Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2021 i ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeologists seldom know the names of the people whose lives they study. But every so often, they have the chance to encounter people of the past and learn their names, even as they uncover information about their daily habits and their place in society. In this issue, you, too, will have that rare opportunity to meet the people behind the archaeological record. In “The Ugarit Archives,” you’ll get to know Urtenu, a Bronze Age merchant who worked from home long before it once again became popular or necessary. In his modest suburban house in the ancient city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast, Urtenu maintained a library filled with more than 600 tablets that chronicle his financial dealings and efforts at diplomacy with Hittite kings and Egyptian pharaohs. These potentates’…

There are many extremely challenging places to dig. In Luxor, Egypt, site of a newly discovered 18th Dynasty city (See “Lost Egyptian City,” page 18), temperatures often rise above 100°F. At the Yana Rhinoceros Horn site in remote northeastern Siberia, where scientists have found 31,000-year-old baby teeth belonging to a previously unknown human population, it can be as cold as −46°F. Some archaeologists regularly dive to the depths of the ocean. In the field, they can face venomous scorpions and active volcanoes. And there are the dangers of the modern world—the “Big Dig” was conducted in downtown Boston as a new highway was built overhead, and the recent coup in Myanmar has put archaeological work on hold. But there are few places where more challenges collide than the Judean Desert…

A team of researchers has virtually unfolded and read a letter that has remained unopened since it was mailed more than three centuries ago. Like many letters sent before the introduction of mass-produced envelopes in the early nineteenth century, this missive was intricately folded into a secure packet using a process called letterlocking. All that is visible on its exterior is the name of its intended recipient: Pierre Le Pers, a merchant in The Hague. The researchers scanned the packet using a high-resolution, high-contrast CT scanner designed for dentistry. The device is able to clearly image substances with very different densities, such as low-density paper and high-density, iron-containing ink. The team developed an algorithm that, along with a 3-D image produced from the scanner’s data, allowed them to determine how…

Archaeologists in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand have unearthed a small vihara, an early type of Buddhist monastery. A team from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) investigating several mounds in a hilly area found a Buddhist shrine in one of them and the vihara in another. According to Rajendra Dehuri, ASI deputy superintending archaeologist, the monastery includes six rooms that open onto a wide veranda. Also found at the site were sculptures of Gautama Buddha, as well as the Buddhist deities Avalokiteshvara and Tara. The structure appears to have been built between the eighth and eleventh centuries A.D.…

During a survey of the ancient city of Mastaura in western Turkey, archaeologists happened upon the stone arches and seats of a large Roman amphitheater, most of which remains underground. Archaeologists Sedat Akkurnaz of Adnan Menderes University and Mehmet Umut Tuncer of the Aydın Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism think the arena was built around A.D. 200, when the city flourished under the largesse of the Severan emperors, who ruled from A.D. 193 to 235. With an estimated seating capacity of 15,000 to 20,000 people, the amphitheater was one of the only such grand structures in Anatolia, the researchers say. It probably attracted spectators from nearby cities for the bloody gladiator bouts and wild animal fights that took place there. As at the famed Colosseum in Rome, rooms beneath…

Workers renovating a popular tapas bar in Seville, Spain, were surprised to encounter the remains of an Islamic bathhouse dating to the twelfth century, when the Almohad Caliphate ruled Andalusia. Soon after construction began, the crew discovered the painted walls of the long-forgotten structure concealed behind the restaurant’s plastered walls. Covered from floor to ceiling in well-rendered red-and-white geometric designs, the ornate bath complex was also adorned with 88 skylights shaped like stars, octagons, and rosettes. Thanks to historical records, archaeologists knew a bath complex was once located in the busy neighborhood, close to the Seville Cathedral and the city’s Great Mosque. They assumed it had been torn down centuries ago. It turns out it remains almost completely intact but was hidden from view when the building was converted into…

ON THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL time line of North America, the so-called Archaic period has been little more than a prehistoric placeholder, an 8,000-year hiatus between the initial peopling of the continent and the development of agriculture and settled life—a time when scholars believed nothing very important happened. For earlier generations of researchers, the people of the Archaic period, who lived between about 9000 and 1000 B.C., languished in what University of Florida archaeologist Kenneth Sassaman calls “the purgatory of America’s developmental trajectory.” They were thought to have been scattered bands of hunter-gatherers who roamed the continent and whose way of life changed slowly, if at all. In hindsight, the only thing archaic about the period may have been twentieth-century archaeologists’ view of it. The problem, Sassaman says, is that “if you…

As I reflect on this past year of the pandemic and the way it has disrupted our routines and daily connections, I also see how it has brought out examples of resilience and has created space for new opportunities. At the AIA, we launched a series of new initiatives. One of these is Archaeology Abridged, short lectures including “Ötzi the Iceman’s Prehistoric Medical Kit”; “The Extraordinary Archaeological Finds from Roman Vindolanda,” which discusses the largest collection of ancient Roman shoes ever found; “A Toast to Ancient Greek Wine Drinking”; and most recently, “Discovering Sutton Hoo.” I’d like to thank the AIA’s staff; our speakers, Patrick Hunt, Elizabeth M. Greene, Kathleen Lynch, and Martin Carver, for their enthusiasm and the terrific sense of fun they brought to these topics; and the…

Farmers in Peru’s Virú Province accidentally unearthed a temple complex dating to between 1000 and 200 B.C. in an earthen mound. Although the farmers’ heavy machinery destroyed much of the site, a vibrant, multicolored mural was preserved on a wall of one of the complex’s adobe buildings. The compound was built by people of the Cupisnique culture who lived along Peru’s northern coast for some 2,000 years. At the mural’s center is a figure holding a ceremonial knife in one of its many limbs. The figure, which also appears on Cupisnique stone vessels, has been interpreted as a spiderlike god. According to archaeologist Régulo Franco Jordán of the Wiese Foundation, this is the first known depiction of the supernatural being on a Cupisnique mural. The Cupisnique people relied on seasonal…

The site of the cabin where Harriet Tubman lived with her family as a young adult in the early 1840s has been located in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. According to the will of his former owner, Tubman’s father, Ben Ross, was to be freed from slavery and granted 10 acres in the area. The precise location of his plot, however—referred to as “Old Ben’s Place” in later land deeds—was unknown. A recent excavation led by Julie Schablitsky, project director and chief archaeologist with the Maryland Department of Transportation, has unearthed a range of evidence of the cabin. This includes a coin dating to 1808 found on an old road leading to the site, ceramic sherds imprinted with dishware patterns popular in the 1820s to 1840s,…

A team of excavators led by Egyptologist Zahi Hawass has uncovered the city where the people who worked in the temples of ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom–era spiritual center at Luxor lived. The city’s ancient name was “the dazzling Aten,” a reference to a newly ascendant solar god. The team found a large bakery that may have been used to feed workers, as well as an administrative and residential district that was surrounded by a zigzag wall, a rare architectural style for the time. The walls’ mud bricks bear the seal of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (r. ca. 1390–1352 B.C.), who conducted an ambitious building program at Luxor.…

Some 3,500 years ago, at the mouth of a harbor on the far eastern end of Crete, a community of Minoan traders built a complex of banquet halls, storage rooms, kitchens, courtyards, and pools. This hub at the site of Zakros is known as a palace, but the term is somewhat of a misnomer both at Zakros and at other contemporaneous Minoan settlements. According to archaeologist D. Matthew Buell of Trent University, there is no evidence from any Minoan site to suggest that these palaces housed rulers or politicians. Instead, Buell says, they are better understood as multipurpose centers where all manner of commercial, political, religious, industrial, and social activities may have taken place. The Zakros palace covers just under an acre of land and featured some 150 rooms arranged…

ON THE NIGHT OF June 24, A.D. 726, a Maya official named Ajpach’ Waal reached the pinnacle of his career. On that day, he was granted an audience with the thirteenth king of Copán, known to scholars today as 18 Rabbit, but to his subjects as Waxaklajuun Ub’aah K’awiil. Situated in a mountain valley in what is today western Honduras, Copán was one of the great Maya city-states. Even now its central plaza is covered with stelas, some standing more than 30 feet tall, which are carved with hieroglyphs that record the deeds of Copán’s kings. A six-story staircase leading to a ritual platform at the city’s center is composed of blocks carved in the shape of hieroglyphs that describe the city’s history. 18 Rabbit was responsible for building the…

The journey to Kiska Island, at the far western end of Alaska’s Aleutian chain, begins with a 1,200-mile flight from Anchorage to Adak Island. “You show up there and you feel like you’re in one of the most remote places on Earth, and then you get on a ship and sail another day past that to Kiska,” says Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and lead archaeologist for Project Recover. “The moment you sail in, there are partially submerged ships sticking out of the water and you can see a Japanese midget submarine on shore. It’s like the land of the lost, like you’ve stepped back in time to this amazing natural setting with no modern structures that is so rich in historical artifacts.”…

A member of the Pazyryk culture, a nomadic Scythian people who once roamed the mountainous terrain where present-day Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia meet, was buried nearly 2,500 years ago with a textile featuring a rich tableau of lotus buds, deer, and cross-shaped figures. The textile, which measures roughly six feet on a side and was woven with more than 1,250,000 knots, is the world’s oldest known pile carpet. Since it was discovered preserved under a layer of permafrost in 1947, researchers have marveled at the carpet’s enduring hues of yellow, blue, and red. A team of scientists led by Andreas Späth and Rainer Fink from Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg recently attempted to figure out how Pazyryk artisans or their trading partners produced such intense colors. They experimented with a method…

Divers exploring a section of the River Wear west of Sunderland, England, retrieved an assortment of Roman artifacts and nine ship anchors that had been buried in the riverbed for 2,000 years. Weighing up to 40 pounds, the stone anchors resemble other Roman examples found elsewhere in Britain, but these are the first to be discovered in a river and not a maritime context. Archaeologist Gary Bankhead believes the anchors may indicate the location of a small harbor or unloading zone once used by the Romans. “Seagoing ships would have been unable to go any further upstream due to the shallow depth of water at low tide, so cargo would have had to be transferred to smaller boats,” says Bankhead. The River Wear was likely an important supply route used…

WASHINGTON: Salmon is an excellent source of lean protein, but eating too much of it isn’t healthy. It has long been thought that Indigenous populations of the Pacific Northwest ate an almost exclusively salmon-based diet yet were somehow unaffected by “salmon starvation,” a toxic condition caused by an overly protein-intensive diet. A new study suggests that Native communities were well aware of these nutritional pitfalls and relied on trade, hunting, and agriculture to supplement their diet with acorns, root crops, and fatty marine mammals. PERU: The culture that inhabited the Supe Valley between 3000 and 2000 B.C. is often considered the first city-building civilization in the Americas, having established urban centers with monumental pyramids and circular plazas. A recent project has determined that the location and orientation of these buildings was…

ANCIENT POMPEII WAS A bustling city of at least 10,000 residents. Its busy streets were lined with houses, workshops, taverns, and other commercial establishments. Traffic created by pedestrians and carts occasionally clogged its thoroughfares, and there undoubtedly would have been a cacophony of sounds and smells, many of them unpleasant. Like city dwellers today, Pompeians must sometimes have required a respite from the chaos and heat. One homeowner perhaps out for an afternoon stroll had only to walk a block south from Pompeii’s most boisterous street, the Via dell’Abbondanza, step through the doorway of his house, and wind his way through a series of rooms until he reached his own personal paradise, an elegantly decorated space as far away from the street as possible. Today, after more than a century…