Never before seen strange 5,000-year-old clay figurine with a tattooed face and bone mask

Never before seen strange 5,000-year-old clay figurine with a tattooed face and bone mask

In Russia, a macabre was found it is a 5000-year-old mass grave containing the bodies of five decapitated individuals.  Archaeologists suspect the ancient Odinov culture in Siberia were head cultists.

Professor Vyacheslav Molodin said that the graveyard of Ust-Tartas 2 in the city of Novosibirsk comprises three decapitated adults and two teenagers. It is assumed that their heads were cut after death – and then kept for worship.

‘Odinov people definitely had a head or skull cult,’ said the archaeologist.

‘It is a characteristic feature of this culture that they had graves with cut off heads. They were perhaps put into a sanctuary, or buried separately in a different way.’

In another grave on the same site, an astonishing figurine has been found on the shoulder of an ancient woman who was laid to rest with her head on a man’s abdomen.

The skeletons of the ancient presumed lovers were cocooned together under a birch bark blanket for five millennia, but in this case, their heads were not severed.

The man lay on his back, she on her front, facing him in a timeless embrace. Perched on the female’s shoulder was a palm-sized clay figurine with a tattooed face.

Bronze Age statuette with a tattooed face was found on the shoulder of the buried ancient woman. It features a deep recess down its centre
Dr Molodin called the Bronze Age figurine discovery the ‘most astonishing find’ of the summer archaeological season this year
‘Interestingly, our anthropologists and genetics found that the Odino people were Mongoloids, yet the face of the figurine had clear Caucasian features. We don’t see the gender of the figurine, which is unusual, and we can’t say if it was dressed’, said Vyacheslav Molodin. Pictures: Novosibirsk Institute of Archeology and Ethnography

It has a mask made of bone – horse vertebrae – decorated with what appears to be an image of a bear’s muzzle, say scientists. Inside the grave, it had been placed on its front and had its head broken off.

It was then turned upside down so that it ‘looked up’ towards its owner in a bizarre ritual – something ‘yet unseen’ by Novosibirsk archaeologists. 

One side of the middle of the statuette also has a long narrow hole, which had a bronze plate and also some organic substance inside it.  Chemical tests are needed to establish more about what was placed inside that opening. 

Dr Molodin said the discovery was unique.

‘We’ve never come across anything like this, despite our extensive knowledge of the Odinov culture’s burial rites,’ he said to the Siberian Times. 

‘The woman must have been an unusual person to have such a figurine “escorting” her to the afterlife.’

Dr Molodin, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), called the Bronze Age figurine discovery the ‘most astonishing find’ of the summer archaeological season.

While the Odinov cattle-breeding people were Mongoloids, the face of the figurine ‘has obviously Caucasian features’ with ‘big eyes and a snub nose’, he said.

This was a tiered grave that had two more people buried beneath the loving couple that were facing each other.

It’s possible the palm-sized figurine was hoped to escort the ‘unusual’ woman to the afterlife. It had its head broken off so it ‘looked up’ at its owner in a bizarre ritual

In a Desert in China, a Trove of 4,000-Year-Old Mummies

In a Desert in China, a Trove of 4,000-Year-Old Mummies

Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary graveyard in the midst of the terrifying desert north of Tibet. Its people died almost 4,000 years ago, and their remains were well preserved by dry air.

The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead of a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.

The long-vanished people have no name because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life, and even the language they spoke.

Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.

The mummy of an infant was one of about 200 corpses with European features that were excavated from the cemetery.

In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han.

The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.

The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA.

Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author.

All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.

A 3,800-year-old mummy, the Beauty of Xiaohe, found at the Small River Cemetery.

The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin.

As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.

At the foot of each pole, there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath – barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.

Within each boat, coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks, and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine.

In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols.

Many of the women buried there wore string undergarments like the one in this drawing.

The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed, at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance of the community attached to fertility. Nowadays those who suffer from infertility can have access to the right medications to help them with their issues, as well as medications like for erectile dysfunction, whereas back then there were more natural ways to help procreation happen.

Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status if it is anything to brag about,” he said.

Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols were “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had a particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.

Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said.

Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe. There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off-site.

Wang Da-Gang

The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.

The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for a hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).

The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D.

Well Preserved 2,000 Year Old Settlement Found Hidden Under Dense Forest In Northern Poland

Well Preserved 2,000 Year Old Settlement Found Hidden Under Dense Forest In Northern Poland

Archeologists found in almost 2,000 years an entirely untouched old village, the only village of its kind in Europe. The magnificent discovery in northern Poland  revealed farming land complete with boundary strips, homesteads, buildings, and even roads.

Well Preserved 2,000 Year Old Settlement Found Hidden Under Dense Forest In Northern Poland
The archeologists from Toruń made the stunning discovery in northern Poland using Aerial Laser Scanning which revealed an entire estate hidden in the heavily forested region

Hidden in dense forests in the Bory Tucholskie region, the area is one of the least explored by archeologists.

Archeologist Mateusz Sosnowski from the NCU (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Institute of Archeology in Toruń told PAP: “When it comes to research, it was virgin territory.

The discovery revealed farming land complete with boundary strips, homesteads, buildings, and even roads.

“It was a great surprise to discover they’re not only individual elements of a former settlement, but also its surroundings: fields surrounding the hamlet, traces of single homesteads and even tracts connecting them probable with other settlements.”

The remains come from the first centuries of the modern era, Sosnowski and fellow researchers who made the discovery, Jerzy Czerniec, believe.

Archeologist Mateusz Sosnowski from the NCU (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Institute of Archeology in Toruń said:  “When it comes to research, it was virgin territory. We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It’s unique!” Mateusz Sosnowski

Sosnowski explained that the discovery is unique because archeologists usually only discover individual elements of settlements or other constructions leftover from the activities of ancient people.

Such discoveries usually occur during the building of houses or roads and the digs are rescue efforts. As a result, research is limited to a small area.

In such cases, there is also not usually an opportunity to search more widely to see whether there are other remains or interesting artefacts in the vicinity.

Sosnowski explained: “Here we have an entirely different situation.

“We have tracked down unknown traces of an ancient Bory Tucholskie settlement. It’s not a matter of one house or a fragment of a settlement.

“We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It’s unique!”

The remains come from the first century of the modern era, researchers believe.

The archeologists discovered the find using Aerial Laser Scanning (ALS), a tool ever more frequently used by researchers.

As part of a project aimed at creating anti-flood defences among other things, the whole of Poland was covered. ALS enables a very thorough inspection of territory, even if it is overgrown with forest and the differences in height are invisible to the naked eye, as was the case in Bory Tucholskie.

The settlement together with its surrounding fields covers an area of over 170 hectares and the fields are surprisingly regular.

Sosnowski said: “Their shape brings to mind the three-field system of farming, known in Poland only from the middle ages. Was it already in use several hundred years earlier? we hope our research will answer that question.”

Scientist Unearths a Colony of Mummified Penguins in Antarctica

Scientist Unearths a Colony of Mummified Penguins in Antarctica

Steven Emslie was finishing a season in January 2016 of researching Penguin colonies near the Antarctica-based Italian station Zucchelli. With the austral Summer quickly coming to a close and all planned work completed, Dr. Emslie, an ornithologist at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, did what any good scientist would do with a few extra days in the Antarctic: He went exploring.

On a rocky cape along the Scott Coast, he heard talk of penguin guano, but he knew no active colonies there. Curious, he arranged and searched around for a helicopter flight to the area and had a look around.

“Because over a hundred years ago Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton had visited the region and had not written about any penguins on this particular site, I did not expect to see anything because they were writing about the penguins often when they saw them,” he said.

And yet, Dr. Emslie immediately knew he had stumbled upon something intriguing when he arrived. “There were pebbles everywhere,” he recalled.

While pebbles are an everyday find on other continents, it is rare to spot them in abundance on dry land in Antarctica. A key exception is found in Adélie penguin colonies, as the birds collect the small stones from the beaches to build their nests.

The pebbles had been gathered together into nests and recently been dispersed a bit by the weather. Then Dr. Emslie saw the guano. There was a lot of dried penguin waste creating iconic white stains on the nearby rocks. Then he found the penguin corpses.

Due to the warming climate, the ice preserving the penguin corpses melted away and revealed the bodies of penguins from an ancient colony.

With feathers still intact and flesh having barely decayed, Dr. Emslie was stunned.

“I remember thinking, wow, a penguin colony that even Shackleton didn’t know about,” he said.

The shock gave way to further curiosity and led him to wonder what could possibly have befallen the colony. Fascinated, he collected some remains and took them back for carbon-dating analysis to work out when the birds had died.

With dates of death that ranged from 800 to 5,000 years ago, Dr. Emslie immediately realized that the guano, feathers, bones, and pebbles had all been locked in place under layers of ice for centuries and that the “freshly dead” penguins were in fact recently defrosted mummies that had been swallowed by advancing snowfields long ago.

Scott and Shackleton could be forgiven for not spotting this colony as it had been entirely hidden from view when the explorers had been in the region.

A mummified Adélie penguin chick, discovered under melted ice in Antarctica.

The find paints a picture of a site that, after experiencing periodic Adélie penguin occupation over thousands of years, saw that occupation come to an abrupt end approximately 800 years ago.

Dr. Emslie speculates in the journal Geology. where he reported his findings in mid-September, that cooling temperatures drove a type of sea ice to form along the coast that persisted well into summer months. Known as “fast ice” because it “fastens” to the coastline, this sea ice makes it very difficult for penguins to gain access to beaches and prevents them from colonizing places where it occurs.

He said he thought the ice forced the colony to be abandoned but also suggested that warming temperatures might change things in the years ahead.

With Antarctic ice melting and sea levels rising, established penguin colonies are being forced to disperse to new places. Dr. Emslie suggests that the penguins could then return to sites like this one.

“They need pebbles for their nests, so they are going to find all the pebbles that are already on the land at this site very attractive,” he said. “I would not be surprised to see them make this place their home again in the near future.”

Other penguin experts agree.

“We always thought Adélie penguins carried a strong impulse to return to the nesting sites they were born at year after year but, as several catastrophic ice collapses have shown us recently, they are actually pretty adaptable,” said David Ainley, a penguin ecologist at H.T. Harvey & Associates, an ecological consulting firm.

“We’ve seen that Adélies will roam the coast in small flocks and, if they find a promising-looking site like this one, they will make it their home,” he said.

Archaeologist Discovered Viking Ship Found Under the Ground in Norway

Archaeologist Discovered Viking Ship Found Under the Ground in Norway

Archaeologists in Norway using ground-penetrating radar have detected one of the largest Viking ship graves ever found. Archaeologists have found the outlines of a Viking ship buried not far from the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

The 65-foot long ship was covered over more than 1,000 years ago to serve as the final resting place of a prominent Viking king or queen. That makes it one of the largest Viking ship graves ever discovered.

An image generated by ground-penetrating radar reveals the outlines of a Viking ship within a burial mound.  Experts say intact Viking ship graves of this size are vanishingly uncommon. “I think we could talk about a hundred-year find,” says archaeologist Jan Bill, curator of Viking ships at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. “It’s quite spectacular from an archaeology perspective.”

An image generated by ground-penetrating radar reveals the outlines of a Viking ship within a burial mound.

The site where the ship grave was discovered is well-known. A burial mound 30 feet tall looms over the site, serving as a local landmark visible from the expressway just north of the Swedish border.

But archaeologists thought any archaeological remains in the nearby fields must have been destroyed by farmers’ plows in the late nineteenth century.

Then, this spring, officials from the surrounding county of Ostfold asked experts from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Research to survey the fields using a large ground-penetrating radar array.

The Viking ship was discovered by georadar at Jellestad next to the monumental Jell Mound in Ostfold.

They were able to scan the soil underneath almost 10 acres of farmland around the mound. Underneath, they found proof of 10 large graves and traces of a ship’s hull, hidden just 20 inches beneath the surface.

The ship burial forms a part of a larger mound cemetery and settlement site from the Iron Age next to the Jell Mound

Knut Paasche, head of the archaeology department at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Research and executive of the recent work at the site, estimates the ship was at least 65 feet long.

It appears to be well preserved, with clear outlines of the keel and the first few strakes, or lines of planking, visible in the radar scans. The ship would have been dragged onshore from the nearby Oslo fjord. At some point during the Viking Age, it was the final resting place of someone powerful.

“Ships like this functioned as a coffin,” says Paasche. “There was one king or queen or local chieftain on board.”

Whoever was buried in the ship was not alone. There are traces of at least 8 other burial mounds in the field, some almost 90 feet across. Three large longhouses—one 150 feet long—are also visible underneath the site’s soil, together with a half dozen smaller structures.

Archaeologists hope future unearthings will help date the mounds and the longhouses, which may have been built at different times. “We can not be sure the houses have the same age as the ship,” Paasche says.

Paasche plans to return to the site next spring to lead more sophisticated scans, including surveying the site with a magnetometer and perhaps digging test trenches to see what condition the ship’s remains are in.

If there is wood from the ship’s hull preserved beneath the ground, it could be used to date the find more decisively.

The chances of finding a king’s fortune are slim. Because they were so prominent in the landscape, many Viking Age burials were robbed centuries ago, long before they were leveled by Nineteenth-century farmers.

But “it would be very exciting to see if the burial is still intact,” says Bill. “If it is, it could be holding some very interesting finds.”

Giant 10-Million-Year-Old Fossil Tree in Peru Reveals Surprises About Ancient Past

Giant 10-Million-Year-Old Fossil Tree in Peru Reveals Surprises About Ancient Past

A lot has changed over those 10 million years to turn the area from a humid and diverse ecosystem into the more arid and sparse state that it’s in today – not least a shift in elevation from around 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) to 4,000 meters (13,124 feet).

It’s not entirely clear how ongoing climate change is going to affect the Central Andean Plateau and the neighbouring Amazon Basin in the coming years.

In Peru, the Central Andes (or Altiplano) researchers have found a giant tree, a fossil hidden in the plains, and the 10 million years of history that it reveals don’t quite match up with what we thought we know about the ancient climate.

Back when this tree died, a little more than halfway through the Neogene period, the South American climate was much more humid than had previously been thought, based on what this tree fossil reveals.

The researchers say it shows the importance of using plant fossils to work out how our planet’s climate has taken sharp turns in the past – and from that, how it might change again in the future.

“This tree and the hundreds of fossil wood, leaf, and pollen samples we collected on the expedition, reveal that when these plants were alive the ecosystem was more humid – even more humid than climate models of the past predicted,” says palaeobotanist Camila Martinez from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.

“There is probably no comparable modern ecosystem because temperatures were higher when these fossils were deposited 10 million years ago.”

A lot has changed over those 10 million years to turn the area from a humid and diverse ecosystem into the more arid and sparse state that it’s in today – not least a shift in elevation from around 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) to 4,000 metres (13,124 feet).

Recovered plant fossils that are a mere 5 million years old suggest the majority of the shift had already taken place by then. They show evidence of grasses, ferns, herbs, and shrubs, suggesting a puna-like ecosystem similar to today’s – rather than one that could have supported the growth of huge trees.

In the scale of Earth’s history, that’s a quick shift in a short space of time, caused by movements in the Earth’s lithosphere under South America over many millions of years.

“The fossil record in the region tells us two things: both the altitude and the vegetation changed dramatically over a relatively short period of time, supporting a hypothesis that suggests the tectonic uplift of this region occurred in rapid pulses,” says STRI palaeobotanist Carlos Jaramillo.

It’s not entirely clear how ongoing climate change is going to affect the Central Andean Plateau and the neighbouring Amazon Basin in the coming years, because of complicated feedback loops that might be triggered. But the new findings suggest that in the ancient past, at least, climate and altitude change occurred alongside one another.

The idea that the tectonic uplift helped to cause less rain and drying out of the region is almost the opposite of the conclusions that several other studies have come to.

In some ways, though, a lack of agreement between studies can be as useful as perfect harmony – the gaps show where experts might be getting their calculations wrong, and there are a lot of calculations to make to peer back through 10 million years of history.

“By the end of this century, changes in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will again approximate the conditions 10 million years ago,” says Martinez.

“Understanding the discrepancies between climate models and data based on the fossil record help us to elucidate the driving forces controlling the current climate of the Altiplano, and, ultimately, the climate across the South American continent.”

Archaeologists Discover Paintings of Ancient Egypt in a 2,000 Year Old Roman Villa in Pompeii

Archaeologists Discover Paintings of Ancient Egypt in a 2,000 Year Old Roman Villa in Pompeii

In Pompeji, a garden in a large ancient villa that housed incredible pictures of the River Nile, secrets could be found of the impact of ancient Egypt on the early Roman Empire.

Comprehensive sketches in the Casa dell’Efebo, one of the largest houses in the city before it was mostly destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, show a series of Nilotic murals with crocodiles, hippopotamuses, lotuses, and short-statured men fighting with wild beasts.

Caitlin Barrett from the Department of Classics at Cornell University said the drawings give the house a more cosmopolitan feel and outline how the Romans took a strong interest in ancient Egyptian culture such as religion.

Archaeologists Discover Paintings of Ancient Egypt in a 2,000 Year Old Villa in Pompeii
Representations of sexual activity, music and alcohol consumption are often central to these paintings
Egyptian fauna and flora, including crocodiles, hippopotamuses and lotuses are a common theme of the work

Barrett told the IBTUK: ‘The paintings from the Casa dell’ Efebo were created after Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire, but several generations after Augustus’ initial conquest of Egypt.

‘Some researchers have turned to explanations emphasizing religion: maybe paintings of Egyptian landscapes have to do with an interest in Egyptian gods. 

‘Others have interpreted these paintings as political statements: maybe this is about celebrating the conquest of Egypt. I suggest that instead of trying to apply a one-size-fits-all explanation, we should look at the context and individual choices.’

Barrett said: ‘Maybe paintings of Egyptian landscapes have to do with an interest in Egyptian gods’
Archaeologists also say the drawings could be about celebrating the conquest of Egypt
Barrett also argue the paintings could underline how the Romans interacted with the outside world, a form of globalization

While representations of sexual activity, music, and alcohol consumption are often central to these paintings. 

The research was compiled in the American Journal of Archaeology and also asserts that artifacts found around the garden of the house and the structure’s elaborate architecture such as water installations mimics the diverse nature of the Roman Empire. 

Barrett continued:  ‘In this particular assemblage, rather than solely trying to make some kind of statement about Isiac rituals or Roman politics, the owner of this house seems to be asserting a cosmopolitan identity as a citizen of the Empire. 

‘In Pompeian houses at this time, when people are representing faraway lands in domestic art, they are also trying to figure out what it means to them to be participants in the Roman Empire.’

The study says the paintings of the Nile in the Pompeian house provided the inhabitants with an opportunity to engage with shifting local and imperial Roman identities and to recreate a microcosm of the world they lived in.

‘People sometimes imagine phenomena like globalization to be creations of the modern world. In fact, if you look at the Roman Empire there are lots of parallels for some of the cross-cultural interactions that are also very much part of our own contemporary world’, the researcher concluded.  

Some of the pictures also show short-statured men fighting with wild beasts
Barrett said: ‘I suggest that instead of trying to apply a one-size-fits-all explanation, we should look at context and individual choices’

Scythian Grave Unearthed in Southern Siberia

Scythian Grave Unearthed in Southern Siberia

A 2,500-year-old grave has been discovered in Siberia by archaeologists, with the remains of four people of ancient Tagar culture — two guerrillas including two warriors, a male and female  — and a stash of their metal weaponry.

Scythian Grave Unearthed in Southern Siberia
A man, two women and an infant were buried in this grave about 2,500 years ago in what is now Siberia.

The early Iron Age burial contained the skeletal remains of a Tagarian man, woman, infant, and older woman, as well as a slew of weapons and artifacts, including bronze daggers, knives, axes, bronze mirrors, and a miniature comb made from an animal horn, according to the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 

The Tagar culture, a part of the Scythian civilization (nomadic warriors who lived in what is now southern Siberia), often buried its dead with miniature versions of real-life objects, likely to symbolize possessions they thought were needed in the afterlife. In this case, however, the deceased was laid to rest with full-size objects, the archaeologists said. 

It’s not yet clear how these individuals died, but perhaps an illness caused their deaths, the archaeologists said.

A team from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography found the burial in the southern part of Khakassia, a region in Siberia, ahead of construction work on a railroad.

The finding is remarkable, given that grave robbers have looted most known Tagarian graves, Yuri Vitalievich Teterin, head of the excavation, said in a statement. (Of note, this culture is different than the fictional “Targaryen” dynasty from the TV drama “Game of Thrones.”)

The remains of the man and woman, who likely died in their 30s or 40s, were laid down on their backs, with large ceramic vessels next to each of them. The man also had two sets of weapons (two bronze daggers and two axes), and the woman had one set, according to the statement.

The woman’s weapons, including a long-handled instrument, perhaps a hatchet or battle ax, were an unusual find; the Tagarians often buried their women with weapons, but those were usually long-range weapons, such as arrowheads, noted Oleg Andreevich Mitko, a leader of the excavation and head of archaeology at Novosibirsk State University in Russia. 

Some of metal grave goods found in the group burial.

The infant’s remains were in bad shape, the archaeologists found.

An aerial view of the burial mount at the foot of Mount Aar-tag.

“The remains of a newborn baby, no more than a month old, were also found in the burial, but fragments of its skeleton were scattered throughout the grave, possibly as a result of the activity of rodents,” Olga Batanina, an anthropologist at the Paleodata laboratory of natural scientific methods in archeology, said in the statement. 

At the man and woman’s feet, lay the remains of an older woman of about 60 years of age; her body was positioned on her right side, with her knees bent. Next to her, archaeologists found a small ceramic vessel and a comb with broken teeth. 

It’s unclear how these people were related to one another, but a forthcoming DNA analysis may reveal whether they had family ties. 

The Tagar culture lasted for about 500 years, from about the eighth to the third centuries B.C.; its people were spread across the Minusinsk Basin, a landscape that is a mix of the steppe, forest-steppe, and foothills, according to the statement. 

The archaeologists have a busy schedule ahead of them. Survey work in 2019 revealed more than 10 archaeological sites, nine of which were directly in the railroad’s development zone. This excavation is just one of those sites. 

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