Earliest Art in the Americas: Ice Age Image of Mammoth or Mastodon

Ω

Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Florida have announced the discovery of a bone fragment, approximately 13,000 years old, in Florida with an incised image of a mammoth or mastodon. This engraving is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art to depict a proboscidean (the order of animals with trunks) in the Americas. The team's research is published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science.



The engraving, approximately 13,000 years old, is 3 inches long from the top of the head to the tip of the tail, and 1.75 inches tall from the top of the head to the bottom of the right foreleg. (Credit: Chip Clark/Smithsonian)

The bone was discovered in Vero Beach, Fla. by James Kennedy, an avocational fossil hunter, who collected the bone and later while cleaning the bone, discovered the engraving. Recognizing its potential importance, Kennedy contacted scientists at the University of Florida and the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute and National Museum of Natural History.

"This is an incredibly exciting discovery," said Dennis Stanford, anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and co-author of this research. "There are hundreds of depictions of proboscideans on cave walls and carved into bones in Europe, but none from America -- until now."

The engraving is 3 inches long from the top of the head to the tip of the tail, and 1.75 inches tall from the top of the head to the bottom of the right foreleg. The fossil bone is a fragment from a long bone of a large mammal -- most likely either a mammoth or mastodon, or less likely a giant sloth. A precise identification was not possible because of the bone's fragmented condition and lack of diagnostic features.

"The results of this investigation are an excellent example of the value of interdisciplinary research and cooperation among scientists," said Barbara Purdy, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Florida and lead author of the team's research. "There was considerable skepticism expressed about the authenticity of the incising on the bone until it was examined exhaustively by archaeologists, paleontologists, forensic anthropologists, materials science engineers and artists."

One of the main goals for the research team was to investigate the timing of the engraving -- was it ancient or was it recently engraved to mimic an example of prehistoric art? It was originally found near a location, known as the Old Vero Site, where human bones were found side-by-side with the bones of extinct Ice Age animals in an excavation from 1913 to 1916. The team examined the elemental composition of the engraved bone and others from the Old Vero Site. They also used optical and electron microscopy, which showed no discontinuity in coloration between the carved grooves and the surrounding material. This indicated that both surfaces aged simultaneously and that the edges of the carving were worn and showed no signs of being carved recently or that the grooves were made with metal tools.

Believed to be genuine, this rare specimen provides evidence that people living in the Americas during the last Ice Age created artistic images of the animals they hunted. The engraving is at least 13,000 years old as this is the date for the last appearance of these animals in eastern North America, and more recent Pre-Columbian people would not have seen a mammoth or mastodon to draw.

The team's research also further validates the findings of geologist Elias Howard Sellards at the Old Vero Site in the early 20th Century. His claims that people were in North America and hunted animals at Vero Beach during the last Ice Age have been disputed over the past 95 years.

A cast of the carved fossil bone is now part of an exhibit of Florida Mammoth and Mastodons at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Birthplace of Abraham Gets a New Lease on Life

Ω



Like the great pyramids of Egypt, it looms above a parched, flat and desolate landscape and easily dominates the skyline of this ancient, now long abandoned city. The Great Ziggurat is what most people think about when one mentions the city of Ur. Much more than a single monumental structure, however, Ur was a royal city that contained the public buildings, religious centers, and tombs of a people who, over 4,000 years ago, set the standards for civilizations that followed. It was one of the first great centers of Mesopotamia. Here Abraham, according to the Biblical account, was born and raised. And here, over the many centuries, elements and events, both natural and human, have combined to lay it to waste. It crumbles before our eyes. That is now changing.

Complete article and pictures

Breeding with Neanderthals helped humans go global

Ω


WHEN the first modern humans left Africa they were ill-equipped to cope with unfamiliar diseases. But by interbreeding with the local hominins, it seems they picked up genes that protected them and helped them eventually spread across the planet.

The publication of the Neanderthal genome last year offered proof that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals after leaving Africa. There is also evidence that suggests they enjoyed intimate relations with other hominins including the Denisovans, a species identified last year from a Siberian fossil.

Complete article

Archaeologists Unscramble Ancient Graffiti In Israel

Aramaic is the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East, the linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic.

"Once you understand Aramaic," says Karen Stern, "you can read anything. You can read Hebrew, you can read Phoenician. I always call it the little black dress of Semitic languages."
Ω

Complete article

Stern, 35, is an archaeologist and an assistant professor in the history department at Brooklyn College. Her passion is the tomb graffiti of the ancient Jews in what was then Roman Palestine. Graffiti has been "published, but sort of disregarded," she says. "Whereas I think it is intimate, vocal and spontaneous, and adds to the historical record..."

Jewish people came to live or be buried here from all over the ancient world, according to Beit She'arim manager, Revital Weiss.

"We have a burial place from the Lebanon community, from Syria — the farthest one is from Yemen," Weiss says.

Jews were exiled from Jerusalem after a revolt in A.D. 132. Beit She'arim, established by a fabled Jewish rabbinical prince, Judah, became a refuge for him and his followers....

It's in the Cave of Coffins that Stern points to two inscriptions in ancient Greek. They are tiny and clustered near niches once holding oil lamps.

One says, "Take courage, Holy Parents of Pharcitae, udes adonitas — no one is immortal." Stern explains that the dead who are being brought into the catacombs shouldn't feel that they are weak just because they've passed on.

She reads aloud the other inscription: "Good luck on your resurrection."

"Of course, resurrection is not in the Jewish tradition," says Emma Maayan Fanar, a professor of Byzantine art at the University of Haifa, who has teamed up with Stern. "It's very uncommon."

Tiny menorahs are scattered as engravings throughout the tomb, a symbol of the Temple in Jerusalem and a symbol of the endurance of the Jewish faith...

"They were grapho-maniacal," Jonathan Price, head of the classics department at Tel Aviv University, says of the ancient Jews who were entombed here in the first and second centuries.

Over the next decade, Price and a group of scholars plan to publish many volumes of inscriptions from walls, pots, glass — everything but books — dating from the time of Alexander the Great to that of the Prophet Muhammad.

They will include many languages, such as Hebrew and Aramaic dialects like Syriac, Nabatean and Samaritan.

Price describes the graffiti as "a spontaneous verbal outburst" that adds intimacy to the historical record of the ancient Levant and Mesopotamia.

"These cultures wrote everything," he says. "They recorded their personal lives, their public lives; empires recorded themselves. They were hyperlinguistic..."

Ancient water source for Jerusalem?

Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have conducted an initial survey of what appears to be an important, ancient water source in a cave that was been discovered during excavation work for a new train station being constructed at the entrance to Jerusalem.

The work was done by members of the Cave Research Unit of the university, headed by Prof. Amos Frumkin of the Department of Geography. The cave was exposed near the base of a deep service shaft that was dug for the train tunnel leading into the new station, located opposite the main bus station in Jerusalem. The full length of the cave is as yet unexplored.

The cave is narrow and a few dozen meters high, forming an underground canyon. It contains an underground stream, flowing in a southeasterly direction. It is a type of karstic cave, which refers to an area of limestone in which dissolution has produced sinkholes, underground streams and caverns. Karstic caves are common mainly where the climate is wetter, such as Slovenia.

The length of the cave is believed to extend for several hundred meters, at least, though its true length will only be known after subsequent explorations. At a distance of some 200 meters from the service shaft, the Hebrew University cave explorers found a series of small waterfalls. Testing of the water in the cave, it is believed, can yield valuable information about potential pollution of the underground water supply in the Jerusalem area.

"This cave is the largest and most impressive of its type that has yet been found in Israel," said Frumkin. He pointed out that the cave is situated in an area about which there is uncertainty regarding the direction of the flow of water in the mountain aquifer, and this cave can assist in achieving a better understanding of that phenomenon.

Frumkin cited the law that requires preservation of the cave for future generations, but said that this should be feasible for the most part without harming the work on the construction of the new train station.

Beer brewing in Iron Age France

Ω

Evidence of beer making in Mediterranean France, as far back as the 5th century BC, has been unearthed by Laurent Bouby from the CNRS - Centre de Bio-Archeologie et d'Ecology in Montepellier, France, and colleagues. Their analyses at the Roquepertuse excavation site in Provence reveal the presence of poorly preserved barley grains suggesting germination, as well as equipment and other remains of deliberate malting in the home. Taken together, these findings suggest that, as well as regular wine making, the French had an early passion for beer brewing. The work has just been published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology.

To date, researchers had only found evidence of wine production in the region. Bouby and team analysed three samples of sediment from excavations carried out in the 1990s. One sample was taken from the floor of a dwelling, close to a hearth and oven. The other two samples came from the contents of a ceramic vessel and from a pit. There were carbonized plant remains in all three samples, dominated by barley.

The barley grains identified were poorly preserved and predominantly sprouted (90 percent of the sample), suggesting that they were carbonized at the end of the malting process and before the grinding of dry malt. The neighboring oven is likely to have been used to stop the germination process at the desired level for beer making, by drying and roasting the grain.

Based on the equipment found at the Roquepertuse dwelling, the authors suggest that the habitants soaked the grain in vessels, spread it out and turned it during germination on the flat paved floor area, dried the grain in the oven to stop germination, and used domestic grindstones to grind the malted grain. Then hearths and containers were likely used for fermentation and storage.

The authors conclude: "The Roquepertuse example suggests that beer was really produced within the context of domestic activities. Compared to other archaeobotanical and archaeological evidence, it contributes to portraying a society which combined an intricate use of various alcoholic beverages including beer, which was probably of long-standing local tradition, and wine, which was, at least in part, promoted by colonial contacts with Mediterranean agents."

Native Americans of Cahokia made copper artifacts

Ω

Northwestern University researchers ditched many of their high-tech tools and turned to large stones, fire and some old-fashioned elbow grease to recreate techniques used by Native American coppersmiths who lived more than 600 years ago.

This prehistoric approach to metalworking was part of a metallurgical analysis of copper artifacts left behind by the Mississippians of the Cahokia Mounds, who lived in southeastern Illinois from 700 until 1400 A.D. The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in May.

The researchers were able to identify how the coppersmiths of Cahokia likely set up their workshop and the methods and tools used to work copper nuggets into sacred jewelry, headdresses, breastplates and other regalia.

"Metals store clues within their structure that can help explain how they were processed," said David Dunand, the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and co-author of the paper. "We were lucky enough to analyze small, discarded pieces of copper found on the ground of the excavated 'copper workshop house' in Cahokia and determine how the metal was worked by the Cahokians."

Two materials science and engineering students conducted much of the research. Matt Chastain, a Northwestern undergraduate at the time of the study, worked alongside Alix Deymier-Black, a graduate student in the materials science and engineering department. Chastain, first author of the paper, undertook the metallurgical analysis of the samples, supplied from ongoing excavations at Mound 34 in Cahokia. Chastain followed up his analysis by volunteering at the excavation site.

"We cut through some samples of the copper pieces and polished them to look at the grain structures of the copper with a microscope," said Deymier-Black, second author of the paper. "From the size, shape and features of the grains inside the copper, we determined that the coppersmiths were likely hammering the copper, probably with a heavy rock, then putting the copper in the hot coals of a wood fire for five to 10 minutes to soften it and repeating the cycle until they had created a thin sheet of copper. "

After using basic metallurgical science to better understand the methods the Cahokians used to create copper sheets, Deymier-Black and Chastain recreated the metalworking process in the lab with natural copper nuggets, fire and a heavy stone ---pounding and heating the copper into thin sheets.

The researchers also tested theories that some archeologists had made about the coppersmiths' techniques. One idea was that they made large copper pieces, like ceremonial breastplates, by "laminating" sheets of copper together through a hammering technique. Deymier-Black said that the lamination could not be reproduced, even with much greater weights achievable with a modern press. The other hypothesis, that the Cahokians used copper knobs or copper rivets and other mechanical devices to secure sheets of copper together, seems more likely.

Another puzzle was how the Cahokians cut the hammered sheets of copper into regular shapes. The researchers cut replicated hammered sheets by four different methods: grinding an embossed ridge, shearing with scissors, hammering against a sharp corner, and bending the sheet back and forth. Only the bent edge looked similar to the edge of the historical artifacts, indicating that the Cahokians most likely used that method to cut copper.

Scientific insight into the process used to create the sacred copper artifacts of Cahokian people is helpful to James Brown, professor of anthropology at Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and John E. Kelly, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. The two researchers, co-authors on the study, are credited with pinpointing the location of the copper workshop at Cahokia.

"I'm delighted that through the scientific process we were able to confirm some of the techniques and end some disputes about how the copper artifacts were made," said Brown, also an international expert on Native American archaeology. "This study gives some of the real details, so that an observer can imagine how it was done and could possibly hook onto other kinds of observations about the people of Cahokia."

King Solomon's Mines? Evidence Supports Early Dating

Ω

A team of archaeologists and others will return to a site southeast of the Dead Sea in late September, 2011 to continue investigations of what is now considered to be one of the largest copper mines of the ancient Middle East. Among other things, scientists hope to be able to identify the ethnicity or nationality of the people who actually controlled the mining and smelting operation during the 10th century B.C.E., the time period when, based on the Biblical accounts, scholars have traditionally dated the kingdom of Edom, as well as that of David and Solomon of ancient Israel...


Radiocarbon-dated finds in 2002 supported an early Iron Age occupation of the site from the end of the 12th century B.C. to the end of the 9th century B.C. The site contained over 100 buildings already visible from the surface, a large desert fortress, and large, extensive mounds of slag, waste products of copper smelting. In 2006, deeply stratified excavations at the site using high-precision radiocarbon dating, Bayesian analysis and advanced digital recording and mapping technologies turned up results that further supported the initial interpretations from 2002.

The recovery of predominantly Edomite local ceramic ware dated to the time period evidenced a substantial or predominant Edomite presence, and the discovery there of Egyptian artifacts known to have been produced during the time of Pharaohs Siamun and Shishak suggested some connection or interaction with ancient Egypt of the 10th and 9th centuries. In short, convincing evidence now supported the suggestion that a massive copper production facility had been operating at KEN during the 10th and 9th centuries B.C., a time period that up until now had been assumed by many scholars, in particular the minimalists, to predate by at least two centuries the emergence of the fully-developed kingdoms of ancient Edom and Israel...

Complete article

Huge Ancient Language Dictionary Finished After 90 Years

21-volume work details the language and culture of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia

An ambitious project to identify, explain and provide citations for the words written in cuneiform on clay tablets and carved in stone by Babylonians, Assyrians and others in Mesopotamia between 2500 B.C. and A.D. 100 has been completed after 90 years of labor, the University of Chicago announced June 5.

To mark the completion of the 21-volume Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Oriental Institute at the University, where the project was housed, will hold a conference Monday, June 6, during which scholars from around the world will discuss the significance of the achievement.

“I feel proud and privileged to have brought this project home,” said Martha Roth, editor-in-charge of the dictionary and dean of Humanities Division at the University of Chicago, who has been working on the project since 1979. “I feel this will be a foundation for how to do more dictionary projects in the future.”

“The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is one of the most important and unique contributions of the Oriental Institute to understanding the civilizations of the ancient Near East,” said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute. “The CAD is the single most impressive effort I know of to systematically record, codify and make accessible the Akkadian language that forms the heart of the textual record of civilization in the place of its birth: Mesopotamia.

“The CAD is not simply a word list. By detailing the history and range of uses of each word, this unique dictionary is in essence a cultural encyclopedia of Mesopotamian history, society, literature, law and religion and is an indispensable research tool for any scholar anywhere who seeks to explore the written record of Mesopotamian civilization,” he added.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project was started in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute and one of the country’s premier Middle Eastern archaeologists. It documents cultures that developed in what is now Iraq.

Although originally named after the Assyrian language, scholars found that Assyrian was a dialect of another Semitic language, Akkadian. Over the years, researchers filled out millions of index cards with references to the use of 28,000 words. The entries for each word denote various meanings and reference the contexts and ways in which it was used.

In the final volume, for instance, the listing for the word umu, meaning “day,” covers 17 pages and documents its use, for example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh: “Those who took crowns who had rule of the land in the days of yore.”_Robert Biggs, professor emeritus at the Oriental Institute, worked on the dictionary and also as an archaeologist on digs where he recovered tablets.

“You’d brush away the dirt, and then there would emerge a letter from someone who might be talking about a new child in the family, or another tablet that might be about a loan until harvest time. You’d realize that this was a culture not just of kings and queens, but also of real people, much like ourselves, with similar concerns for safety, food and shelter for themselves and their families.

“They wrote these tablets thousands of years ago, never meaning for them to be read so much later, but they speak to us in a way that makes their experiences come alive,” he said.