The story begins with a dig by non-archaeologists: nuns who, in 1881, happened upon an ancient cistern while building the Sisters of Nazareth convent, but didn’t know what they had stumbled upon. Dark describes it as “one of the first examples of an archaeological project directed by a woman.”
“In many ways, they were way ahead of their time,” Dark told Artnet News. “They conducted a perfectly reasonable rescue excavation or salvage excavation.”
Records from their exploration, as well as another, by a Jesuit priest in the mid-20th century, were key to Dark’s research. The site had otherwise long languished, ignored by scholars, he said.
The location was home to several structures and uses over two millennia, Dark said, all of which are essential for his conclusion.
First, there was a 1st-century building, partly cut out of rock, that may have been a dwelling. The site was then used as a quarry, and then for a tomb. Later, it was home to a cave church, possibly one mentioned by the pilgrim Egeria, who wrote an account of her travels to the Holy Land in about AD 380.
Later, a Byzantine church was built on the ground above. Dark suspects it may be the previously lost Church of the Nutrition, which was built to commemorate the place where Christ was raised and was mentioned by Irish abbott and historian Adomnán in his book De Locis Sanctis (Concerning Sacred Places) in the late 7th century.
The 1st-century house at the Sisters of Nazareth site.
The church burned down around the year 1200 and was not in religious use until the Sisters of Nazareth began to build their convent there in the 1880s.
“The Byzantine church Sisters of Nazareth seems as though it was almost certainly the building described by Adomnán,” Dark said. “It was very large, very elaborately decorated, and probably from the 5th century.
“It overlay a crypt, which is also described in his book. In the crypt, just as he says, there are two Roman-period tombs, and between them, there’s a house—and that house, Adomnán says, is the place where Jesus was brought up.
“So, we found the church, we found the crypt, we found the house.”
Is it a slam dunk? Dark is quick to say no. But, he said, people historically much closer to Jesus felt it was: “I can be confident that it’s the house that the Byzantines believed, and was probably believed in the 4th century, to be Jesus’s childhood home.”
Dark was hardly out to uncover what he may have found.
“Primarily, I was there to look at the emergence of the Byzantine pilgrimage centre of Nazareth,” he said. “To have found the Sisters of Nazareth in itself seemed to be an amazing discovery.”
He hardly expected to find a 1st-century house, and possibly such an interesting one, underneath.
Genome Study Offers Clues to Anglo-Saxon Migration
The Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield has played a key role in the largest genetic study to date of Early Medieval Europe.
The study has been conducted by an interdisciplinary team that consisted of more than 70 geneticists and archaeologists, led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and the University of Central Lancashire, with the help and expertise of the University’s Archaeogenetics Research Group.
The team has examined, in detail, one of the largest population transformations in the post-Roman world.
Grave goods from inhumation grave 3532 at Issendorf cemetery.
Following their analysis of more than 400 individuals from ancient Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, the research has shown that there was a large-scale stream of migration from the Continental North Sea region into Eastern England during the Anglo-Saxon period, starting around 1500 years ago.
Almost 500 years after the Romans left, early historians like the Venerable Bede wrote about the Angles and Saxons and their migrations to Britain. But over the last century, views of what happened became polarised amongst historians and archaeologists. Was there really a large-scale migration from the Continent, or was it more of conquest by a small warrior elite?
The new genetic results now show that three-quarters of the Early Medieval population in Eastern England was comprised of migrants whose ancestors originated from Continental regions bordering the North Sea. What is more, as analysis of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA by Huddersfield specialist Dr Maria Pala demonstrated, the immigrants were made up as much of women as men – in other words, whole families were involved.
Migrants intermarried with the local population, but with variation from place to place
These families interbred with the existing population of Britain, but this integration varied enormously from region to region. For example, at West Heslerton, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in North Yorkshire excavated over several decades by Professor Dominic Powlesland, most ancestries were from the Continent, whereas at the contemporary post-Roman site of Worth Matravers in Dorset, excavated by Bob Kenyon and Lilian Ladle, there was almost none.
However, most of the Anglo-Saxon sites in eastern and southern England fell somewhere in between. Dr Ceiridwen Edwards, who runs the Ancient DNA Facility at Huddersfield, studied the site of Apple Down in Sussex.
This cemetery had almost 50 per cent of Continental ancestry but, unusually, there were distinct burial styles for people with local and immigrant ancestry, which suggests some level of social separation, at least at this site.
“With 278 ancient genomes from England and hundreds more from Europe, we have now gained really fascinating insights into population-scale and individual histories during post-Roman times,” explains PhD researcher Joscha Gretzinger, who led the study with Dr Stephan Schiffels at the Max Planck Institute and Professor Duncan Sayer at UCLan.
Also, at the same time, the Anglo-Saxons were far from being the only people to shape the ancestry of the English. The team estimated that the present-day English derive only around 40 per cent of their DNA from these medieval Continental ancestors.
Director of the Evolutionary Genomics Research Centre, Professor Martin Richards, leads the Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield and says this research has only been made possible due to a huge advance in ancient DNA sequencing technologies.
“Resolving the question of the English settlements has been a dream of mine since I first started working in archaeogenetics three decades ago,” said Professor Richards. “It has now finally become possible because of the incredible strides in ancient DNA sequencing technologies that have been made in the last few years.”
The work at Huddersfield was funded as part of a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarship programme awarded to Professor Richards and Dr Maria Pala, and a Leverhulme Trust Project Grant awarded to Dr Ceiridwen Edwards.
An intact shoe, a Chilean peso from 1853 and even a former vegetable plot have been unearthed in one of the biggest archaeological digs in New Zealand.
A Chilean peso dating from 1853 was one of the thousands of old items found under a central Christchurch rebuild site.
Archaeologists have been working for three months to unearth hidden treasures beneath the site of the planned Te Kaha arena, which stretches over three blocks in central Christchurch.
They have found thousands of 19th-century items, which have filled 170 boxes, including remnants of brick chimney places, a former potato bed, earthenware drainage pipes and old rubbish pits.
Principal archaeologist Clara Watson said the finds would give fresh insight into how Christchurch people lived in the 19th century.
A clay pipe discovered beneath the site for the planned Te Kaha arena site in central Christchurch.
“They are really well-preserved archaeological features that we would not normally find,” she said.
“We’ve discovered landscaping features, drainpipes for gardens, garden rows and house pilings. A lot of the time we don’t find these sorts of things as they’re usually wiped out.”
She said the rubbish pits contained ornate clay pipes, bottles and ceramic toothpaste and cold cream pots.
“This would be one of the biggest archaeological digs in New Zealand.
A ceramic pot of cold cream was one of thousands of items discovered.
“I just feel really privileged to run a project this large. I am really excited for when we get back to the office and go through everything we have found and pull out those stories.”
The three blocks were largely residential in the 19th century. Watson said they chose to investigate sites that were largely undisturbed and mainly used for car parking since the original 19th-century home was demolished.
The size of the site meant they could compare how different people lived in different periods of Christchurch history.
A ceramic pot of cherry-flavoured toothpaste was also unearthed.
The treasure trove uncovered beneath a layer of gravel on the corner of Gloucester and Colombo streets included metal belt buckles, soda water bottles, marbles, grocery store tokens, and shards of decorative plates.
Historical relics from the 1850s were found under the Christchurch city centre site. Thousands of historical relics have been discovered beneath a central Christchurch site after sitting undisturbed for 170 years.
The archaeologists also found brick foundations, numerous Victorian rubbish pits, hundreds of intact glass bottles, and a corrugated fence line.
The Chilean peso discovered on the Te Kaha arena site was a mystery, Watson said.
“We have no idea how that has ended up in Christchurch.”
Second Ancient Native American Canoe Discovered in Wisconsin
Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologists, alongside partners from Wisconsin’s Native Nations, recovered a 3,000-year-old dugout canoe from Lake Mendota in Madison today, less than one year after their recovery of a 1,200-year-old canoe that drew international attention in November 2021.
Radiocarbon dating performed on the latest canoe places it in 1000 B.C., making it the oldest ever discovered in the Great Lakes region by roughly 1,000 years.
The 3,000-year-old dugout canoe is carved from a single piece of white oak and measures approximately 14.5 feet in length. It was initially located by Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen during a recreational dive in May of this year.
Discussions about recovering it from the lakebed began immediately following the discovery, in collaboration with Wisconsin’s Native Nations.
It was found in the same area the first canoe was discovered, suggesting that the location of Lake Mendota’s shoreline may have changed over time and could have once been much lower, according to Dr. James Skibo, Wisconsin Historical Society state archaeologist.
“Finding an additional historically significant canoe in Lake Mendota is truly incredible and unlocks invaluable research and educational opportunities to explore the technological, cultural, and stylistic changes that occurred in dugout canoe design over 3,000 years,” said Skibo.
“Since it was located within 100 yards of where the first canoe was found at the bottom of a drop-off in the lakebed, the find has prompted us to research fluctuating water levels and ancient shorelines to explore the possibility that the canoes were near what is now submerged village sites.”
Although it is likely that water transportation dates back to the arrival of Native peoples in this region, this discovery provides the earliest direct evidence.
The 3,000-year-old canoe helps to tell a complete story of the continuum of Native life in Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region. Members from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Bad River Tribe were present at the canoe recovery.
“The recovery of this canoe built by our ancestors gives further physical proof that Native people have occupied Teejop (Four Lakes) for millennia, that our ancestral lands are here and we had a developed society of transportation, trade and commerce,” said Ho-Chunk President Marlon WhiteEagle.
“Every person that harvested and constructed this caašgegu (white oak) into a canoe put a piece of themselves into it. By preserving this canoe, we are honouring those that came before us. We appreciate our partnership with the Wisconsin Historical Society, working together to preserve part of not only our ancestors’ history but our state’s history.”
Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists, along with skilled volunteers, conducted the excavation and recovery efforts.
The canoe was hand-excavated in preparation for today’s recovery mission and then securely transported to the State Archive Preservation Facility in Madison for preservation and storage.
It will be cleaned and cared for by Tribal members and Society staff before being hand-lowered into a large preservation vat also containing the 1,200-year-old canoe discovered in 2021. Together the canoes will undergo a two-year preservation process that will conclude with freeze-drying to remove any remaining water.
“I was amazed when a 1,200-year-old canoe was uncovered last year, but this discovery of a canoe dating back to 1000 B.C. is just extraordinary,” said Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers. “This incredible finding provides an opportunity for us to work in concert with Tribal Nations to not only study but celebrate the history of the Indigenous people who’ve called this land home since long before Wisconsin became a state, and I look forward to learning more about this artefact’s origins.”
17 people found in a medieval well in England were victims of an antisemitic massacre, DNA reveals
The remains of at least 17 people killed in the medieval period were found in 2004 during excavations to build a shopping centre in the English city of Norwich.
The remains of 17 people, mainly children, found in 2004 during a construction project in Norwich, England, are probably those of medieval Jews massacred for their religion, according to a new study.
Genetic analysis of the remains indicates the dead were all Ashkenazi Jews — that is, the descendants of Jews who had established communities in northern Europe, mainly in what is now Germany and France, during the early medieval period. (Many Ashkenzai later moved from these regions to eastern Europe, after the 11th to 13th centuries.) And other research suggests the dead people in Norwich were murdered during an antisemitic massacre in the city in 1190, by crusaders who had pledged to campaign against Muslims in Jerusalem.
The study gave researchers a rare opportunity to analyze Jewish remains — religious laws usually prohibit disturbing Jewish graves — and reveal that a “genetic bottleneck” among Ashkenazi Jews probably happened centuries earlier than thought.
And the findings finally offer a solution to the mystery of just who the people were and why they were murdered.
“They weren’t known to be Jewish when they were unearthed,” Mark Thomas, a professor of human evolutionary genetics at University College London, told Live Science. “The only reason we strongly believe they were Jewish is that we did the genetic analysis.”
Thomas is one of the senior authors of a study published Aug. 30 in the journal Current Biology that describes the latest research into the remains. The first bones were found in 2004 during excavations for the construction of a shopping centre in Norwich. The discovery led to a full archaeological investigation of the site, which resulted in the unearthing of a medieval well that held the commingled remains of at least 17 people.
For a while, the remains were stored by the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service. But following growing suspicions the victims might have been Jewish, based on historical accounts of antisemitic massacres, they were reburied in 2013 in a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Norwich, BBC News reported. Anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University, used the remains to create reconstructions of two of the victims’ faces.
Many of the victims of the massacre were children. This face of a young child was digitally reconstructed from an analysis of their remains.
Massacres of Jews were unfortunately common in mostly Christian medieval Europe. This face of a man was virtually reconstructed from his remains in the well at Norwich.
Christians massacre Jews
Initial radiocarbon dating indicated the bones were from the 11th or 12th centuries, study senior author Ian Barnes, an evolutionary geneticist at the Natural History Museum in London, told Live Science. Scientists initially believed the remains came from victims of an epidemic outbreak of disease or a mass famine, and that the bodies had therefore been disposed of quickly, he said.
But the latest research suggests they all had similar genetic ancestry to today’s Ashkenazi Jews. And historical research links their murders to a massacre of Jews in Norwich in 1190 by crusaders that was described by a chronicler of the times, a churchman called Ralph de Diceto.
“Many of those who were hastening to Jerusalem determined first to rise against the Jews before they invaded the Saracens [a term medieval Christians used for Muslims],” Diceto wrote in his Imagines Historiarum(opens in new tab), which was published in about 1200. “Accordingly, on 6th February [in 1190 AD] all the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered; some had taken refuge in the castle.”
Medieval Norwich had been home to a thriving community of Jews since 1137, many of whom lived near the well where the victims were found, BBC News reported; and the latest study reported the historical finding that they were likely to be descended from Ashkenazi Jews from Rouen in Normandy who were invited to settle in England by William the Conqueror after 1066, supposedly so he could obtain their taxes in coins rather than in the agricultural goods usually given as taxes in his new kingdom.
Research suggests the people were killed in a medieval massacre of Jews in the city, and that their bodies were thrown down this well.
Scientists initially thought the dead may have been victims of an epidemic outbreak of disease or famine, but the latest research suggests they were Ashkenazi Jews.
The researchers now think the 17 people found in the well were victims of this outbreak of violence, perpetrated on Jews who lived in medieval England by crusaders pledged to campaign in the Holy Land of what’s now Israel.
During the First Crusade, Christian armies conquered Jerusalem in 1099 after defeating the city’s Muslim rulers; and several more crusades were launched from Europe to the Holy Land in the years that followed, the last of which ended in the 1290s.
Such antisemitic massacres were relatively common in England and other parts of Europe in the medieval period, according to Britannica(opens in new tab); and the massacre of Jews at Norwich in 1190 was brutal. At least 11 children were among the victims found in the well, and three of the victims were sisters — one aged between 5 and 10 years, another aged between 10 and 15 years, and a young adult. Barnes said that the people found in the well seem to have been dead before they were thrown into it, as there was no sign that any of them tried to break their fall.
Genetic bottleneck
The researchers were able to conduct a full genomic analysis of the DNA from six of the individuals found in the well.
There’s no “genetic test” to determine whether a person is Jewish or not, but analysis of the genomes of those six people shows they shared the same genetic ancestry as many Ashkenazi Jews living today, which suggests they were also Ashkenazi Jews, Thomas said.
The modern Ashkenazi population has a greater-than-usual incidence of certain genetic disorders, such as Tay-Sachs disease and some hereditary cancers, he said; and the genetics of four of the people in the well in Norwich showed the same frequency of such disorders, although there’s only a very limited number of victims from which to draw such conclusions.
The cause of these disorders was thought to be a “genetic bottleneck” probably caused by a drop in the population between about 600 and 800 years ago, he said. But their frequency in the victims meant the genetic bottleneck must have happened much earlier, possibly as early as the late stages of the Western Roman Empire from the fifth century, he said.
The findings are important not only because of the historical questions about the remains but also because there is so little historical genetic data about modern Jewish populations and the particular genetic disorders they face.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a flood of ancient Ashkenazi or Jewish genomes in the future, but I think that where more data does become available, it will be probably through a similar route to what we’ve done,” he said.
“That is, they identify human remains where there is no evidence to suggest that they are Jewish or anything else, and then somebody does the genetic work and gets an indication that they are,” he said.
Human spines on sticks found in 500-year-old graves in Peru
Examples of vertebrae on posts, found in Peru’s Chincha Valley.
Hundreds of years ago, Indigenous people in coastal Peru may have collected the scattered remains of their dead from desecrated graves and threaded reed posts through the spinal bones. Scientists recently counted nearly 200 of these bone-threaded posts in stone tombs in Peru’s Chincha Valley, and they suspect that the practice arose as a means of reassembling remains after the Spanish had looted and desecrated Indigenous graves.
Archaeologists investigated 664 graves in a 15-square-mile (40 square kilometres) zone that contained 44 mortuary sites. They documented 192 examples of posts threaded with vertebrae.
The researchers then measured the amount of radioactive carbon in the bones and reed posts. Radioactive carbon accumulates when an organism is alive but decays to nitrogen at a constant rate once the organism is dead. So based on the amount of this carbon, the scientists could estimate when the posts were assembled.
Their analysis placed the vertebrae and posts between A.D. 1450 and 1650 — a time when the Inca Empire was crumbling and European colonizers were consolidating power, the researchers wrote in a new study.
This was a period of upheaval and crisis in which Indigenous tombs were frequently desecrated by the Spanish, and Chincha people may have revisited looted tombs and threaded spinal bones on reeds in order to reconstruct disturbed burials, said lead study author Jacob Bongers, a senior research associate of archaeology with the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.
“The fact that there’s 192 of these and that they’re widespread — we find these throughout the Chincha Valley — it means on one level that multiple groups of people coordinated and responded in a shared way, that this interesting practice was deemed the appropriate way of dealing with disturbed bodies of the dead,” Bongers told Live Science.
Most of the vertebrae on posts were found in and around large and elaborate stone tombs, called chullpas, that typically held multiple burials; in fact, one chullpa contained remains from hundreds of people, Bongers said.
The people who performed the burials were part of the Chincha Kingdom, “a wealthy, centralized society that dominated Chincha Valley during the Late Intermediate period, which is the period that precedes the Incan Empire,” Bongers explained.
In one of the chullpas, threaded vertebrae were inserted into a cranium.
The Chincha Kingdom once had a population numbering around 30,000, and it thrived from around A.D. 1000 to 1400, eventually merging with the Inca Empire toward the end of the 15th century. But after the Europeans arrived and brought famines and epidemics, Chincha numbers plummeted to just 979 heads of household in 1583, according to the study.
Historic documents record accounts of Spaniards frequently looting Chincha graves across the valley, stealing gold and valuable artefacts, and destroying or desecrating remains.
For the new study, the researchers closely examined 79 bone-threaded posts, each of which represented a collection of spinal bones from an adult or from a child.
Most posts held bones belonging to a single individual, but the spines were incomplete, with most of the bones disconnected and out of order. This suggested that the threading was not performed as a part of the original burial. Rather, someone gathered and threaded the spinal vertebrae after the bodies had decomposed — and perhaps after some of the bones were lost to looting, the study authors reported.
Two chullpas in the middle of Chincha Valley.
And because Andean cultures valued preserving the integrity and completeness of a dead body, the likeliest explanation is that Chincha people revisited looted graves and reconstructed the scattered remains in this way to try and restore some semblance of wholeness to remains that had been dispersed and desecrated.
“When you look at all data we gathered, all of that supports the model that these were made after these tombs had been looted,” Bongers said.
Ancient mortuary practices, such as this bone threading, provide valuable clues about how long-ago communities dealt with their dead, but they also shed light on how people defined their identities and culture through their relationships with the dead, Bongers told Live Science.
“Mortuary practices arguably are what make us human — this is one of the key distinguishing features of our species. So, by documenting mortuary practices, we’re learning diverse ways of how people showcased their humanity.”
The findings were published on Feb. 2 in the journal Antiquity.
Gold and silver treasures were discovered with ‘elite craftspeople’ burials near the powerful Wari queen’s tomb
Archaeologists excavating a necropolis north of Lima have unearthed a 1,300-year-old ornate tomb from the Wari era of Peru. The tomb contains the remains of a high-status man dubbed the “Lord of Huarmey.”
The tomb includes the shrouded remains of an elite male, dubbed the “Lord of Huarmey,” and six other people, some of whom may have first been buried elsewhere and brought to the tomb later.
The remains of six other people were found in the same tomb, some of which were likely reinterred after first being buried elsewhere. The remains include four adults — possibly two males and two females — and three people who may be adolescents, according to the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Archaeology.
All the remains in the tomb were buried with gold and silver jewellery, bronze tools, knives, axes, baskets, woven textiles, raw materials for basketry, and wood and leather items — an abundance of objects that makes archaeologists think the people buried there were skilled craftspeople, as well as members of the Wari elite.
“We could call this part of the royal necropolis ‘The Gallery of Elite Craftsmen,'” Miłosz Giersz, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw in Poland who leads the project, told Live Science in an email. “For the first time, we have found the burials of male Wari elite, who were also fine craftsmen and artists.”
Giersz’s team discovered the latest tomb in February at the Wari necropolis near the modern coastal town of Huarmey, in the Ancash region about 155 miles (250 kilometres) north of Lima. It lies just a short distance from a larger tomb, discovered in 2012 by Giersz and his wife Patrycja Prządka-Giersz, an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. This larger tomb contained the remains of three high-status women deemed to be “Wari queens,” as Live Science previously reported.
The queens were buried alongside the remains of 58 other people. Most of the individuals were noblewomen who may have been interred later, but some were from lower social classes and seem to have been sacrificed.
The latest tomb was discovered in February beneath a larger tomb attributed to Wari “queens,” found ten years ago at the Castillo de Huarmey archaeological site in Peru.
Andean empire
The Wari people lived in towns in the mountains and coast of what’s now Peru from about A.D. 500 to 1000. They are famed for their rich tradition of artwork, including gold and silver jewellery, painted pottery(opens in new tab) and vivid woven textiles.
The Wari Empire existed at roughly the same time as the Tiwanaku Empire farther south, and the two Andean states were often rivals, according to a 2003 article by archaeologists at Chicago’s Field Museum(opens in new tab). But both the Wari and the Tiwanaku empires had collapsed by the time the Inca Empire arose in much the same regions after about A.D. 1200.
The site near modern-day Huarmey features a pyramidal structure known as “El Castillo de Huarmey” — meaning the castle of Huarmey. Researchers have known about the structure since at least the 1940s, but many thought it was largely empty due to grave robbers who had already looted its gold and silver.
Many ornate artefacts in various stages of completion were found in the tomb, including this ear ornament made with gold and inlaid with semiprecious stones.
But the excavations in 2012 and 2013 by Giersz and Prządka-Giersz revealed it was an ancient Wari necropolis with at least one untouched tomb.
The subsequent excavation of the tomb of the Wari queens revealed that Castillo de Huarmey had once been “a large Wari mausoleum and site of ancestor worship on the Peruvian North Coast, an area that lies on the borders of the world controlled by the first Andean empire,” Giersz said.
The team also unearthed more than 1,300 artefacts that had been buried as grave gifts in the tomb of the Wari queens, including rich objects made of gold, silver, bronze, precious gems, wood, bone and shells, he said.
These silver ornaments, known as ear spools, were among the grave goods interred in the tomb of the seven people who were buried there about 1,300 years ago.
Wari tomb
Giersz thinks the “Lord of Huarmey” and the other people buried in the newly found tomb may have been members of the Wari elite and highly skilled craftspeople.
“The golden and silver artefacts deposited with them support this assumption,” he said. “Both men and women buried in the royal necropolis at Castillo de Huarmey were directly connected with the highest level of craft production and made the finest luxury goods of their era.”
As well as an elite necropolis, the finds show that Castillo de Huarmey was an important administrative centre of the Wari Empire, he said: “A place of production of the finest handicrafts in the domain, especially exclusive clothing… metal ornaments, and jewellery.”
This decoration for a headdress, made of gold, was found in one of the graves in the tomb. Archaeologists think such finds may signify that only elite craftspeople were buried there
University of Warsaw archaeologist Miłosz Giersz and his colleagues have been working at the Castillo de Huarmey site in northern Peru for more than 10 years.
Archaeologist Justin Jennings of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was not involved in the latest study, but he has excavated other Wari sites in Peru.
He called the latest discoveries “spectacular,” but cautioned that the function of the Castillo de Huarmey site during the Wari era isn’t well understood. It may be that the people buried there were not elite craftspeople, as Giersz has proposed.
“These are wonderful pieces, and it’s so nice to have these associated with the graves,” Jennings said. But “the dead don’t get to choose what goes into their tombs — their grave goods can reflect what they did in life, but they could also very much reflect other types of messages.”
He noted, however, that the upper classes of ancient American societies were often also elite craftspeople, most famously the later Maya in Mesoamerica. “The Maya elite spent a lot of their time making elite goods, so it’s certainly not out of the ordinary,” Jennings said.
The inclusion in the grave goods of unfinished objects was also notable, he said. “I think that does lend some credence to the idea that some of these individuals were involved in the production of things.”
Evidence of Opium Use by Canaanites in 14th Century BC Found
A new study by the Israel Antiquities Authority, Tel Aviv University, and The Weizmann Institute of Science has revealed the earliest known evidence of the use of the hallucinogenic drug opium, and psychoactive drugs in general, in the world.
The opium residue was found in ceramic vessels discovered at Tel Yehud, in an excavation conducted by Eriola Jakoel on behalf of the Antiquities Authority.
The vessels that contained the opium date back to the 14th century BC, and they were found in Canaanite graves, apparently having been used in local burial rituals. This exciting discovery confirms historical writings and archaeological hypotheses according to which opium and its trade played a central role in the cultures of the Near East.
One of the 14th-century-BC Canaanite burials at Tel Yehud was associated with vessels containing traces of opium.
The research was conducted as part of Vanessa Linares’s doctoral thesis, under the guidance of Professor Oded Lipschits and Professor Yuval Gadot of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Archeology and Professor Ronny Neumann of the Weizmann Institute, in collaboration with Eriola Jakoel and Dr. Ron Be’eri of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the study was published in the journal Archaeometry.
In 2012, the Antiquities Authority conducted a salvage excavation at the Tel Yehud site, prior to the construction of residences there.
A number of Canaanite graves from the Late Bronze Age were found in the excavation, and next to them were burial offerings—vessels intended to accompany the dead into the afterlife. Among the pottery, a large group of vessels made in Cyprus and referred to in the study as “Base-Ring juglets,” stood out.
Because the vessels are similar in shape to the poppy flower when it is closed and upside down, the hypothesis arose already in the 19th century that they were used as ritual vessels for the drug. Now, an organic residue analysis has revealed opium residue in eight vessels, some local and some made in Cyprus. This is the first time that opium has been found in pottery in general, and in Base-Ring vessels in particular. It is also the earliest known evidence of the use of hallucinogens in the world.
Be’eri of the Israel Antiquities Authority says, “In the excavations conducted at Tel Yehud to date, hundreds of Canaanite graves from the 18th to the 13th centuries BC have been unearthed. Most of the bodies buried were those of adults, of both sexes.
The pottery vessels had been placed within the graves were used for ceremonial meals, rites and rituals performed by the living for their deceased family members.
The dead were honoured with foods and drinks that were either placed in the vessels, or consumed during a feast that took place over the grave, at which the deceased was considered a participant. It may be that during these ceremonies, conducted by family members or by a priest on their behalf, participants attempted to raise the spirits of their dead relatives in order to express a request, and would enter an ecstatic state by using opium. Alternatively, it is possible that the opium, which was placed next to the body, was intended to help the person’s spirit rise from the grave in preparation for the meeting with their relatives in the next life.”
Linares of Tel Aviv University explains: “This is the only psychoactive drug that has been found in the Levant in the Late Bronze Age. In 2020, researchers discovered cannabis residue on an altar in Tel Arad, but this dated back the Iron Age, hundreds of years after the opium in Tel Yehud.
Because the opium was found at a burial site, it offers us a rare glimpse into the burial customs of the ancient world. Of course, we do not know what the opium’s role was in the ceremony—whether the Canaanites in Yehud believed that the dead would need opium in the afterlife, or whether it was the priests who consumed the drug for the purposes of the ceremony. Moreover, the discovery sheds light on the opium trade in general.
One must remember that opium is produced from poppies, which grew in Asia Minor—that is, in the territory of current-day Turkey—whereas the pottery in which we identified the opium were made in Cyprus. In other words, the opium was brought to Yehud from Turkey, through Cyprus; this of course indicates the importance that was attributed to the drug.”
Be’eri adds, “Until now, no written sources have been discovered that describe the exact use of narcotics in burial ceremonies, so we can only speculate what was done with opium. From documents that were discovered in the Ancient Near East, it appears that the Canaanites attached great importance to ‘satisfying the needs of the dead’ through ritual ceremonies performed for them by the living, and believed that in return, the spirits would ensure the health and safety of their living relatives.”
According to Eli Eskosido, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “New scientific capabilities have opened a window for us to fascinating information and have provided us with answers to questions that we never would have dreamed of finding in the past. One can only imagine what other information we will be able to extract from the underground discoveries that will emerge in the future.”
