Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2019 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Each time we put together a new issue of the magazine, we are struck that people separated by distances of thousands of miles and by many millennia share markedly similar experiences. In this issue, you will read several stories of the very diffierent ways people across space and time have dealt with abandoning their homes and sacred spaces. It may seem improbable that one of ancient Egypt’s most famous sites would be not only abandoned, but also almost entirely forgotten. That is exactly what happened to Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. In “Egypt’s Eternal City,” contributing editor Andrew Curry shares the story of a holy sanctuary filled with temples, obelisks, and monuments honoring the full panoply of Egyptian deities—most notably the creator god Atum and the sun god Ra—and…

When future archaeologists excavate sites dating to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, what will define our era won’t be the smartphone, the plastic straw, or any other artificial product of our throwaway culture. It will instead be the bones of broiler chickens, argues a group of scholars from the United Kingdom and South Africa who have compared the size of chickens over time from Roman Britain to the present day. The results show that chickens gradually increased in size for almost 2,000 years until about 1950, when broiler chickens—those raised to provide meat rather than eggs—started to get huge. Compared with the Asian red jungle fowl, from which they have evolved, modern broilers are positively gargantuan. At the time of slaughter, they can be twice the weight of…

For days or even weeks around the year A.D. 90, the sky over Ecuador’s Jama Valley must have been nearly black, even at the height of the day. Massive clouds of ash from the eruption of a volcano called Guagua Pichincha obscured the sun, buried crops of corn and manioc, and clogged rivers. The people living in the valley, who belonged to the Jama-Coaque culture, were forced to salvage as much of their harvest and as many of their belongings as possible and flee. Survivors of the initial eruption endured devastating lingering effiects. The land would not be habitable again for generations, and people did not return for more than 300 years. When they did, archaeological evidence suggests, they carried their culture and traditions intact. “There was resilience in the…

In my letter for the preceding issue of ARCHAEOLOGY, I considered the typical diet of Galilean villagers in the time of Jesus. Soon after, a documentary television producer asked me about ancient Jewish clothing, and I started thinking about what villagers like Jesus would have worn, and how their choices would have diffiered from those we make today. In the modern world, many of us dress for the occasion—workplace versus casual attire, gym clothes versus black tie. In the Roman East, everyone wore the same two basic articles of clothing: a tunic and a mantle. Although tunics and mantles were universal, variations in their length, color, fabric, and decorative details clearly signaled the wearer’s gender, marital and socioeconomic status, and sometimes even their occupation. Clothing in Roman Palestine was generally…

Modern conveniences such as electricity, running water, and telephone lines that were hallmarks of post–World War II development across Ireland never arrived on the island of Inishark, which lies around five miles off the coast of Connemara in County Galway. The island’s rugged community of fishermen and farmers, which reached a peak population of about 300 in the nineteenth century, had dwindled to a handful of residents by the 1950s. Access to food, medicine, and other provisions was unpredictable. Storms could render the island completely isolated for days or even weeks, and young people moved away hoping to find work elsewhere. The last 24 inhabitants of the island departed in 1960. In addition to the abandoned main village, which was occupied between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the island features…

On the island of New Guinea, archaeologists have discovered several ornately decorated stone statues at a cemetery that may be more than 3,000 years old. Erlin Novita of the Papua Archaeological Center led a team that found the statues at Mount Srobu on the island’s north coast, in Indonesia’s Papua province. Here burials were hewn into limestone bedrock and covered with shell mounds by people of the megalithic cultures who likely made the statues. Most megalithic human depictions are simple, but the three-foot-tall statues unearthed by Novita’s team are complex. The bodies are posed in a crouching position, similar to statues known from Polynesia. Novita believes the statues represented important ancestors and were objects of worship. She notes that they are visually similar to the smoked mummies of Papuan chiefs…

When the Vikings who colonized Iceland more than 1,000 years ago interred their dead, they often included a perhaps surprising grave good—horses. Now, researchers have analyzed the scant amounts of DNA retrievable from 19 of these horses’ remains and determined that all but one was male. Why the Vikings were buried with male horses is unclear, although it may have had to do with an association between stallions and virility, according to zooarchaeologist Albína Hulda Pálsdóttir of the University of Oslo. However, she notes, horse burials were not reserved for men. In fact, around a third of those buried with horses were women.…

COVER—Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images; 1—Marco Merola; 3—(clockwise from top left) Courtesy Andrew Peachey (ArchSol), Courtesy of Fairfield Foundation, Agata T. Gondek, Eitan Klein/Israel Antiquities Authority, © Frédéric Colin, University of Strasbourg; 4—Azoor Photo Collection/Alamy Stock Photo; 6—Art Resource, NY; 8—Courtesy Francisco Valdez; 9—Virginia Department of Historic Resources; 10—Courtesy of Fairfield Foundation, NUTAN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images, Pampuco via Wikimedia Commons; 12—© Frédéric Colin, University of Strasbourg (3); 13—blickwinkel/Alamy Stock Photo; 14—Courtesy Andrew Peachey (ArchSol), Courtesy Effie Fotos-Jones; 16—©MOLA Headland (2); 17—Eitan Klein/Israel Antiquities Authority 18—© MOLA; 19—Wikimedia Commons; 20—Courtesy Erlin Novita/Papua Archaeological Center, ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images, Faina Gurevich/Alamy Stock Photo, Courtesy Alpine Archaeological Consultants; 21—Courtesy Rejane Roure; 22—Courtesy Albína Hulda Pálsdóttir, Agata T. Gondek; 23—Courtesy Mu.Ramkumar; 24—(clockwise from top left) Photo by Richard Estrada, Courtesy Betina Magnussen, Arsty/iStock, Courtesy Nicole E.…

SAN DIEGO’S LEGACY Jarrett A. Lobell’s article “What Sank San Diego?” (January/February 2019) rightly commemorates a little-known but significant event of WWI. After spending my career at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, retirement has allowed me time to study the historical significance of submarine and antisubmarine technologies. The fantasy of submarine warfare portrayed by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea became a reality during the opening months of WWI when Germany’s U-9 torpedoed and sank three British warships in the North Sea. With the arrival off the U.S. coast in July 1918 of U-156, the second of five U-cruisers to cross the Atlantic, naval warfare would never be the same. The loss of San Diego brought that reality to America. In a postwar interview, Frederick Körner, an officer…

One of the largest known underground mausoleums in Luxor, Egypt, was not built for a king or other member of the nobility, but for a priest named Padiamenope, who lived in the seventh century B.C. and is known to have assembled a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary texts. The mausoleum was investigated as far back as the eighteenth century, but a new excavation led by Frédéric Colin of the University of Strasbourg has turned up a pair of previously unknown sarcophagi dating to long before the tomb was constructed. Hieroglyphs on the coffin and lid of one of the sarcophagi identify its occupant as a woman named Pouyou. According to Colin, the style of the coffin suggests it dates to the early 18th Dynasty (ca. 1550–1295 B.C.), while that…

To the Greeks and Romans, a red pigment known as miltos was a sort of multipurpose supersubstance. Ancient writers, from Theophrastus to Pliny, record that the fine-grained, red iron oxide–based material was much sought after for use in decoration, cosmetics, agriculture, medicine, and even boat maintenance. A new study indicates that one of the reasons miltos was so versatile is that not all miltos was created equal. An international team analyzed the mineralogy, geochemistry, and even microbiology of miltos samples recovered from the Greek islands of Kea and Lemnos, and has been able to identify subtle variations that made each sample suitable for a particular use. “Diffierent sources produced diffierent types of miltos,” says University of Glasgow archaeologist Effe Photos-Jones. “It was not a pure mineral but rather a combination…

William Jackson Palmer was a Civil War hero, railroad magnate, and founder of Colorado Springs. He was also a connoisseur of the cutting-edge technology of his day, evidence of which has been found during an excavation of a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dumping ground on land that once belonged to his Colorado Springs estate, Glen Eyrie. Among the artifacts recovered from the site, on a creek bed roughly half a mile from Glen Eyrie’s castle, are fragments of early dry-cell batteries that Palmer used to power electric gates on the estate. “Palmer was on the forefront of technological advancement as well as self-sustainability,” says Sara Millward of Alpine Archaeological Consultants. Her colleague Mike Prouty adds that Palmer also ran a power plant on the property, designed reservoirs to supply…

Srirangam Island, at the confluence of the Kaveri and Kollidam Rivers in southeastern India’s state of Tamil Nadu, is home to a 2,000-year-old temple complex, major parts of which are still in use today. However, much of the complex is hidden or damaged. Many older sections are buried under sediment as a result of centuries of flooding, and the complex was ransacked in the fourteenth century by the Muslim general Ulugh Khan. Recent excavations at the site, guided by geologists with knowledge of flood sediment layers, have begun to reveal what was presumed to have been lost. Researchers including geologist Mu Ramkumar of Periyar University have uncovered parts of the temple destroyed by Ulugh Khan and unearthed artifacts such as pendant lamps and statues of the deity Gopalakrishnan with his…

The mighty stone monuments of ancient Egypt known as obelisks, a word derived from the Greek obeliskos, meaning “skewer” or “spit,” were known in Egyptian as tekhenu, which means “to pierce.” These monolithic, four-sided, pyramid-topped pillars rose high into the Egyptian sky, symbols of the sun god, Ra, and of sun worship, as well as of the power of the pharaoh and his relationship to the gods. As the center of the worship of Ra, Heliopolis at one time boasted dozens of obelisks, only one of which remains in its original position. However, not all of Heliopolis’ obelisks have been lost. At least seven were taken from Egypt and raised in metropolitan centers across the world. One goal of the Heliopolis Project, a joint Egyptian-German excavation, is to determine where…

Since the 1920s, there has been a debate about the identification of a city called Pteria mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus. Kerkenes Project archaeologists have embraced the idea that the city at Kerkenes might be Pteria. Pteria, Herodotus writes, was evacuated and destroyed by Croesus, a Lydian king, as he pursued an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to hold and expand his ground against Cyrus the Great of Persia in 547 B.C. Evidence of the conflagration that destroyed Kerkenes was first detected by a geophysical survey in the 1990s. Later excavations exposed vitrified stones and bricks, carbonized seeds, and charred metal, as well as stone floors and walls that were entirely burned. The heat from the fire was so intense that it even cracked and melted granite. “Nearly every trench has…

archaeological.org AIA-SCS 120TH JOINT ANNUAL MEETING WELCOMES MORE THAN 2,200 ATTENDEES IN SAN DIEGO The AIA kicked off 2019 in San Diego with the 120th AIA-SCS Joint Annual Meeting, a gathering of archaeologists, classicists, philologists, and archaeology enthusiasts. This year’s meeting included more than 70 sessions, seven workshops, and 12 roundtables. The complete program is available at archaeological.org/meeting/program. The tone was set by Sarah Parcak’s opening night public lecture, The Rainbow Marshalltown: An Allegory for the Archaeology of the 21st Century. Parcak, an AIA Trustee and faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is renowned for using satellite remote sensing to locate thousands of previously unknown archaeological sites around the world. In 2016, Parcak built a citizen science platform for archaeology called GlobalXplorer°…

Being able to connect an archaeological artifact with a specific person mentioned in historical sources is relatively unusual—when the person was a woman, it is even more so. This recently discovered medieval seal stamp bears the name of Elisabeth Buggesdatter, a woman of high social status who was well known in medieval Denmark. Her name is written in Old Danish and surrounds what appears to be a decorative monogram. Elisabeth’s father, Sir Niels Bugge of Hald, was one of Jutland’s wealthiest men, and her husband was an influential German nobleman named Godskalk Skarpenberg. Bugge led an unsuccessful revolt against the Danish king Valdemar IV Atterdag (r. 1340–1375) in 1358. For centuries after his murder at the hands of the king’s henchmen, Bugge was celebrated as a national hero in song…