Lead contamination in ancient Greece points to societal change

 

Studies of sediment cores from the sea floor and the coastal regions surrounding the Aegean Sea show that humans contaminated the environment with lead early on in antiquity. A research team led by geoscientists from Heidelberg University conducted the analyses, which revealed that human activity in the region resulted in lead contamination of the environment approximately 5,200 years ago – much earlier than previously known. Combined with the results of pollen analyses from the sediment cores, this contamination also offers insights into socioeconomic change in the Aegean, even reflecting historical events such as the conquest of Greece by the Romans.

The Aegean region gave rise to some of the earliest cultures of ancient Europe. The research team investigated when and to what extent early human activities in the region affected ecosystems both on land and in the marine environment. To this end, the team analyzed 14 sediment cores from the floor of the Aegean Sea and the surrounding coastline. One core from a peat bog offered up the earliest known evidence of environmental contamination with lead. The researchers dated this lead signal to approximately 5,200 years ago, about 1,200 years before the previously earliest known evidence of environmental contamination with the heavy metal that is traceable to human activity.

“Because lead was released during the production of silver, among other things, proof of increasing lead concentrations in the environment is, at the same time, an important indicator of socioeconomic change,” states Dr Andreas Koutsodendris, a member of the Palynology & Paleoenvironmental Dynamics research group of Prof. Dr Jörg Pross at Heidelberg University’s Institute of Earth Sciences. The sediment cores the Heidelberg scientists analyzed contained lead as well as pollen, which allowed them to reconstruct vegetation development in the Aegean region. The pollen content pointed to how the land was used. “The combined data on lead contamination and vegetation development show when the transition from agricultural to monetary societies took place and how that impacted the environment,” stresses Jörg Pross.

Lead concentration rose significantly about 2,150 years ago, accompanied by intense deforestation and increasing agricultural use, as indicated by the composition of the pollen spectra. Starting then, lead contamination is also evident in sediment from the floor of the Aegean Sea – the earliest record worldwide of human-caused lead pollution in the ocean, emphasizes Andreas Koutsodendris. “The changes coincide with the conquest of Hellenistic Greece by the Romans, who subsequently claimed for themselves the region’s wealth of resources,” adds Heidelberg archeologist Prof. Dr Joseph Maran. The Roman conquerors thus pushed the mining of gold, silver, and other metals, with ore extraction and smelting also requiring wood.

The sediment cores from the Aegean Sea were collected during expeditions of the METEOR and AEGAEO research vessels between 2001 and 2021. The German Research Foundation (DFG) and the European Union financed the research expeditions, with the DFG also funding the most recent research work. Along with researchers from Heidelberg University, scientists from Berlin, Frankfurt (Main), Hamburg, Hohenheim, Tübingen and Greece also participated in the studies. The results were published in the journal “Communications Earth & Environment”.

Ancient DNA analyses bring to life the 11,000-year intertwined history of sheep and humans

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Trinity College Dublin

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Vessel supported by two rams, 2600 to 2500 BCE, object number 1989.281.3, Gift of Norbert Shcimmel Trust, 1989, open access Met Museum.

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Credit: Gift of Norbert Shcimmel Trust, 1989, open access Met Museum.

Sheep have been intertwined with human livelihoods for over 11,000 years. As well as meat, their domestication led to humans being nourished by their protein-rich milk and clothed by warm, water-resistant fabrics made from their wool. 

Now, an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and zooarchaeologists from LMU Munich and the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) has deciphered the prehistoric cultural trajectory of this species by analysing 118 genomes recovered from archaeological bones dating across 12 millennia and stretching from Mongolia to Ireland. 

The earliest sheep-herding village in the sample, Aşıklı Höyük in central Türkiye, has genomes that seem ancestral to later populations in the wider region, confirming an origin in captures of wild mouflon over 11,000 years ago in the western part of the northern Fertile Crescent.

By 8,000 years ago, in the earliest European sheep populations, the team found evidence that farmers were deliberately selecting their flocks – in particular for the genes coding for coat colour.  Along with a similar signal in goats, this is the earliest evidence for human moulding of another animal’s biology and shows that early herders, like today’s farmers, were interested in the beautiful and unusual in their animals.

Specifically, the main gene the team found evidence of selection near was one known as “KIT”, which is associated with white coat colour in a range of livestock.

Also by that time, the earliest domestic sheep genomes from Europe and further east in Iran and Central Asia had diverged from each other. However, this separation did not last as people translocated sheep from eastern populations to the west.  

First, in parallel with human cultural influences spreading out from the early cities of Mesopotamia we see sheep genomes moving west within the Fertile Crescent around 7,000 years ago.

Second, the rise of pastoralist peoples in the Eurasian steppes and their westward spread some 5,000 years ago profoundly transformed ancestral European human populations and their culture. This process changed the makeup of human populations, for example, altering the ancestry of British peoples by around 90%, and introduced the Indo-European language ancestor of the tongues spoken across the continent today.

From the dataset used in this study it now seems that this massive migration was fuelled by sheep herding and exploitation of lifetime products, including milk and probably cheese, as it is around the same time that sheep ancestries are also changed. Consequently, by the Bronze Age, herds had about half their ancestry from a source in the Eurasian steppe. 

Remote sensing tools yield insights into abandoned pre-Columbian Mexican city

 

Awareness of the Zapotecs’ level of political and social organization stands to shed light on their level of agency in negotiating with the Spanish

Peer-Reviewed Publication

McGill University

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Serpent sculpture from the serpent plaza found by an earlier archaeological expedition and now in the Oaxacan hall in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

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Credit: Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis

Remote sensing tools yield insights into abandoned pre-Columbian Mexican city

Awareness of the Zapotecs’ level of political and social organization stands to shed light on their level of agency in negotiating with the Spanish

A McGill University researcher has discovered that Guiengola, a 15th century Zapotec site in southern Oaxaca, Mexico, which had been thought to be simply a fortress where soldiers were garrisoned, was in fact a sprawling, fortified city. It covered 360 hectares, with over 1,100 buildings, four kilometres of walls, a network of internal roads and a clearly organized urban layout with temples and communal spaces such as ballcourts, and the elites and commoners lived in separate neighbourhoods.

According to Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, a Banting postdoctoral researcher in McGill’s Department of Anthropology and the author of a recent article in Ancient Mesoamerica, the evidence strongly suggests the city was abandoned just before the Spanish arrived, and that its people moved just 20 kilometres away to Tehuantepec, a small city where their descendants still live today.

Ramón Celis said investigating how the Mesoamerican city was organized on the eve of the Spanish conquest is just the first step. He said he is convinced that as work on Guiengola advances, it will give researchers a better sense of the Zapotecs’ level of political and social organization, and thus a greater understanding of their level of agency in negotiating with the Spanish.

The finding was made by using a remote sensing tool known as lidar (light detection and ranging). Lidar relies on pulsing laser beams, in a process akin to sonar, to provide precise, detailed, three-dimensional topographic information about what is on the earth’s surface, below the dense forest canopy.

“My mother’s family is from the region of Tehuantepec which is about 15 km from the site, and I remember them talking about it when I was a child. It was one of the reasons that I chose to go into archaeology,” Ramón Celis said. “Although you could reach the site using a footpath, it was covered by a canopy of trees. Until very recently, there would have been no way for anyone to discover the full extent of the site without spending years on the ground walking and searching. We were able to do it within two hours by using remote sensing equipment and scanning from a plane.”

By analyzing the data generated by the scans and using the Geo Analytic laboratory at McGill, Ramón Celis has been able to map the size and the layouts of the remaining built structures and infer their use based on the artifacts found at the locations.

To explore how power was distributed in the city, he has calculated how much building space was given over to elite areas such as the temples and ballcourts, for example, compared to what was built in the areas used by commoners. Ballcourts were built in Mesoamerica for the purpose of practicing a ritual ballgame, and represent both the underworld and fertility, since they are a way of connecting with the ancestors and seeds grow below the soil, where the underworld is found.

Ramón Celis added, “Because the city is only between 500 and 600 years old, it is amazingly well preserved, so you can walk there in the jungle, and you find that houses are still standing… you can see the doors… the hallways… the fences that split it from other houses. So, it is easy to identify a residential lot. It's like a city frozen in time, before any of the deep cultural transformations brough by the Spanish arrival had taken place.”

 

The research: “Airborne lidar at Guiengola, Oacaxa: Mapping a Late Postclassic Zapotec city” by Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis was published in Ancient Mesoamerica

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536124000166

A new papyrus from Israel reveals a spectacular criminal case from the Roman empire

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Detail of the infrared image of the Papyrus Cotton

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Credit: (© Israel Antiquities Authority)

Scholars from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem unveil a unique papyrus from the collections held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, offering rare insights into Roman legal proceedings and life in the Roman Near East. In a new publication in the international scholarly journal Tyche, the research team reveals how the Roman imperial state dealt with financial crimes – specifically, tax fraud involving slaves – in the Roman provinces of Iudaea and Arabia. The new papyrus furnishes a strikingly direct view of Roman jurisdiction and legal practice, as well as important new information about a turbulent era shaken by two massive Jewish revolts against Roman rule. 

Link to the photos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dkaUQW0HLLg7zkxkzMDBVtqcI2lHesAp?usp=sharing

The longest Greek papyrus ever found in the Judaean Desert, comprising over 133 lines of text, has now been published for the first time. Initially misclassified as Nabataean, the papyrus remained unnoticed for decades until its rediscovery in 2014 by Prof. Hannah Cotton Paltiel, emerita of the Hebrew University. "I volunteered to organize documentary papyri in the Israel Antiquities Authority’s scrolls laboratory, and when I saw it, marked ‘Nabataean,’ I exclaimed, ‘It’s Greek to me!’" recalls Prof. Cotton Paltiel. In recognition of her discovery, the papyrus has been named P. Cotton, in line with papyrological conventions.

Recognizing the document’s extraordinary length, complex style, and potential ties to Roman legal proceedings, Prof. Cotton Paltiel assembled an international team to decipher it. The team, including Dr. Anna Dolganov of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Prof. Fritz Mitthof of the University of Vienna and Dr. Avner Ecker of Hebrew University, determined the document to be prosecutors’ notes for a trial before Roman officials on the eve of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE), including a rapidly drafted transcript of the judicial hearing itself. The language is vibrant and direct, with one prosecutor advising another on the strength of various pieces of evidence and strategizing to anticipate objections. "This papyrus is extraordinary because it provides direct insight into trial preparations in this part of the Roman Empire," says Dr. Dolganov. Dr. Ecker adds, "This is the best-documented Roman court case from Iudaea apart from the trial of Jesus."

The papyrus details a gripping case involving forgery, tax evasion, and the fraudulent sale and manumission of slaves in the Roman provinces of Iudaea and Arabia, roughly corresponding to modern Israel and Jordan. The main defendants, Gadalias and Saulos, stand accused of corrupt dealings. Gadalias, the son of a notary and possibly a Roman citizen, had a criminal history involving violence, extortion, counterfeiting, and inciting rebellion. Saulos, his collaborator, orchestrated the fictitious sale and manumission of slaves without paying the requisite Roman taxes. To conceal their activities, the defendants forged documents. "Forgery and tax fraud carried severe penalties under Roman law, including hard labor or even capital punishment," explains Dr. Dolganov.

This criminal case unfolded between two major Jewish uprisings against Roman rule: the Jewish Diaspora revolt (115–117 CE) and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE). Notably, the text implicates Gadalias and Saulos in rebellious activities during Emperor Hadrian’s visit to the region (129/130 CE) and names Tineius Rufus, the governor of Iudaea when the Bar Kokhba revolt began. In the wake of prior unrest, Roman authorities likely viewed the defendants with suspicion, connecting their crimes to broader conspiracies against the empire. "Whether they were indeed involved in rebellion remains an open question, but the insinuation speaks to the charged atmosphere of the time," notes Dr. Dolganov. As Dr. Ecker points out, the nature of the crime raises questions, as "freeing slaves does not appear to be a profitable business model." The enslaved individuals’ origins remain unclear, but the case may have involved illicit human trafficking or the Jewish biblical duty to redeem enslaved Jews.

The papyrus offers new insights into Roman law in the Greek-speaking eastern empire, referencing the governor of Iudaea's assize tour and compulsory jury service. "This document shows that core Roman institutions documented in Egypt were also implemented throughout the empire," notes Prof. Mitthof. The papyrus also showcases the Roman state’s ability to regulate private transactions even in remote regions. Likely originating from a hideout cave in the Judaean Desert during the Bar Kokhba revolt, its careful preservation remains a mystery, and the trial's outcome may have been interrupted by the rebellion.
 

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Journal

Tyche

DOI

10.25365/tyche-2023-38-5 

Hominin presence in Eurasia dated to almost 2 million years ago

 

New findings suggest hominins entered Eurasia roughly 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, predating the Dmanisi site in Georgia

The subject of when early hominins, closely related ancestors to humans, first left Africa to begin their slow dispersal across the globe is a matter of ongoing discussion among anthropologists. The general consensus has been that hominins were present in Eurasia at least 1.8 million years ago, but some ephemeral traces of hominins have hinted at an earlier presence. New evidence by an international team of researchers now pushes that date back to almost 2 million years ago. 

This evidence for hominins in Eurasia earlier than previously thought is based on multiple cut-marked fossil bones from the site of Grăunceanu, Romania. The site of Grăunceanu is found in the Olteţ River Valley along with a handful of other fossil localities. Most of these sites were originally excavated in the 1960s. The absence of hominin bones at the site meant anthropologists had to look for other evidence of hominin presence, such as stone tools or signs of tool use.  

More than 5,000 bones from Grăunceanu and surrounding sites were meticulously examined for evidence of cut marks from stone tools used to remove the flesh from animals. Of that total, the team identified at least 20 bones they are confident show signs of cut marks. Biostratagraphic data and high precision uranium-lead dating techniques were used to estimate the age of the bones, which put their minimum age at 1.95 million years ago. 

The findings were published in Nature Communications. The international team of more than a dozen researchers was led by Sabrina Curran, an associate professor of anthropology at Ohio University; Claire Terhune, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas; and Alexandru Petculescu, of the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology in Bucharest.  

Terhune noted that the team had to overcome several challenges, including the absence of hominin bones and stone tools at the site. They also had to contend with the fact that the bones were excavated more than 50 years ago, making the relationship of the bones to one another and the exact reasons for their deposition hard to determine. The fossils are currently curated in the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology and the Museum of Oltenia. Though researchers had worked with the bones intermittently since their discovery, it was not until the last decade or so that they thought to reexamine them and conduct careful inspections of the surface of each bone. 

“We didn’t initially expect to find much,” Curran said. “But during a routine check of the collections we found several cut-marked bones. This led to further investigation in collaboration with Dr. Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Michael Pante of Colorado State University, and the discovery of other distinct marks across different bones, suggesting deliberate butchering activities.”

Prior to this discovery, the site of Dmanisi in the country of Georgia was thought to contain the oldest evidence of hominin activity outside of Africa, dated to roughly 1.8 million years ago. Confirming the age of the marks establishes both the presence of hominins in Eurasia 200,000 years earlier than previously thought as well as tool use by them, providing some of the earliest evidence of hominin activity in this area.  

The team combined this work with isotopic analyses led by Virgil Drăguşin from the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology that helped to reconstruct the environment these hominins would have been living in at the time. This work suggests this region would have experienced seasonal fluctuations in temperature, much like today, but that there likely would have been higher levels of rainfall. This would likely have been different from the environments these hominins were originally adapted to in Africa. Analysis of the animal fossils from the site also shows they would have encountered a range of new fauna, including wooly rhinos, saber tooth cats, pangolins and mammoths. 

“The field of paleoanthropology can be contentious,” Terhune noted. “People get really fired up about human ancestors, and one ongoing debate has been related to the earliest evidence of tool use. Because of this we have been extremely meticulous in documenting the presence of these cut marks because we knew if we handed another paleontologist these bones, they’d say, ‘Oh, yeah these are cut marks.’ But if we told them they’re from Romania two million years ago, they’re going to say, ‘No, that can’t be right’.”

But the team is confident they got the facts right, and that the discovery is an important step forward. 

"The Grăunceanu site represents a pivotal moment in our understanding of human prehistory,” Curran added. “It demonstrates that early hominins had already begun to explore and inhabit diverse environments across Eurasia, showing an adaptability that would later play a crucial role in their survival and spread." 

“The history of human evolution is far more complex and intricate than we could have imagined,” she added, “and we are just beginning to uncover the many chapters of that story.” 

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-56154-9 

Archaeologists find ‘lost’ site depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry

 

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Figure 1: The Bayeux Tapestry, showing King Harold riding to Bosham, where he attends church and feasts in a hall, before departing for France. © The Society of Antiquaries of London. 

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Credit: © The Society of Antiquaries of London.

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that a house in England is the site of a lost residence of Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, and shown in the Bayeux Tapestry.

By reinterpreting previous excavations and conducting new surveys, the team from Newcastle University, UK, together with colleagues from the University of Exeter, believe they have located a power centre belonging to Harold Godwinson, who was killed in the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Bosham, on the coast of West Sussex, is depicted twice in the Bayeux Tapestry, which famously narrates the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 when William, Duke of Normandy, challenged Harold for the throne. The Tapestry culminates in Williams’s victory at Hastings, but earlier in the artwork Bosham is shown as the place where Harold enjoys a feast in an extravagant hall before setting sail for France, and again on his return.

The location of Harold’s residence at Bosham has never been proved, although it has been suggested that a house in the village — now a private home — stands on the site.

Archaeological detective work

The team of archaeologists used a range of methods to unpick the early history of the property, including a geophysical survey of the surrounding area, assessment of standing remains, scrutiny of maps and records, and re-examination of evidence from excavations carried out in 2006 by West Sussex Archaeology.

This confirmed the existence of two previously unidentified Medieval buildings: one integrated into the current house and another in the garden. The crucial indication that the site had even earlier origins comes from the excavations in 2006, which identified a latrine within a large timber building. In the past decade or so archaeologists have begun to recognise a trend in England, beginning during the 10th century AD, for high-status houses to integrate toilets. The discovery of the latrine therefore indicated to the team that the timber building was of elite status, and almost certainly represents part of Harold’s residence illustrated on the Bayeux Tapestry. The hall was one part of a more extensive complex, that also included a church, which still survives.

The research, which is published in The Antiquaries Journal, was led by Dr Duncan Wright, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at Newcastle University, who said: “The realisation that the 2006 excavations had found, in effect, an Anglo-Saxon en-suite confirmed to us that this house sits on the site of an elite residence pre-dating the Norman Conquest. Looking at this vital clue, alongside all our other evidence, it is beyond all reasonable doubt that we have here the location of Harold Godwinson’s private power centre, the one famously depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.”

Professor Oliver Creighton of the University of Exeter, and Co-Investigator of the project, added: “The Norman Conquest saw a new ruling class supplant an English aristocracy that has left little in the way of physical remains, which makes the discovery at Bosham hugely significant — we have found an Anglo-Saxon show-home.”

The research at Bosham was carried out as part of the wider Where Power Lies project, with a team drawn from Newcastle University and the University of Exeter, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project aims to explore the origins and early development of aristocratic centres like Bosham, assessing for the first time the archaeological evidence for these sites across the entirety of England.

 

ENDS  

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Journal

The Antiquaries Journal

DOI

10.1017/S0003581524000350