Mammoth graveyard unearthed at Mexico’s new airport
Archaeologists in hard hats and face masks carefully remove earth from around enormous bones at the site of Mexico City’s new airport, where construction work has uncovered a huge trove of mammoth skeletons.
The remains of dozens of the extinct giants and other prehistoric creatures have been found in Zumpango on the northern edge of the capital, which sits on an ancient lake bed.
“More than 100 individual mammoths, individual camels, horses, bison, fish, birds, antelopes and rodents have already been recovered,” said army captain Jesus Cantoral, who heads the excavation team.
In total remains have been found at 194 spots across the site since the first discoveries were made in October last year during work on a fuel terminal, he told AFP.
Most of the animals are believed to have roamed the Earth between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago. Experts worked painstakingly to extract the bones of one of the mammoth skeletons, taking care not to disturb a mound of the earth supporting another specimen.
At the same time thousands of construction workers continued to labour away across the site as dozens of excavators and trucks shifted earth and transported building materials.
The authorities say they have kept a careful watch to ensure the precious remains are preserved during work on the airport, which President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has promised will be inaugurated in March 2022.
Experts believe the extinct giants were attracted by a lake that existed in prehistoric times
Stuck in mud
Experts believe the mammoths were drawn to the area by food and water provided by a lake that existed in prehistoric times.
“The place had a lot of natural resources, enough for these individuals to survive for a long time and for many generations,” said archaeologist Araceli Yanez.
In winter the lake area became muddy, trapping the giant mammals who starved, she said.
“It attracted a large number of mammoths, and they got stuck, as is the case with this individual, and died here,” Yanez added.
The lake was also very good for preserving the remains.
The remains of prehistoric camels, horses, bison, fish, birds, antelopes and rodents have also been found at the site
Mexico has been the scene of surprising mammoth discoveries before. In the 1970s, workers building the Mexico City subway found a mammoth skeleton while digging on the capital’s north side.
In 2012, workers digging to build a wastewater treatment plant outside the capital discovered hundreds of bones belonging to mammoths and other Ice Age animals.
The authorities plan to put the ancient remains on display at a museum at the airport
And last year archaeologists found the skeletons of 14 mammoths in Tultepec, near the site of the new airport.
Some bore signs that the animals had been hunted, leading experts to conclude at the time that they had found “the world’s first mammoth trap.”
The government began construction of the new aviation hub in 2019 at the Santa Lucia military airbase, months after cancelling work on another partially completed airport.
Lopez Obrador, who ran on a pro-austerity, anti-graft platform, had criticized that project championed by his predecessor Enrique Pena Nieto as an unnecessary mega-project marred by corruption.
His administration has tasked the military with overseeing the construction of the new airport, which will house a museum showcasing the mammoth skeletons and other ancient remains.
Rare Physical Evidence Of Roman Crucifixion Found In 1,900 Year Old English Skeleton
Archaeologists in Cambridgeshire, U.K., have discovered what may be the best-preserved physical evidence of crucifixion—a 1,900-year-old skeleton with a two-inch iron nail driven through his heel.
The skeleton has a nail piercing its foot, perhaps the best-preserved archaeological evidence of crucifixion as carried out by the Roman Empire.
Originally unearthed by a team from Albion Archaeology during excavations in the village of Fenstanton in 2017, the remains date to between A.D. 130 to 337.
The findings from the dig are published in the new issue of British Archaeology magazine.
“This is an extraordinarily important find because it is only the second discovery of a crucifixion victim from Roman times,” John Granger Cook, a professor at LaGrange College in Georgia and the author of Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World, told the Independent.
He estimates that the Romans used crucifixion, which kills its victims through asphyxiation, to execute only about 100,000 to 150,000 people before Emperor Constantine outlawed the practice in A.D. 337 after converting to Christianity.
The skeleton has a nail piercing its foot, perhaps the best-preserved archaeological evidence of crucifixion as carried out by the Roman Empire.
As a particularly drawn-out and gruesome means of capital punishment, crucifixion is believed to have been reserved for enslaved people and enemies of the state.
Most victims were likely secured by rope, rather than nails, and would probably not have received formal burials, making it difficult to find physical evidence of their cause of death.
The deceased found in Fenstanton would have been a 25-to-35-year-old man measuring about 5 foot 7, reports the Guardian. His foot was nailed down to keep him from writhing around during his last moments, while existing injuries to his legs suggest he was kept enslaved and shackled prior to his death.
He was buried with a timber structure, perhaps the bier on which he was executed.
The skeleton was found during a 2017 dig in the village of Fenstanton.
Only four other examples of the remains of possible crucifixion victims, including ones from Gavello, Italy, and Mendes, Egypt, have been identified; this skeleton is the first to be found in northern Europe.
Construction workers in Jerusalem found the only other one featuring a nail in 1968, but the body was not intact, and thus is not fully accepted as firm evidence of crucifixion in archaeological circles.
“It’s essentially the first time that we’ve found physical evidence for this practice of crucifixion during an archaeological excavation,” dig leader David Ingham, of Albion Archaeology, told the Daily Mail.
“You just don’t find this. We have written evidence, but we almost never find physical evidence.”
Excavations in Fenstanton have turned up 48 ancient graves, as well as ceramics and and a horse-shaped copper alloy brooch decorated with enamel.
The village lies along an ancient Roman road called the Via Devana, between Cambridge and Godmanchester.
Ancient Americans made art deep within the dark zones of caves throughout the Southeast
On a cold winter day in 1980, a group of recreational cavemen entered the course of a narrow, wet stream south of Knoxville, Tennessee. He navigated a slippery mud slope and a tight keyhole through the cave wall, trampled himself through the stream, sank through another keyhole and climbed more mud. Eventually, they entered a high and relatively dry passage deep in the “dark zone” of the cave – beyond the reach of outside light.
On the walls around them, they began to see lines and shapes in the remains of the soil laid long ago, when the stream flowed at this high level. No modern or historical graffiti intersected the surfaces. He saw images of animals, people and transformational characters with birds with human characteristics and mammals with snakes.
Ancient cave art has long been the most compelling of all artefacts from the human past, fascinating to both scientists and the public. Its visible manifestations resonate through the ages, as to speak to us from ancient times. And in 1980 this group of caves occurred at the first ancient cave art site in North America.
Since then archaeologists like me have discovered dozens of cave art sites in the southeast.
We have been able to learn details about when cave art first appeared in the region, when it was mostly produced and what it might be used for. We have also learned a great deal by working with the surviving descendants of cave art makers, the present-day Native American peoples of the Southeast, about what cave art means and how important it is to indigenous communities.
From the outside, these caves give no indication of the ancient art that may have been inside.
Cave Art in America?
Some people think of North America when they think of ancient cave art.
The world’s first modern discovery of cave art was made in Altamira, northern Spain, in 1879, a century before Tennessee cavers made their discovery. The scientific establishment of that day immediately denied the authenticity of the site. Later discoveries served to substantiate this and other ancient sites. As the earliest manifestations of human creativity, perhaps 40,000 years old, European Palaeolithic cave art is now justifiably famous around the world.
But similar cave art was not found anywhere in North America, although Native American rock art has been recorded outside the caves since the arrival of Europeans. The artefact deep beneath the ground was unknown in the 1980s, and the Southeast was an impossible place to find it, given how much archaeology had been done there since the colonial period.
Nevertheless, Tennessee cavers assumed they were seeing something extraordinary and brought archaeologist Charles Faulkner to the cave. He started a research project there, named Mud Glyph Cave. His archaeological works have shown that the art was from the Mississippian culture, about 800 years old, and depicts imagery characteristic of ancient Native American religious beliefs. Many of those beliefs are still held by descendants of Mississippian peoples: the modern Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Kaushatta, Muskogee, Seminole and Yuchi, among others.
Following the discovery of Mud Glyph Cave, archaeologists at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, began systematic cave surveys. Today, we’ve listed 92 dark-zone cave art sites in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Some sites are also known in Arkansas, Missouri and Wisconsin.
What did he paint?
There are three forms of southeastern cave art.
Mud glyphs, like Mud Glyphs Cave, are images found in soil surfaces preserved in caves.
Petroglyphs are images carved directly into the limestone of the cave walls.
Pictographs are paintings, usually made with charcoal-based pigments, that are placed on cave walls.
Sometimes, more than one technique is found in the same cave, and neither method appears in other ways at an earlier or later time.
The Archaic picture of a hunter and a hunt dates back to 6,500 years.
Some southeastern cave art is quite ancient. The oldest cave art sites date back to about 6,500 years, during the Archaic period (10,000–1000 BC). These early sites are rare and appear to be clustered on the modern Kentucky–Tennessee state line. The imagery was simple and often abstract, although representational images do exist.
Woodland period Petroglyph of a box-shaped human-like creature with a long neck and U-shaped head.
The number of cave art sites increases with time. The Woodland period (1000 BC – 1000 AD) saw a more general and more widespread art production. Abstract art was still abundant and less mundane. Perhaps more spiritual subject matter was common. During the woodland, collisions between humans and animals such as “bird-man” made their first appearance.
The Mississippian period (AD 1000–1500) is the last contact stage in the Southeast before the arrival of Europeans, and it was when most dark-zone cave arts were produced. The theme is explicitly religious and includes spirit people and animals that do not exist in the natural world. There is also strong evidence that Mississippian art caves were compositions, in which images were arranged through cave passages to suggest stories or narratives in a systematic way, however, their locations and relationships were told.
The painting from the Mississippian period depicts an animal with toes, a blunt forehead and a long muzzle, with a long curved tail on its back.
Cave art continued into the modern era
In recent years, researchers have realized that cave art has a strong connection with the historical tribes that occupied the Southeast at the time of the European invasion.
In several caves in Alabama and Tennessee, inscriptions from the mid-19th century were inscribed on the cave walls in the Cherokee course. This writing system was invented by Cherokee scholar Sequoyah between 1800 and 1824 and was quickly adopted as the tribe’s primary means of written expression.
An 1828 Cherokee syllabic inscription relating to a stickball ceremony, on the wall of a cave in Alabama.
Cherokee archaeologists, historians, and linguists, along with non-native archaeologists like me, have documented and translated these cave writings. As it turns out, they refer to various important religious ceremonies and spiritual concepts that emphasize the sacred nature of the caves, their isolation and their connection to powerful spirits. These texts reflect similar religious ideas represented by graphic images in the earlier, pre-Contact time period.
Mud Glyph Cave was first discovered more than four decades ago, based on all the rediscoveries, the cave art in the Southeast for a long time. These artists worked in ancient times when ancestral Native Americans lived in the rich natural landscapes of the Southeast all the way through historical times, before forcibly removing indigenous people east of the Mississippi River in the 1830s. Trail of Tears was seen.
As the survey continues, researchers uncover more dark cave sites each year – in fact, four new caves were found in the first half of 2021. With each new discovery, the tradition began to reach the richness and diversity of the Palaeolithic art of Europe, where 350 sites are currently known. Archaeologists were unaware of the dark-zone cave art of the American Southeast even 40 years ago, indicating that new finds may be discovered in areas that have been explored for centuries.
Goodbye, Columbus: Vikings crossed the Atlantic 1,000 years ago
Long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, eight timber-framed buildings covered in sod stood on a terrace above a peat bog and stream at the northern tip of Canada’s island of Newfoundland, evidence that the Vikings had reached the New World first.
A tourist (R) photographs the Viking replica ship the Islendingur as it arrives in the fishing village of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.
But precisely when the Vikings journeyed to establish the L’Anse aux Meadows settlement had remained unclear – until now.
Scientists on Wednesday said a new type of dating technique using a long-ago solar storm as a reference point revealed that the settlement was occupied in 1021 AD, exactly a millennium ago and 471 years before the first voyage of Columbus. The technique was used on three pieces of wood cut for the settlement, all pointing to the same year.
A wood fragment from the Norse layers at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking settlement established 1,000 years ago near Hay Cove, Newfoundland, Canada is seen in an undated microscopic image.
The Viking voyage represents multiple milestones for humankind. The settlement offers the earliest-known evidence of a transatlantic crossing. It also marks the place where the globe was finally encircled by humans, who thousands of years earlier had trekked into North America over a land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska.
“Much kudos should go to these northern Europeans for being the first human society to traverse the Atlantic,” said geoscientist Michael Dee of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who led the study published in the journal Nature.
The Vikings, or Norse people, were seafarers with Scandinavian homelands: Norway, Sweden and Denmark. They ventured through Europe, sometimes colonizing and other times trading or raiding. They possessed extraordinary boat-building and navigation skills and established settlements in Iceland and Greenland.
“I think it is fair to describe the trip as both a voyage of discovery and a search for new sources of raw materials,” Dee said. “Many archaeologists believe the principal motivation for them seeking out these new territories was to uncover new sources of timber, in particular.
It is generally believed they left from Greenland, where wood suitable for construction is extremely rare.” Their wooden vessels, called longboats, were propelled by sail and oars. One surviving example, called the Oseberg ship, is roughly 70 feet (21.6 meters long).
The Viking Age is traditionally defined as 793-1066 AD, presenting a wide range for the timing of the transatlantic crossing.
Ordinary radiocarbon dating – determining the age of organic materials by measuring their content of a particular radioactive isotope of carbon – proved too imprecise to date L’Anse aux Meadows, which was discovered in 1960, although there was a general belief it was the 11th century.
The new dating method relies on the fact that solar storms produce a distinctive radiocarbon signal in a tree’s annual growth rings. It was known there was a significant solar storm – a burst of high-energy cosmic rays from the sun – in 992 AD.
In all three pieces of wood examined, from three different trees, 29 growth rings were formed after the one that bore evidence of the solar storm, meaning the wood was cut in 1021, said University of Groningen archaeologist Margot Kuitems, the study’s first author.
It was not local indigenous people who cut the wood because there is evidence of metal blades, which they did not possess, Dee said.
The length of the occupation remains unclear, though it may have been a decade or less, and perhaps 100 Norse people were present at any given time, Dee said. Their structures resembled Norse buildings on Greenland and Iceland.
Oral histories called the Icelandic Sagas to depict a Viking presence in the Americas. Written down centuries later, they describe a leader named Leif Erikson and a settlement called Vinland, as well as violent and peaceful interactions with the local peoples, including capturing slaves.
The 1021 date roughly corresponds to the saga accounts, Dee said, adding: “Thus it begs the question, how much of the rest of the saga adventures are true?”
An important archaeological find has been made by researchers from San Marcos University (UNMSM) in the Chicama Valley, located in the La Libertad region.
A new archaeological landscape of the Chimu Culture —between 500 and 600 years old— has been discovered in this area.
San Marcos University reported that the archaeological site discovered in El Oso ravine, within the framework of the Chicama Archaeological Program, is believed to demonstrate the agricultural orientation of the Chimu Culture.
With this discovery, previous research and the San Marcos team suggest that the site was mainly used for agricultural production purposes, which is inferred because the channel that connects the Chicama River waters and various areas of the Moche Valley flows very close to the settlement.
According to Henry Tantalean, the archaeologist leading the San Marcos team, the site belongs to the Chimu period and comprises three buildings that are very similar to one another, albeit on a smaller scale than the Chan Chan citadel.
In addition, he explained that it has around 40 hectares of cultivated fields that used to be irrigated using an ancient technique involving a series of channels.
For her part, archaeologist Carito Tavera affirmed that the importance of this discovery and the interest in continuing the works at the site is because this demonstrates the long tradition of the Chicama Valley to allocate spaces for cultivation and large-scale agricultural production for the sustainability of people in this area of northern Peru.
In this way, the establishment of a settlement in this place shows that the Chimu people were interested in managing the area of the valley and did great construction works to expand their agricultural frontiers, something that they are doing even nowadays.
During the excavation process, after removing large rocks, archaeologists found traces of what was a great wall —at least two meters high— that surrounded the site, as well as a fairly preserved and compacted floor covered with sand that the wind brings.
A 1,600-year-old flute and bronze ring with a key have been unearthed during excavations in the 3,000-year-old Zerzevan Castle, located in the Çınar district of Diyarbakır and which served as the last garrison of the Roman Empire in the east. The castle is on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List.
Associate Professor Aytaç Coşkun, the head of the excavations, said the flute was important as it showed that the people living in the castle, which was a military settlement, had an interest in art and music.
The historical castle, which is home to the Mithras Temple, is located in an area of 60,000 square meters.
The historical castle has 12-15-meter-high and 1200-meter-long wall ruins, a 21-meter-high watchtower and defence tower, church, administration building, residences, grain and weapon warehouses, underground sanctuary, shelters, rock tombs, water channels and 54 water cisterns. Its 1,800-year-old entrance has been unearthed, too.
Coşkun said they uncovered very important structures and artefacts during the excavations that have continued since 2014.
Stating that the flute, which was identified to be 1,600 years old, and a ring with a special key were also unearthed during the latest excavations, Coçkun said that the flute, produced by making round holes in the bones of small cattle, is important as it reveals that the people living in the castle have an interest in art and music.
“The flute with six holes, one of which is broken, is dated to the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., that is, 1,600 years old. The ring with key, which was used to open a chest keeping very special items, is also dated to the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.
These artefacts are rarely found during excavations and are seen for the first time in the region. The number of visitors to the castle is increasing day by day,” he said.
Coşkun noted that Zerzevan Castle was the military settlement of the Roman Empire and one of the best-preserved garrisons in the world.
“We initiated the excavation works in the castle in 2014 and we took a break in the 2021 season. As of March, we started the excavation works again and the work will continue uninterruptedly until the end of December. Already, Zerzevan Castle is an excavation area and an important project that has been carried out for 12 months.
We have achieved many results in a short time. In fact, the works here are very important both for illuminating the history of the region and for the tourism of the region.
Many structures were unearthed, such as residences for soldiers and civilians, underground passages, water channels, and cisterns, and one of the most important structures was the Temple of Mithras, namely Mitraem,” Coşkun said.
He added that the excavations at the Mithras Temple, which started in 2017, will continue, too.
“We uncovered the underground church, the great church, the south tower, the walls, the main entrance in the walls. We will also carry out works on the wall line.
When we look at the walls, we see that they are protected up to eight-nine meters. And in the underground city of Zerzevan Castle, there is a filling between four and eight meters. There is also a large underground city.
One of the new works of this year will be in the administrative centre.
For the first time, we will start the work on a large complex structure located at the high point of Zerzevan Castle, where the city was managed and the administrators lived. We plan to make an important step in these excavations by the end of the year. We are even planning to open a large part of the structure,” he said.
Viking Longhouses Detected Near Norway’s Gjellestad Ship
Norwegian archaeologists said Monday they have found a cluster of longhouses, including one of the largest in Scandinavia, using ground-penetrating radar in the southeastern part of the country — in an area that researchers believe was a central place in the late Nordic Iron Age.
The longhouses — long and narrow, single-room buildings — were found in Gjellestad, 86 kilometres (53 miles) southeast of Oslo near where a Viking-era ship was found in 2018 close to the Swedish border.
“We have found several buildings, all typical Iron Age longhouses, north of the Gjellestad ship.
The most striking discovery is a 60-meter (197-foot) long and 15-meter (49-foot) wide longhouse, a size that makes it one of the largest we know of in Scandinavia,” archaeologist Lars Gustavsen at Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research said in a statement.
The importance of Gjellestad during that time period wasn’t immediately known. But the body, known by its Norwegian acronym NIKU, said it was working on finding that out.
This autumn, archaeologists covered 40 hectares (about 100 acres) south, east and north of where the Gjellestad ship was found with the radar system, and one of the next steps are archaeological excavations, NIKU said.
The surveys are the first part of a research project called “Viking Nativity: Gjellestad Across Borders” where archaeologists, historians and Viking age specialists have examined the development of the area during the Nordic Iron Age that began at around 500 B.C. and lasted until approximately A.D. 800 and the beginning of the Viking Age.
“We do not know how old the houses are or what function they had. Archaeological excavations and dating will help us get an answer to this,” said Sigrid Mannsaaker Gundersen, another archaeologist.
They have also found several ploughed-out burial mounds in nearby fields.
“We are not surprised to have found these burial mounds, as we already know there are several others in the surrounding area,” Gustavsen said. “ Still, these are important to know about to get a more complete picture of Gjellestad and its surroundings.”
The text in this video is in Norwegian, but the images give an idea of the georadar examinations as well as the findings.
Two golden tongues were found still inside the mouths of an ancient Egyptian man and woman who died over 2,500 years ago, the country’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced on Sunday.
A golden tongue was found inside the skull of an ancient mummy in Egypt, December 2021.
The identities of those interred are unknown, but the stone sarcophaguses were placed alongside each other.
A University of Barcelona archaeological mission discovered the pair of tombs containing the golden prosthetics at Oxyrhynchus, modern-day El Bahnasa, which is located some 220 kilometres south of Cairo.
The tombs are believed to be from the Saite dynasty, a late period of ancient Egypt that ended in 525 BC.
According to the ministry, golden tongues were placed inside the mouths of the dead to enable them to speak with Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, who judged those on their way to the afterlife.
The male’s tomb was still sealed, an unusual find, keeping the mummy inside in a good state of preservation, according to Esther Pons Melado, co-director of the archaeological mission of Oxyrhynchus
“This is very important because it’s rare to find a tomb that is totally sealed,” she told the National News in a Monday report on the discovery.
During excavation work carried out by a Spanish archaeological mission from Barcelona University and IPOA, at El-Bahnasa archaeological site in Meniya, has uncovered two Saite tombs with human remains with golden tongues.
Along with the mummy, there were four canopic jars that were used to preserve the internal organs of the deceased. In addition, archaeologists found a scarab, other amulets, and about 400 funerary figurines made of faience, a tin-glazed earthenware.
The woman’s tomb appeared to have been opened in the past and the contents were not in a good condition, Melardo said.
An additional three golden tongues were also found outside the tombs, according to the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry. They were dated to the Roman period in Egypt that began in 30 BC.
The excavation team of 14 included members from Spain, Italy, France, the US and Egypt.
In February, archaeologists at the ancient Egyptian site of Taposiris Magna found over a dozen tombs, one of which contained a mummy with a similar golden tongue in the skull.
