Top 10
By ERIC A. POWELL
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
An inch-wide image of a deer’s head discovered at the base of a pyramid in the ancient city of San Bartolo is the earliest known notation from the 260-day Maya ritual calendar, which is still in use today. Translated by a team including archaeologists David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin and Skidmore College’s Heather Hurst as “7 Deer,” the glyph represents a date and was painted around 250 B.C. as part of a mural decorating one of the pyramid’s interior walls. Eleven fragments of the mural bearing early Maya writing have been found, but the 7 Deer date is the only hieroglyphic inscription that has been deciphered thus far.
The team believes the glyph was painted by a scribe working in an artistic and literary tradition that was already quite old by the third century B.C. “The 7 Deer date has a graceful calligraphic quality,” says Hurst. “You can see the delicate flicks of the brushwork used to paint it.” Hurst explains that the day sign functioned as a kind of caption, perhaps marking an important date related to the role the pyramid played as part of a larger astronomical observatory. Stuart points out that 7 Deer is one of the dates the Maya still use to mark the beginning of the solar year. “It’s a New Year’s date,” he says. “This had to tie into the function of the pyramid as a kind of solar observation deck in the jungle.”
By DANIEL WEISS
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
At the site of El Castillo de Huarmey on the northern coast of Peru, a team led by archaeologist Miłosz Giersz of the University of Warsaw has unearthed a tomb containing the remains of a man who occupied a powerful position in the Wari Empire (A.D. 650–1000). The Wari controlled most of present-day Peru, relying on a combination of military aggression and irrigation projects to win the favor of local people. The man in the tomb was found wrapped in a mummy bundle, with the remains of six others in chambers nearby—likely another man, two women, and three adolescents whose sex has yet to be determined. “They were obviously members of the elite because we found them buried with important artifacts—gold and silver earspools, which were the elite regalia,” says Giersz. “But what is really interesting is that the men do not appear to have been warriors.”
While the majority of high-status men in Wari iconography are portrayed bearing weapons, the men as well as the women in this tomb appear to have been highly skilled craftspeople. The man in the bundle was buried along with textiles, painted leather, and baskets in different phases of production. Archaeologists also found a range of raw materials to make baskets, including reeds, colorful cotton and wool thread, cords of various sizes and colors, and balls of resin used as glue. Giersz notes that both the men and women in the tomb have marks on their bones caused by the sort of repetitive use of the hands typical of crafting, but no sign of trauma from combat. Their remains also show indications of serious physical disabilities such as bone loss due to osteoporosis, lack of mobility, and severe tooth decay. These conditions, says Giersz, may explain why the men in the tomb were unsuited to be warriors. The tomb is close to an enormous mausoleum discovered by Giersz in 2012 containing the remains of 58 high-status Wari women. The newly discovered tomb is the first to include high-status Wari male craftworkers.
By JARRETT A. LOBELL
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
The region of northwest Pakistan known as the Greater Gandhara was a crossroads for the exchange of goods and culture among the civilizations of the Middle East, Central Asia, and India from around the sixth century B.C. to the sixth century A.D. One of the most significant belief systems carried across the region was Buddhism, which was founded in northern India between the late sixth and early fourth centuries B.C. In the Gandharan city of Barikot, archaeologist Luca Maria Olivieri of Ca’ Foscari University and his ISMEO team have discovered a Buddhist temple dating to at least as early as the end of the second century B.C. This makes it the oldest known Buddhist temple in the region and places its construction firmly during the period when Barikot is known to have been a center of Buddhist teaching and a sacred pilgrimage site. “We did not expect there to be Buddhist monuments in the city at such an early stage,” Olivieri says. “Until now, we have not excavated any evidence of Buddhist presence in Barikot dating to before the end of the first century A.D.” The remnants excavated thus far include a 10-foot-high apsidal structure on which a circular shrine was later erected. The building contains an iconic cone-shaped Buddhist stupa. Olivieri’s team was surprised by the building’s shape, which is well known from Buddhist structures in India at this time but is very rare in Gandhara. The team has also found Buddhist sculptures and inscriptions.
In addition to being a religious center, Gandhara was at the nexus of multiple major imperial expansions, including those of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Alexander the Great, the Mauryan Empire of northern India, and Indo-Greeks from Bactria, or Central Asia, who were in power at the time the newly discovered temple was built. “We are now beginning to realize that, in addition to its strategic importance,” says Olivieri, “Barikot had its own importance for Buddhist communities.”
By DANIEL WEISS
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
The traditional model of early Mesopotamian urban development holds that cities were compact settlements that expanded out from a central monumental religious complex. However, a recent remote-sensing survey of the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash in present-day southern Iraq has established that it was composed of several discrete sections, each bounded by walls or waterways. The survey was conducted by University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Emily Hammer in conjunction with Lagash Archaeological Project directors Holly Pittman and Augusta McMahon. It included drone photography of the entire 750-acre site. The results revealed that some of the people of Lagash, which dates largely to the Early Dynastic period (2900–2350 B.C.), lived on a pair of elongated mounds, each surrounded by substantial walls. One of these mounds, in the east, measured 100 acres, and the other, in the west, covered 220 acres. People also lived on an unwalled mound in the north that spanned 140 acres and was crisscrossed by waterways. A much smaller fourth mound in the northeast was dominated by a large temple.
Hammer was able to detect the details of Lagash’s early layout because the city was largely abandoned by the end of the Early Dynastic period. Thus, unlike many other early cities in the region, it was not built up over the millennia in a manner that would have obscured its original layout. During the Early Dynastic period, the Persian Gulf extended much farther to the northwest than it does today, creating a marshy environment that may have led Lagash’s early inhabitants to settle on stretches of high ground. The gulf retreated southeast, toward its current position, after most of Lagash’s population had departed. “It’s entirely possible that a lot of southern Mesopotamian cities that we see as continuous circular or oval entities only appear that way because they continued to be occupied into the second and first millennium B.C. or even later,” says Hammer. “Because the gulf had retreated, these cities were no longer constrained by waterways and marshy areas, so they could be spatially contiguous. Some of the southernmost Mesopotamian cities may have looked like Lagash at some point in their evolution.”
By DANIEL WEISS
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
The wreck of legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been discovered nearly 10,000 feet underwater, at the bottom of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica, where it sank in November 1915. The 144-foot-long, three-masted ship was located some 4.6 miles south of its last estimated position by members of the Endurance22 expedition under the auspices of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. Shackleton aimed to make the first land crossing of Antarctica, but his plans went awry when Endurance got stuck in dense pack ice and the crew of 28 was forced to abandon ship. The men spent months camping on ice floes that carried them northward until they could make their way by lifeboat to uninhabited Elephant Island. Shackleton and several others continued for another 800 miles to the island of South Georgia, where they enlisted help to rescue the rest of the crew.
The same sea ice that doomed Endurance has foiled multiple attempts to locate the ship over the past century, but 2022’s effort was aided by historically low ice levels. When the team viewed video of the wreck captured by a remotely operated submersible, they were struck by its level of preservation, which is largely thanks to the absence of wood-eating parasites in the frigid Weddell Sea. “Never have I seen a wreck as intact or as clean and fresh as the Endurance,” says marine archaeologist Mensun Bound, the expedition’s director of exploration. One of the first items that came into view was the ship’s rudder, which had been ripped off by the ice, allowing water to penetrate the ship, ultimately making it unsalvageable. As the camera panned up, it captured the ship’s name arced across the stern and, underneath it, a five-pointed depiction of Polaris, the North Star. Along with the ship’s wheel, both of her anchors, and the portholes to Shackleton’s cabin, Bound singles out as particularly noteworthy a trio of holes crew members cut through the deck to retrieve supplies from the sinking ship. “They were able to extract three tons of food and straight away they were back on full rations,” he says. “That food lasted all the way until they got to Elephant Island, and I’m pretty confident that it saved their lives.”
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