18th-Century Cannons Recovered in Georgia

18th-Century Cannons Recovered in Georgia

Archaeologists have hauled up 12 more Revolutionary War-era cannons from the Savannah River, a remarkable find that raises questions about which vessels carried them and precisely how they ended up in the water. The local district of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of the deepening of the channel in Savannah’s busy harbour, on Tuesday posted a video and photos about the discoveries.

18th-Century Cannons Recovered in Georgia
A crew guides a cannon lifted from the Savannah River in mid-January.

Last month’s raising of the rusted artefacts brings to 15 the number of cannons, plus fragments of another, found in the past year during preparation for the port expansion project.

“There is no telling what all is down there,” Corps district archaeologist Andrea Farmer told CNN, saying “so much of the river is unknown.”
That’s because the river bottom is strewn with everything from Native American pottery that was pushed downstream, to a small amount of debris from a Civil War ironclad that sank in 1864 and other vessels lost over time in the colonial Georgia city. Archaeologists said they would have expected the cannons to have been found during maintenance dredging.

One of the artillery pieces is kept in a protective trough at a Savannah facility.

When the first three cannons were located during dredging last February east of the town’s famous River Street, near Old Fort Jackson, archaeologists and Britain’s Royal Navy offered an intriguing possibility about their source.

They said — based on measurements and appearance — the cannons may be from the HMS Rose, a famed British warship that mixed it up with colonists during the revolution or, as the UK calls it, the War of Independence. Nearly 250 years ago, the British scuttled the ship in the Savannah River to block the channel and prevent French ships from coming to the aid of colonists trying to retake the city.

But they quickly learned that theory does not hold water, so to speak. The HMS Rose, it turns out, was sunk farther up the river and its artillery apparently was removed beforehand. British archives indicate the cannons may have belonged to two or more British troop transports also sunk to block the channel. Farmer says officials believe the cannons are associated with the Revolutionary War. Experts are looking for any distinguishing marks or features that can help verify their provenance, such as a known inventory of what a ship was carrying. The goal is to match the artefacts with a specific vessel or wreck.

So why were British troops in Savannah?

A short refresher course might be in order to answer that question.
The 13 colonies, determined to gain their independence, fought the forces of King George III on land and sea. The British, hoping they would gain support from royalists in the South, took Savannah in 1778, only to find themselves defending it less than a year later. The HMS Rose, with its 20 cannons and 160 sailors, and other vessels were brought in to help fellow Redcoats.

The British warships Phoenix and Rose engaged with American vessels in New York during the Revolutionary War. Experts say the Rose led to the formation of the precursor of the US Navy.

The warship was already famous, having been a “scourge” on the colonists, as the Royal Navy puts it. It quelled smuggling in Rhode Island, prompting the formation of the forerunner of the US Navy. The Rose fought in and patrolled New York waterways and parts of the Eastern Seaboard before it sojourned south. In Savannah, the vessel was sacrificed by the Royal Navy on September 19, 1779, to keep French allies from joining the American siege at that point in the river.

“The French had blockaded the port of Savannah, getting ready to attack,” Stephen James, an archaeologist with Commonwealth Heritage Group, says in the Corps video. “They scuttled these troop transports to keep the French out and basically saved the city early on from being taken over. They plugged the channel to where … the French could not come up and take the city.”

Two cannons are displayed during an Army Corps of Engineers briefing in early 2021.

It’s possible that the cannons may have belonged to the HMS Venus or HMS Savannah, which were burned or scuttled as part of the British strategy. The British eventually won the battle and controlled Savannah until almost the war’s end. The cannons appear to date to the mid-1700s — predating the Civil War by about a century — which aligns closely with the HMS Rose’s history. The ones found last February are about 5 feet long. Further study and the removal of sediment on the cannons may provide information on when and where they were manufactured.

“I think it’s fantastic and interesting when artefacts from maritime history come to light,” Cmdr. Jim Morley, serving as the UK’s assistant naval attache in Washington, told CNN last year. “It just gives us an opportunity to look back at our common maritime history and history in general.”

CNN reached out Tuesday to Morley for further comment.

More research and analysis lies ahead

The Army Corps of Engineers utilizes contractors for much of its work, and that is the case with historic artefacts found in the water, such as the cannons found in a deep spot called Five Fathom Hole. Salvage divers assisted Commonwealth Heritage Group in lifting the ordnance from the channel. Divers can work only during high or low tide and when no freighters are passing directly overhead. Conditions are hazardous and the government has discouraged treasure hunters from diving in these waters. A diver enters the water in December 2021. Crews have explored Revolutionary War and Civil War sites.

A diver enters the water in December 2021. Crews have explored Revolutionary War and Civil War sites.

“The tide turns and it turns like that. You got zero vis (visibility),” diver Richard Steele says in the video. “The current is ripping you, you are holding on for dear life half the time, trying to hike your way through down there. Every time you get in the water, you are racing the clock.”
Crews placed slings beneath the cannons and used inflatable lift bags to free them from the mud. They were moved to a holding area in advance of the January recovery.

It’s possible the cannons come from several ships — whether for combat or ballast.

Farmer said she does not believe they are associated with the CSS Georgia, a Confederate ship that defended the city during the Civil War. It was stationed in the vicinity of Old Fort Jackson and where the 15 cannons were found.

Several cannons were pulled up several years ago when the wreckage of the CSS Georgia was removed by the Corps as part of the harbour deepening. Archaeologists involved in that project are now helping on the current one.

Robert Neyland, head of the underwater archaeology branch at the Naval History and Heritage Command, last year said it’s possible the Civil War ironclad carried older guns and more research was needed. It’s possible some of the cannons were used at Fort Jackson, which was constructed in the early 1800s, or elsewhere and discarded.

“You have to do the detective work to solve the mystery,” Neyland said at the time.

He could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but the NHHC said it received a report on the cannons from the Army Corps of Engineers “and looks forward to reviewing the data.”

Farmer says officials will identify a few of the artillery pieces — which are being kept in protective troughs — for conservation and, ideally, put them on exhibit in Savannah. The Corps, meanwhile, is in the final stages of deepening the harbour from 42 feet to 47 feet to make sure supertankers have ample room to navigate.

Besides the cannons, archaeologists using sonar have found anchors and bar shot, a type of munition designed to destroy ship rigging. They were commonly used during the Revolutionary War. Divers also studied “cribs” — underwater obstructions placed in the river to ward off Union ships during the Civil War. The Army Corps of Engineers’ Savannah office will provide more details to the media next week. An expert will provide an analysis of what has been learned. “They are still actively performing archival research and working with other experts on this, so they will have more information to share,” Farmer said.

The public will have a chance to learn more at 7 p.m. ET on February 17 during a free program at the Savannah History Museum. Face masks are required.

Swedish orienteering enthusiast finds Bronze Age treasure trove

Swedish orienteering enthusiast finds Bronze Age treasure trove

A Swedish orienteering enthusiast working on a map stumbled across a stash of some 50 Bronze Age relics dating back over 2,500 years, authorities said.

Mainly consisting of ancient jewellery, the find outside the small town of Alingsas in western Sweden represents one of “the most spectacular and largest cache finds” from the Bronze Age ever in the Nordic country, the County Administrative Board said in a statement.

Among the relics, believed to be from the period between 750 and 500 BC, are some “very well preserved necklaces, chains and needles” made out of bronze.

Some of the bronze Age treasures discovered near Alingsas
Some of the bronze Age treasures discovered near Alingsas

The objects were lying out in the open in front of some boulders out in the forest.

“Presumably animals have dug them out of a crevice between the boulders, where you can assume that they had been lying before,” the government agency said.

Tomas Karlsson, the cartographer who made the discovery when he was out updating a map, at first thought, it was just junk.

“It looked like metal garbage. Is that a lamp lying here, I thought at first,” Karlsson told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

He told the paper he then hunched over and saw a spiral and a necklace.

“But it all looked so new. I thought they were fake,” he continued.

He reported the find to local authorities who sent out a team of archaeologists to examine the site.

“Most of the finds are made up of bronze items that can be associated with women of high status from the Bronze Age,” Johan Ling, professor of archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, said in the statement.

“They have been used to adorn different body parts, such as necklaces, bracelets and ankle bracelets, but there were also large needles and eyelets used to decorate and hold up different pieces of clothing, probably made of wool,” Ling added.

Israeli archaeologists discover 7,000-year-old settlement

Israeli archaeologists discover 7,000-year-old settlement

Authorities in Israel have announced the discovery of an ancient human settlement in Jerusalem which is thousands of years old. The historic site was found while authorities were doing roadwork.

Archaeologists in Jerusalem have uncovered an ancient settlement that dates back as far as 7,000 years. They are calling it the oldest discovery of its kind in the area.

“This is the first time we found the architecture of this kind in Jerusalem itself,” said Ronit Lupu, director of excavations for Israel’s Antiquities Authority. “We are talking about an established society, very well organized, with the settlement, with cemeteries.”

This handout photo released by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2016, shows work on uncovering an ancient settlement in Jerusalem. Israeli archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old settlement in northern Jerusalem in what they say is the oldest discovery of its kind in the area.

The excavation exposed two houses with well-preserved remains and floors containing pottery vessels, flint tools and a basalt bowl.

Lupu said these items are representative of the early Chalcolithic period, which began around 5,000 BC.

This handout photo released by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2016, shows a basalt bowl found at a site of an ancient settlement in Jerusalem. Israeli archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old settlement in northern Jerusalem in what they say is the oldest discovery of its kind in the area.
This handout photo released by the Israel Antiquities Authority on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2016, shows polished flint axe and blades, and a gemstone bead found at a site of an ancient settlement in Jerusalem. Israeli archaeologists have discovered a 7,000-year-old settlement in northern Jerusalem in what they say is the oldest discovery of its kind in the area.

In the Chalcolithic period, humans were “still using stone tools, but began to create high-level ceramics and for the first time, copper tools as well,” said Lupu.

Small settlements from the period have been discovered in parts of Israel and Jordan, but only a few remnants had previously been unearthed in Jerusalem.

“Now in the new dig we found remnants of a village, an established village,” said Amnon Barzilai, the head of the authority’s prehistory branch.

“Now we can know that even in the periods prior to the First and Second Temples, even in the Chalcolithic period, it was an inhabited area,” he said.

The Chalcolithic period is considered by some to be a bridge between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. A lack of archaeological evidence of this period in Jerusalem had long puzzled many researchers.

For Lupu, the discovery is closure to a long quest for this type of settlement in Jerusalem.

“For years in Jerusalem we had a feeling – we knew it was there somewhere but never found it. But here we found it,” she said.

The site was discovered while authorities were doing roadwork in the east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Shuafat, and there are no current plans to expand the 50 square meters (500 square foot) dig site.

New evidence shows humans moved to Europe 10,000 years earlier than thought

New evidence shows humans moved to Europe 10,000 years earlier than thought

Modern humans arrived in western Europe about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A human tooth found in southern France suggests an early attempt by our species to colonise the continent that lasted for over a thousand years before the Neanderthals re-established themselves. A single tooth found in France’s Rhône Valley shows that modern humans had arrived in western Europe about 54,000 years ago.

Sites along the Rhône valley show evidence of advanced Neronian tools, unlike anything that was made immediately before or after it.

A new paper involving a Museum scientist suggests it belongs to Homo sapiens, and that the species arrived in western Europe significantly earlier than previously known. However, researchers believe they didn’t stay long, abandoning the site. After a gap, the Neanderthals returned, before giving way to modern humans again around 45,000 years ago.

Prof Chris Stringer, a Research Leader in human evolution at the Museum and co-author on the paper, says, ‘This finding demonstrates there is even more complexity for the arrival of modern humans in Europe than previously known.

‘These early modern humans probably dispersed around the Mediterranean and went up the Rhône Valley, where they may have lived for more than a thousand years before the Neanderthals eventually returned to these cave sites.

On opposite sides of the Mediterranean, similar stone points were made by Homo sapiens around the same time.

‘It really suggests that modern humans tried to establish themselves in Europe again and again before they eventually succeeded.’

The paper, by an international team of researchers, was published in the journal Science Advances.

First Africa, then the world

The history of modern humans and their close relatives is a complex one, with many disagreements and debates over the exact timing of key events. It’s generally agreed that hominin species evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees around seven million years ago, and gave rise to the australopithecines which were among the first of our ancestors who could walk upright. Subsequently, Homo erectus emerged with similar body proportions to modern humans and was the first human species known to have spread beyond Africa.

Following a period of development that is still subject to the intense ongoing debate, our species, Homo sapiens, diverged from the lineage of the Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, around 600,000 years ago. Evolving in Africa, Homo sapiens attempted to spread to new lands on multiple occasions. However, the Neanderthals, who lived across Europe and Asia, were entrenched in their home as Chris explains.

‘We’ve got what seems to be a Homo sapiens fossil in Greece at Apidima Cave dated at around 210,000 years ago,’ he says. ‘However, that is a really early incursion that seemingly didn’t go any further and there’s no archaeology with it to suggest how these people were behaving at that time.

‘At the same site about 40,000 years later, we find a Neanderthal fossil. This suggests that our species appeared here at least briefly, but that Neanderthals then returned later.’

While modern humans continued to disperse into Asia, other groups went west as they attempted to enter Europe over thousands of years. While their migration was initially thought to have occurred quite late, new finds such as modern human fossils from Czechia and Bulgaria and groups of artefacts known as the Initial Upper Palaeolithic pushed this date back to around 45,000 years ago.

However, over in France, there were another group of artefacts that didn’t seem to fit.

‘There’s a series of sites in the Rhône Valley in France where there’s a strange stone tool industry called the Neronian,’ Chris says. ‘It exists for just a short time between two distinct periods of Neanderthal Mousterian tools.

Neronian tools have what seem to be little projectile point heads – either tiny spearpoint heads or even more intriguingly they could be arrowheads. These are really distinctive. There’s nothing else like them in Europe at this time.’

These Neronian points have no equivalent technology among the Neanderthal groups that lived before and after the arrival of the first modern humans in Grotte Mandarin.

While similar tools had been found in Africa and the Middle East, there wasn’t enough evidence to suggest conclusively this was anything other than a unique Neanderthal group. However, one site in the Rhône Valley, known as Grotte Mandarin, contained more concrete evidence of who made these tools as they were found alongside nine teeth.

A human tooth was found in the Neronian layer at Grotte Mandrin.
Cultural and anthropological evidence in Grotte Mandrin shows the arrival of Homo sapiens in the heart of Neanderthal territories.

The first of many?

These teeth were scattered amongst the different layers, representing at least seven different humans. As DNA couldn’t be extracted from them, the shape of each tooth was compared to those of modern humans and Neanderthals to try and assess their species. The researchers found that the single tooth from the Neronian layer was set apart from the rest, which all looked, Neanderthal. It showed characteristics that were instead like those of modern humans. In addition, the layer it was found in dated to between 56,800 to 51,700 years ago.

While a child’s tooth can show a great deal of variation compared to that of an adult, Chris is confident it provides the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens in this area.

‘We’ve only got a single tooth at the moment, and it’s a shame we don’t know more about these people,’ Chris says. ‘But together with the completely distinct Neronian industry, it provides a persuasive scenario for modern humans in western Europe at this surprisingly early time.’

The archaeological evidence of the site suggests that modern humans could have taken over from Neanderthals in the area in as little as one year, perhaps aided by their Neronian tools. Several other sites in the area also have these tools, which are found for a short period of time.

While it’s likely that modern humans and Neanderthals came in contact during this time, there’s currently no contemporaneous genetic evidence that they did. It is known from later evidence that the species bred together, with most people living today have inherited around 2% of their genome from Neanderthals. As for the French sites, the full story remains to be uncovered. How modern humans came so suddenly, and why they disappeared just as rapidly, is still unknown. However, the site offers clues that may allow us to discover the answers.

‘To get to the Rhône Valley, we assume there will be sites along the northern Mediterranean coast,’ Chris says. ‘If this really is a dispersal, then we could be looking for sites in Italy, in Greece, in Turkey, and back to Syria and Lebanon even. There are also some other mysterious industries in central Europe such as the Bohunician. There’s speculation that may have been made by early modern humans as well because it’s nothing like anything the Neanderthals were made before or after.’

Though the Neanderthals subsequently returned to Grotte Mandrin, this came amid the beginning of the end for the species. While Homo sapiens would continue to disperse across the globe, Homo neanderthalensis became less common and diverse, before vanishing forever some 40,000 years ago.

Archaeologists Identify Mummified Legs as Queen Nefertari’s

Archaeologists Identify Mummified Legs as Queen Nefertari’s

A team of international archaeologists believe a pair of mummified legs on display in an Italian museum may belong to Egyptian Queen Nefertari — the favourite wife of the pharaoh Ramses II.

The team, which included Dr Stephen Buckley and Professor Joann Fletcher from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, used radiocarbon dating, anthropology, palaeopathology, genetics and chemical analysis to identify the remains.

They conclude that “the most likely scenario is that the mummified knees truly belong to Queen Nefertari.”

Archaeologists Identify Mummified Legs as Queen Nefertari's
Queen Nefertari’s knees.

As the favourite wife of the pharaoh Ramses II, Nefertari was provided with a beautifully decorated tomb in the Valley of the Queens to which Professor Fletcher was recently given access.

Although plundered in ancient times, the tomb, first excavated by Italian archaeologists in 1904, still contained objects which were sent to the Egyptian Museum in Turin.

This included a pair of mummified legs which could have been part of a later interment as was often the case in other tombs in the region.

But as the legs had never been scientifically investigated, it was decided to undertake the recent study to find out if the legs could actually represent all that remained of one of Egypt’s most legendary queens.

The study, published in the journal Plos One, revealed that the legs are those of an adult woman of about 40 years of age.

Dr Buckley’s chemical analysis also established that the materials used to embalm the legs are consistent with 13th Century BC mummification traditions, which when taken in conjunction with the findings of the other specialists involved, led to the identification.

Professor Fletcher said: “This has been the most exciting project to be part of, and a great privilege to be working alongside some of the world’s leading experts in this area.

“Both Stephen and myself have a long history studying Egypt’s royal mummies, and the evidence we’ve been able to gather about Nefertari’s remains not only complements the research we’ve been doing on the queen and her tomb but really does allow us to add another piece to the jigsaw of what is actually known about Egyptian mummification.”

Carthaginians sacrificed their own children, archaeologists say

Carthaginians sacrificed their own children, archaeologists say

A collaborative paper by academics from institutions across the globe, including Oxford University, suggests that Carthaginian parents ritually sacrificed young children as an offering to the gods.

The paper argues that well-meaning attempts to interpret the ‘tophets‘ – ancient infant burial grounds – simply as child cemeteries are misguided.

And the practice of child sacrifice could even hold the key to why the civilisation was founded in the first place.

A Tophet outside Carthage, a special part of a cemetery dedicated to the burial of infants, according to Josephine Quinn.

The research pulls together literary, epigraphical, archaeological and historical evidence and confirms the Greek and Roman account of events that held sway until the 1970s when scholars began to argue that the theory was simply anti-Carthaginian propaganda.

The paper is published in the journal Antiquity.

Dr Josephine Quinn of Oxford University’s Faculty of Classics, and author of the paper, said: ‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that the stories about Carthaginian child sacrifice are true. This is something the Romans and Greeks said the Carthaginians did and it was part of the popular history of Carthage in the 18th and 19th centuries.

‘But in the 20th century, people increasingly took the view that this was racist propaganda on the part of the Greeks and Romans against their political enemy and that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander.

‘What we are saying now is that the archaeological, literary, and documentary evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming and that instead of dismissing it out of hand, we should try to understand it.’

The city-state of ancient Carthage was a Phoenician colony located in what is now Tunisia. It operated from around 800BC until 146BC when it was destroyed by the Romans.

Children – both male and female, and mostly a few weeks old – were sacrificed by the Carthaginians at locations known as tophets. The practice was also carried out by their neighbours at other Phoenician colonies in Sicily, Sardinia and Malta. Dedications from the children’s parents to the gods are inscribed on slabs of stone above their cremated remains, ending with the explanation that the god or gods concerned had ‘heard my voice and blessed me.

Dr Quinn said: ‘People have tried to argue that these archaeological sites are cemeteries for children who were stillborn or died young, but quite apart from the fact that a weak, sick or dead child would be a pretty poor offering to a god, and that animal remains are found in the same sites treated in exactly the same way, it’s hard to imagine how the death of a child could count as the answer to a prayer. It’s very difficult for us to recapture people’s motivations for carrying out this practice or why parents would agree to it, but it’s worth trying.

‘Perhaps it was out of profound religious piety, or a sense that the good the sacrifice could bring the family or community as a whole outweighed the life of the child. We have to remember the high level of mortality among children – it would have been sensible for parents not to get too attached to a child that might well not make its first birthday.’

Dr Quinn added: ‘We think of it as a slander because we view it in our own terms. But people looked at it differently 2,500 years ago.

‘Indeed, contemporary Greek and Roman writers tended to describe the practice as more of an eccentricity or historical oddity – they’re not actually very critical.

‘We should not imagine that ancient people thought like us and were horrified by the same things.’

The backlash against the notion of Carthaginian child sacrifice began in the second half of the 20th century and was led by scholars from Tunisia and Italy, the very countries in which tophets have been found.

Dr Quinn added: ‘Carthage was far bigger than Athens and for many centuries much more important than Rome, but it is something of a forgotten city today.

‘If we accept that child sacrifice happened on some scale, it begins to explain why the colony was founded in the first place.

‘Perhaps the reason the people who established Carthage and its neighbours left their original home of Phoenicia – modern-day Lebanon – was because others there disapproved of their unusual religious practice.

‘Child abandonment was common in the ancient world, and human sacrifice is found in many historical societies, but child sacrifice is relatively uncommon. Perhaps the future Carthaginians were like the Pilgrim Fathers leaving from Plymouth – they were so fervent in their devotion to the gods that they weren’t welcome at home anymore.

‘Dismissing the idea of child sacrifice stops us from seeing the bigger picture.’

Egypt Archaeologists Discover 18,000 Notes Describing Lives of Ancient Civilisation

Egypt Archaeologists Discover 18,000 Notes Describing Lives of Ancient Civilisation

Archaeologists from the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities have unearthed a collection of more than 18,000 ostraca (inscribed pottery fragments) in the ancient Egyptian town of Athribis, near to the modern city of Sohag, Egypt. The artefacts document names, purchases of food and everyday objects, and even writings from a school.

Ostraca (plural for ostracon) are pottery fragments used as surfaces for writing or drawing.

They were used as notepads for private letters, laundry lists, records of purchases, and copies of literary works.

An ostracon with a child’s drawing.

By extension, the term is applied to flakes of limestone which were employed for similar purposes.

“In ancient times, ostraca were used in large quantities as writing material, inscribed with ink and a reed or hollow stick (calamus),” explained Professor Christian Leitz, a researcher with the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen, and his colleagues from the Athribis Project, an archaeological and philological endeavour investigating the ancient Egyptian town of Athribis.

The archaeologists uncovered a collection of more than 18,000 ostraca in the ruins of Athribis.

Fragment of a school text with a bird alphabet in Hieratic. On the right, the name of the bird, and on the left, the numbers from 5 to 8, which reflect the position of the letters in the list.

“These ostraca provide a variety of insights into the everyday life of Athribis,” they said.

“Around 80% of the potsherds are inscribed in Demotic, the common administrative script in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, which developed from Hieratic after 600 BCE.”

“Among the second most common finds are ostraca with Greek script, but we also came across inscriptions in Hieratic, hieroglyphic and — more rarely — Coptic and Arabic scripts.”

Pupils had to write lines.

The researchers also found pictorial ostraca with various figurative representations, including animals such as scorpions and swallows, humans, deities from the nearby temple, even geometric figures.

“The contents of the ostraca vary from lists of various names to accounts of different foods and items of daily use,” they said.

“A surprisingly large number of sherds could be assigned to an ancient school.”

“There are lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, grammar exercises and a ‘bird alphabet’ — each letter was assigned a bird whose name began with that letter.”

Receipt for bread in Demotic; the loaves are distributed in multiples of 5 (often 5, sometimes 10 or 20); many of the buyers are women.

“Several hundreds of ostraca also contain writing exercises that we classified as punishment,” they added.

“They are inscribed with the same one or two characters each time, both on the front and back.”

Traces of 3,600-Year-Old Settlement Found in Qatar’s Desert

Traces of 3,600-Year-Old Settlement Found in Qatar’s Desert

Scholars looking for underground water sources on the Eastern Arabian Peninsula for a project funded by the United States Agency for Aid and International Development have accidentally uncovered the outlines of a settlement that appears to be over 3600 years old.   Asymmetrical  2 x 3 kilometre, landscaped area—or trace outlines of a settlement  (and one of the largest potential settlements uncovered in the area) was identified using advanced radar satellite images in an area of Qatar where there was previously thought to be little evidence of sedentary, ancient civilizations. Their new study, published in the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, counters the narrative that this peninsula was entirely nomadic and evidence mapped from space indicates that the population appears to have had a sophisticated understanding of how to use groundwater. The research also points to the critical need to study water and safeguard against climate fluctuations in arid areas.

DRONE SHOT OF SURVEY OF SETTLEMENT AREA IN THE EASTERN ARABIAN PENINSULA

“Makhfia,” the name attributed to the settlement by researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and which refers to an invisible location in the local Arabic language), was discovered using L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar images from the Japanese Satellite ALOS 1 and specially acquired, high-resolution radar images by its successor, ALOS 2. While the settlement was not visible from space using normal satellite imaging tools nor through surface observation on the earth—the large, underground rectangular plot, it was determined, had to be manmade due to its shape, texture and soil composition which were in sharp contrast to surrounding geological features. 

Independent carbon dating of retrieved charcoal samples suggests that the site is at least 3650 years old, dating back potentially to the same era of the Dilmun civilization.

Lead author, Essam Heggy, of the USC Arid Climate and Water Research Center, describes the site as akin to a “natural fortress surrounded by very rough terrain,” almost making the area inaccessible.

This discovery has significant historic and scientific implications.  Historically, this may be the first piece of evidence of a sedentary community in the area—and perhaps evidence of advanced engineering for the time period.  While we cannot see the remains of a monument or walls of a settlement, the proof is in the soil.  The properties of the soil at the site have a different surface texture and composition than the terrain surrounding it—a disparity typically associated with planting and landscaping.

A settlement of this size in this particular area, which is far from the coastline where most ancient civilizations were located, is unusual, says Heggy.

“With this area now averaging about 110 degrees Fahrenheit in summer months, this is like finding evidence of very green ranch in the middle of Death Valley, California dating back thousands of years ago.”

Further, the site yields new insights on the poorly understood climatic fluctuations that occurred in the region, and how these changes may have impacted human settlement and mobility.

Most critically, the scholars believe that this settlement must have been in place for an extended period due to its development of agriculture and reliance on groundwater, a fact which speaks to the civilization’s advanced engineering prowess given Qatar’s complex aquifers and harsh terrain.

The researchers believe that a population with sufficient knowledge to leverage such unpredictable groundwater resources— inaccessible by digging through hard limestone and dolomite—would have certainly been ahead of its time in mitigating droughts within harsh, inland environments. There is strong evidence that this settlement’s inhabitants relied on deep groundwater sapping, a method by which one accesses water from deeper aquifers through fractures in the ground, in order to use this water for crop irrigation and to support daily life.

This presence of this settlement is now enabling researchers to piece together the most recent paleoclimatic changes that took place on the Eastern Arabian Peninsula.

The bleak side of this, says Heggy, is that we do not fully know who this culture was and why they disappeared. However, based on the presence of charcoal found on the site, Heggy and his colleagues suggest that fire could be one of several plausible explanations for its demise.

This evidence calls for increased study of this area by archaeologists, says Heggy.

The work also has some implications for how we study and address climate fluctuations today.

“Deserts cover about 10 per cent of our planet. We might think today that they were always inhabitable, but this discovery (along with others in the area) shows that this might not have been always the case,” says Heggy who is a research scientist at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at USC.

His concern is that the increase in climate fluctuations in arid areas can worsen food insecurity, migration, and degradation of water resources.

Why should people care about the ruins of this ancient settlement? To Heggy, this culture’s ability to mitigate climatic fluctuations could be our story.

“This story is very important today. In arid areas, we have widespread disbelief in climate research. Many think climate change is something in the future or far away in the ‘geologic’ past. This site shows that it has always been here and that our recent ancestors have made its mitigation a key to their survival,” he says.

Heggy remains hopeful.  He says the forthcoming NASA Earth Observation missions focused on desert research will bring new subsurface mapping capabilities and will provide unique insights on deserts’ paleoclimatic evolution as well as a human presence in desert areas during climate fluctuations.

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