The insect, which is 49 million years old, appears to have been smashed just a few days ago
A beetle that lived about 49 million years ago is so well-preserved that the insect looks like it could spread its strikingly patterned wing coverings and fly away. That is if it weren’t squashed and fossilized.
Though originally identified as a type of long-horned beetle, Pulchritudo attenboroughi belongs to the frog-legged beetle group.
Wing cases, or elytra, are one of the sturdiest parts of a beetle’s exoskeleton, but even so, this level of colour contrast and clarity in a fossil is exceptionally rare, scientists recently reported.
The beautiful design on the ancient beetle’s elytra prompted researchers to name it Pulchritudo attenboroughi, or Attenborough’s Beauty, after famed naturalist and television host Sir David Attenborough. They wrote in a new study that the pattern is “the most perfectly preserved pigment-based colouration known in fossil beetles.”
When the researchers described the beetle beauty, it was already in the collection of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) in Colorado, where it had been on display since it was identified in 1995.
Palaeontologists found the fossil that year in the Green River Formation; once a group of lakes, this rich fossil site spans Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, and dates to the Eocene epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago).
Scientists initially classified the fossil as a long-horned beetle in the Cerambycidae genus. But while its body shape resembled those of long-horned beetles, its hind limbs were unusually short and beefy, which led the museum’s senior curator of entomology — Frank-Thorsten Krell, lead author of the new study — to question if the beetle might belong to a different group.
In the study, the authors described the beetle as a new genus in a subfamily known for its robust and powerful hind legs: frog-legged leaf beetles.
The fossilized insect, a female, is only the second example of a frog-legged leaf beetle to be found in North America, Krell told Live Science in an email (no modern beetles in this group live in North America today, according to the study).
On P. attenboroughi’s back, dark and symmetrical circular patterns stand out in sharp contrast against a light background. This suggests that bold patterns were present in beetles at least 50 million years ago, the researchers reported.
Digital reconstruction of Pulchritudo attenboroughi.
For a beetle to fossilize as well as this one did, “you need a very fine-grained sediment,” Krell said. Silt or clay at the bottom of a lake is the best substrate for fossilizing insects, and the beetle must sink quickly into the silty lake bottom before its body disintegrates. “And then it should not rot, so an oxygen-poor environment on the lake floor is helpful,” he said.
However, questions still remain about how sediments in the lake bottom preserved the beetle’s high-contrast colours so vividly, Krell added.
Visitors to the DMNS can admire P. attenboroughi for themselves, as the renamed fossil is back on display in the museum’s “Prehistoric Journey” exhibit, representatives said in a statement.
Preserved in poop: 1,000-year-old chicken egg found in Israel
It’s been said that the elegant egg is the perfect food, and that just might be true as eggs have been a staple of human diets for millions of years before chickens were domesticated for both eggs and meat some 8,000 years ago.
Israel Antiquities Authority discovered a fully intact 1,000-year-old chicken egg
In a remarkably rare discovery involving one of these ovoid essentials, scientists in Israel have cracked the archaeological case on a 1,000-year-old petrified egg that remained intact for centuries without breaking. This is an extraordinary event in that only a handful of ancient chicken eggs have ever been located undamaged.
During a recent excavation at an ancient Islamic cesspit dating back roughly 1,000 years ago, Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists in Yavne unearthed a single unbroken chicken’s egg.
This expansive dig site, directed by Dr. Elie Haddad, Liat Nadav-Ziv, and Dr. Jon Seligman, had been the location of a diverse industrial settlement dating from the Byzantine period.
Intact chicken egg dating from roughly 1,000 years ago was revealed during archaeological excavations in Israel
“Eggshell fragments are known from earlier periods, for example in the City of David and at Caesarea and Apollonia, but due to the eggs’ fragile shells, hardly any whole chicken eggs have been preserved.
Even at the global level, this is an extremely rare find,” says Dr. Lee Perry Gal of the Israel Antiquities Authority in an official press statement provided to SYFY WIRE. “In archaeological digs, we occasionally find ancient ostrich eggs, whose thicker shells preserve them intact.”
Domesticated poultry farming first emerged in Israel 2,300 years ago, during the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods.
“Even today, eggs rarely survive for long in supermarket cartons. It’s amazing to think this is a 1,000-year-old find!” notes Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Alla Nagorsky in the same press release.
“The egg’s unique preservation is evidently due to the conditions in which it lay for centuries, nestled in a cesspit containing soft human waste that preserved it.”
Unfortunately, even with careful handling, researchers found that the shell of the egg had been slightly cracked. Back in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s organics lab, conservationist Ilan Naor was able to restore the egg for further study.
“Families needed a ready protein substitute that does not require cooling and preservation, and they found it in eggs and chicken meat,” adds Dr. Gal in the statement.
“Unfortunately, the egg had a small crack in the bottom so most of the contents had leaked out of it. Only some of the yolk remained, which was preserved for future DNA analysis.”
When German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt first began excavating on a Turkish mountaintop 25 years ago, he has convinced the buildings he uncovered were unusual, even unique.
Atop a limestone plateau near Urfa called Gobekli Tepe, Turkish for “Belly Hill”, Schmidt discovered more than 20 circular stone enclosures. The largest was 20m across, a circle of stone with two elaborately carved pillars 5.5m tall at its centre. The carved stone pillars – eerie, stylised human figures with folded hands and fox-pelt belts – weighed up to 10 tons. Carving and erecting them must have been a tremendous technical challenge for people who hadn’t yet domesticated animals or invented pottery, let alone metal tools. The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity’s oldest known monumental structures, built not for shelter but for some other purpose.
The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity’s oldest known monumental structures
After a decade of work, Schmidt reached a remarkable conclusion. When I visited his dig house in Urfa’s old town in 2007, Schmidt – then working for the German Archaeological Institute – told me Gobekli Tepe could help rewrite the story of civilisation by explaining the reason humans started farming and began living in permanent settlements. The stone tools and other evidence Schmidt and his team found at the site showed that the circular enclosures had been built by hunter-gatherers, living off the land the way humans had since before the last Ice Age. Tens of thousands of animal bones that were uncovered were from wild species, and there was no evidence of domesticated grains or other plants.
Schmidt thought these hunter-gatherers had come together 11,500 years ago to carve Gobekli Tepe’s T-shaped pillars with stone tools, using the limestone bedrock of the hill beneath their feet as a quarry.
Situated in modern-day Turkey, Gobekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world
Carving and moving the pillars would have been a tremendous task, but perhaps not as difficult as it seems at first glance. The pillars are carved from the natural limestone layers of the hill’s bedrock. Limestone is soft enough to work with the flint or even wood tools available at the time, given practice and patience. And because the hill’s limestone formations were horizontal layers between 0.6m and 1.5m thick, archaeologists working at the site believe ancient builders just had to cut away the excess from the sides, rather than from underneath as well. Once a pillar was carved out, they then shifted it a few hundred metres across the hilltop, using rope, log beams and ample manpower.
Schmidt thought that small, nomadic bands from across the region were motivated by their beliefs to join forces on the hilltop for periodic building projects, hold great feasts and then scatter again. The site, Schmidt argued, was a ritual centre, perhaps some sort of burial or death cult complex, rather than a settlement.
That was a big claim. Archaeologists had long thought complex ritual and organised religion were luxuries that societies developed only once they began domesticating crops and animals, a transition known as the Neolithic. Once they had a food surplus, the thinking went, they could devote their extra resources to rituals and monuments.
Gobekli Tepe, Schmidt told me, turned that timeline upside down. The stone tools at the site, backed up by radiocarbon dates, placed it firmly in the pre-Neolithic era. More than 25 years after the first excavations there, there is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals. And Schmidt didn’t think anyone lived at the site full-time. He called it a “cathedral on a hill”.
More than 25 years after the first excavations there, there is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals.
If that was true, it showed that complex ritual and social organisation actually came before settlement and agriculture. Over the course of 1,000 years, the demands of gathering nomadic bands together in one place to carve and move huge T-pillars and build the circular enclosures prompted people to take the next step: to regularly host large gatherings, people needed to make food supplies more predictable and dependable by domesticating plants and animals. Rituals and religion, it seemed, launched the Neolithic Revolution.
The next day, I drove with Schmidt to the hilltop before dawn. I wondered, mystified and awestruck, among the pillars as Schmidt, his head wrapped in a white cloth to protect it from the blazing sun, oversaw a small team of German archaeologists and workers from the small village down the road.
Gobekli Tepe’s circular structures have changed the way archaeologists look at the beginnings of civilisation
Schmidt had just published his first reports on Gobekli Tepe the year before, setting the small world of Neolithic archaeology experts abuzz. But the site still had a sleepy, forgotten feel, with excavation areas covered by makeshift corrugated steel roofs and potholed dirt roads winding up to the mountaintop dig site from the valley below.
Schmidt’s take on the site’s striking T-pillars and large, round “special buildings” captivated colleagues and journalists when they were first published in the mid-2000s. Breathless media reports called the site the birthplace of religion; the German magazine Der Spiegel compared the fertile grasslands around the site to the Garden of Eden.
Soon, people from around the world were flocking to see Gobekli Tepe for themselves. Within a decade, the hilltop was totally transformed. Until the civil war in nearby Syria disrupted tourism in the region in 2012, work on the site often slowed to a crawl as busloads of curious tourists crowded around open excavation trenches to see what some were calling the world’s first temple and made it impossible to manoeuvre wheelbarrows on the narrow paths.
Over the past five years, the mountaintop on the outskirts of Urfa has been reshaped once again. Today, roads and car parks and a visitor’s centre can accommodate curious travellers from around the world. In 2017, corrugated steel sheds were replaced by a state-of-the-art, swooping fabric-and-steel shelter covering the central monumental buildings. swooping fabric-and-steel shelter covering the central monumental buildings. The Şanlıurfa Archaeology and Mosaic Museum, , built-in 2015 in central Urfa, is one of Turkey’s largest museums; it features a full-scale replica of the site’s largest enclosure and its imposing T-pillars, allowing visitors to get a feel for the monumental pillars and examine their carvings up close.
In 2018, Gobekli Tepe was added to the Unesco World Heritage register, and Turkish tourism officials declared 2019 the “Year of Gobekli Tepe”, making the ancient site the face of its global promotion campaign. “I still remember the site as a remote place on a mountaintop,” said Jens Notroff, a German Archaeological Institute archaeologist who began working at the site as a student in the mid-2000s. “It’s changed completely.”
Gobekli Tepe was constructed more than 11,000 years ago, right on the cusp between a world of hunter-gatherers and a world of farmers
Schmidt, who died in 2014, didn’t live to see the site’s transformation from dusty mountaintop dig to major tourist attraction. But his discoveries there spurred global interest in the Neolithic transition – and in the last few years, new discoveries at Gobekli Tepe and closer looks at the results of earlier excavations are upending Schmidt’s initial interpretations of the site itself.
Work on foundations needed to support the site’s swooping fabric canopy required archaeologists to dig deeper that Schmidt ever had. Under the direction of Schmidt’s successor, Lee Clare, a German Archaeological Institute team dug several “keyhole” trenches down to the site’s bedrock, several metres below the floors of the large buildings. “We had a unique chance,” Clare said, “to go look in the lowest layers and deposits of the site.”
New discoveries at Gobekli Tepe and closer looks at the results of earlier excavations are upending Schmidt’s initial interpretations of the site.
What Clare and his colleagues found may rewrite prehistory yet again. The digs revealed evidence of houses and year-round settlement, suggesting that Gobekli Tepe wasn’t an isolated temple visited on special occasions but a rather a thriving village with large special buildings at its centre.
The team also identified a large cistern and channels for collecting rainwater, key to supporting a settlement on the dry mountaintop, and thousands of grinding tools for processing grain for cooking porridge and brewing beer. “Gobekli Tepe is still a unique, special site, but the new insights fit better with what we know from other sites,” Clare said. “It was a fully-fledged settlement with permanent occupation. It’s changed our whole understanding of the site.”
Meanwhile, Turkish archaeologists working in the rugged countryside around Urfa have identified at least a dozen other hill-top sites with similar – if smaller – T-pillars, dating from around the same time period. “It’s not a unique temple,” said Austrian Archaeological Institute researcher Barbara Horejs, an expert on the Neolithic who was not part of the recent research efforts. “That makes the story much more interesting and exciting.” Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy went as far as saying that this area could be referred to as the “pyramids of south-east Turkey“.
New discoveries made over the last few years may rewrite prehistory yet again
Rather than a centuries-long building project inspiring the transition to farming, Clare and others now think Gobekli Tepe was an attempt by hunter-gatherers clinging to their vanishing lifestyle as the world changed around them. Evidence from the surrounding region shows people at other sites were experimenting with domesticated animals and plants – a trend the people of “Belly Hill” might have been resisting.
Clare argues the site’s stone carvings are an important clue. Elaborate carvings of foxes, leopards, serpents and vultures covering Gobekli Tepe’s pillars and walls “aren’t animals you see every day,” he said. “They’re more than just pictures, they’re narratives, which are very important in keeping groups together and creating a shared identity.”
When I first wandered across the site more than 15 years ago, I remember a feeling of great distance. Gobekli Tepe was built 6,000 years before Stonehenge, and the exact meaning of its carvings – like the world the people there once inhabited – is impossible to fathom.
That, of course, is part of the Gobekli Tepe’s tremendous magnetism. As thousands of visitors marvel at a place most people had never heard of a decade ago, researchers will continue trying to understand why it was built in the first place. And each new discovery promises to change what we now know about the site and the story of human civilisation.
“The new work isn’t destroying Klaus Schmidt’s thesis; it stands on his shoulders,” said Horejs. “There’s been a huge gain of knowledge, in my view. The interpretation is changing, but that’s what science is about.”
TURKEY: Discovery of Ancient Relief depicting Greco-Persian wars
Archaeologists in northwestern Turkey discovered a relief on Aug. 16 depicting a war between the Greeks and Persians in the fifth century B.C.
The figures on the relief show fighting Greek soldiers beneath the hoofs of Persian warhorses said archaeologist Kaan Iren, who leads the dig site of the ancient city of Dascylium found in the modern-day Bandırma district of Balıkesir province.
“Here is a scene of propaganda under the pretext of war. We can say these reliefs are a scene from the Persian-Greek wars,” İren told the state-run Anadolu Agency.
Ancient relief depicting Greek-Persian war unearthed in NW Turkey
“We think these reliefs were probably made for propaganda purposes during the wars,” he added.
Iren, who has been working at the excavation site in Dascylium with a team of 30 people since June 22, said they had unearthed parts of a stone and mudbrick wall dating back to the eighth century B.C. this year.
“Of the eighth-century-B.C. wall left from the Phrygian age, this year we unearthed an area of 4 meters high and 40 meters long. We think that this wall had a height of 7 to 8 meters.
We prepared a protection roof project for this place. We will present it to the Balıkesir Cultural Heritage Preservation Regional Board. If approved, we will take this place until protection,” said Iren, who is also a faculty member of the Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University.
The 5-meter-wide wall is believed to have been built by the ancient Phrygian civilization to protect its territory, Iren said.
Stating that the first settlers of the ancient city were the Phrygians, İren mentioned that the last place where this civilization was seen in the north and west of Anatolia was Dascylium.
“The wall is a 5-meter-wide fortification wall that these people built to protect their own space. Our work continues here.
There is a tower just ahead. We will continue to work until this tower. If the sponsors continue in the coming seasons, we will open this area completely and bring it to tourism,” he said.
İren said that the discovery of reliefs during the wall excavation this year was a surprise. Stating that the reliefs carved into the stone were cleaned by the restorers in the excavation house, İren said: “The relief, dating from the Persian era in the fifth century B.C., depicts the war between the Persians and the Greeks.
This was one of the most important findings of the season for us. In the figures on it, there are Greek soldiers fighting and Persians on horseback fighting them. Greek soldiers are depicted under the hoofs of Persian horses.
There is a propaganda scene here under the pretext of war. We can say that these reliefs are a scene from the Persian-Greek wars. We think that these reliefs were probably made for propaganda purposes during the wars.”
Traces of Medieval Abbey Uncovered in Northeastern England
A team from York Archaeological Trust are currently based in Museum Gardens, where the Environment Agency will soon start work on a major upgrade of the flood embankment as part of the York Flood Alleviation Scheme.
Both the Environment Agency and the City of York Council recognised the historical importance of the area, which was once the grounds and precincts of St Mary’s Abbey and invited experts to survey the site for ancient remains.
The dig began in July and details of some of the preliminary findings have now been revealed.
York Archaeological Trust staff George Loffman and Fran Birtles examine the trench
York Archaeological Trust staff hoped to find traces of medieval buildings that were once part of the abbey complex, of which The Hospitium is the only survivor still intact today. There had not been investigations on the site previously because it had never been subject to development.
Initially, topsoil stripping revealed pottery and other items dating from the 19th century, when the Yorkshire Philosophical Society first landscaped the area as a botanical garden.
Yet below the Victorian layer was evidence of earlier activity. Across the trench is rubble including limestone roof and floor tiles, suggesting that several buildings were demolished following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. However, this razing could have taken place at any time up until the 1830s, when the garden landscaping began.
The Hospitium was renovated around this time, but historians are aware that several other buildings would have stood on the south side of the precinct.
Short sections of medieval wall uncovered during the dig suggest that these structures extended east from The Hospitium – a lodging house for lay guests of the monastery which historians believe may have also acted as a warehouse for goods delivered through the river gate.
An excavator at work besides The Hospitium
York Archaeological Trust project manager Ben Reeves explained: “This area had never been developed, and our principle is that we don’t disturb unless necessary. We won’t be going any deeper than we need to and only to the same level as the construction work.
“We know that in the 19th century, buildings such as stables were demolished, and there could have been outbuildings from all periods. We’ve identified some wall remains and are investigating them.
“We expected to find some form of remains, and our aim is to record and re-bury them. Nothing will be removed or damaged.
“It’s difficult to say when the buildings were cleared – was it in the aftermath of the Dissolution or much later? In the 1830s did they decide they wanted to keep The Hospitium but not the others?
Pieces of limestone wall suggest that buildings that were part of the abbey were demolished on a date unknown
“It was a relief to find the structures below the level of the trench so that their discovery won’t impact on the scheme. They will be covered over and preserved.”
The dig is expected to conclude by the end of the month, after which the site will be returned to Environment Agency contractors BAM.
Well-Preserved Human Remains Discovered in Pompeii Tomb
The partially mummified remains of an urbane Pompeii resident have been discovered in a tomb outside the city centre erected before the famous eruption that buried the town in ash.
The remains of Marcus Venerius Secundio were preserved in a sealed chamber in a Pompeii cemetery. Though the body is nearly 2,000 years old, close-cropped hair and an ear are still visible on the skull.
According to the inscriptions on the tomb, the deceased was a man named Marcus Venerius Secundio, who was in his 60s when he died and was, at one point, enslaved. Later in life, after being freed, Secundio became a well-off priest who conducted rituals in Latin and Greek.
The tomb inscription referring to these Greek rituals is the first direct evidence of Greek performances being held in the Italian city.
A close view of the mummification of Marcus Venerius Secundio. The remains have been taken to a laboratory so researchers can learn more about whether this mummification was intentional.
“That performances in Greek were organised is evidence of the lively and open cultural climate which characterised ancient Pompeii,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said in a statement.
Mummified remains
Secundio’s remains rest in a rectangular masonry tomb that was once painted with images of green plants on a blue background; traces of this paint still grace the outside walls of the tomb.
The masonry tomb of Marcus Venerius Secundio in the Porta Sarno Necrtopolis. Faint traces of blue and green paint still grave the outer walls.
The partially mummified body was tucked into a sealed alcove in the tomb with an arched ceiling. Close-cropped hair and an ear are still visible on the skull.
Archaeologists also recovered scraps of fabric and two glass bottles called “unguentaria” from Secundio’s tomb. Unguentaria are often found in Roman and Greek cemeteries and may have held oils or perfumes for graveside rituals.
The tomb also contained two funerary urns, including a beautiful blue-glass urn belonging to a woman whose name is recorded as Novia Amabilis (“kind wife”). Cremation was the most common method of burial for Pompeiians during the Roman period, according to archaeologists.
A beautiful blue glass urn was found in the tomb of Marcus Venerius Secundio. The urn likely contains the cremated remains of a woman named Novia Amabilis.
It’s not clear why Secundio’s remains weren’t cremated. It’s also not clear if his body was mummified naturally or if it was treated to prevent decomposition.
“We still need to understand whether the partial mummification of the deceased is due to intentional treatment or not,” University of Valencia archaeologist Llorenç Alapont said in the statement.
Multilingual city
The tomb is in the Porta Sarno Necropolis, which sits just outside the town walls by the Porta di Nola gate. A number of notables were buried in the necropolis, including city administrator Marcus Obellius Firmus, who lived during the reign of Emperor Nero (between A.D. 54 and 68), according to ArchaeoSpain, a field school that coordinates internships at Pompeii and other sites.
What is known of Marcus Venerius Secundio’s life comes from a previously discovered record-keeping tablet belonging to the banker Cecilius Giocondus, as well as the inscription carved in marble on Secundio’s tomb.
The inscription on the tomb names Marcus Venerius Secundio and says that he performed four days of performances in Greek and Latin as a priest in the imperial cult.
He was a slave at the temple of Venus before his release, after which he joined the priesthood of the imperial cult, dedicated to glorifying the memory of the Roman emperor Augustus, who ruled from 27 B.C. to A.D. 14.
As one of these “Augustales,” Secundio “gave Greek and Latin ‘ludi’ for the duration of four days,” according to the tomb inscription. “Ludi graeci” were theater performances in Greek, Zuchtriegel said.
“It is the first clear evidence of performances at Pompeii in the Greek language, which had previously been hypothesised on the basis of indirect indicators,” he said. These performances indicate that Pompeii in the first century was a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic place where Eastern Mediterranean cultures melded.
Ancient coins dating to 1,700 years ago were discovered by a family during a camping trip on an Israeli beach near Atlit on Tuesday. Yotam Dahan, a tour guide from Klil in northern Israel, found a bundle of antique coins during a family camping trip in Habonim beach.
The ancient bundle of coins was found on Habonim beach in Israel.
The bundle of coins, weighing a total of 6 kg., agglutinated after years of lying underwater. They were determined to have been used in the fourth century CE, following an inspection by expert Dr Donald Tzvi-Ariel.
After posting photos of the coins to Facebook, Dahan was contacted by Israel Antiquities Authority’s (IAA) Haifa District director Karem Said to identify the exact location of the discovery on the beach.
IAA marine archaeology department head Yaakov Sharvit noted the coins might have belonged to an ancient ship sailing the Mediterranean Sea.
“Archaeological sites are prevalent all along the Habonim beach strip,” Sharvit said. “Archaeological records show vessels were often washed ashore along with all their cargo,” he added.
“The bundle of coins found shows they were packed together and agglutinated due to oxidation of the metals,” Sharvit noted.
Dahan generously handed the coins to IAA’s Treasures of the State Department and was subsequently given a certificate of appreciation by the IAA.
Graves dating back 2,700 years have been unearthed in southern Mexico City
Experts from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) have discovered 26 ancient graves dating back 2,700 years at a site in Mexico City.
Located in the south of the capital and adjoining a modern-day cemetery, the site measures 360 square meters and archaeologists believe that it might have been used by women for activities related to the care of infants.
During excavations over the last four months, the INAH team has found the graves at depths between 1.2 and 3.3 meters below street level. About 20 of them are in a perfect state of conservation.
They were found between 1.2 and 3.3 meters below street level; about 20 are perfectly conserved.
“Until now, we have detected four stages of settlement; four historical periods linked to the start of the 20th century, the Porfiriato [the period of more than three decades when former president Porfirio Díaz was in power], Mexico’s independence and the pre-Hispanic period,” said Antonio Balcorta Yépez, an INAH archaeologist working on the project.
Of the 26 graves found, 11 are in the form of a truncated cone, while the archaeologists have also found vestiges of walls from pre-Hispanic structures.
Ancient graves were discovered in southern Mexico City.
“We’ve made a series of discoveries that have revolutionized the knowledge we had about graves in the pre-classic period. The context suggests to us that we are in a village where they carried out specialized activities.
The height [of the site and] its geographical and strategic position indicates to us that the people [who lived on] this hill may have had greater control over certain resources compared to the village of Copilco,” Balcorta said.
Truncated cone graves were not only used for funeral purposes but also to store grains, artefacts and waste materials, he explained.
However, there is also evidence that indicates that at least two of the graves may have been used by women for everyday activities related to caring for their children, such as giving a herbal steam bath to a newborn baby.
That theory is supported by the discovery of more than 130 figurines in the graves, most of which represent pregnant women, while a smaller number are of infants. The ceramic pieces feature red, yellow and black colourings on their different body parts.
The INAH team has extracted samples from different parts of the graves to carry out chemical and pollen analyses aimed at confirming or rejecting the perinatal care hypothesis.
The archaeologists have also made discoveries from more recent times including remnants of ammunition used in the Mexican revolution and parts of adobe bricks and other building materials that formed part of a house that stood on the site at the end of the 19th century.
Because it is 2,296 meters above sea level, it is believed that the site was not affected by lava flows following the eruption of the Xitle Volcano between 245 and 315 AD and for that reason it has remained in well-conserved condition.
