Tag: archaeology

Huge Lost Maya City Has Emerged From the Jungle in Mexico

Mexican archaeologists harnessed the potential of LiDAR drones to undertake an extensive survey of the Yucatan Peninsula, yielding the remarkable discovery of a once-forgotten city. This extraordinary find includes pyramids, a ball court and sacred spaces distinguished by the presence of meticulously crafted stone columns.

Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History ( INAH) has just announced that a team of archaeologists have identified a jungle-locked, ancient Maya city. Discovered deep in southern Mexico, the previously unknown city comprises large pyramids, stone columns, three plazas with “imposing buildings” and other sacred stone structures arranged in concentric circles.

INAH said the city is located in the state of Campeche, in the Balamku Ecological Reserve on the country’s Yucatan Peninsula . Archaeologists have named this lost Maya city in Mexico Ocomtun, which in the Yucatec Maya language means “stone column.” Speculatively, INAH said the city would have been an important Maya center for the entirety of the peninsula’s central lowland region, between 250 and 1000 AD.

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Oldest Signs of Human Ancestors’ Trek to Australia Found in Laotian Cave

In the bowels of a Laotian cave, illuminated by faint sunlight and bright lamps, scientists have unearthed the earliest known evidence of our human ancestors making their way through mainland Southeast Asia en route to Australia some 86,000 years ago.

Any trace of human remains is a delight for archaeologists – but none more so when they dust off a discovery, date it, and realize it could push back timelines of early human migration in an area by more than ten thousand years.

The international team of researchers behind this new discovery dug deeper than others had gone before in a karst cave in northern Laos, unearthing a skull fragment with delicate features, and the shard of a leg bone.

They estimate the two human fossils are between 86,000 and 68,000 years old, by using five different dating techniques to reconstruct the timeline of the cave site in which early humans sheltered on their journeys southward.

Tam Pà Ling Cave, where the bones were found, has a deep history of human occupation, though it is a contested one. A handful of human fossils including two jawbones previously found in shallower layers of sediments – shipped to the United States for study before being returned home to Laos – have dated to between 70,000 and 46,000 years old.

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Ancient Bird Bones May Have Been Fashioned Into Flutes for Catching More Birds

12,000-year-old bird bones found in the far north of Israel may have been used as instruments by prehistoric humans to lure more birds to their death, according to a team of archaeologists that studied the artifacts.

The perforated bones were found in Israel’s Hula Valley, just west of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967. The bones were first excavated in 1955 but were recently reexamined.

Seven wing bones from the site belonged to coots and teals. Upon recent inspection, a team of archaeologists found that marks on the bones were actually minuscule holes bored into their sides.

The team posits that the bones were used as flutes (aerophones, to use scientific language) to mimic the calls of birds of prey. These calls would frighten the migratory birds into taking wing, making them easier targets for Natufian hunters, the scientists speculate. The team’s analysis of the bones was published today in Scientific Reports.

“If the flutes were used for hunting, then this is the earliest evidence of the use of sound in hunting,” said Hamudi Khalaily, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority and co-author of the paper, in a Hebrew University of Jerusalem release.

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Newly discovered stone tools drag dawn of Greek archaeology back by a quarter-million years

Deep in an open coal mine in southern Greece, researchers have discovered the antiquities-rich country’s oldest archaeological site, which dates to 700,000 years ago and is associated with modern humans’ hominin ancestors.

The find announced Thursday would drag the dawn of Greek archaeology back by as much as a quarter of a million years, although older hominin sites have been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The oldest, in Spain, dates to more than a million years ago.

The Greek site was one of five investigated in the Megalopolis area during a five-year project involving an international team of experts, a Culture Ministry statement said.

It was found to contain rough stone tools from the Lower Palaeolithic period — about 3.3 million to 300,000 years ago — and the remains of an extinct species of giant deer, elephants, hippopotamus, rhinoceros and a macaque monkey.

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Boncuklu Tarla: A megalithic site predating Göbekli Tepe

The uncovering of the stunning megalithic architecture of Göbekli Tepe in modern day Türkiye less than three decades ago turned our view of pre-history upside down, with the massive t-shaped pillars of the site pre-dating the pyramids and Stonehenge by some six or seven thousand years. But while it took the spotlight, archaeologists in the area continued finding other, similar sites with impressive architecture and dating back the same mind-boggling stretch in time, some 10,000 years before present.

One of the sites that has become well-known recently is Karahan Tepe (perhaps most notably after it was covered in Graham Hancock’s Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse). But another, lesser known site that lies further to the east may end up being even more important: Boncuklu Tarla. Discovered during construction work on the Ilısu Dam in 2008, it has undergone excavation over the last 11 years and has already turned up many things of note.

Like the other ancient sites of that time in Turkey, Boncuklu Tarla features a walled ‘temple’ with rock pillars – but they appear to predate Göbekli Tepe by a thousand years or so (though the pillars don’t appear to be as impressive), with the earliest layer of the site dating back a staggering 13,000 years. What’s more, the excavation over the past eleven years has worked through multiple layers of the site, with dating of those layers suggesting that it was occupied for around 4,000 years – from around 11,000 BCE to 7,000BCE!

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Mystery Surrounds Sudden Firing Of Notable Archaeologist. What Was He Digging Up?

World-renowned archeologist and university professor David Keller was mysteriously released from his job in December, and no one will go on record to say why.

Keller, 52, is best known as an award-winning author and intrepid researcher of human history and for bringing grants to his former employer of 21 years, the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross State University, according to a report from mid-2022. Keller was fired from his position at the school despite being in the throes of research.

“It was humiliating and sad and infuriating all at the same time,” Keller told Texas Monthly following his firing. “That was my career, my livelihood, and much of my identity. To fire me in such a swift and cavalier manner felt very unfair considering my time there.” Keller said he planned to retire in five years anyway and was in the middle of three major projects for the institution.

According to Keller, the school told him, “We’re not going to tell you why, and we appreciate your service, and you need to pick up your stuff and go.” He further claimed that the school told him the decision had something to do with his work at Big Bend National Park, where Keller’s permit was suspended in December.

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Rare Discovery Of Roman Dodecahedron Fragment Adds To Archaeological Mystery

A chance find by an amateur metal detectorist has added to a long-running mystery of archaeology, as a fragment of an Ancient Roman dodecahedron has been found in the small town of Kortessem, in Belgium. 

The piece, originally part of a dodecahedron measuring 5-6 centimeters (2–2.36 inches) in size, shows signs of having been repaired in the past, with local archaeologists at the Flanders Heritage Agency suggesting that it may have been broken in some kind of ancient ritual.

Roman dodecahedra are something of a puzzle: more than 100 such artifacts have been found throughout Europe over the past few centuries, each of them meticulously cast in these perfect 12-sided polyhedra. Each face of the bronze dodecahedra has a small hole through the center, though no hole is the same size as another, and each vertex is decorated with a tiny bauble – though apart from that, the little doodads seem to have no distinctive markings at all.

We can infer that they must have been important, at least to some of their owners, since several have been found among coin hoards and – the new example notwithstanding – hardly any show signs of the kind of wear and tear you might expect over nearly two millennia of history. 

And yet the simple fact is that nobody knows what Roman dodecahedra were actually used for. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that hundreds of them have been discovered, you’d never know they existed at all, since no record of them has ever been found in contemporary art or writing.

That hasn’t stopped people from theorizing. Perhaps the mysterious little objects were used as rangefinders or angle measurers, people have suggested, or maybe the Romans used them for astronomical predictions to aid in agriculture. Since the advent of YouTube, the idea that the dodecahedra were used as knitting aids has proved particularly popular – but since even knitting needles aren’t known in the historical record until a good few centuries later, that hypothesis is likely not true. 

Instead, archaeologists at the Flanders Heritage Agency favor a more esoteric explanation. “There is increasing evidence that dodecahedrons may not have been practical objects, such as measuring instruments,” the statement says. “The known specimens are too different in dimensions and details for that.”

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OLDEST KNOWN PROJECTILE POINTS UNCOVERED IN THE AMERICAS

ARCHAEOLOGISTS FROM THE OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY HAVE UNCOVERED A COLLECTION OF PROJECTILE POINTS THAT DATE FROM ROUGHLY 15,700 YEARS AGO.

The researchers found 13 full and numerous fragmentary projectile points at the Cooper’s Ferry site along the Salmon River in present-day Idaho. They are 2,300 years older than the points previously found at the same site, and 3,000 years older than the Clovis fluted points found throughout North America.

The Salmon River site is on traditional Nez Perce land, known to the tribe as the ancient village of Nipéhe. The land is currently held in public ownership by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

The points are revelatory not just in their age, but in their similarity to projectile points found in Hokkaido, Japan, dating to 16,000-20,000 years ago. Their presence in Idaho adds more detail to the hypothesis that there are early genetic and cultural connections between the ice age peoples of Northeast Asia and North America.

Loren Davis, an anthropology professor at OSU said: “The earliest peoples of North America possessed cultural knowledge that they used to survive and thrive over time. Some of this knowledge can be seen in the way people made stone tools, such as the projectile points found at the Cooper’s Ferry site.”

“By comparing these points with other sites of the same age and older, we can infer the spatial extents of social networks where this technological knowledge was shared between peoples,” added Davis.

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The rise of Archaeologists Anonymous

In a quiet group chat in an obscure part of the internet, a small number of anonymous accounts are swapping references from academic publications and feverishly poring over complex graphs of DNA analysis. These are not your average trolls, but scholars, researchers and students who have come together online to discuss the latest findings in archaeology. Why would established academics not be having these conversations in a conference hall or a lecture theatre? The answer might surprise you.

The equation of anonymity on the internet with deviance, mischief and hate has become a central plank in the global war on “misinformation”. But for many of us, anonymity has allowed us to pursue our passion for scholarly research in a way that is simply impossible within the censorious confines of modern academia. And so, in these hidden places, professional geneticists, bioarchaeologists and physical anthropologists have created a network of counter-research. Using home-made software, spreadsheets and private servers, detailed and rigorous work is conducted away from prying eyes and hectoring voices.

Many, like myself, are “junior researchers” or PhD drop-outs — people with one foot in the door but who recognise how precarious academic jobs are. Anonymity comes naturally to a younger generation of internet users, reared on forums and different social media platforms. They exploit the benefits and protections of not having every public statement forever attached to your person. I chose to start an anonymous profile during lockdown, a period which saw many professionals adopt a pseudonym as eyes turned to the internet and political positions emerged in relation to Covid, the presidential election and public demonstrations in the West.

Archaeology has always been a battleground, since it helps define and legitimise crucial subjects about the past, human nature and the history of particular nations and peoples. Most humanities disciplines veer to the Left today, explicitly and implicitly, but archaeology is the outlier. Instead, it is in the middle of an upheaval — one which will have deeply troubling consequences for many researchers who suddenly see decades of carefully managed theories crumble before their eyes.

In the absence of genetic data, it was once possible to argue that changes in the material record (objects and artefacts such as pottery, stone and metal tools, craft objects, clothing and so on) reflected some kind of passive or diffuse spread of technologies and fashions, but this is no longer the case. For instance, for many years students and the public were told that “pots are not people” — that new styles of pottery suddenly appearing in the record does not mean that new people had arrived with them — and the appearance of the so-called “Bell Beaker” pottery in the British Bronze Age showed how imitation and trade allowed new styles of ceramics to spread from the continent.

But in 2018, a bombshell paper proved this was fundamentally incorrect. In fact, nearly 90% of the population of Britain was replaced in a short period, corresponding to the movement of the Bell Beaker people into Britain and the subsequent disappearance of the previous Neolithic inhabitants. We know this because careful genetic work, building from paper to paper, shows clearly that the new arrivals were different people, with different maternal and paternal DNA. Papers like this appear almost weekly now. Most recently, the confirmation that the Anglo-Saxons did indeed arrive from northern Europe has caused many academics a great headache, since for years the very idea of an invasion of Germanic peoples has been downplayed and even dismissed.

What seems obvious to the general public — that prehistory was a bloody mess of invasions, migrations, battles and conflict — is not always a commonplace view among researchers. Worse, the idea that ancient peoples organised themselves among clear ethnic and tribal lines is also taboo. Obvious statements of common sense, such as the existence of patriarchy in the past, are constantly challenged and the general tone of academia is one of refutation: both of established theories and thinkers and of disagreeable parts of the past itself.

Added to this is the ever-present fear that studies and results are being used by the wrong kind of people. In a 2019 journal article, entitled “Genetics, archaeology and the far-Right: An unholy trinity”, Susanne Hakenbeck expresses grave concern that recent genetics work on the early Bronze Age invasions of the Indo-European steppe are needlessly giving oxygen to dangerous ideas — namely that young men from one ethnic group might have migrated from the Pontic-Caspian grasslands and violently subdued their neighbours, passing on their paternal DNA at the expense of the native males. This narrative, fairly well-supported in the genetics literature, is for Hakenbeck deeply unpleasant and wrong:

“We see a return to notions of bounded ethnic groups equivalent to archaeological cultures and of a shared Indo-European social organisation based on common linguistic fragments. Both angles are essentialist and carry a deeply problematic ideological baggage. We are being offered an appealingly simple narrative of a past shaped by virile young men going out to conquer a continent, given apparent legitimacy by the scientific method.”

That war-like young men might have invaded a nearby settlement is apparently a troublesome statement, something that, again, most lay people simply wouldn’t find difficult to contemplate. Yet others have gone further still. Historian Wolf Liebeschuetz and archaeologist Sebastian Brather, to pick on just two, have both firmly insisted that archaeology must not, and cannot, be used to trace migrations or identify different ethnic groups in prehistory. To quote from Liebeschuetz’s 2015 book, East and West in Late Antiquity: “Archaeology can trace cultural diffusion, but it cannot be used to distinguish between peoples, and should not be used to trace migration. Arguments from language and etymology are irrelevant.”

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Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater

Archaeologists are trying to piece together the mystery of an underwater trail of ancient rock piles, or cairns, that stretch for miles under the shimmering waters of Lake Constance, a glacial lake that lies between Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and which appear to have been made by humans who lived some 5,500 years ago, according to a 2021 study.

The huge cairns have attracted public attention and expert debate ever since they were first discovered in 2015 by the Institute for Lake Research in Langenargen. Roughly 170 of these rock formations are arranged in a line under the shallow waters of Lake Constance, several hundred feet from its southwest Swiss shore. 

A team led by Urs Leuzinger, an archaeologist at the Museum of Archaeology of the Canton of Thurgau, have amassed compelling evidence that the rock formations were made by humans who lived in the area during the Neolithic period. 

The piles are several dozen feet wide, with heights of up to six feet, distinguishing them as impressive structures that would have required a lot of effort and time to build, though “the function of this 10-kilometer long prehistoric feature remains enigmatic,” according to a 2021 study published in the Annual Review of Swiss Archaeology. The findings of this study will be presented in a pop-up exhibit this week called “Bodensee Stonehenge” (meaning Lake Constance Stonehenge) at the Office for Archaeology Thurgau.

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