Medieval College Building Found in Oxford, England
A “lost” Oxford University college has been unearthed during the construction project for new student flats. The former St Mary’s College was founded in 1435 but had already fallen into disrepair 100 years later.
Thirty student flats are being developed at Brasenose College’s Frewin Annexe where the college was found
A team from Oxford Archaeology discovered a massive limestone wall foundation, butchered animal bones and decorated floor tiles.
Construction firm Beard is developing 30 student flats at Brasenose College’s Frewin Annexe.
The ill-fated St Mary’s College was to be a base for Augustinian canons studying in Oxford.
A two-storey college chapel and library was built, but construction was very slow.
The college further faded into obscurity after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
A team from Oxford Archaeology are excavating a series of pits
Archaeologists have found a wall believed to have supported one of the college’s stone buildings.
They are also excavating a series of pits where disposed animal bones and charcoal suggest the kitchens were nearby.
Other items include a 17th Century stone flagon – drinks container, a bone comb and a medieval long cross silver penny.
A two-storey college chapel and library was built at the site
The site has been occupied since the late 11th Century and was once the location of a high-status Norman house.
Ben Ford, senior project manager at Oxford Archaeology, called the remains a “unique and fascinating part of Oxford”.
“We are hoping to shed light not only on the layout of the lost college of St Mary’s but also discover evidence that tells us about the lives of some of medieval Oxford’s most powerful Norman families who probably lived at the site,” he said.
He added: “If we are really lucky, we may uncover signs of even older everyday life, from Oxford’s earliest years when it was first built as a heavily-defended town on the Thames, guarding the border between Saxon and the Viking held lands.”
New Thoughts on the Migration Out of Africa and Into Arabia
An international team of researchers from the Sharjah Archaeology Authority/United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Universities of Tübingen and Freiburg as well as Oxford Brookes/England led by Dr. Knut Bretzke from the University of Tübingen and Prof. Dr. Frank Preusser from the Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Freiburg has uncovered startlingly new results that show Palaeolithic humans repeatedly occupied the rock shelter site of Jebel Faya in Southern Arabia between 210,000 and 120,000 years ago; shattering previously held ideas about when, and how, humans first moved into Arabia from Africa.
The researchers have published their findings in the current issue of Scientific Reports.
Jebel Faya, located in Sharjah, UAE, is one of the most important Palaeolithic sites in Arabia. In 2009 excavations revealed human occupation dating back to 125,000 years ago making it the then oldest known human site in Arabia.
Excavations at Jebel Faya Rock Shelter, UAE.
New archaeological data from Jebel Faya, published in Scientific Reports, indicate that human settlement in Southern Arabia occurred under an unexpected range of climatic conditions and significantly earlier than previously thought.
Humans were not dependent on favourable climatic conditions
Previously it has been argued that Arabia was closed to prehistoric humans during dry climate phases and that humans had to wait for periods of more wet climatic conditions in order to expand into the region.
The new results contradict this view and show humans were far more adaptable than previously thought and not reliant on extended periods of favourable climate conditions to thrive.
Using a cutting-edge range of archaeological, palaeoclimatological and dating techniques, the team were able to reconstruct four distinct phases of human occupation between 210-120,000 years ago.
Crucially this demonstrates that humans occupied the site during dry and wetter climate events – challenging previous ideas about when humans could and could not occupy Arabian sites during the Palaeolithic and opening up the possibility that Arabia may yet yield more evidence of the human journey out of Africa during drier phases.
Re-evaluate interactions between humans and the environment
Dr. Knut Bretzke commented: “Most exciting for me personally is that our data provide the first evidence for human occupation of Arabia about 170,000 years ago. This period is traditionally thought to be characterized by extremely dry conditions that must have prevented human presence in Arabia.
We think that the unique interplay of human behavioural flexibility, the mosaic landscapes of South-East Arabia and the occurrence of brief spells of more humid conditions enabled the survival of these early human groups.
To study the details of this interplay and the evolution of the human-environment interdependencies, Jebel Faya and its surroundings are the key area and I am convinced that more surprises will come.”
Prof. Adrian Parker, Oxford Brookes University, who led the reconstruction of the palaeoenvironments, noted that “Our data challenges previous assumptions that human occupation in Arabia was only confined to well-defined wetter climate phases.
Understanding the environmental context is paramount when evaluating human occupation. Well constrained evidence in Arabia is still limited and the complex interrelationships between humans, climate, and environment need careful re-evaluation especially in the light of our findings”.
Luminescence dating elementary for archaeological research
The Freiburg geologist Frank Preusser, who dated the phases of human occupation, said: “The fact that luminescence dating allows determining the time of the last daylight exposure of quartz grains embedded in sediment
layers has revolutionised archaeological research. The study from Jebel Faya is another milestone in enlightening the complex history of our species.”
Ancient Buddhist Temple Unearthed in Pakistan Is One of The Oldest Ever Discovered
An ancient temple dating from the early centuries of Buddhism has been unearthed in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan — part of the ancient Gandhara region that was conquered by Alexander the Great and gave rise to the mixing of Buddhist beliefs and Greek art.
Aerial view of the temple.
Archaeologists think that the temple dates from about the middle of the second century B.C., at a time when Gandhara was ruled by the Indo-Greek kingdom of northern India, and that it was built above an earlier Buddhist temple that may have dated from as early as the third century B.C.
That means people would have built the older temple within a few hundred years of the death of the founder of Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama, who lived in what is now northern India and Nepal between about 563 B.C. and 483 B.C.
The excavated remains of the temple found so far, near the centre of the modern town of Barikot, are over 10 feet (3 meters) tall and consist of a ceremonial platform topped by a cylindrical structure that housed a conical or dome-shaped Buddhist monument called a stupa.
The temple complex, which was built and reconstructed several times, also included a smaller stupa, a cell or room for monks, a staircase, the podium of a monumental pillar or column, vestibule rooms and a public courtyard that looked out onto an ancient road.
Radiocarbon dating will establish precise dates of the structures, but the temple at Barikot is clearly one of the earliest Buddhist monuments ever found in the ancient Gandhara region, Luca Maria Olivieri, an archaeologist at Ca’ the Foscari University of Venice and the International Association for the Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (ISMEO) who led the excavations with Pakistani and Italian colleagues, told Live Science.
Ancient and modern
Italian archaeologists, who have been working in Swat since 1955, began the excavations at Barikot in 1984.
Their mission had been to preserve the important archaeology of the city by renting vacant land and excavating as much of it as possible, thereby protecting it against urban sprawl and clandestine archaeological excavations that sought to recover artefacts to sell in the foreign antiquary markets, he said.
Until a few years ago, the excavations at Barikot had included the southwestern districts of the city and the acropolis — but not the city centre, where the land rental costs are very high, he said. (The land at the Barikot sites is often privately owned, and renting it under terms that allow the excavations is simpler and less expensive than buying it.)
But the newly discovered temple was found on land acquired by the provincial archaeological authorities near the centre of the city, which enabled the team to begin excavations there in 2019. Pits made by looters had already suggested something important might be buried there.
“For years, we had been watching what came out of the foundation trenches of modern houses, agricultural excavations and the pits left by clandestine digging,” Olivieri said. “[So] there were hints that there was a large monument there.”
Much of the work of the archaeologists has been to excavate the ancient fortress and another temple at the “acropolis” on the outskirts of Barikot.
Thousands of ancient artefacts have been unearthed in the excavations at Barikot, including the face of a Buddha carved in gray schist.
The temple was located along an ancient road leading to the ancient city’s main Buddhist monument, a 65-foot-wide (20 m) stupa that was revealed by public works a few years ago; it is now the site of an electricity pylon.
In addition to the architectural features of the buried temple, archaeologists have discovered more than 2,000 artefacts at the site, including coins, jewels, seals, pottery pieces, stonework and statues, some of which bear ancient inscriptions that can be used to date them, Olivieri said.
Alexandrian conquest
Barikot is mentioned as “Bazira” or “Beira” in classical sources from the time of Alexander the Great, who conquered the already ancient Gandhara kingdom in 327 B.C. Its name meant “the city of Vajra,” referring to an ancient king mentioned in “The Mahabharata,” a Sanskrit epic poem that is thought to relate events from about the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.
Alexander was the king of Macedon in Greece, and he led military campaigns east against the Persian Empire from 334 B.C., staging an invasion of northwestern India — his farthest conquest — in 326 B.C.
Alexander eventually turned back toward Europe at the demand of his homesick troops, but he died at Babylon in 323 B.C., probably from a disease such as malaria but possibly from poisoning. His generals then divided up his territories; the region of Bactria to the north of Gandhara became ruled by kings of Greek descent, while Gandhara for a time reverted to native Indian rule under the Maurya Empire.
Olivieri said Buddhism was already present in Gandhara by the time of Menander I, a descendent of the Greek kings of Bactria, who established the Indo-Greek kingdom in about 165 B.C. and took over the region, but it may have been limited to the region’s elites.
Later, Buddhism became much more widespread, and Swat became a sacred centre for the religion, especially during the Kushan Empire from about A.D. 30 to A.D. 400 when Gandhara became famous for the Greco-Buddhist style that portrayed Buddhist subjects with the techniques of Greek art.
Swat also has a temperate microclimate, which allows two harvests every year — in spring and late summer — so ancient Barikot was an important centre for the management of the region’s agricultural surplus. As a result, Alexander probably used the region as a “breadbasket” to provision his armies before continuing their military campaign south to India, according to a statement from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Olivieri said the Italian archaeological mission had wrapped up its latest season of excavations at Barikot, but the team will return later this year to make further investigations of the site and hopefully reveal more of the ancient temple.
Rare ‘fish scale’ armour discovered in a Chinese tomb
About 2,500 years ago, a man in northwest China was buried with armour made of more than 5,000 leather scales, a military garment fashioned so intricately, its design looks like the overlapping scales of a fish, a new study finds.
The armour, which resembles an apron-like waistcoat, could be donned quickly without the help of another person. “It is a light, highly efficient one-size-fits-all defensive garment for soldiers of a mass army,” said study lead researcher Patrick Wertmann, a researcher at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Zurich.
The team called it an early example of bionics or taking inspiration from nature for human technology. In this case, the fish-like overlapping leather scales “strengthen the human skin for better defence against the blow, stab and shot,” said study co-researcher Mayke Wagner, the scientific director of the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute and head of its Beijing office.
Researchers unearthed the leather garment at Yanghai cemetery, an archaeological site near the city of Turfan, which sits at the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. Local villagers discovered the ancient cemetery in the early 1970s. Since 2003, archaeologists have excavated more than 500 burials there, including the grave with the leather armour. Their findings show that ancient people used the cemetery continuously for nearly 1,400 years, from the 12th century B.C. to the second century A.D. While these people did not leave written records, ancient Chinese historians called the people of the Tarim Basin the Cheshi people, and noted that they lived in tents, practised agriculture, kept animals such as cattle and sheep and were proficient horse riders and archers, Wertmann said.
The armour is a rare find. Leather scale armour discovered in the ancient Egyptian tomb of King Tutankhamun, from the 14th century B.C., is the only other well-preserved ancient leather scale armour with a known provenance.
The tomb in Yanghai with the remains of the male individual and the position of the leather scale armour indicated by the red circle
Another well-preserved leather scale armour, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, dates from the eighth to the third century B.C., but its origin is unknown.
It was a “big surprise” to find the armour, Wagner told Live Science in an email. The researchers found the garment in the grave of a man who died at about age 30 and was buried with several artefacts, including pottery, two-horse cheekpieces made from horn and wood, and the skull of a sheep.
Conservators examine the 2,500-year-old leather scale armour found in a man’s burial in northwestern China.
“At first glance, the dusty bundle of leather pieces [in the burial] … did not arouse much attention among the archaeologists,” Wagner said. “After all, the finds of ancient leather objects are quite common in the extremely dry climate of the Tarim Basin.”
A reconstruction of the body armour revealed that it sported 5,444 small leather scales and 140 larger scales, likely made of cow rawhide, that was “arranged in horizontal rows and connected by leather laces passing through the incisions,” Wagner said.
The different scaled rows overlap, a style that prompted the Greek historian Herodotus to call similarly fashioned armour, worn by fifth century B.C. Persian soldiers, just like “the scales of a fish,” Wagner noted.
A plant thorn stuck into the armour gave a radiocarbon date of 786 B.C to 543 B.C., the researchers found, indicating that it was older than the fish-like armour worn by the Persians. According to the team’s reconstruction, the armour would have weighed up to 11 pounds (5 kilograms).
Utterly unique
The discovery is one of a kind. “There is no other scale armour from this or an earlier period in China,” Wagner said. “In eastern China, armour fragments have been found, but of a different style.”
A deep dive into the history of scaled armour revealed that West Asian engineers developed scale armour to protect chariot drivers in about 1500 B.C. when chariotry became part of the military. After that, this style of armour spread northward and eastward to the Persians and Scythians and eventually to the Greeks. “But for the Greeks, it was always exotic; they preferred other types of armour,” Wertmann told Live Science.
Due to its local uniqueness, it appears that the newly described armour was not made in China, Wagner said. In fact, it looks like Neo-Assyrian military equipment from the seventh century B.C., which is seen in rock carvings, according to The British Museum.
“We suggest that this piece of leather scale armour was probably manufactured in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and possibly also the neighbouring regions,” Wertmann said. If this idea is correct, “then the Yanghai armour is one of the rare actual proofs of West-East technology transfer across the Eurasian continent during the first half of the first millennium B.C.E.,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Photos of the Yanghai leather scale armor, including the end piece of the left side panel’s inside (A) and outside (B).
A photo (top) and illustration (bottom) of the Yanghai leather scale armour.
The different types of leather scales found in the armour, include type A (about 5,159 pieces preserved), type B (about 115 pieces preserved) and type C (about 67 pieces preserved).
How was it worn?
The armour mainly protects the front torso, hips, left side and lower back. “This design fits people of different statures because width and height can be adjusted by the thongs,” Wertmann said. Its left-side protection meant the wearer could easily move their right arm.
“It seems the perfect outfit for both mounted fighters and foot soldiers, who have to move rapidly and rely on their own strength,” he added. “The horse cheek pieces which were found in the burial may indicate that the tomb owner was indeed a horseman.”
However, how the armour ended up in the man’s burial “remains a riddle,” Wertmann said. “Whether the wearer of the Yanghai armour himself was a foreign soldier (a man from Turfan) in Assyrian service who was outfitted with Assyrian equipment and brought it home, or he captured the armour from someone else who was there, or whether he himself was an Assyrian or North Caucasian who had somehow ended up in Turfan is a matter of speculation. Everything is possible.”
Headless HORSE skeleton with rider unearthed in a medieval graveyard in Germany
The skeletal remains of a man buried 1,400 years ago near a headless horse have been discovered at an ancient cemetery in the town of Knittlingen in southern Germany. He likely was the horse’s owner/rider when he was alive.
This decapitated horse, dating back about 1,400 years, was found next to the remains of a male rider.
The man was buried at a time when the Merovingian dynasty (A.D. 476–750) flourished in the area, ruling a giant swath of territory in what is now France and Central Europe.
During his lifetime, the man likely served the dynasty’s kings. “He stood in a ‘chain of command’ with the Merovingian kings on its top, which meant he was obliged to participate in the king’s campaigns,” Folke Damminger, an archaeologist in charge of research at the site, told Live Science in an email.
Part of the ancient cemetery that is currently being excavated is shown in this aerial image.
“As a member of the local elite, he most probably was the head of a farming household consisting of his family and his servants,” Damminger said.
However, the man was not a farmer in a strict sense, as other workers may have done much of the actual farming, Damminger said.
Why exactly he was buried near a headless horse is not clear, but “most probably the decapitation [of the horse] was part of the burial ceremony,” Damminger told Live Science.
The horse may have been placed near its owner as a ‘grave good’ for the afterlife rather than a sacrifice, Damminger said. The horse’s head has not been found so far.
His family members would have wanted to portray him as a wealthy and important individual so that they could benefit from his status.
“One function of this ceremony was the ‘staging’ of the deceased in his former status and wealth as a claim of his successors to maintain this status,” Damminger said.
The archaeologists discovered the remains of several other people, who lived at around the same time as this rider, within the same cemetery.
Some of them were buried with wealthy grave goods, such as a woman interred with a gold brooch. Some of the men were buried with weapons such as swords, lances, shields and arrowheads.
The researchers will continue to investigate the headless horse burial and excavate other burials at the cemetery.
Damminger said that the team is in the process of excavating and restoring the mysterious man’s grave goods, and future anthropological work of the man’s bones and teeth will be done to learn about his health, why he died and how old he was when he perished.
Damminger works for Stuttgart Regional Council’s State Office for Monument Preservation. Much of the excavation work is being carried out by archaeologists from the cultural resource management firm ArchaeoBW.
A Cave in France Changes What We Thought We Knew About Neanderthals
The stone rings found inside the French cave were probably built by the Neanderthals 176,500 years ago. The study says that the structures are the oldest known human constructions, possibly altering the way we think about our ancestors.
The team led by archaeologist Jacques Jaubert of the University of Bordeaux, using advanced dating techniques, noted that the stalagmites used in the stone ring construction had to be broken off the ground about 176,500 years ago.
Dating of the structures – if substantiated – would push back the first known cave exploration by members of the human family for tens of thousands of years. It would also change the widely held view that ancient cousins of humans were incapable of complex behaviour.
Earlier research had suggested the structures pre-dated the arrival of modern humans in Europe around 45,000 years ago and thus the idea that Neanderthals could have made them didn’t fit and was largely disregarded.
“Their presence at 336 meters (368 yards) from the entrance of the cave indicates that humans from this period had already mastered the underground environment, which can be considered a major step in human modernity.
A chance find
The structures – discovered by chance in 1990 after a rockslide closed the mouth of a cave at Bruniquel in southwest France – were made from hundreds of pillar-shaped mineral deposits, or stalagmites, which were up to 40 centimetres (16 inches) high.
The authors said the purpose of the oval structures – measuring 16 square meters (172 sq. feet) and 2.3 square meters – is still a matter of speculation, though they may have served some symbolic or ritual purpose.
“A plausible explanation is that this was a common meeting place for some type of ritual social behaviour,” said Paola Villa, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who wasn’t involved in the study.
The Neanderthals who built them must have had a “project” to go so deep into a cave where there was no natural light, said Jaubert.
“The site provides strong evidence of the great antiquity of those elaborate structures and is an important contribution to a new understanding of the greater level of social complexities of Neanderthal societies,” Villa noted.
Who were the Neanderthals?
Neanderthals were a species or subspecies of humans that became extinct between 40,000 and 28,000 years ago. Closely related to modern humans, they left remains mainly in Eurasia, from western Europe to central, northern, and western Asia.
Neanderthals are generally classified by palaeontologists as the species Homo neanderthalensis, having separated from the Homo sapiens lineage 600,000 years ago.
Several cultural assemblages have been linked to the Neanderthals in Europe. The earliest, the Mousterian stone tool culture, dates to about 300,000 years ago. Late Mousterian artefacts were found in Gorham’s Cave on the south-facing coast of Gibraltar.
In December 2013, researchers reported evidence that Neanderthals practised burial behaviour and buried their dead.
In addition, scientists reported having sequenced the entire genome of a Neanderthal for the first time. The genome was extracted from the toe bone of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal found in a Siberian cave.
Breakthrough in Translating Proto-Elamite, World’s Oldest Undeciphered Writing
Specialists believe that the oldest undeciphered writing system will be decoding 5,000-year-old secrets.
“I hope we are actually about to make a breakthrough,” said Jacob Dahl, a fellow at Oxford Wolfson‘s College and Director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.
Live Science has confirmed that Dahl’s secret weapons can see this writing more clearly than ever.
In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilizations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out the light.
This device is providing the most detailed and high-quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets.
Experts working on proto-Elamite hope they are on the point of ‘a breakthrough’
It’s being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200 BC and 2900 BC in a region now in the southwest of modern Iran.
The Oxford team thinks that they could be on the brink of understanding this last great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world.
Dahl, from the Oriental Studies Faculty, shipped his image-making device on the Eurostar to the Louvre Museum in Paris, which holds the most important collection of this writing.
The clay tablets were put inside this machine, the Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the clay tablets.
It allows a virtual image to be turned around, as though being held up to the light at every possible angle.
So far Dahl has deciphered 1,200 separate signs, but he said that after more than 10 years study much remains unknown, even such basic words as “cow” or “cattle”.
Dahl believes that the writing has proved so hard to interpret because the original texts seem to contain many mistakes – and this makes it extremely tricky for anyone trying to find consistent patterns.
“The lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless,” Dahl said.
Unlike any other ancient writing style, there are no bi-lingual texts and few helpful overlaps to provide a key to these otherwise arbitrary looking dashes and circles and symbols.
Proto-Elamite writing is the first-ever recorded case of one society adopting writing from another neighbouring group.
However, when these proto-Elamites borrowed the concept of writing from the Mesopotamians, they made up an entirely different set of symbols. The writing was the first ever to use syllables, Dahl said.
Dahl added that with sufficient support within two years this last great lost writing could be fully understood.
A group of UK-based researchers discovered the remains of a stillborn human fetus with an unusual condition in a 2,100-year-old Egyptian mummy long thought to be that of a hawk.
The mummy of an ancient bird was found at the Maidstone Museum in the United Kingdom. Its funerary casement featured a gilt-painted hawk’s face and was just the right size for a bird.
Horus, the Egyptian falcon-headed god, was also mentioned in the hieroglyphics on it.
All these decorations combined with the common practice of animal mummification in ancient Egypt led to the misidentification of the mummy.
Archaeologists long suspected that a tiny 2,100-year-old Egyptian mummy contained the remains of a hawk.A new analysis of the tiny mummy shows it was not a bird beneath the wrappings, but a stillborn human fetus
As a result, it was stored with other animal mummies without conducting CT scans or special attention.
However, the error came to light when the museum decided to scan their resident female mummy as well as a bunch of other animal mummies kept in storage including “EA 493 — Mummified Hawk Ptolemaic Period.”
The images of the scan revealed arms crossed over the chest and suggested that there was something else inside — a human or maybe a monkey — but not a bird for sure.
They called bioarchaeologist Andrew Nelson from Western University, London, to take a closer look.
Nelson and his interdisciplinary team conducted high-resolution micro-CT scans to virtually unwrap the mummy and found that it contains a severely malformed male human fetus, stillborn between 23 and 28 weeks of gestation.
The fetus, as the researchers revealed, suffered from major spinal abnormalities and a rare birth condition called anencephaly, wherein the brain and the skull fail to develop properly.
While the images revealed the mummified fetus had well-formed toes and fingers, the skull bore severe signs of deformities. “The whole top part of his skull isn’t formed,” Nelson said in a statement, noting that the brain of the fetus would not have formed in that scenario.
“The arches of the vertebrae of his spine haven’t closed. His earbones are at the back of his head.”
The work, as the researchers said, makes it the second mummified fetus to have been identified with anencephaly as well as the most studied fetal mummy in history.
“The family’s response was to mummify this individual, which was very rare. In ancient Egypt, fetuses tended to be buried in pots, below house floors, in various ways,” Nelson added.
According to Western University bioarchaeologist Andrew Nelson, there are only about six to eight known fetal mummies from ancient Egypt, making this family’s response very rare. The rarity of this mummification suggests it may have ties to ancient Egyptian magic
“There are only about six or eight known to have been mummified. So this was a very special individual.”
The findings also provide important clues into the diet of the baby’s mother and hint at a lack of foods containing folic acid, which plays a critical role in the development of the neural tube and can lead to anencephaly, if not provided sufficiently.
“It would have been a tragic moment for the family to lose their infant and to give birth to a very strange-looking fetus, not a normal-looking fetus at all,” the researcher concluded.
