Amarna – City of the Sun God

 The Glyptotek is providing a rare glimpse not only of the absolute monarchy and lifestyle of a famous pharaoh, but also of the lives and dreams of the people of ancient Egypt. The special exhibition ‘Amarna – City of the Sun God’ will run from 26 January to 18 June 2023.

What happens when a new pharaoh takes over as ruler and sets a completely different agenda? He replaces magical animal gods with the sun god Aten, heralding the start of a brand new religion and social structure. The year is 1350 BCE, and we are in ancient Egypt. The pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti are in power. The sun god Aten is now the sole permitted god, and the new cult leads to major social upheaval. The royal couple move 250 km along the Nile and build a magnificent new royal seat – Amarna.

“For about 15 years Amarna reflected a vision of the ultimate society, dedicated to the ideal of the sun as the paramount, life-giving god. The newly founded city housed temples for the new god, palaces for the royal family, residential areas, workshops and burial grounds for the people. However, following the death of Akhenaten, Amarna was destroyed and abandoned, and Egypt turned its back on the new religion. It also meant that the city was forgotten for posterity. No new buildings were constructed on top of the ruins, so they are very well preserved,” says Tine Bagh, the Glyptotek’s Egyptologist.

Unique work connected for the first time in more than 3,000 years
The age of Amarna is also the story of a city’s sudden collapse. It was barely 20 years before the dream city turned into a ghost town. Because, when the pharaoh Akhenaten died, the city was destroyed and abandoned, and those that followed attempted to erase all traces of the period. But the brief life of the city makes Amarna a treasure trove for archaeologists, and excavations have revealed countless fragments of the city’s history.

Amarna had to be built quickly, using small blocks of stone covered in decorative motifs. As the city disintegrated, the blocks got scattered all over the place, and it was not until 2015 that the Egyptologist Raymond Johnson discovered that one of the blocks on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York matched a block and a motif in the Glyptotek’s collection. One block features Kiya, Akhenaten’s second wife; the other Akhenaten himself. The exhibition reunites them for the first time since c. 1350 BCE.

The Glyptotek’s special Amarna exhibition recreates parts of the city using photos, drawings and a 3D video, providing insight into the magnificent city, its history and the dreams and way of life of the people of ancient Egypt. But it also reveals how tough life was for many of the inhabitants, who slogged away during the construction of the city.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun
The exhibition will spotlight the distinctive visual style of the period, while solar anthems, the development of a new musical style and ordinary everyday objects will provide a sense of religious and secular life at the time. A presentation of the protagonists in their familiar setting will paint a vivid picture of Amarna. The Amarna era ended with the spotlight on the child king Tutankhamun. As the son of Akhenaten, he grew up in Amarna. During his reign, the decision was made to return to the ancient deities and the former residence in Thebes. So, the exhibition also commemorates the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun on 4 November 1922.

The Glyptotek has an impressive collection of artefacts from Amarna, which will bring the place and its fascinating history to life. They will be accompanied by selected loans from abroad – including museums in New York, Paris and Berlin – and from the National Museum of Denmark and the Royal Cast Collection in Copenhagen.

Read more about the exhibition here.

Study offers new insight on what ancient noses smelled

Scientists compare humans' extinct genetic relatives to present-day people

 

IMAGE: A RECONSTRUCTION OF A NEANDERTHAL WOMAN view more 

CREDIT: <A HREF="HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/WIKI/FILE:RECONSTRUCTION_OF_NEANDERTHAL_WOMAN.JPG">BACON CPH</A>, <A HREF="HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/2.5">CC BY 2.5</A>, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

It sounds a little like Stone Age standup: A Denisovan and a human walk past a bees’ nest heavy with honeycomb. What happens next?

According to a study led by University of Alaska Fairbanks biological anthropologist Kara C. Hoover and Universite Paris-Saclay biochemist Claire de March, the Denisovan, with the species’ greater sensitivity to sweet smells, may have immediately homed in on the scent and beat the human to a high-energy meal.

"This research has allowed us to draw some larger conclusions about the sense of smell in our closest genetic relatives and understand the role that smell played in adapting to new environments and foods during our migrations out of Africa,” said Hoover, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UAF.

A paper on the research, recently published in iScience, was written by collaborators from UAF, Duke University, Universite Paris-Saclay, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and the University of Manchester. The study investigated whether humans share a sense of smell with their now-extinct Denisovan and Neanderthal cousins, who left Africa about 750,000 years ago. Contemporary humans left Africa about 65,000 years ago.

To recreate the noses of our extinct genetic relatives and compare them to those of present-day people, the research team used publicly available genome sequences from multiple Neanderthals, one Denisovan and one ancient human. They used data from the 1000 Genomes project to represent modern humans.

They then compared 30 olfactory receptor genes from each group. The team found that 11 of the receptors had some novel mutations present only in extinct lineages. In the largest study of its kind to date, the team created laboratory versions of those 11 olfactory receptors and then exposed them to hundreds of odors at different concentrations. 

When the receptors detected an odor, they literally lit up. The speed and brightness of the luminescence told the scientists whether, how soon and to what degree each “nose” could smell the odors. While the receptors could detect the same things as modern humans, they differed in sensitivity to many of the odors.

“We literally reproduced an event that hadn’t happened since the extinction of Denisova and Neanderthal 30,000 years ago: an extinct odorant receptor responding to an odor in cells on a lab bench,” de March said. “This took us closer to understanding how Neanderthal and Denisova perceived and interacted with their olfactory environment.”

Neanderthals, who lived in Eurasia between 430,000 and 40,000 years ago, had the poorest sense of smell. For example, the Neanderthal from the Chagyrskaya Cave couldn’t detect the sex steroid androstadienone, which smells something like sweat and urine. That may have been useful, Hoover said, given that they were trapped in close quarters in caves during glacial maximums, when the ice sheets from the poles expanded southward and made many areas uninhabitable.

Denisovans have left behind less physical evidence than Neanderthals. They are known mostly from modern-day Siberia, where remains in the Denisova Cave were dated to between 76,200 and 51,600 years ago. Denisovans were generally more sensitive to odors than humans and much more sensitive than Neanderthals. They were most responsive to sweet and spicy smells like honey, vanilla, cloves and herbs. That trait could have helped them find high-calorie food.

Present-day humans fell somewhere in the middle.

“This is the most exciting research I have ever been involved in,” said co-author Matthew Cobb from the University of Manchester. “It shows how we can use genetics to peer back into the sensory world of our long-lost relatives, giving us insight into how they will have perceived their environment and, perhaps, how they were able to survive.”

In many species, olfactory receptors have been linked to their ecological and dietary needs.

"Each species must evolve olfactory receptors to maximize their fitness for finding food," said co-author Hiroaki Matsunami in a Duke University news release. "In humans, it's more complicated because we eat a lot of things. We're not really specialized."

Smell is integral to the human story, Hoover said. “Such a strongly overlapping olfactory repertoire suggests that our generalist approach to smelling has enabled us to find new foods when migrating to new places — not just us but our cousins who left Africa much earlier than us!”

 

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JOURNAL

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2022.105908 

‘Golden boy’ mummy was protected by 49 precious amulets, CT scans reveal

 

IMAGE: THE MUMMY WAS GARLANDED WITH FERNS AND WORE A GILDED FACE MASK. view more 

CREDIT: SN SALEEM

Scientists used CT scans to ‘digitally unwrap’ the approximately 2,300-year-old undisturbed mummy of a teenage boy of high socioeconomic status. The body was equipped with 49 amulets of 21 different types, many of which were made of gold, which had been carefully placed on or inside the body. These included a two-finger amulet next to the uncircumcised penis, a golden heart scarab placed inside the thoracic cavity, and a golden tongue inside the mouth. He was clad in sandals and garlanded with ferns, with ritual significance. This mummy is a showcase of Egyptian beliefs about death and the afterlife during the Ptolemaic period.

Main text: The ancient Egyptians believed that when we died, our spiritual body sought out an afterlife similar to this world. But entry into this afterlife wasn’t guaranteed: it first required a perilous journey through the underworld, followed by an individual last judgment. For this reason, relatives and embalmers did everything they could to ensure that their loved one might reach a happy destination.

Here, scientists from Egypt used computerized tomography (CT) to ‘digitally unwrap’ the intact, never-opened mummy of a 2,300-year-old teenage boy of high socioeconomic status. They found that this ‘Golden boy’ is an undisturbed showcase of ancient Egyptian beliefs about life after death. For example, he was sent on his way with no fewer than 49 amulets of 21 types to promote his bodily resurrection. He wore sandals and was garlanded with ferns, rich in ritual meaning. These results provide a unique insight into mummification procedures and beliefs about the importance of grave ornaments during the Ptolemaic period. They are published in Frontiers in Medicine.

“Here we show that this mummy's body was extensively decorated with 49 amulets, beautifully stylized in a unique arrangement of three columns between the folds of the wrappings and inside the mummy’s body cavity. These include the Eye of Horus, the scarab, the akhet amulet of the horizon, the placenta, the Knot of Isis, and others. Many were made of gold, while some were made of semiprecious stones, fired clay, or faience. Their purpose was to protect the body and give it vitality in the afterlife,” said Dr Sahar Saleem, the study’s first author and a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Cairo University, Egypt.

Sandals to walk to the afterlife

The ’Golden boy’ mummy had been found in 1916 at a cemetery used between approximately 332 and 30 BCE in Nag el-Hassay in southern Egypt. It has been stored unexamined in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo until the present study.

The mummy was laid inside two coffins, an outer coffin with a Greek inscription and an inner wooden sarcophagus. Within, he wore a gilded head mask, a pectoral cartonnage that covered the front of the torso, and a pair of sandals. Apart from the heart, the viscera had been removed through an incision, while the brain had been removed through the nose and replaced with resin.

“The sandals were probably meant to enable the boy to walk out of the coffin. According to the ancient Egyptians’ ritual Book of The Dead, the deceased had to wear white sandals to be pious and clean before reciting its verses,” said Saleem.

No wisdom teeth 

The CT scans showed that the boy was 128 cm tall, not circumcised, and without any known cause of death other than natural causes. From the degree of bone fusion and the non-erupted wisdom teeth, the authors estimate that the boy was between 14 and 15 years old. His teeth were good, with no evidence of caries, tooth loss, or periodontal disease.

Ferns were garlanded around the mummy’s outer surface. “Ancient Egyptians were fascinated by plants and flowers and believed they possessed sacred and symbolic effects. Bouquets of plants and flowers were placed beside the deceased at the time of burial: this was done for example with the mummies of the New Kingdom kings Ahmose, Amenhotep I, and Ramesses the Great. The deceased was also offered plants in each visit to the dead during feasts,” said Saleem.

The amulets are a testament to a wide range of Egyptian beliefs. For example, a golden tongue leaf was placed inside the mouth to ensure the boy could speak in the afterlife, while a two-finger amulet was placed beside his penis to protect the embalming incision. An Isis Knot enlisted the power of Isis in the protection of the body, a right-angle amulet was meant to bring balance and leveling, and double falcon and ostrich plumes represented the duality of spiritual and material life. A golden scarab beetle was found placed inside the thoracic cavity, of which a copy was 3D printed by the researchers.

Scarab to silence the heart

“The heart scarab is mentioned in chapter 30 of the Book of the Dead: it was important in the afterlife during judging the deceased and weighing of the heart against the feather of the goddess Maat. The heart scarab silenced the heart on Judgement Day, so as not to bear witness against the deceased. It was placed inside the torso cavity during mummification to substitute for the heart if the body was ever deprived of this organ,” explained Saleem.

Based on these exciting results, the management of the Egyptian Museum decided to move the mummy to the main exhibition hall under the nickname ‘Golden boy’. In its new location, visitors can admire the mummy next to CT images and a 3D printed version of the heart scarab amulet, to get as close as possible to the glories of ancient Egyptian civilization.

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JOURNAL

Violence and warfare were widespread in many Neolithic farming communities across Northwest Europe

Violence and warfare were widespread in many Neolithic communities across Northwest Europe, a period associated with the adoption of farming, new research suggests.

Of the skeletal remains of more than 2300 early farmers from 180 sites dating from around 8000 – 4000 years ago to, more than one in ten displayed weapon injuries, bioarchaeologists found.

Contrary to the view that the Neolithic era was marked by peaceful cooperation, the team of international researchers say that in some regions the period from 6000BC to 2000BC may be a high point in conflict and violence with the destruction of entire communities.

The findings also suggest the rise of growing crops and herding animals as a way of life, replacing hunting and gathering, may have laid the foundations for formalised warfare.

Researchers used bioarchaeological techniques to study human skeletal remains from sites in Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and Sweden.

The team collated the findings to map, for the first time, evidence of violence across Neolithic Northwestern Europe, which has the greatest concentration of excavated Neolithic sites in the world,

The team from the Universities of Edinburgh, Bournemouth and Lund in Sweden, and the OsteoArchaeological Research Centre in Germany examined the remains for evidence of injuries caused predominantly by blunt force to the skull.  

More than ten per cent showed damage potentially caused by frequent blows to the head by blunt instruments or stone axes. Several examples of penetrative injuries, thought to be from arrows, were also found.

Some of the injuries were linked to mass burials, which could suggest the destruction of entire communities, the researchers say.

Dr Linda Fibiger, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology, said: “Human bones are the most direct and least biased form of evidence for past hostilities and our abilities to distinguish between fatal injuries as opposed to post-mortem breakage have improved drastically in recent years, in addition to differentiating accidental injuries from weapon based assaults.”

Dr Martin Smith, of Bournemouth University’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, said: “The study raises the question to why violence seems to have been so prevalent during this period. The most plausible explanation may be that the economic base of society had changed. With farming came inequality and those who fared less successfully appear at times to have engaged in raiding and collective violence as an alternative strategy for success, with the results now increasingly being recognised archaeologically.”

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is available here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209481119

In the Neanderthal site of Combe-Grenal, France, hunting strategies were unaffected by changing climate

 

IMAGE: FROM DENTAL FACETS TO PALEOECOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTIONS. view more 

CREDIT: EMILIE BERLIOZ, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Neanderthals in Combe-Grenal (France) preferred to hunt in open environments, and their hunting strategies did not alter during periods of climatic change, according to a study published January 18, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Emilie Berlioz of the CNRS/Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France, and colleagues, as part of research carried out in the ANR DeerPal project.

The archaeological site of Combe-Grenal in France was inhabited by Neanderthals for many millennia throughout the Middle Palaeolithic from around 150,000 to 45,000 years ago. These inhabitants hunted local animals whose remains are also found at the site. During the Neanderthals’ occupation, the region experienced numerous oscillations of climate and environmental conditions which are known to have impacted the habits of local fauna. In this study, Berlioz and colleagues investigated the habitat preferences of species hunted by the Neanderthals to investigate whether these environmental shifts affected Neanderthal hunting strategies.

The authors examined nearly 400 specimens of hunted animals from the site, including bison, aurochs, red deer, and reindeer, using wear on the animals’ teeth to infer their diets during the final days of their lives. The animals were found to have fed predominantly on plants growing in an open, tundra-like environment. This pattern was consistent across the many millennia recorded at Combe-Grenal, suggesting that these hunted animals continued to prefer an open-habitat feeding ecology, even during times of significant climate fluctuations. As a result, Neanderthal hunters “stayed in the open”, and were not forced to switch to hunting tactics adapted to close encounters in forested environments. In Combe-Grenal, these results put into perspective the link generally established between the evolution of the production of lithic tools and the adaptation of hunting strategies of human populations in response to environmental changes

This information is essential to understanding the influences of local environmental changes on material culture or the human history. Further examination of similar data at other sites will allow researchers to investigate whether this trend holds true at different times and in different regions.

The authors add: “Dental microwear texture analysis of ungulate preys at Combe-Grenal shows Neanderthal hunting strategies were unaffected by climatic and environmental oscillations throughout millenia.”

Freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278395

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Marriage in Minoan Crete

 

IMAGE: THE WELL-KNOWN FIGURE OF A MINOAN GODDESS, ARTISTICALLY APPROPRIATED AND DEPICTED HOLDING DNA CHAINS INSTEAD OF SNAKES. THE POPULATION IS BORN FROM HER "ANCIENT" BODY. THE ORANGE AND RED GENEALOGY REFERS TO THE RESEARCH FINDING OF ENDOGAMY BETWEEN FIRST AND SECOND COUSINS. view more 

CREDIT: © EVA SKOURTANIOTI

• A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, gained new insights into whom the Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans married through analysing genetic material from Bronze Age human bones.
• The archaeologists were able to show that it was customary to marry one's first cousin.
• In addition, they have succeeded for the first time in reconstructing a biological family tree for a Mycenaean family

When Heinrich Schliemann discovered the gold-rich shaft tombs of Mycenae with their famous gold masks over 100 years ago, he could only speculate about the relationship of the people buried in them. Now, with the help of the analysis of ancient genomes, it has been possible for the first time to gain insights into kinship and marriage rules in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. The results were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), together with an international team of partners, analysed over 100 genomes of Bronze Age people from the Aegean. "Without the great cooperation with our partners in Greece and worldwide, this would not have been possible," says archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer, one of the study's lead authors.

First biological family tree of a Mycenaean family

Thanks to recent methodological advances in the production and evaluation of ancient genetic datasets, it has now been possible to produce extensive data even in regions with problematic DNA preservation due to climate conditions, such as Greece. For a Mycenaean hamlet of the 16th century BC, it has even been possible to reconstruct the kinship of the house's inhabitants - the first family tree that has so far been genetically reconstructed for the entire ancient Mediterranean region.

Apparently, some of the sons still lived in their parents' hamlet in adulthood. At least their children were buried in a tomb under the courtyard of the estate. One of the wives who married into the house brought her sister into the family, as her child was also buried in the same grave.

Customary to marry one’s first cousin

However, another finding was completely unexpected: on Crete and the other Greek islands, as well as on the mainland, it was very common to marry one's first cousin 4000 years ago. "More than a thousand ancient genomes from different regions of the world have now been published, but it seems that such a strict system of kin marriage did not exist anywhere else in the ancient world," says Eirini Skourtanioti, the lead author of the study who conducted the analyses. "This came as a complete surprise to all of us and raises many questions."

How this particular marriage rule can be explained, the research team can only speculate. "Maybe this was a way to prevent the inherited farmland from being divided up more and more? In any case, it guaranteed a certain continuity of the family in one place, which is an important prerequisite for the cultivation of olives and wine, for example," Stockhammer suspects. "What is certain is that the analysis of ancient genomes will continue to provide us with fantastic, new insights into ancient family structures in the future," adds Skourtanioti.

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JOURNAL

Nature Ecology & Evolution

DOI

10.1038/s41559-022-01952-3 

Ancient Siberian genomes reveal genetic backflow from North America across the Bering Sea

 

IMAGE: SKULL view more 

CREDIT: SERGEY V. SEMENOV

The movement of people across the Bering Sea from North Asia to North America is a well-known phenomenon in early human history. Nevertheless, the genetic makeup of the  people who lived in North Asia during this time has remained mysterious due to a limited number of ancient genomes analyzed from this region. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on January 12 describe genomes from ten individuals up to 7,500 years old that help to fill the gap and show geneflow from people moving in the opposite direction from North America to North Asia.

Their analysis reveals a previously undescribed group of early Holocene Siberian people that lived in the Neolithic Altai-Sayan region, near to where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together. The genetic data show they were descendants of both paleo-Siberian and Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) people.

“We describe a previously unknown hunter-gatherer population in the Altai as early as 7,500 years old, which is a mixture between two distinct groups that lived in Siberia during the last Ice Age,” says Cosimo Posth at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and senior author of the study. “The Altai hunter-gatherer group contributed to many contemporaneous and subsequent populations across North Asia, showing how great the mobility of those foraging communities was.”

Posth notes that the Altai region is known in the media as the location where a new archaic hominin group, the Denisovans, was discovered. But the region also has importance in human history as a crossroad for population movements between northern Siberia, Central Asia, and East Asia over millennia.

Posth and colleagues report that the unique gene pool they uncovered may represent an optimal source for the inferred ANE-related population that contributed to Bronze Age groups from North and Inner Asia, such as Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers, Okunevo-associated pastoralists, and Tarim Basin mummies. They uncovered Ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) ancestry as well—which had initially been described in Neolithic hunter-gatherers from the Russian Far East—in another Neolithic Altai-Sayan individual associated with distinct cultural features.

The findings reveal the spread of ANA ancestry about 1,500 kilometers farther to the west than previously observed. In the Russian Far East, they also identified 7,000-year-old individuals with Jomon-associated ancestry, indicating links with hunter-gatherer groups from the Japanese Archipelago.

The data also are consistent with multiple phases of gene flow from North America to northeastern Asia over the last 5,000 years, reaching the Kamchatka Peninsula and central Siberia. The researchers note that the findings highlight a largely interconnected population throughout North Asia from the early Holocene onwards.

“The finding that surprised me the most is from an individual dated to a similar period as the other Altai hunter-gatherers but with a completely different genetic profile, showing genetic affinities to populations located in the Russian Far East,” says Ke Wang at Fudan University, China, and lead author of the study. “Interestingly, the Nizhnetytkesken individual was found in a cave containing rich burial goods with a religious costume and objects interpreted as possible representation of shamanism.”

Wang says the finding implies that individuals with very different profiles and backgrounds were living in the same region around the same time.

“It is not clear if the Nizhnetytkesken individual came from far away or the population from which he derived was located close by,” she says. “However, his grave goods appear different than other local archeological contexts implying mobility of both culturally and genetically diverse individuals into the Altai region.”

The genetic data from the Altai show that North Asia harbored highly connected groups as early as 10,000 years ago, across long geographic distances. “This suggests that human migrations and admixtures were the norm and not the exception also for ancient hunter-gatherer societies,” Posth says.

Why was Roman concrete so durable?

The ancient Romans were masters of engineering, constructing vast networks of roads, aqueducts, ports, and massive buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Many of these structures were built with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and was dedicated in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some ancient Roman aqueducts still deliver water to Rome today. Meanwhile, many modern concrete structures have crumbled after a few decades.

Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secret of this ultradurable ancient construction material, particularly in structures that endured especially harsh conditions, such as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or those constructed in seismically active locations.

Now, a team of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has made progress in this field, discovering ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated several key self-healing functionalities. The findings are published in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, former doctoral student Linda Seymour, and four others.

For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix. “Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features,” says Masic. “These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”

Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability. “The idea that the presence of these lime clasts was simply attributed to low quality control always bothered me,” says Masic. “If the Romans put so much effort into making an outstanding construction material, following all of the detailed recipes that had been optimized over the course of many centuries, why would they put so little effort into ensuring the production of a well-mixed final product? There has to be more to this story.”

Upon further characterization of these lime clasts, using high-resolution multiscale imaging and chemical mapping techniques pioneered in Masic’s research lab, the researchers gained new insights into the potential functionality of these lime clasts.

Historically, it had been assumed that when lime was incorporated into Roman concrete, it was first combined with water to form a highly reactive paste-like material, in a process known as slaking. But this process alone could not account for the presence of the lime clasts. Masic wondered: “Was it possible that the Romans might have actually directly used lime in its more reactive form, known as quicklime?”

Studying samples of this ancient concrete, he and his team determined that the white inclusions were, indeed, made out of various forms of calcium carbonate. And spectroscopic examination provided clues that these had been formed at extreme temperatures, as would be expected from the exothermic reaction produced by using quicklime instead of, or in addition to, the slaked lime in the mixture. Hot mixing, the team has now concluded, was actually the key to the super-durable nature.

“The benefits of hot mixing are twofold,” Masic says. “First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction.”

During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality. As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread. Previous support for this hypothesis was found through the examination of other Roman concrete samples that exhibited calcite-filled cracks.

To prove that this was indeed the mechanism responsible for the durability of the Roman concrete, the team produced samples of hot-mixed concrete that incorporated both ancient and modern formulations, deliberately cracked them, and then ran water through the cracks. Sure enough: Within two weeks the cracks had completely healed and the water could no longer flow. An identical chunk of concrete made without quicklime never healed, and the water just kept flowing through the sample. As a result of these successful tests, the team is working to commercialize this modified cement material.

“It’s exciting to think about how these more durable concrete formulations could expand not only the service life of these materials, but also how it could improve the durability of 3D-printed concrete formulations,” says Masic.

New study suggests Mayas utilized market-based economics

 

IMAGE: OBSIDIAN COLLECTIONS FROM THE SITE OF Q'UMARKAJ AND THE SURROUNDING REGION. view more 

CREDIT: R. HOROWITZ

More than 500 years ago in the midwestern Guatemalan highlands, Maya people bought and sold goods with far less oversight from their rulers than many archeologists previously thought. 

That’s according to a new study in Latin American Antiquity that shows the ruling K’iche’ elite took a hands-off approach when it came to managing the procurement and trade of obsidian by people outside their region of central control. 

In these areas, access to nearby sources of obsidian, a glasslike rock used to make tools and weapons, was managed by local people through independent and diverse acquisition networks. Overtime, the availability of obsidian resources and the prevalence of craftsmen to shape it resulted in a system that is in many ways suggestive of contemporary market-based economies. 

“Scholars have generally assumed that the obsidian trade was managed by Maya rulers, but our research shows that this wasn’t the case at least in this area,” said Rachel Horowitz, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington State University. “People seem to have had a good deal of economic freedom including being able to go to places similar to the supermarkets we have today to buy and sell goods from craftsmen.” 

While there are extensive written records from the Maya Postclassic Period (1200-1524 AD) on political organization, much less is known about how societal elites wielded economic power. Horowitz set out to address this knowledge gap for the K’iche’ by examining the production and distribution of obsidian artifacts, which are used as a proxy by archeologists to determine the level of economic development in a region. 

She performed geochemical and technological analysis on obsidian artifacts excavated from 50 sites around the K’iche’ capital of Q’umarkaj and surrounding region to determine where the raw material originally came from and techniques of its manufacture. 

He results showed that the K’iche’ acquired their obsidian from similar sources in the Central K’iche’ region and Q’umarkaj, indicating a high degree of centralized control. The ruling elite also seemed to manage the trade of more valuable forms of nonlocal obsidian, particularly Pachua obsidian from Mexico, based off its abundance in these central sites. 

Outside this core region though, in areas conquered by the K’iche, there was less similarity in obsidian economic networks. Horowitz’s analysis suggests these sites had access to their own sources of obsidian and developed specialized places where people could go to buy blades and other useful implements made from the rock by experts. 

“For a long time, there has been this idea that people in the past didn’t have market economies, which when you think about it is kind of weird. Why wouldn’t these people have had markets in the past?” she said. “The more we look into it, the more we realize there were a lot of different ways in which these peoples’ lives were similar to ours.”

The Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University loaned Horowitz the obsidian blades and other artifacts she used for her study. The artifacts were excavated in the 1970s. 

Moving forward, Horowitz said she plans to examine more of the collection, the rest of which is housed in Guatemala, to discover further details about how the Maya conducted trade, managed their economic systems, and generally went about their lives.  

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JOURNAL

Latin American Antiquity

DOI

10.1017/laq.2022.79 

DNA from archaeological remains shows that immigration to Scandinavia was exceptional during the Viking period

A new study based on 297 ancient Scandinavian genomes analysed together with the genomic data of 16,638 present day Scandinavians resolve the complex relations between geography, ancestry, and gene flow in Scandinavia – encompassing the Roman Age, the Viking Age and later periods. A surprising increase of variation during the Viking period indicates that gene flow into Scandinavia was especially intense during this period.

An international study coordinated from Stockholm and Reykjavik investigates the development of the Scandinavian gene pool over the latest 2000 years. In this effort the scientists relied on historic and prehistoric genomes, and from material excavated in Scandinavia. These ancient genomes were compared with genomic data from 16,638 contemporary Scandinavians. As the geographical origin and the datings were known for all these individuals, it was possible to resolve the development of the gene pool to a level never realised previously.

Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela at the Centre for Palaeogenetics*, who analysed all the data and extracted some of the ancient DNA used in the study, explains: “With this level of resolution we not only confirm the Viking Age migration. We are also able to trace it to the east Baltic region, the British-Irish Isles and southern Europe. But not all parts of Scandinavia received the same amounts of gene flow from these areas. For example, while British-Irish ancestry became widespread in Scandinavia the eastern-Baltic ancestry mainly reached Gotland and central Sweden.”

The gene pool bounced back after the Viking period
Another new discovery in this study was what happened to the gene pool after the Viking period. The scientists were surprised to find that it bounced back in the direction of what it looked like before the Viking period migration.

Professor Anders Götherström at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, who is a senior scientist on the study, is intrigued: “Interestingly, the non-local ancestry peaks during the Viking period while being lower before and after. The drop in current levels of external ancestry suggests that the Viking-period migrants got less children, or somehow contributed proportionally less to the gene pool than the people who were already in Scandinavia.”

Yet a new discovery was the history of the northern Scandinavian gene pool. There is a genetic component in northern Scandinavia that is rare in central and western Europe, and the scientists were able to track this component in northern Scandinavia through the latest 1000 years.

Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela comments, “We suspected that there was a chronology to the northern Scandinavian gene pool, and it did indeed prove that a more recent influx of Uralic ancestry into Scandinavia define much of the northern gene pool. But if it is recent, it is comparatively so. For example, we know that this Uralic ancestry was present in northern Scandinavia as early as during the late Viking period”.

Based on well-known Swedish archaeological sites
The study is based on a number of well-known Swedish archaeological sites. For example, there are genomes from the 17th century warship Kronan, from the Viking and Vendel period boat burials in the lake Mälaren Valley, and from the migration period ring fortress Sandby borg on Öland.

Anders Götherström conclude: “We were working on a number of smaller studies on different archaeological sites. And at some point it just made sense to combine them into a larger study on the development of the Scandinavian gene pool.

The study, published today in Cell, is an international effort with several collaborators, but it was led by Dr Ricardo Rodríguez Varela and Professor Anders Götherstörm at Stockholm University, and Professor Agnar Helgason, and Kristján Moore at deCODE in Reykavijk.

*The Centre for Palaeogenetics (CPG) is a joint venture between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
 

Contact:
Prof, Anders Götherström, Stockholm University +46 73 992 78 64 E-mail: anders.gotherstrom@arklab.su.se
Dr. Ricardo Rodríguez Varela, Stockholm University, E-mail: ricardo.rodriguez.varela@arklab.su.se, Mobile: +46 (0)737147174;  +34 616762821
 

More information:
The article “The genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present” is published in Cell. https://www.cell.com/