“Unprecedented” Phoenician necropolis found in southern Spain
A 4th or 5th-century B.C Phoenician necropolis has been found at Osuna in Southern Spain. A well-preserved underground limestone vault necropolis, where the Phoenicians living in the Iberian peninsula buried their dead, was discovered during water utility upgrades.
Council workers have found a well-preserved necropolis from the Phoenician era with at least eight subterranean limestone burial vaults and a staircase.
Archaeologists said the “unprecedented” Phoenician-Carthaginian cemetery. Such sites are normally found in coastal areas rather than so far inland, they say.
It is a unique find because the only comparable necropolises that have been unearthed so far are coastal, dotting the area around the ancient Phoenician colony of Cádiz. Osuna is inland, about 55 miles east of Seville.
Preliminary surveys have so far turned up eight burial vaults as well as staircases and areas that are thought to have served as atriums. These were elite graves, and unprecedented in what would have been practically the hinterlands of Phoenician Spain.
The phoenician-Punic necropolis was discovered in Osuna, Spain.
The lead archaeologist, Mario Delgado, described the discovery as very significant and very unexpected. “To find a necropolis from the Phoenician and Carthaginian era with these characteristics – with eight well tombs, atriums, and staircase access – you’d have to look to Sardinia or even Carthage itself,” he said.
“We thought we might find remains from the imperial Roman age, which would be more in keeping with the surroundings, so we were surprised when we found these structures carved from the rock – hypogea [subterranean vaults] – perfectly preserved beneath the Roman levels.”
Rosario Andújar, the mayor of Osuna, said the find had already prompted a re-examination of the area’s history.
The mayor said that while more research needed to be done, the luxurious nature of the necropolis suggested it had been built for those at “the highest level” of the social hierarchy.
Excavation work is currently underway in order to reach the ground levels of a possible atrium, officials said.
The Phoenicians were amongst the greatest Mediterranean traders from approximately 1,500 to 600 BC. Based on archaeological remains, the consensus now is that colonisation began around 800, when settlements were founded along the south coast of the peninsula.
They settled in southern Spain, not long after the founding of Phoenicia’s greatest colony, Carthage.
They set to work exploiting the region’s rich and untapped deposits of tin, gold, and silver and expanding their trade networks.
The trade of metals and consumer goods (fish, textiles) made the Phoenician settlements of what is now Andalusia enormously prosperous.
Archaeologists believe that the rich tombs found on the coast were built for the shipping dynasties that ran Phoenician commerce.
The Spanish town of Osuna came to the spotlight when it became the location for parts of the fifth season of the HBO series, Game of Thrones.
Several of the ancient Egyptian branding-irons — actually made of bronze — were too small for large animals like cattle and were probably used to brand human slaves.
Small branding irons from ancient Egypt were likely used to mark the skin of human slaves, a new study suggests. Several ancient texts and illustrations, as well as 10 branding irons dating to 3,000 years ago, suggest that ancient Egyptians branded slaves.
These branding irons, actually made of bronze, are now in the collections of the British Museum and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London.
The branding irons are thought to date roughly to Egypt’s 19th dynasty, from around 1292 B.C. until the 25th dynasty, which ended in 656 B.C., according to a study published Oct. 15 in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.
Until now, most Egyptologists had assumed that they were used to brand cattle — a practice seen in ancient Egyptian paintings — or perhaps horses. But the brands in the museums are too small for that purpose, said Ella Karev, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago and the study’s author.
“They are so small that it precludes them from being used on cattle or horses,” she told Live Science. “I’m not excluding the possibility, but we have no evidence of small animals like goats being branded, and there is so much other evidence of humans being branded.”
Modern cattle-branding guidelines call for a brand that’s larger than at least 4 inches (10.6 centimetres) long so the scar it leaves won’t become illegible as a calf grows — an issue that the ancient Egyptians likely knew about, too.
But the brands in the British Museum and the Petrie Museum are typically a third of that size — far too small for cattle, Karev wrote. The cattle brands in ancient Egyptian paintings are also square or rectangular, and look larger than the brands in the museums.
Branding people
Some of the ancient Egyptian branding irons are almost exactly the same size as branding irons used by Europeans on African enslaved people during the trans-Atlantic slave trade many centuries later, Karev said. “Human branding-irons from the mid-and late 19th century parallel the size and shape of the smaller branding irons discussed here,” she wrote in the study.
Ancient Egyptian writings also talk about “marking” slaves, which was assumed to be a reference to the practice of tattooing, Karev told Live Science. For instance, branding is seen in a depiction of prisoners of war in a carving at Medinet Habu near Luxor in Upper (southern) Egypt dated to the 20th dynasty, perhaps around 1185 B.C.
An Egyptian carving from about 1185 B.C. shows the “marking” of prisoners-of-war and was thought to depict tattooing. But the new study argues it depicts branding instead.
But research shows that tattooing in ancient Egypt was almost exclusively performed on women and for religious purposes, she said, and the marking of prisoners of war in the Medinet Habu carving is unlikely to be tattooing.
“Practically speaking, ‘hand-poking’ a tattoo [without a tattoo machine] takes quite a lot of time and skill — and if you’re doing that on a large scale, it’s not easily replicable,” Karev said. “It would make much more sense for this to be branding.”
Moreover, the tools used to mark the prisoners in the Medinet Habu carving look different from the cattle brands used in ancient Egyptian paintings. It’s been suggested that’s because they were needles for tattooing, and that the carving shows them placed in a bowl of pigment. But Karev argues that the depiction instead shows small brands being heated to red hot in a portable heater known as a brazier.
Egyptian slavery
The practice of slavery in Egypt was very different from the modern conception of slavery informed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Karev said.
“The way that we define slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, debt bondage — all of these are modern classifications and categorizations,” she said. “The ancient Egyptians did not have these classifications, and so it is up to historians to figure out what, in context, is actually going on.”
While ancient writings state that people were sometimes bought and sold as property, and perhaps with the land they subsisted on — what are called “serfs” today — there’s also evidence that the dowry for the marriage of a slave might be paid by their owner and that many slaves were adopted into families.
In addition, there is evidence that people were often manumitted, or freed from slavery, and became regular members of Egyptian society, she said.
In such cases, the brand of a slave might be a “permanent marker of an impermanent status,” Karev said. “They clearly had no issue with an ex-slave adopting a new name, becoming fully Egyptian, marrying an Egyptian free person and moving up the ranks.”
Antonio Loprieno, an Egyptologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland who wasn’t involved in the study, said the paper was a “fantastic piece of scholarship.”
Only foreigners, rather than native Egyptians, seem to have been marked in this way, so “assuming that the branding-bronzes were used for humans … is empirically more probable at this time, where the number of foreign workers and soldiers in Egypt was at its peak,” he told Live Science in an email.
Loprieno, too, noted that modern ideas of slavery did not apply in Egypt at this time and that further evidence is needed of the “moral connotations” of slavery in ancient Egypt.
Genetic Study Suggests Neolithic Mesopotamia Was a Melting Pot
Cranial features of the cay008 toddler.
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Turkey, working with one colleague from Austria and two from Sweden, has found evidence via genetic analysis of a blend of demographics in Neolithic people living in the Upper Tigris portion of Mesopotamia.
In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they extracted tissue samples from the remains of people buried in Çayönü Tepesi from the period 8500–7500 BCE.
Upper Mesopotamia was a region between the Tigress and Euphrates rivers in what is now Turkey and Iran.
Researchers believe the region played a major role in the Neolithic Transition when people began to transition away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. It was also a time of many other cultural changes.
For many years, historians have wondered if the shift in Mesopotamia came about due to the efforts of locals who lived there, or if it was a melting pot of sorts with ideas coming from people from many different places.
To answer that question, the researchers conducted a genetic analysis of the DNA of 13 people who lived and died during that time and were buried in a way that preserved some of their tissue—two adult men, six adult women, two male children and three female children.
By comparing the samples via multidimensional scaling to the genomes of others from nearby regions, they found evidence that the people had blended backgrounds—they had a three-way admixture of people from South Levant, Central Anatolia and Central Zagros.
There was also an exception—one of the women had a Caucasus/Zagros background. This showed that there was migration into the region of people from much farther north, and perhaps other areas as well.
The researchers also found that one of the children, a toddler, had experienced intentional skull shaping and cranial cauterization—the latter of which might have been part of a medical procedure.
The researchers suggest that the Upper Tigris portion of Mesopotamia during the Neolithic era was likely a vibrant hub with people coming and going, bringing with them both goods and culture.
Large Temple Found in Italy’s Etruscan City of Vulci
Archaeologists from the universities of Freiburg and Mainz identify one of the largest known sacred buildings of the Etruscans
An interdisciplinary team headed by archaeologists Dr. Mariachiara Franceschini of the University of Freiburg and Paul P. Pasieka of the University of Mainz has discovered a previously unknown Etruscan temple in the ancient city of Vulci, which lies in the Italian region of Latium.
The building, which is 45 meters by 35 meters, is situated west of the Tempio Grande, a sacred building which was excavated back in the 1950s.
Archaeologists and other colleagues uncover the walls of the Etruscan temple in Vulci.
Initial examination of the strata of the foundation of the northeast corner of the temple and the objects they found there, led the researchers to date the construction of the temple towards the end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century BCE.
“The new temple is roughly the same size and on a similar alignment as the neighbouring Tempio Grande, and was built at roughly the same Archaic time,” explains Franceschini. “This duplication of monumental buildings in an Etruscan city is rare, and indicates an exceptional finding,” adds Pasieka.
The team discovered the temple when working on the Vulci Cityscape project, which was launched in 2020 and aimed to research the settlement strategies and urbanistic structures of the city of Vulci.
Vulci was one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan federation and in pre-Roman times was one of the most important urban centres in what is now Italy.
New discoveries about city design and development
“We studied the entire northern area of Vulci, that’s 22.5 hectares, using geophysical prospecting and Ground Penetrating Radar,” explains Pasieka.
“We discovered remains from the city’s origins that had previously been overlooked in Vulci and are now better able to understand the dynamics of settlement and the road system, besides identifying different functional areas in the city.”
The researchers were able in 2021 to uncover the first sections of wall, made of solid tuff.
“Our knowledge about the appearance and organization of Etruscan cities has been limited until now,” says Franceschini. “The intact strata of the temple are offering us insights into more than a thousand years of development of one of the most important Etruscan cities.”
Over the coming years scientists want to study the different phases of use and the precise architectural appearance of the temple in more depth, in order to learn more about the religion of the Etruscans, the social structures in Vulci and what the lives of the city’s inhabitants were really like.
Fritz Thyssen Foundation and Gerda Henkel Foundation are funding the excavation
The project is being funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (2020-2022) and the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2022-2023) along with the University of Mainz’s research area “40,000 Years of Human Challenges: Perception, Conceptualization and Coping in Premodern Societies”.
The departments of classical archaeology at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Mainz are working together with the Vulci Foundation, which administers the archaeological park “Parco Naturalistico Archeologico di Vulci”, and the Italian national monument authority, Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria meridionale.
Fish fossils show first cooking may have been 600,000 years earlier than thought
Early human ancestors living 780,000 years ago liked their fish well done, Israeli researchers have revealed, in what they said was the earliest evidence of fire being used for cooking.
The skull of a modern carp is housed at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv. The scientists’ claims are based on 16 years of work at a site near the Jordan River.
Exactly when our ancestors started cooking has been a matter of controversy among archaeologists because it is difficult to prove that an ancient fireplace was used to prepare food, and not just for warmth.
But the birth of the culinary arts marks an important turning point in human history because, by making food easier to chew and digest, it is believed to have greatly contributed to our eventual expansion across the world.
Previously, the first “definitive evidence” of cooking was by Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens 170,000 years ago, according to a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution on Monday.
The study, which pushes that date back by more than 600,000 years, is the result of 16 years of work by its first author, Irit Zohar, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University’s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.
During that time she catalogued thousands of fish remains found at a site called Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in northern Israel.
The site near the banks of the Jordan River was once home to a lake, where a treasure trove of ancient fish fossils helped the team of researchers investigate exactly when the first cooks started getting inventive in the kitchen.
“It was like facing a puzzle, with more and more information until we could make a story about human evolution,” Zohar told AFP.
The first clue came in an area that contained “nearly no fish bones” but lots of teeth, she said.
This could point to cooking because fish bones soften and disintegrate at temperatures under 500C (930F), but their teeth remain.
In the same area, a colleague of Zohar’s found burnt flints and other evidence that it had previously been used as a fireplace.
And most of the teeth belonged to just two particularly large species of carp, suggesting they had been selected for their “succulent” meat, the study said. Some of the carp were over two metres (6.5 feet) long.
The “decisive” proof came from studying the teeth’s enamel, Zohar said.
The researchers used a technique called X-ray powder diffraction at the Natural History Museum in London to find out how heating changes the structure of the crystals that make up the enamel.
Comparing the results with other fish fossils, they found that the teeth from the key area of the lake were subjected to a temperature of between 200-500C (400-930F). That is just the right range for well-cooked fish.
Whether our forerunners baked, grilled, poached or sautéd their fish remains unknown, though the study suggested they may have used some kind of earth oven.
Fire is thought to have first been mastered by Homo erectus some 1.7 million years ago. But “because you can control fire for warming, that does not mean you control it for cooking – they could have eaten the fish next to the fire”, Zohar said.
Then the human ancestors might have thrown the bones in the fire, said Anaïs Marrast, an archaeozoologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the study.
“The whole question about exposure to fire is whether it is about getting rid of remains or a desire to cook,” she said.
Revolutionary War–Era Graves Unearthed in South Carolina
Bill Stevens (from left), Rachel Baker and Madeline Atwell, all forensic anthropologists with the Richland County Coroner’s Office, carefully remove skeletal remains on Nov. 4, 2022, from a gravesite located where the Battle of Camden was fought between American Patriots and the British. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
The bones came out, one by one, lifted from the earth by experienced hands, wrapped in foil and labelled, until the entire skeleton was liberated from this shallow gravesite. The coroners laid each package in a box. Someone unfurled a Maryland flag. Doug Bostick, executive director of the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust, offered words of thanks to the team.
“It’s so surreal,” he said of the find, “and real.”
Then his colleague David Reuwer voiced a loud cheer.
“Hip-hip …” he called.
“Hoozah!” came the collective response.
“Hip-hip …”
“Hoozah!”
“And for them, hip-hip …”
“HOOZAH!”
The box containing the remains of this Continental Army fighter from Maryland was carried slowly, in procession, to a nearby car as everyone gathered on this old battlefield stood respectfully, hand upon their chest.
Sara Rogers, with the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, holds a box with the remains of a Revolutionary War soldier found at the site of the Battle of Camden. A Maryland state flag is draped over the box in honor of the fighter’s origins. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
The soldier, one of 14 discovered here in recent months, surely died a miserable death. His bones, and the skeletal remains of four others hastily buried next to him, were reminders of war’s terrible violence and time’s indifference.
These young men had been lost to the sandy soil, their determination in the face of an overpowering enemy largely forgotten. The battle is known, but not the individual fighters — men of the 1st and 2nd Maryland Brigades, the Delaware Continental Army, Armand’s Legion, and Virginia and North Carolina militias. This archaeological and forensic work changes that. The human remains, tattered though they are, will go to the lab of University of South Carolina anthropology professor Carlina Maria de la Cova for extensive analysis that surely will reveal new information about the Battle of Camden, a disaster for Continental Army Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates and the men under his command on that hot summer day of Aug. 16, 1780.
CAMDEN BATTLEFIELD: The Battle of Camden, fought on a hot summer day in 1780, was a major defeat for the Continental Army. An archaeological project has turned up artifacts and human remains. (SOURCE: ESRI)
A project that began as an effort to remove artefacts and prepare a historic battlefield for public access became something else when the bones were discovered. Thirteen of the dead appear to have been artlessly buried before the wild hogs could get to them. The corpse of a British fighter was set deeper in the soil and formally laid out, perhaps by friends who took extra care. One of the 14 dead found here appears to have been a Native American who possibly was part of the North Carolina Royal Volunteers, a Loyalist militia unit.
Embedded in the broken bones were musket balls. In one set of remains found across Flat Rock Road, the lead ball lodged in the spine of a teenager, perhaps 14 or 15 years old. Archaeologists know this because of the growth plates visible at the ends of long bones. The boy with the shattered spine was one of at least two teenagers found during this dig. It’s highly unusual to exhume human remains from a historic battlefield, and even more unusual to find this many in one place, Bostick said. Generally, if bones are encountered, an effort is made to minimize activities that disturb them.
But this time, thanks to the expertise of forensic anthropologists from the Richland County Coroner’s Office and support from the Department of Natural Resources, the team determined to scrutinize their find in order to glean new information about the Camden killing field in which 3,700 Patriots and 2,230 British fighters and American Loyalists faced off. Plans already are afoot for a grand reinterment ceremony April 20-23. The bones will be returned to their original resting places, enclosed by pine caskets made in an 18th-century style and protected by vaulted graves.
The battle
By the time the dust cleared, some 1,900 men — more than half of the American forces — were dead or wounded. Perhaps 290 injured Patriots were taken, prisoner. Many of the rest, the inexperienced militiamen, had abandoned the battlefield so quickly, just a few suffered injuries. On the British side, about 70 men perished and 245 were wounded, representing about 15 per cent of Gen. Charles Cornwallis’ total forces.
The British had the advantage from the beginning. In May, they had finally captured Charleston, and to support the occupation of the city, Cornwallis established satellite garrisons, staging grounds and supply depots in the South Carolina backcountry, including a significant installation in Camden. Many of his fighters, therefore, were local, rested and ready for action.
Gates, determined to push the British out, marched his troops from Greensboro, N.C., starting that July. When Cornwallis heard about the approach of the Continental Army, he hastened from Charleston to Camden and organized his men.
The face-off was a mismatch, with experienced British regulars confronting a motley assortment of novice militiamen on one side of the battlefield. Gates’ men were hungry and tired; some were sick with dysentery. In the absence of proper rations and rum, they had been fed green peaches and molasses. When the militiamen threw down their arms, turned and fled, the Patriot side collapsed, though the Maryland and Delaware divisions attempted to hold their ground against the dominant British side.
Buttons dating to the late 1700s, embossed with “USA,” were among artifacts found by archaeologists at the Revolutionary War battlefield near Camden on Friday Nov. 4, 2022. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Steven Smith, research professor at the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, said he and colleague James Legg first started exploring the Camden battlefield with metal detectors in 1998. Over the years, they have found and plotted around 4,000 artefacts. During the COVID pandemic, they opted to spend much of the time in the open air with their equipment; it was an easy way to stay safe from the virus.
The site, several miles north of the city, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The S.C. Battleground Preservation Trust secured nearly 300 acres and transferred ownership of the property to the Katawba Valley Land Trust in 2019. In September, the archaeologists started excavating for human remains. Collectors had told them about eight known burials. Legg found three sites; Smith found one. Then they encountered another, and another, until they had identified one double grave, one triple grave, one quintuple grave and four graves that each contained the bones of a single person.
“It was a disposal process,” Legg said. “The Continentals fought like Vikings in this battle, but they were overrun.”
It’s said that every battlefield is a burial ground. And there is little time for reverence.
The excavation
Bill Stevens, Richland County deputy coroner and a forensic anthropologist, is kneeling in the shallow gravesite with his two colleagues, Madeline Atwell and Rachel Baker. Loblolly pines tower overhead, but their spacing allows plenty of sunlight to reach the ground. A few flying bugs run accidentally into human obstacles.
The trio have exposed a cluster of five skeletons, digging delicately through the compact sand several inches beyond the bones that now are elevated atop earthen pedestals. Some of the appendages are intertwined and it’s difficult to determine which arm bone belongs to which individual. The dig looks like a miniature Bryce Canyon, except it wasn’t erosion that caused these formations, but an odd combination of human conflict and a researcher’s tiny spade.
Madeline Atwell, a forensic anthropologist with the Richland County Coroner’s Office, carves out a bone from the remains of a Revolutionary War soldier found at the site of the Battle of Camden on Friday Nov. 4, 2022. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
The coroners already have removed nine sets of remains; this is the last gravesite to receive their meticulous attention. Gently, they insert the small blade between the sand pedestal and the skeleton, dislodging enough material to free the bone. These shallow burial sites have been disturbed over the decades by wild creatures, loggers, wagons, road workers and farmers. It’s remarkable that the skeletal remains are intact.
Inside this grave, archaeologists find more than bones. A beautifully made arrowhead, thousands of years old, is lodged in the sand. Several musket balls, the cause of injury and death, are clearly visible. Pewter buttons embossed with “USA” lay among the other objects.
The number of interested spectators is growing. Charles Baxley, chairman of S.C. American Revolution 250th commission has arrived, along with Bonnie Moffat, state regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Baxter is overseeing an ambitious project to educate residents and visitors about the war and the founding of the nation. The work here will become an important part of the commission’s narrative, he said.
“These are America’s first veterans, and these veterans were unceremoniously dumped into a hole,” he said.
A Native American arrowhead was among the artifacts found during an archaeological dig at the site of the Battle of Camden on Friday Nov. 4, 2022. The arrowhead likely is thousands of years old. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Moffat said her organization is arranging to install perhaps 10 historic markers at battlefields across the state in conjunction with the 250th-anniversary celebration. Each marker costs about $4,800, she said. One is planned for Camden.
The S.C. Battleground Preservation Trust has been busy in recent years securing several properties and arranging for public access. It has been partnering with the nonprofit American Battlefield Trust, based in Washington, D.C., to develop the Liberty Trail, a network of Revolutionary War sites in South Carolina. A website, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/maps/liberty-trail, features details about the various historic confrontations and provides maps for those interested in visiting these sites. Now the trust is raising money, as much as $250,000, to help pay for the Camden project and reinterment events, Bostick said.
The reinterment
Battlefield archaeology is a relatively new field of study, Legg said. The first big project took place in 1984-85 at the site of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana. A grass fire ignited by a tossed cigarette had exposed artifacts and inspired scholars to investigate the area, Legg said. They found a lot: spent cartridges, fired bullets, personal items and human remains.
In 1988, Legg and Smith performed excavation work at a Civil War battle site on Folly Island where they discovered, and removed, 19 sets of human remains, including what was left of the Black soldiers of the 55th Massachusetts Regiment who died there. This was one of the first formally organized Black units to fight on behalf of the United States. Legg and Smith arranged for a reburial at the Beaufort National Cemetery. The Camden battlefield now is well-marked with stakes indicating the top of the head and the bottom of the feet of each skeleton exhumed so archaeologists know precisely where the custom pine caskets sealed with hand-wrought nails are to lay, Smith said.
This will be no ordinary reinterment.
Robert Gibbes, with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, marks containers for soil samples during the removal of human remains from a gravesite on the Camden battlefield on Friday Nov. 4, 2022. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
After about five months of study in the lab, the skeletal remains unearthed at the old battlefield will lie in state at the Kershaw-Cornwallis House from April 20 until the morning of April 22, Bostick said. On April 21, reenactors will set up an encampment by the house. An outdoor concert is planned for that evening.
The next morning, participants will process a mile north to Bethesda Presbyterian Church for a joint Anglican-Presbyterian religious service honouring the fallen soldiers. That afternoon, people will gather at the battlefield for a secular ceremony and reburial. Organizers have informed Gov. Henry McMaster of the events, and they have reached out to the state’s congressional delegation and to British officials. Horse-drawn caissons already are reserved.
Bostick said he expects some or all of the events to be live-streamed.
The X-rays and strontium isotope analysis likely will shed light on exactly how these men died, their age at the time of death, and the precise circumstances of their death. The DNA analysis will take a bit longer to complete, perhaps returning results during the summer.
Linsay Mitchell, an intern with the Richland County Coroner’s Office, helps Stacey Ferguson, of the Historic Camden Foundation, on Nov. 4, 2022, sift through dirt from a gravesite where five soldiers killed in the 1780 Battle of Camden were buried. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
The Battle of Camden “is the outstanding symbol of a series of disastrous setbacks suffered by the American side in the South during The War for Independence,” the National Park Service noted on its National Registry of Historic Places nomination form. “These losses, the surrender of Charleston, the wipe-out at Waxhaws, and then Camden, represent the lowest point to which American fortunes sank in that struggle.”
It was a rout that prompted Gates, the commanding officer, to flee along with many of his men, abandoning the now outnumbered Continental regulars to their fate. Their commander, Maj. Gen. Johann de Kalb, was mortally wounded. Congress wanted an inquiry into Gates’ actions, but it never came to pass. Gates was reassigned and Gen. Nathanael Greene assumed command of the Southern forces. It was a consequential change of leadership, a turning point in the war. Over the next two years, Greene and the fighters he commanded succeeded in driving the enemy from the Carolinas and Georgia. On Dec. 14, 1782, the British completed their evacuation of Charleston, boarding ships at Gadsden’s Wharf and sailing off. The war was coming to an end.
Bathhouse Dated to Third Century B.C. Uncovered in Egypt
This view, from the west, shows part of the bathhouse discovered at Berenike. Dating back more than 2,200 years, it would have been a place where people went to relax after work or exercise.
The ruins of a 2,200-year-old bathhouse dating to the second half of the third century B.C. have been discovered at Berenike, a town in Egypt by the Red Sea.
The giant bathhouse has two tholoi (circular structures) with 14 bathtubs in each that would have had cold or lukewarm water, as well as a separate room for hot baths.
The water entered the building from two large water reservoirs fed by a single well. It’s possible that a gymnasium may have been built to the west of it, Marek Woźniak, an assistant professor at the Polish Academy of Science’s Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, told Live Science in an email.
Woźniak is in charge of researching remains from Berenike that date to ancient Egypt’s Hellenistic period (circa 323 B.C. to 30 B.C.), the time between the death of Alexander the Great and the death of Cleopatra VII. During this time, Greek culture, including architectural styles, flourished in the Middle East.
A well and two water reservoirs are shown in this picture. They fed the bathhouse at Berenike.
At the time that the bathhouse’s waters were flowing, Berenike had a sizable military presence and was a hub for imported goods and war elephants from East Africa said Woźniak.
This bathhouse likely would have been used by people involved in these operations, such as ship crews, said Woźniak.
The heavy military involvement means that most of the people living at Berenike at this time were probably men, Woźniak said.
This bathhouse likely would have been used as a place to relax by the military personnel posted there. Bathhouses in Hellenistic times often “served as places to meet and relax after work or sporting exercise, hence they were often combined with gymnasia [gyms]” Wozniak said.
No writing was found at the bathhouse, but archaeologists unearthed coins and pieces of pottery, finds which helped archaeologists date the bathhouse’s active years, Woźniak said.
The excavations at Berenike are led by Mariusz Gwiazda, an assistant professor of archaeology at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, and Steven Sidebotha, a history professor at the University of Delaware who specializes in the ancient global economy.
The team has made many finds at Berenike over the past few years, including a 2,300-year-old fort and a 1,700-year-old falcon shrine with a stele inscribed with a cryptic message. Excavations and analysis of remains at Berenike are ongoing.
Archaeologists unearth ancient Sumerian riverboat in Iraq
All that’s left today of an ancient boat discovered in 2018 in what was formerly Uruk is the bitumen, black tar that once coated its framework of reeds, palm leaves, or wood. That fragile organic material is long gone, leaving behind only ghostly imprints in the bitumen.
But there’s enough left for archaeologists to tell that in its heyday, the boat would have been a relatively slender craft—7 meters long and about 1.5 meters wide—well-suited to navigating the rivers and canals of ancient Sumer.
Archaeologists found the boat in an area that, 4,000 years ago, would have been the bustling hinterlands of the largest city in the world: Uruk.
Founded in 5000 BCE from the merger of two smaller settlements on the bank of the Euphrates River, Uruk was one of the world’s first major cities and possibly even the birthplace of the world’s first writing (the oldest known writing samples in the world are tablets from Uruk).
The Sumerian King List claims the legendary hero-king, Gilgamesh, ruled from his seat at Uruk in the 2600s BCE, which is not long before the recently excavated boat was built, sailed, and sank.
At its height around 3000 BCE, Uruk boasted 40,000 residents in the city, with a total population of about 80,000 or 90,000 people in the surrounding hinterlands.
The area outside the city boasted smaller communities, farms, ancient manufacturing workshops, and networks of canals. Uruk was beginning its long, slow decline by 2000 BCE, around the time our boat was built.
The outline of the boat’s hull is just visible from the air in this photo.
Based on its resting place in layers of silty sediment, it seems that the boat sank in a river, which swiftly buried it and preserved it for the next 4,000 years. That ancient river has long since silted up, but a few years ago, it began to yield at least one long-held secret: erosion revealed the outline of the boat, which archaeologists documented with digital photos and measurements in 2018.
At the time, archaeologists from the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and the German Archaeological Institute chose to leave the boat buried, where the ancient river’s silt could continue to protect it from decay and damage.
But over the last few years, it became clear that the boat was no longer safe in its resting place. Erosion in the area had picked up the pace, and parts of the boat’s structure were sticking out above the surface.
“Traffic passing close to the site of the discovery was an acute threat to the preservation of the boat,” explained the German Archaeological Institute in a press release.
That led to a rescue mission in which archaeologists had to balance urgency with delicacy as they carefully excavated the boat from its once-watery, now-silty grave.
They encased the boat and a block of the surrounding sediment in a shell made of clay and gypsum plaster to make it easier to safely unearth and move it.
Now, 4,000 years after setting out on its ill-fated final journey, the boat has a new homeport: the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, where archaeologists will study and conserve what’s left of the hull and eventually display it to the public.
