimately ran dry.
These futile ancient efforts make for a fascinating story—Frederic Auth, the leader of the excavations since 2019, won first prize for his account of the history of the site at the 2022 Wiesbaden Science Slam.
Research and excavations are slated to continue, ledby Markus Scholz, a professor of archaeology and ancient Roman history of Roman at Goethe University; archaeologist Daniel Burger-Völlmecke, and Peter Henrich of the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Rhineland-Palatinate. Meanwhile, the ancient wooden spikes are now at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz.
Evidence of Europe’s first Homo sapiens was found in a French cave
Stone artefacts and tooth pre-date the earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by more than 10,000 years.
Excavations at the Grotte Mandrin rock shelter uncovered stone tools, animal bones and hominin teeth.
Archaeologists have found evidence that Europe’s first Homo sapiens lived briefly in a rock shelter in southern France — before mysteriously vanishing.
A study published on 9 February in Science Advances1 argues that distinctive stone tools and a lone child’s tooth were left by Homo sapiens during a short stay, some 54,000 years ago — and not by Neanderthals, who lived in the rock shelter for thousands of years before and after that time.
The Homo sapiens occupation, which researchers estimate lasted for just a few decades, pre-dates the previous earliest known evidence of the species in Europe by around 10,000 years.
But some researchers are not so sure that the stone tools or teeth were left by Homo sapiens. “I find the evidence less than convincing,” says William Banks, a paleolithic archaeologist at the French national research agency CNRS and the University of Bordeaux.
Tools, bones, and teeth
A team co-led by Ludovic Slimak, a cultural anthropologist at CNRS and the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, has spent the past three decades excavating the Grotte Mandrin rock shelter in the Rhône Valley.
The researchers have uncovered tens of thousands of stone tools and animal bones, as well as 9 hominin teeth, all dating from around 70,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Most of the stone tools resemble artifacts categorized as ‘Mousterian technology’ that are found at Neanderthal sites across Eurasia, says Slimak. But one of the shelter’s archaeological levels — known as layer E and dated to between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago — contains tools such as sharpened points and small blades that are more typical of early Homo sapiens technology. Slimak says the layer E stone tools resemble those found at much younger sites in southern France, left by makers unknown, as well as those from similarly aged sites in the Middle East that are linked to Homo sapiens.
These sharpened stones — which might have been the tips of spears or other tools — have been linked to Homo sapiens
An analysis led by Clément Zanolli, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Bordeaux who, found that the only hominin tooth in layer E, a molar probably from a child, is similar in shape to those of Homo sapiens who lived in Eurasia during the last Ice Age. Other teeth found in Grotte Mandrin resemble those of Neanderthals.
The researchers have not attempted to extract DNA from the layer E tooth to confirm whether it belongs to Homo sapiens or a Neanderthal.
Slimak says that in an unpublished analysis, other researchers have found Neanderthal DNA in sediments older than layer E, as well as in a tooth from Grotte Mandrin’s younger layers.
But the team was unable to extract much well-preserved DNA from horse teeth found in the rock shelter, including layer E. So they have decided to hold off on the destructive process of taking samples from the layer E hominin tooth until they have access to technology that will give them a good chance of getting genetic material out intact. “This tooth is very precious. There’s some chance there’s preserved DNA in it,” Slimak says.
If Homo sapiens left the tools and tooth in layer E, they weren’t in Grotte Mandrin for long. Slimak estimates that the residency lasted for around 40 years, on the basis of an analysis of fragments of the shelter’s ceiling that had broken off and been deposited alongside other archaeological material.
New layers of the white mineral calcite accrued on the ceiling twice each year, during wet periods, and soot from fires in the shelter left black marks, creating a sort of ‘barcode’ that can pinpoint hominin occupations to within a year. The researchers concluded that the last Homo sapiens fire went out no more than a year before the next Neanderthal one. “The populations must have in some way met each other,” Slimak adds. Yet the researchers found no obvious signs of cultural exchanges, such as similarities in stone tools, between the two groups.
Early settlers
If layer E was occupied by Homo sapiens, however fleetingly, it would put the species in Europe thousands of years earlier than other records suggest. The region’s oldest definitive Homo sapiens remains — confirmed with DNA — come from Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, and are around 44,000 years old2.
“It is exciting to see that Homo sapiens was in western Europe several thousand years earlier than previously thought,” says Marie Soressi, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “It shows that the peopling of Europe by Homo sapiens was likely a long and hazardous process.”
But Banks is not yet convinced that Grotte Mandrin was once home to Europe’s earliest known Homo sapiens. He says that the layer E tools are more likely to be local inventions than imports from people in the Middle East.
There can also be substantial overlap in the shapes of the teeth of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. “It is not a stretch to think that a single Neanderthal tooth could have dental characteristics that resemble moderns,” he says.
The researchers made replicas of the stone points using local flint, and incorporated them into spears and arrows.
A 54,000-year-old cave site in southern France holds hundreds of tiny stone points, which researchers say closely resemble other known arrowheads — including replicas that they tested on dead goats.
The discovery, reported on 22 February in Science Advances1, suggests that the first Homo sapiens to reach Europe hunted with bows and arrows. But it also raises the question of why Neanderthals — which occupied the Grotte Mandrin rock shelter in the Rhône Valley before and after Homo sapiens — never adopted these superior weapons.
Last year, researchers excavating Grotte Mandrin claimed that the site held the earliest known evidence of Homo sapiens in Europe2. In one of the cave’s archaeological levels, known as layer E, researchers co-led by cultural anthropologist Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in France identified a child’s tooth and thousands of stone tools. They concluded that the child had been a Homo sapiens.
Among the tools were hundreds of tiny points, many of which were as small as 1 centimetre wide, weighed only a few grams and were nearly identical in shape and size.
The smallest points were similar to other arrowheads made by ancient and modern humans, and some contained similar fractures and other damage at their tips, which could have been created by high-velocity impact.
Spears and arrows
The researchers made dozens of replica points from flint found near the rock shelter, and fashioned them into bows and arrows using wood and other materials. They also made thrusting spears and spear-thrower darts. They used the weapons to stab or shoot at dead goats.
Some of the larger points could have been used effectively with spears or darts. But only a bow and arrow could have generated the force needed to wound or kill an animal with the smallest points, says Laure Metz, an archaeologist at Aix-Marseille University in France who co-led the latest study with Slimak. “It’s not possible to use these tiny points with something other than a bow and arrow.”
Some archaeologists think the Grotte Mandrin shelter contains the earliest known evidence for Homo sapiens in Europe.
Grotte Mandrin contains many horse bones, and Metz suspects that humans sheltering in the cave hunted these animals as well as bison migrating through the Rhône Valley.
The team has found a horse femur with damage consistent with a stone point, and Metz dreams of finding an arrow point embedded in an animal bone.
“This is as solid as it gets,” says John Shea, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “They’ve made a more convincing case that these things are arrows, than cases have been made for arrows in data from the last 12,000 years.”
Neanderthal puzzle
Above and below Grotte Mandrin’s layer E, researchers have found Neanderthal teeth and DNA, along with stone tools characteristic of the extinct group.
Slimak’s team contends that layer E represents an early but short-lived incursion of Homo sapiens into Neanderthal territory, more than 10,000 years before the species permanently settled in Europe. Not all archaeologists agree.
If Homo sapiens did make the stone points in layer E, it’s not clear why Neanderthals in the region and elsewhere did not pick up bow-and-arrow technology, as far as anyone can tell. Some researchers have speculated that Neanderthals lacked the cognitive capacity to use projectiles, a difference that might have helped humans to out-compete Neanderthals for scarce game.
But Metz doubts that that is the reason. She wonders whether cultural traditions explain why Neanderthals seem never to have used bows and arrows.
Marie Soressi, an archaeologist at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, agrees that the Neanderthals living at Grotte Mandrin didn’t leave arrow points behind. But she wonders whether evidence for bow and arrow use might be found elsewhere. “I would find it very strange if Neanderthals were so conservative that they would not copy mechanically propelled weapons used by other humans.”
Archaeologists have dated the unusual face-down burial of the young woman at the Monte Luna necropolis in Sardinia to late in the third century B.C. or early in the second century B.C.
The strange facedown burial of a young woman, who likely had a nail driven into her skull around the time she died in Sardinia more than 2,000 years ago, could be the result of ancient beliefs about epilepsy, according to new research.
The facedown burial may indicate that the individual suffered from a disease, while an unusual nail-shaped hole in the woman’s skull may be the result of a remedy that sought to prevent epilepsy from spreading to others — a medical belief at the time, according to a study coming out in the April issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Epilepsy is now known to be a brain condition that can’t be transmitted to other people, but at the time the woman died, “The idea was that the disease that killed the person in the grave could be a problem for the entire community,” said study co-author Dario D’Orlando, an archaeologist and historian at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia.
The tomb is one of more than 120 Punic tombs at the Monte Luna necropolis in southern Sardinia, which was established after the sixth century B.C. and was used until the second century B.C.
The unusual burial was found in a tomb in the Necropolis of Monte Luna, a hill located about 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of Cagliari in the southern part of Sardinia. The burial ground was first used by Punic people after the sixth century B.C. and continued in use until the second century B.C.
Punic necropolis
The latest study found evidence of blunt-force trauma to the woman’s head, possibly from falling, and a square hole that appears to have been made by an ancient nail.
The Monte Luna necropolis was excavated in the 1970s, and the latest study is based on photographs of the tomb and a new examination of the woman’s skeleton.
Pottery in the tomb suggests she was buried in the last decade of the third century B.C. or the first decades of the second century B.C. — a time when Sardinia, a center of Punic or Phoenician culture for hundreds of years, had come under Roman rule since the end of the First Punic War against Carthage, which took place from 264 B.C. to 241 B.C.
And a new analysis of the young woman’s skeleton — based on her pelvis, teeth and other bones — confirmed an earlier estimate that she was between 18 and 22 years old when she died.
It also showed she had suffered trauma to her skull shortly before or around the time she died. The archaeologists found evidence of two types of trauma: blunt-force trauma, which could have occurred during an accidental fall — possibly during an epileptic seizure — and a sharp-force injury in the form of a square hole in her skull consistent with an impact by an ancient Roman nail; such nails have been found at several archaeological sites in Sardinia.
D’Orlando said the sharp-force injury by a nail may have been inflicted after the woman’s death to prevent the perceived “contagion” of her epilepsy.
The authors suggest the woman’s skull may have been pierced by an ancient nail with a square cross-section, like this one, to prevent the spread of the perceived “contagion” of epilepsy.
Medical beliefs in ancient Sardinia
Such treatment may have been based on a Greek belief that certain diseases were caused by “miasma” — bad air — that would have been known throughout the Mediterranean at that time, D’Orlando said.
The same remedy is described in the first century A.D. by the Roman general and natural historian Gaius Plinius Secundus — known as Pliny the Elder — who recommended nailing body parts after a death from epileptic seizures to prevent the spread of the condition, the authors reported.
D’Orlando suggested that this practice of nailing the skull, and perhaps the woman’s unusual facedown burial, could be explained by the introduction of new Roman ideas, which were heavily influenced by ancient Greek ideas, into rural Sardinia.
The tomb was excavated in the 1970s and the latest study is based on photographs and a new analysis of the bones it contained, in particular the young woman’s skull.
But Peter van Dommelen, an archaeologist at Brown University who wasn’t involved in the study, said the culture in Sardinia stayed resolutely Punic in spite of Roman rule.
“Culturally speaking, and particularly in rural places like here, the island remains Punic,” he said. “There’s no reason to look at the Roman world for affinities — what people were doing was entirely guided by Punic traditions.”
Van Dommelen has not heard of similar burials in Sardinia, but “it’s interesting,” he said. “It fits with a broader pattern that you can see across the world and across cultures.”
Archaeologists Discover Homes Of The Builders Of Europe’s First Monuments Made 6,400 Years Ago
Archaeologists in France have found one of the first residential sites belonging to the prehistoric builders of some of Europe’s first monumental stone structures.
During the Neolithic, people in west-central France built many impressive megalithic monuments such as barrows and dolmens.
While these peoples’ tombs stood the test of time, archaeologists have been searching for their homes for more than a century.
“It has been known for a long time that the oldest European megaliths appeared on the Atlantic coast, but the habitats of their builders remained unknown,” said Dr. Vincent Ard from the French National Center for Scientific Research.
Now, Dr. Ard and a team of researchers working in the Charente department have identified the first known residential site belonging to some of Europe’s first megalithic builders.
The Le Peu enclosure was discovered during an aerial survey in 2011 and has since been the subject of intense research.
The results of this work, published in the journal Antiquity, revealed a palisade encircling several timber buildings built during the fifth millennium BC.
This makes them the oldest wooden structures in the region and the first residential site contemporary with the Neolithic monument makers. At least three homes were found, each around 13 meters long, clustered together near the top of a small hill enclosed by the palisade.
From his hill, the nearby Tusson megalithic cemetery would be visible. This raised the possibility that the inhabitants of Le Peu built the site’s five long mounds. To test this, the archaeologists carried out radiocarbon dating that revealed these monuments are contemporary with Le Peu, suggesting the two sites are linked.
While the people of Le Peu may have built monuments to the dead, they also invested a lot of time and effort in protecting the living. Analysis of the paleosol recovered from the site revealed it was located on a promontory bordered by a marsh. These natural defenses were enhanced by a ditch palisade wall which extended around the site.
The entrance had particularly heavy defenses, guarded by two monumental structures.
These appear to have been later additions, requiring part of the defensive ditch to be filled in.
“The site reveals the existence of unique monumental architectures, probably defensive. This demonstrates a rise in Neolithic social tensions,” said Dr. Ard.
However, these impressive defenses may have proved insufficient as all the buildings at Le Peu appear to have been burnt down around 4400 BC. However, such destruction helped preserve the site.
As such, Dr. Ard and the team hope further research at Le Peu will continue to shed light on the lives of people only known from their monuments to the dead. Already it shows how their residential sites had a monumental scale, never before seen in prehistoric Atlantic society.
