Fragments of Crocodile Skulls Found in Ancient Egyptian Tombs
Polish archaeologists working in the North Asasif necropolis (West Thebes) near the Temple of Hatshepsut discovered 9 crocodile heads deposited in two elite tombs.
“This is a unique discovery, because until now no graves containing crocodiles were known in Egypt. Mummies of these dangerous reptiles have so far been discovered in temples,” Dr. Patryk Chudzik, head of the research project from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the University of Warsaw told PAP.
The finds come from two tombs: of Cheti, one of the most important officials during the reign of pharaoh Mentuhotep II (reign: 2055-2002 BC), and in another anonymous tomb, probably of a vizier at the court of the same ruler.
Egyptologists compare the position to today’s prime minister. The tombs are located in the North Asasif necropolis near the Temple of Hatshepsut. They have been the target of research by Polish archaeologists since 2013.
The archaeologist emphasised that the crocodile heads discovered by his team had not been mummified, only wrapped in a fabric. They had not been subjected to any additional treatment.
He said: “Our discoveries show that the remains of crocodiles were part of funerary equipment, and therefore had a magical meaning.”
He added that they were supposed to assist the deceased on his journey in the afterlife.
Crocodiles lived in Egypt until around the middle of the 20th century, when the Great Aswan Dam was built in the south of the country. In ancient Egypt they were worshipped and feared, because they liked to bask on the sandy banks of the Nile. They also preyed on victims in the Nile canals.
The ancient Egyptian deity Sobek was depicted as a crocodile or a man with a crocodile head. He gained a high rank in the pantheon thanks to Egyptian syncretism. He was sometimes called Sobek-Ra, which made him a solar deity. Ra was one of the most important Egyptian gods.
Referring to the ancient spells recorded in the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts – a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary spells from the times of the Old and Middle Kingdom, Dr. Chudzik said: “The soul of the deceased whose tomb contained crocodile heads was protected by Sobek and the fusion form Sobek-Ra. It could take the form of a god, and thus take over his powers, which also protected her from the dangers of the afterlife.”
Chudzik’s team found crocodile skulls not in tombs, but in heaps left by their first explorer, Herbert Winlock from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the US, who worked there 100 years ago.
Researchers at the time paid little attention to animal remains. They focused on acquiring artefacts they considered valuable: jewellery, sculptures and everyday objects. The rest, like in this case, would end up on a heap.
According to Dr. Chudzik, the practice of placing crocodile heads in ancient Egyptian tombs certainly was no exception. Earlier researchers simply got rid of such finds, unattractive from the antiquarian point of view.
Chudzik believes that crocodile heads were placed in at least some of the richest tombs, but it was not a rule. This is confirmed by the latest discoveries in the North Asasif necropolis, where more remains of these Nile reptiles were found in a third tomb.
The skulls from the tombs studied by Polish archaeologists belonged to young and adult individuals. Their average length was from 2 to 3-4 m. Only fragments of skulls and mandibles have survived so experts are unable to say how the decapitation was done.
Lasers reveal sites used as the Americas’ oldest known star calendars
This laser-mapped, eastward-looking view of the Maya site Aguada Fénix includes a rectangular ceremonial center (top center) oriented toward sunrise at a particular time of year.
Olmec and Maya people living along Mexico’s Gulf Coast as early as 3,100 years ago built star-aligned ceremonial centers to track important days of a 260-day calendar, a new study finds.
The oldest written evidence of this calendar, found on painted plaster mural fragments from a Maya site in Guatemala, dates to between 300 and 200 B.C., nearly a millennium later (SN: 4/13/22). But researchers have long suspected that a 260-day calendar developed hundreds of years earlier among Gulf Coast Olmec groups.
Now, an airborne laser-mapping technique called light detection and ranging, or lidar, has revealed astronomical orientations of 415 ceremonial complexes dating to between about 1100 B.C. and A.D. 250, say archaeologist Ivan Šprajc and colleagues.
Most ritual centers were aligned on an east-to-west axis, corresponding to sunrises or other celestial events on specific days of a 260-day year, the scientists report January 6 in Science Advances.
The finding points to the earliest evidence in the Americas of a formal calendar system that combined astronomical knowledge with earthly constructions. This system used celestial events to identify important dates during a 260-day portion of a full year.
“The 260-day cycle materialized in Mesoamerica’s earliest known monumental complexes [and was used] for scheduling seasonal, subsistence-related ceremonies,” says Šprajc, of the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana. “We cannot be certain exactly when and where it was invented.”
Some of the oldest ceremonial centers identified by lidar clearly belong to the Olmec culture, but others are hard to classify, says archaeologist Stephen Houston of Brown University in Providence, R.I., who did not participate in the new study.
Olmec society dates from around 3,500 to 2,400 years ago. Links between the Olmec and later Maya culture, known best for Classic-era cities and kingdoms that flourished between roughly 1,750 and 1,100 years ago, are unclear. But Classic Maya inscriptions and documents also reference the 260-day calendar.
Mobile groups in Mesoamerica, an ancient cultural region that extended from central Mexico to Central America, may have scheduled large, seasonal gatherings using the 260-day calendar long before it gained favor among Classic Maya kings, Šprajc and colleagues suggest.
The same calendar may also have marked days of important agricultural activities or rituals as maize cultivation spread in Mesoamerica starting around 3,000 years ago, they add. Some Maya communities still use a 260-day calendar to organize maize cultivation and schedule agricultural rituals.
The most common architectural alignment detected in the new study corresponded to the position of sunrises on February 11 and October 29 when complexes were in use, separated by 260 days. These complexes faced east toward a point on the horizon where the sun rose on those two days.
Another frequent orientation matched sunrises separated by 130 days, or half of the 260-day count.
A minority of ceremonial complexes were aligned with dates of solstices (longest and shortest days of the year), quarter days (the midpoint of each half of the year) or lunar cycles in the 260-day year. Other centers tracked the position of Venus, a star associated with the rainy season and maize farming.
Sunrises or sunsets recorded at ceremonial centers were typically separated by multiples of 13 or 20 days. Aside from representing basic mathematical units of a 260-day year, the numbers 13 and 20 have long been associated with various gods and sacred concepts among Maya people and other Mesoamerican groups, Šprajc says.
Future excavations at lidar-detected ceremonial complexes can investigate whether ancient groups formally dedicated certain structures to specific days in the 260-day year, Houston says.
2,000 years of genetic history in Scandinavia elucidates Viking age to modern day
Underwater Kronan excavations.
A new study published in the journal Cell on January 5 captures a genetic history across Scandinavia over 2,000 years, from the Iron Age to the present day.
This look back at Scandinavian history is based on an analysis of 48 new and 249 published ancient human genomes representing multiple iconic archaeological sites together with genetic data from more than 16,500 people living in Scandinavia today.
Among other intriguing findings, the new study led by Stockholm University and deCODE genetics (Reykjavik) offers insight into migration patterns and gene flow during the Viking age (750–1050 CE). It also shows that ancestries that were introduced into the area during the Viking period later declined for reasons that aren’t clear.
“Although still evident in modern Scandinavians, levels of non-local ancestry in some regions are lower than those observed in ancient individuals from the Viking to Medieval periods,” said Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela of Stockholm University.
“This suggests that ancient individuals with non-Scandinavian ancestry contributed proportionately less to the current gene pool in Scandinavia than expected based on the patterns observed in the archaeological record.”
“Different processes brought people from different areas to Scandinavia [at different times],” added Anders Götherström, Stockholm University.
The researchers hadn’t originally planned to piece together Scandinavian history over time and space. Rather, they were working on three separate studies focused on different archaeological sites.
Sandby borg archaeological excavations.
“When we were analyzing the genetic affinities of the individuals from different archaeological sites such as the Vendel period boat burials, Viking period chamber burials, and well-known archaeological sites like the Migration period Sandby borg ringfort, known for the massacre that occurred there [in] 500 CE, and individuals from the 17th-century royal Swedish warship Kronan, we start to see differences in the levels and origin of non-local ancestry across the different regions and periods of Scandinavia,” Rodríguez-Varela explained.
“Initially, we were working with three different studies,” Götherström said. “One on Sandby borg, one on the boat burials, and one on the man-of-war Kronan. At some point it made more sense to unite them to one study on the Scandinavian demography during the latest 2,000 years.”
The goal was to document how past migrations have affected the Scandinavian gene pool across time and space to better understand the current Scandinavian genetic structure.
As reported in the new study, the researchers found regional variation in the timing and magnitude of gene flow from three sources: the eastern Baltic, the British Irish Isles, and southern Europe.
British Irish ancestry was widespread in Scandinavia from the Viking period, whereas eastern Baltic ancestry is more localized to Gotland and central Sweden.
In some regions, a drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that ancient immigrants contributed proportionately less to the modern Scandinavian gene pool than indicated by the ancestry of genomes from the Viking and Medieval periods.
Finally, the data show that a north-south genetic cline that characterizes modern Scandinavians is mainly due to differential levels of Uralic ancestry. It also shows that this cline existed in the Viking Age and possibly even earlier.
Underwater Kronan excavations.
Götherström suggests that what the data reveal about the nature of the Viking period is perhaps most intriguing. The migration from the west impacted all of Scandinavia, and the migration from the east was sex biased, with movement primarily of female people into the region.
As the researchers write, the findings overall “indicate a major increase [in gene flow] during the Viking period and a potential bias toward females in the introduction of eastern Baltic and, to a lesser extent, British-Irish ancestries.
“Gene flow from the British-Irish Isles during this period seems to have had a lasting impact on the gene pool in most parts of Scandinavia,” they continued. “This is perhaps not surprising given the extent of Norse activities in the British-Irish Isles, starting in the 8th century with recurrent raids and culminating in the 11th century North Sea Empire, the personal union that united the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and England.
The circumstances and fate of people of British-Irish ancestry who arrived in Scandinavia at this time are likely to have been variable, ranging from the forced migration of slaves to the voluntary immigration of more high-ranking individuals such as Christian missionaries and monks.”
Overall, the findings show that the Viking period in Scandinavia was a very dynamic time, they say, with people moving around and doing many different things. In future work, they hope to add additional genetic data in hopes of learning more about how the ancestries that arrived during the Viking period were later diluted. They’d also like to pinpoint when the north-south cline was shaped based on study of larger ancient datasets from the north.
“We need more pre-Viking individuals form north Scandinavia to investigate when the Uralic ancestry enter in this region,” Rodríguez-Varela said. “Also, individuals from 1000 BCE to 0 are very scarce, [and] retrieving DNA from Scandinavian individuals with these chronologies will be important to understand the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in this part of the world. Finally, more individuals from the Medieval period until the present will help us to understand when and why we observe a reduction in the levels of non-local ancestry in some current regions of Scandinavia.”
“There is so much fascinating information about our prehistory to be explored in ancient genomes,” Götherström said.
Archaeologists have made a detailed three-dimensional model of the surviving timbers of the hull using laser scans and digital photography.
Much of the wooden hull of a rare Elizabethan-era ship has been found in a flooded quarry in southeast England, hundreds of yards from the nearest coast.
Few vessels from this time have survived, so an analysis of the find may shed new light on a key period in seafaring, when the country rapidly expanded its trading links throughout Europe through its control of the English Channel.
“To find a late-16th-century ship preserved in the sediment of a quarry was an unexpected but very welcome find indeed,” said Andrea Hamel, a marine archaeologist for Wessex Archaeology, which investigated the discovery on behalf of Historic England, a government agency dedicated to historical preservation.
“The ship has the potential to tell us so much about a period where we have little surviving evidence of shipbuilding, but yet was such a great period of change in ship construction and seafaring,” she said in a statement from Wessex Archaeology.
The remains of the ship were found in April in a flooded quarry being dredged for gravel on the Dungeness headland in Kent, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of London.
Workers from the quarry firm CEMEX reported the discovery to local government officials, who then contacted Historic England to arrange specialist support and emergency funding to recover the remains, according to the statement.
Analysis shows that the ship was built from trees felled in the late 16th century, a transitional time for shipbuilding and seagoing trade.
Moving coastline
The quarry site now lies about 1,000 feet (300 meters) from the nearest coast, but archaeologists think that the site formed part of the coastline in the 16th century and that the ship may have been abandoned there after it was wrecked on the rocky headland or discarded after it was no longer seaworthy.
The vessel has not been identified, but dendrochronological analysis of more than 100 timbers from the hull — based on the patterns of tree growth rings — show it was built from trees of English oak (Quercus robur) felled between 1558 and 1580.
The ship was built in the “carvel” style of flush planks nailed to an internal frame, which made stronger but heavier ships than those built in the traditional “clinker” style of overlapping planks.
According to the Wessex Archaeology researchers, that date estimate places the ship during a transitional period in shipbuilding in northern Europe, when the traditional “clinker” construction of overlapping hull planks was replaced by the stronger but heavier “carvel” construction developed in the Mediterranean, which used flush hull planks nailed to an internal frame.
The remains of the ship found at Dungeness had this newer carvel type of construction, and its introduction led to much heavier ships than had been built before, including those that would explore the Atlantic coastline of the New World in later decades, the researchers said.
The hull timbers were found in April in a flooded quarry being dredged for gravel. The quarry is now half a mile from the sea, but it is thought to have been on the coast 400 years ago.
When the archaeological analysis is complete, the timbers will be reburied in the flooded quarry so that they will be protected by a layer of silt.
Rare find
Wood quickly rots away in both air and water, and it usually lasts only a few years unless it is protected by an anaerobic layer of sediment — that is, a layer that protects it from oxygen. That means the wrecks of very few old wooden ships have survived to be found. And in the case of the Dungeness ship, the remaining hull timbers may have been covered by an anaerobic layer of silt beneath the floor of the quarry lake.
“The remains of this ship are really significant, helping us to understand not only the vessel itself but the wider landscape of shipbuilding and trade in this dynamic period,” Antony Firth, head of marine heritage strategy at Historic England, said in the statement.
Using laser scanning and digital photographs, archaeologists are documenting what’s left of the ship, and when the analysis is finished, the timbers will be carefully reburied in the quarry lake so they can continue to be protected by the silt layer.
High-Tech Tools Offer a Glimpse Into a Medieval Reliquary
An interdisciplinary research team led by the Leibniz Center for Archeology (LEIZA) has revealed the secret of a gold-plated pendant that was found in 2008 in a medieval rubbish pit in the old town of Mainz.
Thanks to non-destructive investigations at the research neutron source Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (FRM II) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the researchers were able to locate the smallest bone splinters inside the object, which are probably relics.
The restored reliquary. Outside it is decorated with images of Jesus and Mary.
Analysis of the tomography and Prompt Gamma Activation Analysis (PGAA) with neutrons revealed five individual packets made of silk and linen – bone splinters were packed in each. “Neutron non-destructive testing was particularly helpful because we couldn’t just open the trailer and look inside.
The object and above all the locking mechanism are severely damaged by centuries of corrosion, and opening it would mean destroying it irrevocably,” explains restorer Matthias Heinzel from LEIZA.
During the restoration, Heinzel discovered a cord fragment in the suspension eyelet which, on closer examination, was identified as silk. “This is the first evidence that such pendants may have been worn around the neck on a silk cord.
Using neutron tomography at the TUM, we were also able to measure the thread thickness and thread spacing of the textiles on the inside,” adds the restorer.
Neutron analysis makes organic substances visible
In 500 hours of work, Heinzel freed the found object from corrosion deposits. Initial investigations showed that the pendant, which is about six centimeters high and wide and one centimeter thick, was probably a storage container for relics.
Since the organic content of the object was not recognizable on the first X-ray images, the investigation using neutrons from the FRM II was used: Dr. Burkhard Schillinger from TUM conducted the ANTARES instrument performed a neutron tomography, which made the individual textile packages with the bone splinters inside visible. Unlike X-rays, the neutrons can penetrate metals and make organic substances visible.
The researchers determined individual elements of the sample by using neutrons to excite them to emit characteristic gamma radiation during the PGAA.
“It is not possible to find out whether the bones belong to saints and which saints the bone splinters can be assigned to. A strip of parchment with the name of the saint is usually attached to a relic parcel. In this case, unfortunately, we cannot see it.
As an archaeological research institute of the Leibniz Association, we see it as our task to preserve the historical authenticity of the object for posterity in the best possible way and use the modern possibilities of non-destructive examination at the Technical University of Munich,” explains Heinzel.
Only three other reliquaries of this type, called phylactery, are known so far. Phylacterium translates from Greek as means of preservation or protection. Their owners wore them on their bodies, usually around their necks.
On the outside, the gilded copper pendant is enameled with images of Jesus, the four evangelists, Mary and four female saints.
The researchers date it to the late 12th century and assign it to a workshop in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony. The find is in the possession of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage, Directorate of State Archeology Mainz and can be viewed until further notice in the medieval exhibition “AUREA MAGONTIA – Mainz in the Middle Ages” of the State Museum Mainz.
20,000-year-old cave painting ‘dots’ are the earliest written language, study claims. But not everyone agrees.
A 21,500-year-old cave painting depicting an aurochs, an extinct cattle species, in the Lascaux caves in France. Notice the four dots (within the digital yellow circle), which may have had a special meaning for ice age peoples.
At least 20,000 years ago, humans living in Europe created striking cave paintings of animals that they paired with curious signs: lines, dots and Y-shaped symbols. These marks, which are well known to researchers, might relate to the seasonal behavior of prey animals, making the signs the first known writing in the history of humankind, a new study claims.
Although Paleolithic cave art is better known for its graceful horses and ghostly handprints, there are thousands of nonfigurative or abstract marks that researchers have begun studying only in the past few decades. In a study published Jan. 5 in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal, a team of scholars suggests that these seemingly abstract dots and lines, when positioned near animal imagery, actually represent a sophisticated writing system that explains early humans’ understanding of the mating and birthing seasons of important local species.
Other researchers, however, are not convinced by the study’s interpretations of these human-made marks.
Melanie Chang, a paleoanthropologist at Portland State University who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that she agrees with the researchers’ assessment that “Upper Palaeolithic people had the cognitive capacity to write and to keep records of the time.” However, she cautioned that the researchers’ “hypotheses are not well-supported by their results, and they also do not address alternative interpretations of the marks they analyzed.”
This image of an 17,000-year-old engraved salmon, from Pindal cave in Asturias, Spain, has three lines placed within.
What do the painted marks mean?
Early humans in Europe were hunter-gatherers who ate a lot of meat from species such as horses, deer and bison. When those animals came together seasonally in herds, they would have been vulnerable to slaughter by humans.
“It follows that knowledge of the timing of migrations, mating and birthing would be a central concern to Upper Paleolithic behaviour,” study first author Bennett Bacon, an independent researcher and furniture conservator based in London, and colleagues wrote in their study.
Looking at the total number of marks — either dots or lines — found in sequences across hundreds of caves, the researchers discovered that none of the series contained more than 13 marks, consistent with the 13 lunar months in each year.
“We hypothesize that sequences are conveying information about their associated animal taxa in units of months,” they wrote, noting that spring, “with its obvious signals of the end of winter and corresponding faunal migrations to breeding grounds, would have provided an obvious, if regionally differing, point of origin for the lunar calendar.”
An annotated image of a roughly 23,000-year-old painting showing four dots associated with a red ochre drawing of an aurochs in La Pasiega cave in Cantabria, Spain.
The researchers’ statistical analysis of more than 800 sequences of marks associated with animals supports their idea — they found strong correlations between the number of marks and the lunar months in which the specific animal is known to mate.
Taking their hypothesis a step further, Bacon and colleagues focused on a Y-shaped sign that they think refers to a particular event in an animal’s life cycle. The similar statistical analysis supports their conclusion that the placement of the Y-shaped sign within a series of marks signals an animal species’ birthing season.
“The ability to assign abstract signs to phenomena in the world,” they wrote, “to record past events and predict future events, was a profound intellectual achievement.”
Writing or proto-writing?
But is this the earliest known writing? Bacon and colleagues demur, suggesting that “it is best described as a proto-writing system, an intermediary step between a simpler notation/convention and full-blown writing.”
April Nowell, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in this study, told Live Science by email that “any study that explores non-figurative signs in more detail is welcome, but I think there are a number of assumptions being made here that have yet to be proven.” Nowell questioned the Y sign, in particular. “The majority of animals considered in this study are quadrupeds, and humans normally squat giving birth,” she said. “If this sign is supposed to be iconic of the birth process, it is not obvious to me.”
Chang, the paleoanthropologist who is also an equestrian and horse owner, posed two alternative explanations for the Y sign. In some cases, it could represent the edge of the brachiocephalic muscle, a prominent landmark on a horse’s neck. “In other cases,” she said, “it is possible that what they recorded as Y’s represent what modern horsepeople refer to as ‘primitive markings’ such as leg bars that are associated with wild-type horse colors, or they may represent hair patterns, or other anatomical features.”
Study co-author Robert Kentridge, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email that one of the strengths of their study is that they “have formally tested Ben [Bacon’s] hypotheses about the meaning of the Y-sign’s position in sequences of marks and the lengths of sequences of dots and lines and shown that these do convey meaning, indeed meaning that would be important in the lives of Palaeolithic hunters.”
In summarizing their conclusions, Bacon and colleagues wrote that they have “proposed the existence of a notational system associated with an unambiguous animal subject relating to biologically significant events” and that this allows them “for the first time to understand a Palaeolithic notational system in its entirety.”
Nonfigurative signs dating to 15,000 years ago that hunter-gatherers drew in black manganese and red ochre in Niaux Cave in the French Pyrenees.
A decade ago, however, Nowell and then-graduate student Genevieve von Petzinger co-created a database of dozens of signs and repeating motifs from more than 200 caves in southern France and Spain. Von Petzinger’s thesis detailed patterns of cave wall symbols across time and space in order to better understand what these signs meant for ice age people.
“There are at least 32 different recurring signs,” Nowell explained. “The authors have chosen to study three of them in a very specific context.”
But the authors defended their decision to focus on the trio.
“It seemed sensible to focus first on the most common markings associated with figurative images,” study co-author Paul Pettitt, a professor of archaeology at Durham University, told Live Science in an email. “Simple dots and lines are by far the most common. Of the more elaborate signs, the Y sign is the most common.”
The researchers plan to expand on their work. “We are analyzing other signs,” Bacon told Live Science in an email. “Rather than searching for the meaning of individual signs, what we are looking for is the linguistic and cognitive bases that underpin the ‘writing’ system.”
Nowell agreed with the study authors that the symbols were likely not randomly chosen and that it is possible the lines and dots represent numbers. Even if the authors are correct, she noted, that leaves 90% of the signs without any known meaning.
“There is still a lot about graphic communication in the Paleolithic that we do not understand,” Nowell said.
Discovery of 60 mummies in Egyptian city of Luxor points to elaborate burial ground
A wall drawing in the tomb of Amenhotep-Huy in Luxor.
A team of Spanish archaeologists have discovered tombs housing around 60 mummies in the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor, according to Spanish press reports.
The Spanish news agency Efe posted a video on YouTube, describing how the Spanish archaeological mission known as the Vizier Amenhotep Huy Project discovered the tombs late last year in the southern Egyptian city.
The mission was led by Francisco Martin-Valentin, director of the Madrid-based Institute of Ancient Egyptian Studies, and the institute’s co-director Teresa Bedman.
The Institute of Ancient Egyptian Studies also posted a corresponding article on Twitter from Efe.
Compartimos con vosotros una interesante entrevista realizada a nuestros directores, el Dr. Francisco Martín-Valentín y Teresa Bedman, en donde hablaron sobre el «Proyecto Visir Amen-Hotep Huy».
Martin-Valentin says that the two tombs were built after the 18th dynasty (1550-1292 BC) and are linked to Amenhotep-Huy who served as vizier (high-ranking official) under pharaoh Amenhotep III.
Two chambers connect the newly discovered tombs to the vizier’s tomb, a chapel comprising 30 columns.
Martin-Valentin tells The Art Newspaper: “In the excavations of two secondary tombs existing in the courtyard of the main tomb of the Vizier Amen-Hotep Huy (Asasif nº -28) have been found stripped mummies—more or less complete—and parts of mummies, which testify after the examination of our anthropologists to belong to about 60 individuals, originally buried in these tombs.”
Martin-Valentin adds that the new findings are “evidence that the vizier’s tomb at some point became a necropolis”. He tells us: “From the archaeological context we can affirm that the individuals found, belong to family groups of, or linked to, the medium-high clergy of Amun of Karnak.”
Items from the vizier’s tomb, including a sarcophagus adorned with the god Amun, are currently on display in an exhibition at the Luxor Museum.
Martin-Valentin says that the archaeological mission will resume at the end of September, when the vizier’s chapel will be restored with the reconstruction of six columns.
3000 years old wooden wishing well discovered in Germany
In the town of Germering, in the Germany state of Bavaria, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a well-preserved Bronze Age wooden well filled with ritual deposits.
People may have sunk jewelry and ceramics as offerings in the special water spring, similar to how coins are still thrown into so-called wishing wells today, according to the archaeologists.
The area of today’s town of Germering in Upper Bavaria was a settlement area early on. Numerous finds from prehistory and early history bear witness to this.
Many new ones have been added since the beginning of 2021: In the run-up to construction work, numerous traces of settlements from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages were discovered on an excavation area of around seven hectares.
This also includes the remains of wells that were used by people of different eras to supply water. But one of the wells discovered on the site differed significantly from the others, reports the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BlfD).
This wooden water point is dated to be more than 3000 years old and, at around five meters (16.4 feet), reached particularly deep into the ground compared to others.
“It is extremely rare for a well to survive more than 3,000 years so well. Its wooden walls have been completely preserved at the bottom and are still partly damp from the groundwater. This also explains the good condition of the finds made from organic materials, which are now being examined more closely. We hope this will provide us with more information about the everyday life of the settlers of the time,” adds Dr. Jochen Haberstroh, a responsible archaeologist at the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments.
Medieval pottery from well fill.
The team of archaeologists discovered in what was once the base of the fountain: 26 bronze clothing pins, a bracelet, two metal spirals, a mounted animal tooth, amber beads and more than 70 ceramic vessels.
The archaeologists emphasize that this filling makes this well fundamentally different from the others on the excavation site.
These expensive items, which were typically discovered in Middle Bronze Age graves, were not items for everyday use (1800-1200 B.C.). The state they were in when discovered at the bottom of the well suggests they were carefully lowered into the water rather than dropped or thrown.
“Even today, fountains have something magical about them for many people. They drop coins in the hope that their wishes will be granted. We cannot exactly explain what motives our ancestors 3000 years ago made to offer jewelry and other valuable gifts. But it can be assumed that they were intended as sacrifices for a good harvest,” explains Mathias Pfeil from the BlfD.
Among other things, the archaeologists discovered numerous bronze clothing pins at the bottom of the well.
There may also be a clue in the unusual features of the well: “The depth of this well shows that it was used at a time when the groundwater level had dropped considerably, which indicates a long drought and certainly poor harvest yields.
One can possibly see a reason why the people who lived here at that time sacrificed part of their possessions to their gods in this well,” says Marcus Guckenbiehl, city archaeologist and archivist of Germering.
Archaeologists have been working in advance of construction work for a letter distribution center on the site where the well has now been discovered since the beginning of 2021.
The excavations are among the largest area excavations in Bavaria this year. In the meantime, scientists have documented approximately 13,500 archaeological finds, primarily from the Bronze Age and early Middle Ages.
Some of the discoveries are currently being examined and conserved at the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation.
