The Dura-Europos site in modern-day Syria is famous for its exceptional state of preservation. Like Pompeii, this ancient city has yielded many great discoveries, and serves as a window into the world of the ancient Hellenistic, Parthian, and Roman periods. Yet despite the prominence of Dura-Europos in Near Eastern scholarship, there is another city, only some miles down the Euphrates river, that presents a long-neglected opportunity for study. A new paper in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, entitled "The Ancient City of Giddan/Eddana (Anqa, Iraq), the 'Forgotten Twin' of Dura-Europos," identifies the city of Anqa as a near mirror image of Dura-Europos, of the same size, comparable composition, and potentially equal value to scholars of the region.
Anqa is located just across the Syrian border from Dura-Europos, in the present-day Al-Qaim district of the Anbar Governorate in Iraq. Its remains include an identifying tell mound, at the northern end of the site, a polygonal inner wall circuit, and a large outer defensive wall, or enceinte. Situated at a point where the Euphrates floodplain drastically narrows, the city would have controlled movement between the populous section of the valley upstream and the trade route downstream linking Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, and Babylonia, giving it great strategic and economic significance. However, the site was ignored entirely by archaeologists until the 1850 publication of a British Middle Euphrates expedition survey. A more thorough study of the site was performed in the late 1930s by Aurel Stein, including aerial photographs of the standing structures, but even after these forays, there was little desire to learn more than the geographical location of this twin city to Dura-Europos.
One reason for the disparity in interest between Anqa and Dura-Europos, posits article author Simon James, is the history of British and French colonial intervention in the region. In 1920, as a result of the San Remo conference, Iraq was seized for British control, and Syria for French. As James writes, the “new political, military, and administrative boundary created a barrier to research and understanding of the earlier history of the region as a whole.” Yet while Dura-Europos and some other sites in Iraq and Syria have suffered from looting, destruction, and civilian death as a consequence of conflict in the region, Anqa has remained relatively untouched. As further archaeological inquiry is performed, Anqa may continue to provide valuable insight into the history of the Middle Euphrates. And furthermore, as methods of digital scholarship bring thinkers together “despite political borders,” the practice of studying sites like it may even, in the words of Simon James, help “address the consequences of colonialism in archaeology.”
A large lava tube in Saudia Arabia provided valuable shelter for humans herding livestock over at least the past 7,000 years, according to a study published April 17, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mathew Stewart of Griffith University, Brisbane and colleagues.
Research in northern Arabia over the last decade has highlighted a diverse Holocene archaeological record. However, the timing of human occupations and their connections with the nearby Levant remain poorly understood, primarily due to poor preservation of organic remains in the region’s arid conditions. To circumvent this problem, Stewart and colleagues focused investigations on caves and other underground settings where ancient materials are sheltered from sun, wind and high fluctuations in temperature. In this study, they analyze an archaeological site from a lava tube called Umm Jirsan located in the volcanic field of Harrat Khaybar in Saudi Arabia, approximately 125km north of Medina.
Within the lava tube are artifacts, rock art, and skeletal remains that document repeated human occupation over at least the past 7,000 years. The lava tube seems to have been an important resource for pastoralists keeping and herding livestock, as evidenced by rock art and animal bones representing domesticated sheep and goats. Isotopic analysis of human remains reveals an increase over time in C3 plants such as cereal and fruit in the diet, possibly linked to a rise in oasis agriculture in the Bronze Age.
The authors conclude that Umm Jirsan was likely not a permanent home, but instead a valuable stopping point for people traveling between oasis settlements. Lava tubes and other natural shelters were valuable resources for communities surviving in a challenging environment, and with further investigation, they present a key source of archaeological information about the history of human occupation in Arabia.
The authors add: “Exploring Arabia’s hidden past, our study uncovers millennia of human occupation within and around the Umm Jirsan lava tube, shedding light on ancient lifestyles and adaptations to environmental change in this harsh desert environment.”
The early origins of the Israelites are at the centre of a new research project at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. A team of researchers led by Hebrew Bible scholar and archaeologist Prof. Dr Benedikt Hensel will explore over a three-year period how one of the largest “megacities” of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean was abandoned and then resettled over centuries – and how the narratives about these events influenced the shaping of early Israelite identities.
The Gerda Henkel Foundation is providing around 400,000 euros in funding for the project, titled “Resettlement of Ruins and Memories in the Making – A Case Study on Hazor and the Shaping of Early Israelite Identities during the Iron Age”, as part of its “Lost Cities” programme. The international team of researchers based in Oldenburg will work closely with academics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the University of Regensburg.
The ruins of the ancient city of Hazor are located in northern Israel, north of the Sea of Galilee. Based on the archaeological findings the site was first settled about 5,000 years ago, in the Early Bronze Age. By the Middle and Late Bronze Age Hazor’s population had grown to between 10,000 and 15,000 people thanks to its strategic location at the crossroads of several trade routes, making it the largest city in the entire region. Various sources from this period, including letters and clay tablets from cities in Syria and Egypt with which the rulers of Hazor conducted trade, testify to the central role Hazor played as a trading hub and cultural melting pot for the entire Near East region.
At the end of the Bronze Age, around 1300 B.C., Hazor was destroyed and temporarily abandoned for unknown reasons. In the subsequent Iron Age, the site was repopulated, albeit on a much smaller scale. “Which culture the inhabitants of Hazor belonged to is something we don’t know for sure,” says Hensel. In addition to the archaeological findings, biblical texts have also served as a key source of information on Hazor. The Book of Joshua from the Old Testament, for instance, describes how the Israelites conquered Hazor, which was inhabited by Canaanites at the time. The historicity of these passages is, however, disputed among researchers, because the texts date from a much later period. “They are probably not directly connected to the resettlement of Hazor,” says Hensel, whose specialty is biblical archaeology.
The interdisciplinary research team is now examining the resettlement period in greater detail. Researchers from the fields of archaeology, social and cultural history, anthropology and Hebrew biblical studies plan to use the results to create a comprehensive overview of the cultural and ethnic transformations that took place in the area between the Euphrates and the Sinai Peninsula known as the Levant during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age – and of how the identity of the early Israelites developed in the course of these upheavals.
Why did the new settlers avoid certain places in the abandoned city?
One of the project’s key objectives is to investigate the resettlement of the Bronze Age ruins during the Iron Age. The researchers aim to learn more about how the new settlers viewed and treated the remains of the destroyed buildings at the site and gain insights into their cultural and ethnic identity. “The new settlers seem to have deliberately avoided certain places in the city, such as the former temple district in the upper city, which would actually have been an ideal place to settle,” Hensel explains. The team plans to carry out further excavations to locate other sites with a similar history within the city complex.
A second objective of the project is the literary-historical and cultural-historical reconstruction of the accounts of Hazor and the Canaanites within the biblical tradition, and an examination of how these narratives are linked to the biblical imagination of Israel as an early tribal culture. “In the biblical narratives, Hazor is portrayed as the capital of the Canaanites. This image is for the most part artificial, but over the centuries during which the biblical texts were compiled it endured – even long after the settlement had been abandoned,” Hensel explains. “Hazor serves as a counter-image to the Israelites, shaping the identity of biblical Israel through literary means," he observes. The project team is investigating the potential historical anchor points of these identity-building processes.
Extensive archaeological excavations have been underway in Hazor since the 1990s. They are led by Professor Hensel and by Dr. Igor Kreimermann from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who is also involved in the current project. Oldenburg students also took part in the Hazor Excavations Project for the first time last year. The project funds will enable volunteers from Oldenburg to continue to participate in the archaeological work.
Indigenous Australian message sticks, which feature markings to convey messages over long distances, analyzed for first time at scale through new database of 1,500 artifacts
New evidence of one of the first cities in the Pacific shows they were established much earlier than previously thought, according to new research from The Australian National University (ANU).
The study used aerial laser scanning to map archaeological sites on the island of Tongatapu in Tonga.
Lead author, PhD scholar Phillip Parton, said the new timeline also indicates that urbanisation in the Pacific was an indigenous innovation that developed before Western influence.
“Earth structures were being constructed in Tongatapu around AD 300. This is 700 years earlier than previously thought,” Mr Parton said.
“As settlements grew, they had to come up with new ways of supporting that growing population. This kind of set-up – what we call low density urbanisation – sets in motion huge social and economic change. People are interacting more and doing different kinds of work.”
Mr Parton said traditionally, studying urbanisation in the Pacific has been tricky due to challenges collecting data, but new technology has changed that.
“We were able to combine high-tech mapping and archaeological fieldwork to understand what was happening in Tongatapu,” he said.
“Having this type of information really adds to our understanding of early Pacific societies.
“Urbanisation is not an area that had been investigated much until now. When people think of early cities they usually think of traditional old European cities with compact housing and windy cobblestone streets. This is a very different kind of city.
“But it shows the contribution of the Pacific to urban science. We can see clues that Tongatapu’s influence spread across the southwest Pacific Ocean between the 13th and 19th centuries.”
According to Mr Parton, the collapse of this kind of low-density urbanisation in Tonga was largely due to the arrival of Europeans.
“It didn’t collapse because the system was flawed; it was more to do with the arrival of Europeans and introduced diseases,” he said.
“This is just the beginning in terms of early Pacific settlements. There’s likely still much to be discovered.”
Kent State University’s experimental archaeologists, along with those from several other universities, joined forces with the popular hunting, outdoors, and conservation media platform, MeatEater, Inc., for a unique animal processing experiment, shedding new light on ancient stone knives and showcasing the importance of testing and looking for equifinality. ‘Equifinality’ is when two or more distinct processes can lead to the same outcome or result.
The Kent State archaeologists included Professor Metin I. Eren, Ph.D.; Assistant Professor Michelle Bebber, Ph.D. and Alumni Michael Wilson (Kent State B.A., ‘18; M.A., ‘21) and Lawrence Mukusha (Kent State M.A., ‘23). The primary objective of the experiment was to test the efficiency of Clovis stone tools in processing a bison, offering insights into early human technologies. ‘Clovis’ refers to 13,000-year-old archaeological culture that represents some of the earliest hunting and gathering peoples in North America.
The experiment was meticulously documented and detailed in a recently published open-access article in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
While the researchers learned much about Clovis knife efficiency and other aspects of stone tool animal processing, one outcome that the researchers did not anticipate was that several of the replica knives broke during animal processing very similarly to breaks some assume would result from shooting the Clovis points.
“Even though one can use Clovis stone points for both hunting and processing, the breakage resulting from these distinct activities can be similar,” Eren said. “If an archaeological site is found that is comprised of a large animal and broken Clovis points, some archaeologists might assume that's because the points were used to hunt the animal. What our experiment suggests is another interpretation: the animal was already dead and people scavenged it and processed it with knives.”
The researchers also documented several other instances of equifinality, involving bone cut marks, tool functional morphology, and resharpening.
“I used to think that the power of experimental archaeology was that it allowed us to help reverse engineer past technologies. And it can,” Eren said. “But, I think a more valuable aspect of experimental archaeology that's becoming more and more consequential is that it documents equifinality, providing a vital check on archaeologists’ interpretations.”
Partnering with MeatEater, Inc. Inspiration for the experiment stemmed from previous conversations that David J. Meltzer, Ph.D. (Southern Methodist University) and Eren had during their guest appearances on The MeatEater Podcast, where discussions about mammoth hunting led to the idea of a collaborative butchery experiment. Meltzer was a co-author on the study.
“The unique skills of the MeatEater crew in animal processing and media documentaries, combined with our expertise in archaeology and artifact recreation, sparked the idea of testing Clovis stone tools’ efficiency,” Eren said.
The entire experiment was recorded by a MeatEater film crew, and an edited version of the video was posted on YouTube as a documentary entitled Butchering a Bison with Clovis Points and Tools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmsrkFjPiKM).
“It was a career highlight for us to work with all the folks at MeatEater who have amazing experience and skills; we learned so much from them,” Eren said. “And they’re so curious – they’re natural scientists.”
CREDIT: MUSEO DELL'ACCADEMIA ETRUSCA E DELLA CITTÀ DI CORTONA
A large, highly decorated bronze lamp found in a ditch near the town of Cortona, central Italy, is significantly older than previously estimated and shows the god Dionysus, a new study published in De Gruyter’s Etruscan and Italic Studies argues.
The date of the lamp and the meaning and significance of its decorations have been the subject of controversy since its discovery in 1840. Now, PhD studentRonak Alburz and Associate Professor Gijs Willem Tol of the University of Melbourne, Australia, have used literary sources and other iconographic evidence to provide a comprehensive new analysis of the object.
The Cortona lamp is a bronze hanging oil lamp, roughly in the shape of a chandelier, measuring 60cm across and weighing almost 60kg. It originates from the Etruscan civilization of Archaic Etruria, a region of central Italy corresponding roughly to present-day Tuscany and part of Umbria. The Etruscan civilization thrived from about 900 BCE, but was gradually absorbed into the Roman Republic after about 400 BCE.
The Cortona lamp has defied a comprehensive and satisfactory explanation for two main reasons. Firstly, very few similar objects (‘comparanda’) have been discovered in Etruscan or Ancient Greek art, making it difficult to draw insightful comparisons. Secondly, the lamp lacks context, having been found with only an inscribed bronze plaque which originates from much later. This means there is no information about the building in which it was used or how it related to other artifacts. Scholars were therefore restricted to analyzing individual decorative motifs displayed on the lamp.
In their re-evaluation, Alburz and Tol identify new comparanda that indicate the lamp originated in about 480 BCE, significantly earlier than many other estimates.
They also argue that earlier scholars were incorrect in identifying the lamp’s 16 bull-horned figures as the Greek river god Acheloos. By drawing on various literary sources and presenting new iconographic evidence, they show that Dionysus, the Ancient Greek god of wine and pleasure, was also often portrayed with bull features. They thus propose that the lamp depicts the Dionysian thiasus, the ecstatic retinue of Dionysus who are often portrayed as inebriated revelers.
Lead author Alburz said: “The lamp was probably an object associated with the mystery cult of Dionysus. Its decoration represents the Dionysian thiasus, perhaps engaged in a cultic performance in the cosmos of the mysteries in celebration of Dionysus.”
The herding groups of the Southern Iberian Peninsula applied different management strategies for their livestock at the beginning of the Neolithic period, with different breeding, feeding and movement patterns, depending on their ecological and productive needs. This is indicated by a study led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) that has reconstructed the feeding practices of the first herding communities occupying the Cueva de El Toro (Antequera, Malaga) 7,200 years ago, with the aim of exploring their feeding strategies and the socioeconomic factors that could have influenced them.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, involved researchers from the Department of Prehistory of the UAB, as well as from the University of La Laguna (Tenerife), Milà i Fontanals Institution of Humanities Research (IMF-CSIC), the University of Cardiff, and the Natural History Museum of Paris.
The agricultural economy in the Iberian Peninsula during the Neolithic period developed very quickly, between 7,600 and 7,400 years ago. However, specific information on the herding strategies of the first Neolithic communities, especially in the south, is limited, mainly due to the difficulty of investigating these management practices in the same place and in such a short archaeological period of time.
The study published today has been able to reconstruct their livestock management practices, including those of altitudinal mobility, in the same site and with a very precise time resolution. By means of high-resolution radiocarbon dating of eight dental specimens from the Cueva de El Toro and the analysis of stable carbon and oxygen isotopes in the enamel, researchers were able to confirm that the animals were managed in the cave during a period of only 240 years, during the Neolithic expansion throughout the Iberian Peninsula, and to establish their feeding patterns.
The results show that the herding communities applied different breeding patterns - in the autumn, winter and spring - thereby controlling the reproduction of their herds; they fed the animals different plants throughout the annual cycle, with some animals consuming species typical of saline areas in the summer and had them graze at different altitudes and in mountainous areas. This large variability indicates that, probably, each sheep was herded in a different way, and that it was possible to apply different patterns within one same flock.
These discoveries question the previous perception of homogeneity in the management of livestock at the beginning of the Neolithic in the western Mediterranean and reinforce the hypothesis of the complexity of the first Neolithic populations of southern Iberia. "The different herding strategies that we have found fit in the economic model proposed for the Neolithic communities of southern Iberia, which have been considered as highly mobile herding communities", says Alejandro Sierra, researcher at the UAB who coordinated the study.
The variability identified could be explained as an adaptive response of the first agricultural and farming societies for diverse and not unrelated reasons, such as better access to resources, changes in climatic conditions or the dominant socio-economic characteristics of each location. In this sense, the study published today "may have broader implications for understanding the adaptability of the first agricultural and farming communities at the beginning of the Neolithic period in the Iberian Peninsula", says MarÃa Saña, researcher at the UAB and coordinator of the research.
During archaeological excavations in the Schöningen open-cast coal mine in 1994, the discovery of the oldest, remarkably well-preserved hunting weapons known to humanity caused an international sensation. Spears and a double-pointed throwing stick were found lying between animal bones about ten meters below the surface in deposits at a former lakeshore. In the years that followed, extensive excavations have gradually yielded numerous wooden objects from a layer dating from the end of a warm interglacial period 300,000 years ago. The findings suggested a hunting ground on the lakeshore. An interdisciplinary research team from the Universities of Göttingen and Reading (UK), and the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage (NLD) has now examined all the wood objects for the first time. State-of-the-art imaging techniques such as 3D microscopy and micro-CT scanners have produced surprising results. The research was published in PNAS.
This is the first time that researchers have been able to demonstrate new ways of handling and working the wood, such as the “splitting technique”. Small pieces of split wood were sharpened, for example to use them in processing hunted animals. First author Dr Dirk Leder from NLD says: "There is evidence of much more extensive and varied processing of spruce and pine wood than previously thought. Selected logs were shaped into spears and throwing sticks and brought to the site, while broken tools were repaired and recycled on site." At least 20 spears and throwing sticks had been left behind on the former lakeshore. This doubles the number of known wooden weapons at the site. Dr Tim Koddenberg from the University of Göttingen explains: "The extraordinary state of preservation of the Schöningen wood has enabled us, for the first time, to document and identify the woodworking techniques in detail thanks to state-of-the-art microscopy methods.”
The wide range of woodworking techniques used, as well as the various weapons and tools of early humans, show the outstanding importance of wood as a raw material, which is almost never preserved from this period. The Schöningen finds bear witness to extensive experience in woodworking, technical know-how and sophisticated work processes. Project leader Professor Thomas Terberger, who works at the NLD and the University of Göttingen, states: "Wood was a crucial raw material for human evolution, but it is only in Schöningen that it has survived from the Palaeolithic period in such quality". Schöningen is therefore part of the internationally outstanding cultural heritage of early humans. Only recently, the site was included in the nomination list for UNESCO World Heritage Site at the request of the state of Lower Saxony.
Chickens are one of the most economically important animals in the world today. However, the story of their origins and dispersal across the ancient world is still poorly understood. In fact, new archaeological techniques have recently led to the recognition that many finds of bones previously thought to represent early chickens in fact belonged to wild birds. Now, in a new publication, an international team of archaeologists, historians, and biomolecular scientists present the earliest clear evidence for the raising of chickens for egg production, and argue that the loss of seasonal egg laying was the main driver for the dispersal of domestic chickens across Eurasia and northeast Africa.
Using eggshell fragments collected from 12 archaeological sites spanning roughly 1500 years, the researchers show that chickens were widely raised in Central Asia from approximately 400 BCE to 1000 CE and were likely dispersed along the ancient Silk Road. The abundance of eggshells further suggests that the birds were laying out of season. It was this trait of prolific egg laying, the researchers argue, that made the domestic chicken so attractive to ancient peoples.
To reach these conclusions, the team collected tens of thousands of eggshell fragments from sites located along the main Central Asian corridor of the Silk Road. They then used a method of biomolecular analysis called ZooMS to identify the source of the eggs. Much like genetic analysis, ZooMS can make species identifications from animal remains such as bone, skin and shell, but it relies on protein signals rather than DNA. This makes it a faster and more cost-effective option than genetic analysis.
“This study showcases the potential of ZooMS to shed light on human-animal interactions in the past,” says Dr. Carli Peters, researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and first author of the new paper.
The identification of these shell fragments as chickens, and their abundance throughout the sediment layers at each site, led the researchers to an important conclusion: the birds must have been laying more frequently than their wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl, which nests once per year and typically lays six eggs per clutch.
“This is the earliest evidence for the loss of seasonal egg laying yet identified in the archaeological record,” says Dr. Robert Spengler, leader of the Domestication and Anthropogenic Evolution research group and principal investigator on the study. “This is an important clue for better understanding the mutualistic relationships between humans and animals that resulted in domestication.”
Taken together, the new study suggests an answer to the age-old riddle of the chicken and the egg. In Central Asia, evidence suggests that the ability to lay a multitude of eggs is what made the chicken the chicken we know today – a global species of enormous economic importance. The authors hope that this study will demonstrate the potential of new, cost-effective methods and interdisciplinary collaboration to address long-standing questions about the past.
Analysis of skeletons exhumed at a burial ground dating from the period 500-400 BCE, shortly after the collapse of the ChavÃn culture, revealed lethal injuries inflicted on men, women and children, as well as signs of material poverty
FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO
IMAGE:
VARIOUS TRAUMATIC INJURIES IN ONE OF THE INDIVIDUALS STUDIED: A) PERIMORTEM PENETRATING FRACTURE IN RIGHT PARIETAL PRODUCED BY BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA; B) CUT MARK IN RIGHT SUPERCILIARY ARCH RELATING TO SHARP FORCE TRAUMA, AND PERIMORTEM INJURY RELATING TO STONE FLAKE, WHICH REMAINS EMBEDDED IN RIGHT WALL OF NASAL PYRIFORM APERTURE; C) HEALED LINEAR PENETRATING FRACTURE AND CUT MARKS IN LEFT ZYGOMATIC BONE RELATING TO SHARP-BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA, AND HEALED NASAL FRACTURE
The transition from the fifth to the fourth century BCE (Before the Common Era) seems to have been a critical period for the Central Andes, a region now part of Peru. Researchers have found evidence of turbulence during the passage from the Middle Formative period (1200-400 BCE) to the Late Formative period (400-1 BCE). Political disintegration and intergroup violence were apparently part of the context, possibly associated with a shift from theocracy to secular government. A new study, published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, consistently reinforces these suppositions.
The study was conducted by a team of Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian researchers led by Peruvian bioarcheologist Luis Pezo-Lanfranco, then affiliated with the Biological Anthropology Laboratory at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Biosciences (IB-USP) in Brazil. The project was supported by FAPESP via the Grant Program for Young Investigators in Emerging Research Centers.
“We made a detailed analysis of the skeletal remains of 67 individuals excavated at a burial ground dating from the period 500-400 BCE and located in the Supe Valley region, a few kilometers from Caral, a famous ceremonial center that functioned between 2900 and 1800 BCE. There we detected injury patterns characteristic of repeated events of interpersonal violence. Among the individuals examined, 80% of the adults and adolescents died from inflicted traumatic injuries,” Pezo-Lanfranco told Agência FAPESP. He currently works in the Department of Prehistory at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in Spain.
Perimortem injuries to the skull, face and chest observed in several individuals are compatible with lethal, probably intercommunity, violence, whose victims included children. “Our hypothesis is that a group of strangers came to the community and committed the murders. After the aggressors left, the murder victims were buried by their own people with the usual funeral rites, as suggested by the burial patterns,” he said.
Perimortem means at or near the time of death. Bone damage in perimortem injuries shows no evidence of healing. Bone damage in antemortem injuries shows evidence of healing.
Although perimortem trauma was the most frequent type of injury among the adult skeletons studied, as well as some of the child remains, many examples of antemortem trauma were also found, and several individuals displayed both, suggesting the occurrence of at least two violent events during their lives. The first led to injuries that healed, while the second killed them.
“The markers point to exposure to repetitive and lethal violence during the course of their lives,” Pezo-Lanfranco said. The most frequent injuries were depressed fractures of the cranial vault, other maxillofacial fractures, thoracic fractures (mainly in ribs and scapulae), and “defensive” fractures of the ulna (forearm, indicating an attempt to parry a blow).
Sixty-four of the 67 individuals studied were buried in a fetal position: 12 in dorsal decubitus (lying on their back), four in ventral decubitus (on their stomach), seven in left lateral decubitus (on their left side), and 41 in right lateral decubitus. The fetal position is a recurring burial pattern in prehistoric and ancient communities worldwide. Given its association with the womb, some experts believe it reflects the expectation of rebirth after death.
Besides the signs of violence, the analysis of the bones showed a high incidence of non-specific stresses and infectious diseases, possibly associated with adverse living conditions due to a combination of a shortage of resources and population growth. The simplicity of most of the grave goods also points to poverty. Many of the skeletons were buried with plain cotton fabric, woven mats and basketry, gourds containing vegetables, cotton seeds and roots, necklaces, and pottery. “Stable isotope studies showed that staple crops were the basis for their subsistence,” Pezo-Lanfranco said.
Competition for scant resources in the Supe Valley region was probably a major factor in the collapse of the ChavÃn culture, which spread through Peru’s mountains and coast between 1200 and 500 BCE. Its center was ChavÃn de Huantar, a monumental ceremonial site in northern Peru in the Marañon River basin. The Marañón rises in the Peruvian Andes at about 5,800 m, first flowing northwest and then turning northeast to meet the Ucayali and become the Upper Amazon and Solimões in Brazil.
“The ChavÃn system reached exhaustion during the Middle to Late Formative transition, around 500-400 BCE. Several ceremonial centers, including ChavÃn de Huantar, were desacralized and abandoned. Political formations organized around the religious sphere disintegrated, perhaps characterizing the decline of theocracy and the emergence of secular government,” Pezo-Lanfranco said.
The ChavÃn people worshipped a “zooanthropomorphic” deity resembling a man-jaguar. Gods that combine animal and human attributes are featured in many ancient cultures around the world, including those of Crete, India and Egypt. In a purely speculative approach, some scholars think they may be later re-elaborations of prehistoric shamanic traditions in which the virtues of tutelary animals are syncretized in the figure of the shaman. This hypothesis cannot be confirmed on the basis of existing knowledge.
The name of the ChavÃn man-jaguar god is unknown. Unlike ancient civilizations in the Old World, the Andean people who worshiped the deity left no written records that could be deciphered to furnish more detailed information. It is worth stressing that the period in question preceded the formal establishment of the Inca Empire by almost 2,000 years. Founded by Pachacuti in 1438 CE (Common Era), the Inca Empire was the ultimate expression of thousands of years of Andean civilizations, yet it lasted for less than 100 years. The Spanish executed the last reigning Inca Emperor, Atahualpa, in 1533, and in 1572 captured and killed Túpac Amaru in Vilcabamba, where he had been leading the resistance.
For the researchers who conducted the study, the results are particularly important because of what they reveal about an era of ancient Andean history that has so far been poorly documented. Few burial grounds from the period in the Central Andes have been excavated, and still fewer have been found to contain remains as well-conserved as these. Their conservation is due mainly to the dry climate in the region, permitting detailed observation of injuries in almost intact bones.
“The study belongs to a field we call the ‘bioarcheology of violence”, which helps understand the nature of interpersonal conflict around the middle of the first millennium before the common era. On the other hand, data from the same analysis, to be published soon, offers several answers regarding factors in this society that modulated morbidity and mortality, which developed in the hypothetical context of population pressure and political transition associated with the collapse of belief systems in a highly resource-poor environment,” Pezo-Lanfranco said.
Archaeologist Xinyi Liu at Washington University in St. Louis teamed up with Martin Jones of the University of Cambridge to write a new paper for theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesthat explains how recent research is connecting the science of biological domestication to early food globalization.
Liu, an associate professor of archaeology and associate chair of the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, proposes a new conceptual framework to understand domestication, which is relevant not only to anthropology but other fields such as biology and ecology.
In this Q&A, he also offers his perspective on how understanding the past conditions can help us to forge a vision for the future.
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The domestication of plants and animals is among the most significant transitions in human history. How has our understanding of domestication changed recently?
Our new article focuses on how we conceptualize domestication. A considerable intellectual legacy has depicted domestication as a series of short-lived, localized and episodic events. Some of the literature, particularly those pieces dating back to the early 20th century, envisioned the process as a transition from humans within nature to humans controlling nature in a revolutionary fashion.
The metaphor there is “revolution.” So, as people described it, there was a “Neolithic Revolution” that functioned in a similar way as the “Industrial Revolution” or the “scientific revolution” — a rapid technological shift followed by changes in societies, according to some narratives.
It is time to reconsider all this. Newly emergent evidence from the last 15 years challenges the idea of rapid domestication. This evidence shows unambiguously that plant and animal domestication in a range of species entailed a more gradual transition spanning a few thousand years across extensive geographies.
How has archaeology contributed to this line of inquiry?
Much of this evidence was brought to light by archaeological and scientific investigations. For example, it took about 5,000 years for the domestication traits of wheat to be fully developed from its wild morphology, according to archaeobotanical work in the Near East. In the lower Yangtze Valley in China, research informed a similar process that ancient communities had cultivated rice for a few millennia before the plant reached domesticated states, in the biological sense.
So domestication has extended in time. But you also argue that it has extended in space. What does that mean?
Over the last 15 years we’ve also seen an improvement in the understanding of how people have moved domesticated plants and animals over continents. In some cases, people moved crops and stocks before the genetic changes associated with domestication were fully fixed within the species. This raises questions about the role translocations played in the domestication process.
Central to our inquiry is the relationship between domesticated crops and stocks and their free-living ancestors, or progenitors. Newer genetic evidence suggests that long-term gene flow between wild and domestic species was much more common than previously appreciated.
It makes sense: At the so-called domestication center, where ancestral varieties were dominant, such gene flow would have been very strong. No meaningful mechanism could have stopped the introgression.
But if farmers took their crops, or herders their stocks, and moved to a new environment beyond the natural distribution of the ancestors, then selection pressures would have changed dramatically. Eventually you are domesticating in a single pathway, with no return. Such a process has been documented genetically and archaeologically in a number of domesticated species, such as maize and wheat.
How do human preferences or traditions factor in?
If crop or stock movements were entangled with the domestication process, the newly introduced species would have to adapt to the new physical environment encountered. But they would have also been adapted to align with new cultural habits. We envision both the physical and cultural adaptation played roles in the fixation of some domestication traits.
Does this research have any implications for modern agriculture?
Understanding the past conditions can help us to forge visions about the future. In that sense, archaeology plays a key role in establishing the historical and community roots of a range of contemporary challenges, such as food security, planetary health and sustainability, providing solutions drawing from humanity at the deepest level.
One such example is the positive impact that archaeogenetic research about millet made on the livelihoods of farmers across the globe. At its 75th session, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2023 the International Year of Millets to raise awareness of the crop’s deep community roots and future potential. There has been considerable recent momentum in understanding the biodiversity and historical geography of millets, which are a diverse group of cereals originating from several continents, including pearl, proso (or broomcorn), foxtail, barnyard, little, kodo, browntop, finger and fonio millets.
Millets can grow on arid lands with minimal inputs and are resilient to changes in climate. They are, therefore, an ideal solution for communities to increase self-sufficiency and reduce reliance on imported cereal grains.
These grains once sustained ancient populations by large. Archaeology played a key role in establishing the original biogeography, domestication and early dispersals of millets. The knowledge we have gained consequently has profoundly impacted food security and conservation in areas where millets are culturally relevant.
What did an ancient Chinese emperor from 1,500 years ago look like? A team of researchers reconstructed the face of Chinese Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou using DNA extracted from his remains. The study, published March 28 in the journal Current Biology, suggests the emperor’s death at the age of 36 might be linked to a stroke. It also sheds light on the origin and migration patterns of a nomadic empire that once ruled parts of northeastern Asia.
Emperor Wu was a ruler of the Northern Zhou dynasty in ancient China. Under his reign from AD 560 to AD 578, Emperor Wu built a strong military and unified the northern part of ancient China after defeating the Northern Qi dynasty.
Emperor Wu was ethnically Xianbei, an ancient nomadic group that lived in what is today Mongolia and northern and northeastern China.
“Some scholars said the Xianbei had ‘exotic’ looks, such as thick beard, high nose bridge, and yellow hair,” says Shaoqing Wen, one of the paper’s corresponding authors at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Our analysis shows Emperor Wu had typical East or Northeast Asian facial characteristics,” he adds.
In 1996, archaeologists discovered Emperor Wu’s tomb in northwestern China, where they found his bones, including a nearly complete skull. With the development of ancient DNA research in recent years, Wen and his team managed to recover over 1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on his DNA, some of which contained information about the color of Emperor Wu’s skin and hair. Combined with Emperor Wu’s skull, the team reconstructed his face in 3D. The result shows Emperor Wu had brown eyes, black hair, and dark to intermediate skin, and his facial features were similar to those of present-day Northern and Eastern Asians.
“Our work brought historical figures to life,” says Pianpian Wei, the paper’s co-corresponding author at Fudan University. “Previously, people had to rely on historical records or murals to picture what ancient people looked like. We are able to reveal the appearance of the Xianbei people directly.”
Emperor Wu died at the age of 36, and his son also died at a young age with no clear reason. Some archaeologists say Emperor Wu died of illness, while others argue the emperor was poisoned by his rivals. By analyzing Emperor Wu’s DNA, researchers found that the emperor was at an increased risk for stroke, which might have contributed to his death. The finding aligns with historical records that described the emperor as having aphasia, drooping eyelids, and an abnormal gait—potential symptoms of a stroke.
The genetic analysis shows the Xianbei people intermarried with ethnically Han Chinese when they migrated southward into northern China. “This is an important piece of information for understanding how ancient people spread in Eurasia and how they integrated with local people,” Wen says.
Next, the team plans to study the people who lived in ancient Chang’an city in northwestern China by studying their ancient DNA. Chang’an was the capital city of many Chinese empires over thousands of years and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, an important Eurasian trade network from the second century BC until the 15th century. The researchers hope that the DNA analysis can reveal more information about how people migrated and exchanged cultures in ancient China.
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Funding information for this paper can be found in the paper text. The authors declare no competing interests.
