An unusual pre-Hispanic chimú burial was discovered in Peru
In an archaeological discovery in Peru, a pre-Hispanic burial belonging to the Chimu Culture was discovered on Wednesday by government workers who carried out domestic gas connection works very close to an urban area in the city of Chimbote, in the Ancash district.
Juan Lopez Marchena, head of the Decentralized Culture Directorate (DDC) of Chimbote, clarified that the skeletal remains belonged to an individual who was found in a flexed ventral ulna position along with three vessels.
“Following the studies and analyses, we will be able to know part of the pre-Hispanic history of the people at that time, the gender of the individual, the diet, the occupation, as well as information about the vessels associated with the find,” he told Andina news agency.
According to Lopez, the vessels were apparently destined for domestic use, and —on the inside— there was evidence of the presence of piruros, which the Chimu women used to spin wool.
“The vessels feature characteristic circles of the Chimu Culture, which settled mainly in Casma,” he mentioned.
Rich and millenary peoples
The discovery occurred in the shantytown of Bolivar. Before that —also while gas installation works were being carried out— a burial of the Moche Culture was found in the shantytown of San Pedro.
These discoveries are important for this reason, he said, because “we are building a cultural sequence.”
“Two finds have been reported, and they are very important because they indicate how rich and millenary different peoples in Chimbote can be,” he stressed.
The remains will be taken to the Max Uhle Museum, located in the city of Casma. They will be analyzed, and the results will be significant for the investigation of pre-Hispanic Peru.
Mass-Murder Under The Silvery Light Of The Moon
One aspect of the Chimú culture, which the Spanish conquistadors couldn’t forgive, was the mass-sacrifice of captive adult warriors at the Temple of the Moon, just a few miles from Chan Chan. However, this was way less horrific than the Chimú elite’s institutionalized killing of babies and children.
In a 2019 National Geographic article Dr. Gabriel Prieto, a professor of archaeology from the National University of Trujillo, discussed a shocking discovery in Huanchaquito, a hamlet on the north coast of Peru.
In 2011 he discovered the broken bodies of “269 children between the ages of five and 14.” More than 500 years ago these children were systematically murdered in “carefully orchestrated acts of a ritual sacrifice that may be unprecedented in world history,” said Dr. Preito.
A shocking number of children’s bodies have been found at Huanchaquito
Chan Chan’s sustained success depended on carefully managed irrigation systems and coastal fisheries. This means a severe El Niño weather event might have shaken the political and economic stability of the Chimú kingdom.
It is thought that the priests and leaders may have ordered the mass sacrifice of these children in a desperate attempt to persuade the gods to stop the rains and flooding caused by an El Niño.
Jane Eva Baxter, an anthropology professor at DePaul University, said the Chimú people probably considered their children as the most valuable offerings they could present to the gods and Dr. Prieto said this number of children (269) would have been “a massive investment on behalf of the state”.
Neanderthals’ gut microbiota already included some beneficial micro-organisms that are also found in our own intestine. An international research group led by the University of Bologna achieved this result by extracting and analyzing ancient DNA from 50,000-year-old fecal sediments sampled at the archaeological site of El Salt, near Alicante (Spain).
The 50,000 years old sedimentary faeces (the oldest sample of faecal material available to date) were collected in El Salt, Spain.
Published in Communication Biology, their paper puts forward the hypothesis of the existence of ancestral components of human microbiota that have been living in the human gastrointestinal tract since before the separation between the Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals that occurred more than 700,000 years ago.
“These results allow us to understand which components of the human gut microbiota are essential for our health, as they are integral elements of our biology also from an evolutionary point of view” explains Marco Candela, the professor of the Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology of the University of Bologna, who coordinated the study.
“Nowadays there is a progressive reduction of our microbiota diversity due to the context of our modern life: this research group’s findings could guide us in devising diet- and lifestyle-tailored solutions to counteract this phenomenon.”
The Issues of the “Modern” Microbiota
The gut microbiota is the collection of trillions of symbiont micro-organisms that populate our gastrointestinal tract. It represents an essential component of our biology and carries out important functions in our bodies, such as regulating our metabolism and immune system and protecting us from pathogenic micro-organisms.
Recent studies have shown how some features of modernity — such as the consumption of processed food, drug use, life in hyper-sanitized environments — lead to a critical reduction of biodiversity in the gut microbiota. This depletion is mainly due to the loss of a set of microorganisms referred to as “old friends.”
“The process of depletion of the gut microbiota in modern western urban populations could represent a significant wake-up call,” says Simone Rampelli, who is a researcher at the University of Bologna and first author of the study. “This depletion process would become particularly alarming if it involved the loss of those microbiota components that are crucial to our physiology.”
Indeed, there are some alarming signs. For example, in the West, we are witnessing a dramatic increase in cases of chronic inflammatory diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and colorectal cancer.
How the “Ancient” Microbiota Can Help
How can we identify the components of the gut microbiota that are more important for our health? And how can we protect them with targeted solutions? This was the starting point behind the idea of identifying the ancestral traits of our microbiota — i.e. the core of the human gut microbiota, which has remained consistent throughout our evolutionary history.
Technology nowadays allows to successfully rise to this challenge thanks to a new scientific field, paleomicrobiology, which studies ancient microorganisms from archaeological remains through DNA sequencing.
The research group analyzed ancient DNA samples collected in El Salt (Spain), a site where many Neanderthals lived. To be more precise, they analyzed the ancient DNA extracted from 50,000 years old sedimentary feces (the oldest sample of fecal material available to date). In this way, they managed to piece together the composition of the micro-organisms populating the intestine of Neanderthals. By comparing the composition of the Neanderthals’ microbiota to ours, many similarities aroused.
“Through the analysis of ancient DNA, we were able to isolate a core of microorganisms shared with modern Homo sapiens,” explains Silvia Turroni, a researcher at the University of Bologna and first author of the study.
“This finding allows us to state that these ancient micro-organisms populated the intestine of our species before the separation between Sapiens and Neanderthals, which occurred about 700,000 years ago.”
Safeguarding the Microbiota
These ancestral components of the human gut microbiota include many well-known bacteria (among which Blautia, Dorea, Roseburia, Ruminococcus and Faecalibacterium) that are fundamental to our health. Indeed, by producing short-chain fatty acids from dietary fiber, these bacteria regulate our metabolic and immune balance.
There is also the Bifidobacterium: a microorganism playing a key role in regulating our immune defences, especially in early childhood. Finally, in the Neanderthal gut microbiota, researchers identified some of those “old friends.” This confirms the researchers’ hypotheses about the ancestral nature of these components and their recent depletion in the human gut microbiota due to our modern life context.
“In the current modernization scenario, in which there is a progressive reduction of microbiota diversity, this information could guide integrated diet- and lifestyle-tailored strategies to safeguard the micro-organisms that are fundamental to our health,” concludes Candela. “To this end, promoting lifestyles that are sustainable for our gut microbiota is of the utmost importance, as it will help maintain the configurations that are compatible with our biology.”
Reference: “Components of a Neanderthal gut microbiome recovered from fecal sediments from El Salt” by Simone Rampelli, Silvia Turroni, Carolina Mallol, Cristo Hernandez, Bertila Galván, Ainara Sistiaga, Elena Biagi, Annalisa Astolfi, Patrizia Brigidi, Stefano Benazzi, Cecil M. Lewis Jr., Christina Warinner, Courtney A. Hofman, Stephanie L. Schnorr and Marco Candela, 5 February 2021,
Children’s ID tags unearthed at Nazi death camp in Poland
I.D. was found by archaeologists excavating the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. The Yeshiva World notes the tags containing the names of four Jewish children from Amsterdam aged 5 to 11 who were sent to their deaths during the Second World War.
Yoram Haimi, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) who helped lead the dig, notes that the tags included the children’s birthdates and hometowns.
“Since the tags are very different from each other, it is evident that this was probably not some organized effort,” he says in a statement. “The children’s identity tags were prepared by their parents, who were probably desperate to ensure that the children’s relatives could be located in the chaos of the Second World War.”
Parents probably created the tags in hopes of finding their children again.
More than 70 years after the children’s murders, researchers were able to connect the tags to information kept at a memorial centre at the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands.
“I’ve been digging at Sobibor for 10 years,” Haimi tells Israel Hayom’s Yori Yalon. “This was the most difficult day. We called the centre and gave them the names. They sent pictures of young, smiling kids to our phones. The hardest thing is to hear that one of the kids [whose] tag you’re holding in [your] hand arrived at Sobibor on a train full of children ages 4 to 8, who were sent here to die alone.”
As Patrick Pester reports for Live Science, the team was able to trace all of the children through train records. Some were part of mass deportation of 1,300 small children who were sent to the gas chambers as soon as they arrived at the camp.
The archaeologists found the tag of 6-year-old Lea Judith De La Penha, who was killed in 1943, near the camp’s railway platform. They discovered the other three tags—belonging to 6-year-old Deddie Zak, 11-year-old David Juda Van der Velde and 12-year-old Annie Kapper—in the camp’s “killing area,” which housed a gas chamber, crematorium and mass grave, per Live Science. Only half of Van der Velde’s partially burned tag was found.
Deddie Zak (left) was murdered in 1943 at age 6.
“The Germans burned his body and on his neck was this tag,” Haimi tells Live Science.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia, Nazi authorities built Sobibor in the spring of 1942. It was the second of three killing centres—along with Belzec and Treblinka—that was part of Operation Reinhard, a plan to murder Jews living in the part of Nazi-occupied Europe known as the General Government.
Most of the camp personnel came from Operation T4, the Nazi’s first mass murder program, which targeted people with disabilities. The Operation Reinhard camps channelled carbon monoxide generated by large motor engines to fill gas chambers.
Ongoing excavations at Sobibor also revealed the camp’s gas chamber, a 3,700-square-foot building with eight rooms.
An aerial view of the extermination area of Sobibor death camp where three of the tags were found.
“We can say that every time you can put between 800 to 900 people in this gas chamber, turn on the motor of the tank and kill in 10 minutes 900 people,” Haimi tells Live Science. “It’s a factory of killing.”
Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust remembrance memorial, estimates the number of people murdered at Sobibor around 250,000. But Hami says the real number is likely higher.
“We will never know how many Jewish people [were] killed in this camp,” he tells Live Science. “I can tell you from the size of the mass graves—because they are huge—it must be much more than 250,000.”
Ofer Aderet of Haaretz reports that Haimi began excavating the site in 2007 as a “private undertaking.” He’s now working with Polish colleague Wojtek Mazurek and others to continue uncovering artefacts.
The team recently discovered several I.D. tags that identified some of the camp’s victims as North African Jews. Other discoveries include pins worn by the right-wing Jewish group Beitar, as well as jewellery, keys, shoes and other personal items owned by those killed at the camp.
Haimi tells Haaretz that he has also discovered a “huge number of alcohol bottles” apparently belonging to Nazis and other camp personnel. The archaeologists gave the items to a museum at the camp that opened last year but is currently closed due to the pandemic.
Sobibor remained in operation until October 1943, when prisoners staged an uprising. Around half of the 600 people then held at the camp escaped, but many were subsequently killed. About 50 former prisoners from the camp survived the war. After the uprising, the Nazis shut the centre down, shooting all prisoners who hadn’t managed to flee.
The Ancestral Myth of the Hollow Earth and Underground Civilizations
The endless tales, myths, and legends are told of the hidden settlements and subterranean societies that are dispersed across the vast network of interconnected tunnels across the planet.
These underground portals are surrounded by numerous rumours. All we have to do is recall the mysterious tales that revolve about Ecuador’s Cueva de Los Tayos tunnels and galleries, or the stories of the entrances to the underground worlds that are supposed located in the Andes, the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, Turkey, and even below the Sphinx of Giza.
The Hollow Earth Theory and an Expedition to the Arctic
The Hollow Earth theory states that the Earth is a hollow planet with ancient entrances to the subterranean world scattered throughout it, including near both polar caps. This theory has been reported since ancient times and scientists such as Edmund Halley have defended it throughout history.
From 1818-1826, the American John C. Symmes passionately supported the theory as well. According to him, there was a subterranean world inside our planet illuminated by a tiny sun, and that included mountains, forests, and lakes. Symmes launched a national campaign aiming to raise the necessary funds to send an expedition to the Arctic to search for an entrance to the subterranean world. He even sent a proposal to the United States Congress, with the intention of getting government assistance to find the entrance to the inner world.
Unfortunately for him, he died before the government did allocate funding for his purpose and the expedition departed in 1838, although, in truth, its goals were not so altruistic. In reality, it was part of the ploy as world powers were trying to learn the importance of the only land not yet conquered the world: both polar caps. Regardless, commanded by Charles Wilkes, the expedition lasted four years. It served to discover the vast geographical extent of the Arctic, but no sign of a passage into the earth was found.
The entrance to the Hollow Earth according to Symmes, as he believed we would see it from the moon with a telescope. Illustration of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine October 1882
Nonetheless, the idea of Symmes remained anchored in the minds of a handful of writers (who tend to love the search for the attainment of seemingly impossible dreams.) Thus, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and HP Lovecraft, among many others, paid tribute to the fascinating theory of the Hollow Earth.
Illustration drawn by Edouard Riou in 1864 from the original edition of “Journey to the Center of the Earth” by the famous Jules Verne.
Interest in the Hollow Earth theory did not end there. In fact, in the twentieth century, with a knowledge of geography and geology of the earth, that was still lacking, there were those who continued trying to access that mysterious world under the earth’s crust. For example, some of the Nazi leaders, the lovers of ancient myths and the occult in Germany, showed a marked interest in these types of theories.
History of Hollow Earth Theory
Edmund Halley (1656 – 1742), the English scientist who studied the comet that bears his name, may have been the first to develop a scientific hypothesis about the Hollow Earth. After a series of observations of the Earth’s magnetic field, Halley concluded that the anomalies observed could only be explained if the Earth was composed of two spheres: an external solid one and an internal hollow one, each with its own magnetic axis.
Edmund Halley with a drawing showing shells of his hollow earth theory. (1736)
Later on, another American, Cyrus Teed, became convinced that it is mathematically impossible to discern whether we are inside or outside of a sphere, so we could live inside a hollow universe. In the centre, it would be the Sun, with the planets and stars only appearing bright to us because they reflect sunlight on the surface of the concave Earth. This land was called Koresh – which is the Hebrew translation of his own name, Cyrus. Teed even founded a church and its adherents remained active and defending these ideas until at least 1982.
With the dawn of the twentieth century other scholars, such as William Reed and Marshall Gardner, also believed they could provide evidence of the existence of an inner world. One of the most curious facts wielded as an argument, made by some Arctic explorers, was that air and water temperatures warmed as they approached the North Pole. Based on these and other observations, they also claimed that mammoths were not extinct, but still inhabiting the interior of the Earth.
Mammoth model exhibited at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada. Some scientists believed that warm temperatures near the North Pole could be evidence that the mammoths lived on…in the hollow earth.
As previously mentioned, there were Nazi leaders who supported the hollow earth theory. Adolf Hitler also believed in the hollow earth theory, but for him, it provided the location where the “pure” and “perfect” Aryans who he thought dominated the world would meet. What is more, the German Thule Society – the main esoteric circle of the time, held a very close hypothesis, although theirs was related to the myths of lost underground kingdoms of Agartha and Shambhala.
Adolf Hitler and several of his colleagues firmly believed in the Hollow Earth Theory
Meanwhile, the first man to fly over the poles, Richard E. Byrd, in his report said he “inspected about 26,000 km (16,155.7 miles) around and beyond the Pole.” This simple sentence with the words “beyond the Pole” is the foundation on which many advocates of the hollow earth theory accuse the US government (who funded Byrd’s flight) of a cover-up, saying that Byrd went into the Inner Earth.
The arctic continent or Hyperborea as shown in the Gerardus Mercator Atlas of 1595
Shambhala Myths and Agartha
Myths are as old as humanity itself, so are the myths of beings that inhabit the depths of the Earth. In contrast to the angels of heaven, tradition generally sent demons underground. A clear example is a Christian hell.
In contrast, Central Asian Buddhists believe in the wonderful land under our feet which is known as Agartha (or Agartta). Agartha is supposedly a place where beings are more beautiful and much wiser than we are and which has a king that has the power to read the human soul.
For thousands of years Tibetan scholars, besides teaching about an inner world, say they are in contact with this “King of the Inner World” or supreme ruler for the entire planet, for whom the Dalai Lama is a representative for the outside world.
They also speak and write about tunnels that connect Tibet with the inner world (which they protect), saying that there are many others scattered across the Earth, such as those found under the great pyramids of Egypt and South America. Entrances to subterranean cities also are said to exist around the vast Amazon Basin, for example connecting the lost city of “El Dorado“ with the rest of the ancient world.
The capital of this inner world – and therefore of the whole world is said to be a city called Shambhala where the King of the World resides and his court of advanced beings teach some of humanity about science, art, religion, and philosophy.
According to ancient Tibetan myths, pyramids of Central and South America (pictured, Tikal in Guatemala) are settled on vast networks of underground tunnels, connecting the ancient cities with the sacred kingdom they refer to as Agartha.
The Shambhala Tibetan headquarters of the “spiritual government of humanity,” may be located in the vicinity of Balkh, a former Afghan settlement known as “the mother of cities” according to the prestigious scholar on Tibet, Alexandra David-Neel. The folk traditions of Afghanistan say that after the Muslim conquest, Balkh was called Shams-i-Bala (Candle High) which seems a transformation from the Sanskrit Shambhala into Persian.
An amazing discovery in Egypt – The bones of a 3600-year-old giant palm
A team of archaeologists has found that one of the palaces in the ancient city of Avaris, in Egypt, has hundreds of human sacrifices hidden beneath the earth. Archaeologists in the past have excavated the skeletons of 16 human hands that were found in four pits.
Two of the pits, located in front of what is believed to be a throne room, hold one hand each. Two other pits, constructed at a slightly later time in outer space of the palace, contain the 14 remaining hands.
They are all right hands; there are no lefts.
“Most of the hands are quite large and some of them are very large,” Manfred Bietak, project and field director of the excavations, told LiveScience.
A severed right hand discovered in front of a Hyksos palace at Avaris (modern-day Tell el-Daba). It would have been chopped off and presented to the king (or a subordinate) in exchange for gold. This discovery is the first archaeological evidence of the practice. At the time they were buried, about 3,600 years ago, the palace was being used by King Khayan. The Hyksos were a people believed to be from northern Canaan, they controlled part of Egypt and made their capital at Avaris on the Nile Delta.
The finds, made in the Nile Delta northeast of Cairo, date back about 3,600 years to a time when the Hyksos, a people believed to be originally from northern Canaan, controlled part of Egypt and made their capital at Avaris a location known today as Tell el-Daba. At the time the hands were buried, the palace was being used by one of the Hyksos rulers, King Khayan.
The hands appear to be the first physical evidence of a practice attested to in ancient Egyptian writing and art, in which a soldier would present the cut-off right hand of an enemy in exchange for gold, Bietak explains in the most recent edition of the periodical Egyptian Archaeology.
“Our evidence is the earliest evidence and the only physical evidence at all,” Bietak said. “Each pit represents a ceremony.”
Cutting off the right hand, specifically, not only would have made counting victims easier, it would have served the symbolic purpose of taking away an enemy’s strength.
“You deprive him of his power eternally,” Bietak explained. It’s not known whose hands they were; they could have been Egyptians or people the Hyksos were fighting in the Levant. “Gold of valor”
Cutting off the right hand of an enemy was a practice undertaken by both the Hyksos and the Egyptians.
One account is written on the tomb wall of Ahmose, son of Ibana, an Egyptian fighting in a campaign against the Hyksos. Written about 80 years later than the time the 16 hands were buried, the inscription reads in part:
“Then I fought hand to hand. I brought away a hand. It was reported to the royal herald.” For his efforts, the writer was given “the gold of valor” (translation by James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume II, 1905). Later, in a campaign against the Nubians, to the south, Ahmose took three hands and was given “gold in double measure,” the inscription suggests.
Scientists are not certain who started this gruesome tradition. No records of the practice have been found in the Hyksos’ likely homeland of northern Canaan, Bietak said, so could have been an Egyptian tradition they picked up, or vice versa, or it could have originated from somewhere else.
Bietak pointed out that, while this find is the earliest evidence of this practice, the grisly treatment of prisoners in ancient Egypt was nothing new.
The Narmer Palette, an object dating to the time of the unification of ancient Egypt about 5,000 years ago, shows decapitated prisoners and a pharaoh about to smash the head of a kneeling man.
The archaeological expedition at Tell el-Daba is a joint project of the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s Cairo branch and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
A team of international researchers led by ancient DNA experts from the University of Adelaide has resolved the longstanding issue of the origins of the people who introduced farming to Europe some 8000 years ago.
A detailed genetic study of one of the first farming communities in Europe, from central Germany, reveals marked similarities with populations living in the Ancient Near East (modern-day Turkey, Iraq and other countries) rather than those from Europe.
Project leader Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, says: “This overturns current thinking, which accepts that the first European farming populations were constructed largely from existing populations of hunter-gatherers, who had either rapidly learned to farm or interbred with the invaders.”
Ancient DNA from human remains (pictured) found in Anatolia, Turkey, has revealed that the farmers who lived there 8,000 years ago were among the first to spread into Europe. The farming revolution brought about changes in human culture that led to some of the first civilisations in history emerging.
The results of the study have been published in the online peer-reviewed science journal PLoS Biology.
“We have finally resolved the question of who the first farmers in Europe were — invaders with revolutionary new ideas, rather than populations of Stone Age hunter-gatherers who already existed in the area,” says lead author Dr Wolfgang Haak, Senior Research Associate with ACAD at the University of Adelaide.
“We’ve been able to apply new, high-precision ancient DNA methods to create a detailed genetic picture of this ancient farming population, and reveal that it was radically different to the nomadic populations already present in Europe.
“We have also been able to use genetic signatures to identify a potential route from the Near East and Anatolia, where farming evolved around 11,000 years ago, via south-eastern Europe and the Carpathian Basin (today’s Hungary) into Central Europe,” Dr Haak says.
The project involved researchers from the University of Mainz and State Heritage Museum in Halle, Germany, the Russian Academy of Sciences and members of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project, of which Professor Cooper is a Principal Investigator and Dr Haak is a Senior Research Associate.
The ancient DNA used in this study comes from a complete graveyard of Early Neolithic farmers unearthed at the town of Derenburg in Saxony-Anhalt, central Germany.
Neolithic farmers spread to replace hunter-gatherer populations in Europe. Wall paintings of hunters (pictured) found in Catal Hoyuk in Anatolia, Turkey is thought to have been made in 6,000BC, just as farming was beginning to spread into Europe. The new study suggests the area was a hub for the farming revolution
“This work was only possible due to the close collaboration of archaeologists excavating the skeletons, to ensure that no modern human DNA contaminated the remains, and nicely illustrates the potential when archaeology and genetics are combined,” says Professor Kurt Werner Alt from the collaborating Institute of Anthropology in Mainz, Germany.
An ancient Egyptian mummy was wrapped in an unusual mud shell
As a result, the discovery of a remarkable “mud mummy” from ancient Egypt has shocked archaeologists, who weren’t expecting to find the deceased encased in a hardened mud shell.
The mud shell was added after the woman’s original mummification, perhaps to repair the damage inflicted by grave robbers.
The “mud carapace” is an unparalleled find; it reveals “a mortuary treatment not previously documented in the Egyptian archaeological record,” the researchers wrote in the study, published online Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.
It’s possible the “mud wrap” was used to stabilize the mummy after it was damaged, but the mud may have also been meant to emulate practices used by society’s elite, who were sometimes mummified with imported resin-based materials during a nearly 350-year period, from the late New Kingdom to the 21st Dynasty (about 1294 B.C. to 945 B.C.), the researchers said.
So, why was this individual covered with mud, rather than resin? “Mud is a more affordable material,” study lead researcher Karin Sowada, a research fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told Live Science in an email.
The mud sheath isn’t the mummy’s only oddity. The mummy, dated to about 1207 B.C., was damaged after death, and was even interred in the wrong coffin actually meant for a woman who died more recently, the researchers found.
Like many ancient Egyptian mummies, the “mud mummy” and its lidded coffin were acquired in the 1800s by a Western collector, in this case, Sir Charles Nicholson, an English-Australian politician who brought it to Australia.
Nicholson donated them to the University of Sydney in 1860, and today they reside at the university’s Chau Chak Wing Museum. But it appears that whoever sold the artefacts tricked Nicholson; the coffin is younger than the body buried in it, the researchers found.
“Local dealers likely placed an unrelated mummified body in the coffin to sell a more complete ‘set,’ a well-known practice in the local antiquities trade,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The coffin is inscribed with a woman’s name — Meruah or Meru(t)ah — and dates to about 1000 B.C., according to iconography decorating it, meaning the coffin is about 200 years younger than the mummy in it.
While the individual isn’t Meruah, anatomical clues hint that it is a female who died between the ages of 26 and 35, the researchers said.
Muddy treatment
Researchers got their first inkling that the 3,400-year-old mummy was unusual in 1999 when a CT (computed tomography) scan revealed something strange inside. To investigate, the researcher extracted a few samples of the wrappings and discovered they contained a sandy mud mixture.
When a new team of researchers re-scanned the mummy in 2017, they uncovered previously unknown details about the carapace, especially when they chemically reexamined the mud fragments.
After she died, the woman was mummified and wrapped in textiles. Then, her remains, including her left knee and lower leg, were damaged in “unknown circumstances,” possibly by grave robbers, which prompted someone to repair her mummy, likely within one to two generations of her first burial — a feat that included “rewrapping, packing and padding with textiles, and application of the mud carapace,” the researchers wrote in the study.
CT images of the mummy offered clues to the wrapping process.
Whoever repaired the mummy made a complicated earthy sandwich, placing a batter of mud, sand and straw between layers of linen wrappings.
The bottom of the mud mixture had a base coat of a white calcite-based pigment, while its top was coated with ochre, a red mineral pigment, Sowada said. “The mud was apparently applied in sheets while still damp and pliable,” she said. “The body was wrapped with linen wrappings, the carapace applied, and then further wrappings placed over it.”
Later, the mummy was damaged again, this time on the right side of the neck and head. Because this damage affects all of the layers, including the muddy carapace, it appears this damage was more recent and prompted the insertion of metal pins to stabilize the damaged areas at the time, the researchers said.
This “mud mummy” isn’t the only ancient Egyptian mummy subject to post-mortem repair; the body of King Seti I was wrapped more than once, and so were the remains of King Amenhotep III (King Tut’s grandfather), the researchers noted.
As for the woman’s mud carapace, “this is a genuinely new discovery in Egyptian mummification,” Sowada said. “This study assists in constructing a bigger — and a more nuanced — picture of how the ancient Egyptians treated and prepared their dead.”
‘Find of the century’: a medieval hoard of treasures unearthed in Cambridge
A mediaeval graveyard with an excess of unidentified graves being uncovered underneath student accommodation in Cambridge University is listed as being one of the most exciting discoveries of Anglo-Saxon archaeology since the 19th century.
The human remains found at the Cambridge site are remarkably well preserved in the alkaline soil.
After demolishing a group of 1930s buildings that had recently housed graduates and employees in the west of the city, King’s College discovered the “extensive” cemetery, containing more than 60 graves, to make way for more modern halls.
Many objects (around 200 items) have been found in the graves, including bronze brooches, bead necklaces, knives, small blades, pottery and glass bottles.
A late Roman glass flask found at the site.
Most date from the early Anglo-Saxon period from 400 to 650, although evidence of iron-age structures and Roman earthworks has also been found. Caroline Goodson, who teaches early medieval history at King’s College, said the human remains they found were remarkably “well-preserved.”
“The alkaline soil, which is typical around here, hasn’t decomposed the bones,” she said.
This is significant because it would enable archaeologists to apply modern scientific techniques to reveal the diet and DNA of the dead, permitting analysis of migration and family relationships.
Goodson said excavators had been “surprised” to find so many graves and such an extensive early medieval cemetery surrounded by Roman ditches and so close to the remains of Roman Cambridge.
According to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, which was written in the eighth century, Cambridge was abandoned — like many other Roman towns — when the Romans withdrew their military forces from England during the fifth century.
“We already know that Cambridge wasn’t fully abandoned. But what we’re seeing now is a greater and clearer picture of life in the post-Roman settlements,” she said.
Goodson speculated that people living in Cambridgeshire were a mix of descendants from earlier Roman populations and recent migrants to Britain from the continent, living in a post-imperial world.
“They are no longer living as the Romans did, they’re eating differently, dressing differently and finding different ways of exploiting the land. They are changing the way they are living during a period of considerable fluidity,” Goodson said.
Some of the finds throw up questions about the emotional connections people living at the time of the burials might have felt toward the Romans who lived in Cambridge before them.
In one grave, archaeologists found a body buried with what appears to be a late Roman piece of glass shaped like a small barrel for storing wine.
“It looks like a classic Roman object being reused in a post-Roman context, as grave goods,” Goodson said.
Another grave looks like a typical late Roman burial from the fifth century, suggesting there might have been continuity of use of the burial ground from the Roman period onward.
Archaeologists have so far not found “strong evidence” that people living in the sixth century were still choosing to bury their dead near late Roman graves, but few graveyards of this size have ever been scientifically excavated using modern methods and technologies, such as advanced radiocarbon dating techniques and isotopic analysis.
The site of the dig, in the west of the city.
“It would be great to say very clearly — and we’re going to need an ample suite of carbon-14 dates to do this — that we’ve got people using this site from the fifth until the seventh century,” Goodson said. “We can see that the burial of the dead and the treatment of their bodies is particularly significant to living in a way that is different from elsewhere in the post-Roman world.”
That points to a different world view and a different “cosmology”: “It’s a new form of commemoration,” she said.
She hoped to find out whether anyone in the cemetery died of the Justinianic Plague, a pandemic that raged across Europe in the 540s.
