Ancient History (3500 BC – 499 AD)

[weatheriscool]

Study finds nearly 500 ancient ceremonial sites in southern Mexico

by University of Arizona

A team of international researchers led by the University of Arizona reported last year that they had uncovered the largest and oldest Maya monument—Aguada Fénix. That same team has now uncovered nearly 500 smaller ceremonial complexes that are similar in shape and features to Aguada Fénix. The find transforms previous understanding of Mesoamerican civilization origins and the relationship between the Olmec and the Maya people.

The team's findings are detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. UArizona anthropology professor Takeshi Inomata is the paper's first author. His UArizona coauthors include anthropology professor Daniela Triadan and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab director Greg Hodgins.

Using data gathered through an airborne laser mapping technique called lidar, the researchers identified 478 complexes in the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz. Lidar penetrates the tree canopy and reflects three-dimensional forms of archaeological features hidden under vegetation. The lidar data was collected by the Mexican governmental organization Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía and covered a 32,800-square-mile area, which is about the same size as the island of Ireland.

Publicly available lidar data allows researchers to study huge areas before they follow up with high-resolution lidar to study sites of interest in greater detail.

"It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago," Inomata said. "Publicly available lidar is transforming archaeology."

[weatheriscool]

DNA analysis confirms 2,000-year-old sustainable fishing practices of Tsleil-Waututh Nation
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-dna-analy ... shing.html
by Simon Fraser University

Ancient Indigenous fishing practices can be used to inform sustainable management and conservation today, according to a new study from Simon Fraser University.

Working with the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and using new palaeogenetic analytical techniques developed in SFU Archaeology's ancient DNA lab, directed by professor Dongya Yang, the results of a new collaborative study featured in Scientific Reports provides strong evidence that prior to European colonization, Coast Salish people were managing chum salmon by selectively harvesting males.

[caltrek]

^^^While I did find this topic to be very interesting, I was a little frustrated in that I previously had no idea who the Tsleil-Waututh Nation of peoples are (or were). Here is a Wikipedia link that helps in that regard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsleil-Wa ... rst_Nation

Introduction:

(Wikipedia) The Tsleil-Waututh Nation (Halkomelem: səlilwətaɬ IPA: [səlilwətaɬ]), formerly known as the Burrard Indian Band or Burrard Inlet Indian Band, is a First Nations band government in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation ("TWN") are Coast Salish peoples who speak hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the Downriver dialect of the Halkomelem language, and are closely related to but politically and culturally separate from the nearby nations of the Squamish and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), with whose traditional territories some claims overlap.

The TWN is a member government of the Naut'sa mawt Tribal Council, which includes other governments on the upper Sunshine Coast, southeastern Vancouver Island and the Tsawwassen band on the other side of the Vancouver metropolis from the Tsleil-waututh. There are almost 600 members with 287 living on the reserve as of January 2018.

According to the 2011 national Community Well Being Index, Burrard Inlet 3 is considered the most prosperous First Nation community in Canada.

There is also a nice location map available at the Wikipedia link.

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Edit: Moved to correct time-period forum.

[R8Z]

Very interesting Russian Youtube channel that goes into details on how ancient artifacts were built, dismissing many fringe theories that although at face value seem plausible, in practice are just pseudoscience. One of the videos that I liked the most was the one about drilling into granite (a very strong rock) in ancient Egypt using softer materials and leaving "drill marks" along the way as if the tool was carving very fast onto the stone. I think it was a very strong video to settle the argument on how these drill holes were made.

[weatheriscool]

The toilet of a First Temple period luxury villa reveals the Jerusalem elite suffered from infectious disease
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-toilet-te ... villa.html
by Tel-Aviv University

A new study by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority has exposed the remains of 2,700-year-old intestinal worm eggs below the stone toilet of a magnificent private estate. The egg remnants belong to four different types of intestinal parasites: roundworm, tapeworm, whipworm, and pinworm. According to the researchers, the stone toilet seat was in the estate's "restroom," and the presence of the worms indicates that even the wealthy residents of Jerusalem at that time suffered from diseases and epidemics. The article was recently published in the International Journal of Paleopathology.

The study was led by Dr. Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University's director of the Laboratory of Archaeobotany and Ancient Environments at the Institute of Archaeology and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History. Dr. Langgut collected sediment samples from underneath the stone toilet, where the cesspit was located. Next, in her laboratory, she chemically extracted the parasite eggs, scrutinized them under a light microscope, and identified them. The egg remains were discovered as part of a salvage excavation by the Israel Antiquities Authority, recently carried out at the Armon Hanatziv Promenade in Jerusalem.

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A Rare, Isolated Script Invented From Scratch Holds Clues to The Evolution of Writing
by Tessa Koumoundouros
January 12, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/rare-scrip ... of-writing

Introduction:

(Science Alert) A rare script from a language in Liberia has provided some new insights into how written languages evolve.

"The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries," says linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly, now at the University of New England, Australia.

"Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing evolves over short spaces of time."

We might all take the written word for granted these days, but researchers still don't know exactly how this early human technology came to develop into the ubiquitous necessity that it is today.

As far as we know so far, the invention of writing occurred around 5,000 years ago in the Middle East and has been reinvented over and over again. New writing systems are still being created today, in places like Nigeria and Senegal.

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Ancient Peruvian Politicians Partied Way Harder Than We Thought
by Elana Spivack
January 12, 2022

https://www.inverse.com/science/ancient-peru-empire

Introduction:

(Inverse) IN THE PRINCE, Machiavelli advises would-be tyrants to rule their kingdoms by making subjects both fear and love them, in that order. He doesn’t mention anything about hosting extravagant feasts where everyone hallucinates together, but this strategy seems to have worked exceedingly well for one of the world’s most successful empires: The Wari, who ruled what is now Peru, a millennia ago.

Long before Columbus arrived in the “New World,” South America was home to vast empires. Some 600 years-worth of evidence suggests some imperial houses used both hallucinogens and alcohol to maintain their power, and one such drug is vilca. Vilca, or Anadenanthera colubrina, is a plant that grows in dry, tropical forests like Ayacucho. Its earliest known use dates back to 2000 B.C.E. in northern Argentina. This legume-producing plant, it seems, may have been key to the Wari’s power.

WHAT’S NEW — In a study published the Journal of Antiquity on Wednesday, archaeologists reveal the first evidence of vilca being used among the Wari people. It seems the Wari blended the use of drugs and alcohol — marking a pivotal time period in South American history when cultural practices began to shift.

“This is the first time in a Wari context that we have it in an archeological sites where people were living and doing their day to day lives,” says Matthew Biwer. Biwer is an archaeology professor at Dickinson College and the paper’s first author.

The study states that during the Formative period (900–300 B.C.E.), civilizations throughout South America primarily used only hallucinogens to solidify their alliances, power, and ritual. But by the Late Horizon, around 1450– 1532 C.E., alcohol had supplanted hallucinogens as the preferred psychoactive substance of the ruling elite. The Wari fall during the Middle Horizon (600–1000 C.E.) — and it seems they ingeniously combined hallucinogens with alcohol.

[caltrek]

Japan's Genetic History
by Daniel Weiss

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/453- ... -migration

Entire Article (excluding photographs):

(Archaeology.og) The genetic origins of modern Japanese people have traditionally been traced to two populations: Jomon hunter-gatherers and Yayoi farmers. New research has identified evidence of a third ancestral strand, dating to the imperial Kofun period (A.D. 300–700), when the modern Japanese state began to take shape. A team led by geneticist Shigeki Nakagome of Trinity College Dublin analyzed 12 newly sequenced genomes—nine from the Jomon and three from the Kofun period. The team also studied five previously published genomes—three from Jomon and two from Yayoi individuals.

Their findings show that the emergence of the Jomon lineage dates to around 20,000 years ago, when a land bridge connected the Korean Peninsula to Japan. Around 17,000 years ago, sea levels rose, submerging the land bridge and isolating the Jomon from continental Asia for millennia, until agriculturalists arrived starting around 3,000 years ago and developed the Yayoi culture. According to the team’s analysis, these wet-rice farmers appear to have come from northeastern Asia. Unlike in Europe, where newly arrived farmers supplanted local hunter-gatherers, the Yayoi assimilated with the Jomon.

The researchers found that during the Kofun period, people with East Asian ancestry, most likely Han Chinese, migrated to Japan and added their genes to those of the Jomon and Yayoi. Archaeological evidence and historical records have suggested that a group of migrants arrived around this time, but this is the first genetic evidence of Japan’s tripartite lineage. “Previous studies that looked at modern genomic variation proposed that there might have been more than two major migrations to Japan,” says Nakagome. “But because they only looked at the modern population, they couldn’t identify when and where the additional genetic component came from.”

[weatheriscool]

Archaeologists discover ancient highways in Arabia
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-archaeolo ... rabia.html
by University of Western Australia

Archeologists from The University of Western Australia have discovered people who lived in north-west Arabia in the Early to Middle Bronze Age built 'funerary avenues'—long-distance corridors linking oases and pastures, bordered by thousands of elaborate burial monuments.

Dr. Matthew Dalton, from UWA's School of Humanities, is lead author of the findings published in the journal The Holocene.

"Funerary avenues were the major highway networks of their day, and show that the populations living in the Arabian Peninsula 4,500 years ago were far more socially and economically connected to one another than we previously thought," Dr. Dalton said.

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Researchers Identify Oldest Known Hybrid Animal Bred by Humans
by Nate MacKay
January 14, 2022

https://www.courthousenews.com/research ... by-humans/

Introduction:

(Courthouse News) — Scientists announced Friday they have used genome sequencing to uncover the earliest known evidence of humans breeding hybrid animals.

According to research published in the journal Science Advances, researchers determined that 4,500-year-old skeletons from the horse family found buried in modern-day northern Syria are most likely domesticated hybrid animals called kungas that can be traced to the Bronze Age of Mesopotamia.

The research indicates the people were breeding kungas more than 500 years before the first domestic horses were introduced to the area. Crosses between domesticated female donkeys and male Syrian wild asses, kungas have long been at the center of debate among specialists.

“We have a pretty good answer to a debate that lasted for decades,” said Eva-Maria Geigl, one of the paper’s authors from the Institut Jacques Monod in France. “These are the most ancient human-made hybrids that we know.”

Geigl said kungas are documented as a distinct animal on ancient tablets and seals dating back to 2500 BC, often with four of them pulling warriors to war in wagons. Researchers knew the animals depicted were not horses because the domestic horses were not yet in the area and the drawings showed tails like that of a donkey.

[weatheriscool]

Archeologists discover 2 giant sphinxes
Archeologists discover 2 giant sphinxes at the lost 'Temple of a Million Years' built by a great pharaoh in Egypt 3,300 years ago


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ar ... ar-AAT1Var?

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A Cosmic Airburst May Have Devastated a Vast Native American Culture 1,500 Years Ago
by David Nield
February 3, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-near-ear ... -years-ago

Introduction:

(Science Alert) More than 1500 years ago, a vast culture known as the Hopewell tradition (or Hopewell culture) stretched across what is today the eastern United States.

The cause of the culture's decline has long been debated, with war and climate change two of the possibilities, but now a new avenue of inquiry has opened up: debris from a near-Earth comet.

Researchers working across 11 different Hopewell archaeological sites covering three states have found unusual concentrations of iridium and platinum in their digging – telltale signs of meteorite fragments. Meanwhile, a charcoal layer in the sediment suggests an intense period of high heat.

The hypothesis is that debris from a passing comet may have struck close to the Ohio Hopewell communities, causing an airburst that would have profound and potentially devastating effects on the local environment.

Signs that the people collected meteorite fragments and incorporated them into their jewelry and instruments, along with hints of a calamity in local folklore, suggest there was certainly some significant event – one that the researchers suggest may have contributed to a significant upheaval in the social sphere.

The research results were published in Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05758-y

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This May be One of the Oldest Buddhist Temples Ever Discovered
by Tom Metcalfe
February 2, 2022

https://www.livescience.com/early-buddi ... e-pakistan

Introduction:

(Live Science) An ancient temple dating from the early centuries of Buddhism has been unearthed in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan – part of the ancient Gandhara region that was conquered by Alexander the Great and gave rise to a mixing of Buddhist belief and Greek art.

Archaeologists think that the temple dates from about the middle of the second century BCE, at a time when Gandhara was ruled by the Indo-Greek kingdom of northern India, and that it was built above an earlier Buddhist temple that may have dated from as early as the third century BCE.

That means people would have built the older temple within a few hundred years of the death of the founder of Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama, who lived in what is now northern India and Nepal between about 563 BCE and 483 BCE.

The excavated remains of the temple found so far, near the center of the modern town of Barikot, are over 10 feet (3 meters) tall and consist of a ceremonial platform topped by a cylindrical structure that housed a conical or dome-shaped Buddhist monument called a stupa.

The temple complex, which was built and reconstructed several times, also included a smaller stupa, a cell or room for monks, a staircase, the podium of a monumental pillar or column, vestibule rooms, and a public courtyard that looked out onto an ancient road.

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Roman mosaic floor found at Southwark Street development site

Tuesday 22 February 2022

Archaeologists working on a site in Southwark Street have uncovered the largest area of Roman mosaic to be discovered in London for half a century.

The mosaic floor is thought to date from AD 175-225 and archaeologists believe it formed part of a dining room.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime find in London," said site supervisor Antonietta Lerz from Museum of London Archaeology.

"It has been a privilege to work on such a large site where the Roman archaeology is largely undisturbed by later activity – when the first flashes of colour started to emerge through the soil everyone on site was very excited!"

The discovery was made last month on the plot of Transport for London-owned land at the junction of Southwark Street and Redcross Way, previously known as Landmark Court and now being redeveloped by U+I under the 'Liberty of Southwark' name.

https://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/ ... zSCfLRdaJw



Credit: Museum of London Archaeology

[weatheriscool]

Excavation unearths a 1,500-year-old mystery at a Roman site in rural Britain
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-excavatio ... roman.html
by Newcastle University

An abandoned mausoleum and silver extraction taking place on an industrial scale at a Roman site in rural Kent have left archaeologists with a 1500-year-old mystery.

Silver extraction on an industrial scale

Archaeologists working on an excavation at Grange Farm, near Gillingham, discovered 15 kilograms of litharge—a material associated with the extraction of silver from other metals. This is the largest amount ever found on a British Roman site and greatly exceeds the amount that archaeologists would normally expect to find on a rural settlement such as that at Grange Farm, suggesting that the refining of silver was taking place on an industrial scale.

However, the excavation team did not unearth any signs of the infrastructure that could have supported the size of operation required to produce this amount of material.

The excavation and subsequent research, which was led by Pre-Construct Archaeology (PCA) and involved archaeologists from Newcastle University, revealed a rectangular building which would have been built from timber and divided internally by three aisles. This type of multi-function "aisled" building was fairly common in Roman Britain and would have been used both as a house and place for crafts. However, although the archaeologists found evidence of small-scale metalworking at one end of the building, it was not at a level that would have produced the amount of litharge discovered.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Two DNA defense systems behind resilience of 7th cholera pandemic
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-dna-defen ... olera.html
by Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

Cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, a waterborne pathogen that infects the gut of humans through contaminated water and food. When ingested, V. cholerae colonizes the gut's inner surface, causing a watery diarrhea, that if left untreated, can lead to severe dehydration and death.

Cholera is still a problem, especially in less-developed or crisis-hit regions. The WHO reports that the ongoing seventh cholera pandemic is still responsible for up to four million infections, and up to 143,000 deaths each year.

Horizontal gene transfer

Only a few strains of V. cholerae can cause pandemic disease, with most being harmless aquatic organisms. This is because the pandemic strains have acquired specialized "toolboxes" of genes and other genetic elements called "pathogenicity islands", which can turn the bacterium into a pathogen.

[caltrek]

Hermas - Commands was written some-time in the 150 years following the Birth of Christ. It is considered by some as one of the "lost" books of the Bible, meaning it is considered of doubtful origins and therefore not a part of church canon. I recently came across a passage which is positively mind blowing. It starts off as a kind of run-of-the-mill lecture in morality, with a surprise twist. Hermas Command V reads, in part, as follows:

Be patient, says he, and long-suffering, so shalt thou have dominion over all wicked things, and shall fulfil all righteousness.

For if thou shalt be patient, the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in thee shall be pure, and not darkened by any evil spirit; but being full of joy shall be enlarged, and feast in the body in which it dwells, and serve the lord with joy, and in great peace.

But if any anger shall overtake thee, presently the Holy Spirit which is in thee will be straightened and seek to depart from thee. For he is choked by the evil spirit, and has not the liberty of serving the Lord as he would; for he is grieved in anger. When, therefore, both these spirits dwell together, it is destructive to man.

As if one should take a little wormwood, and put it into a vessel of honey, the whole honey would be spoiled; and great quantity of honey is corrupted by a very little wormwood, and loses the sweetness of honey, and is no longer acceptable to its Lord because the honey is made bitter, and loses its use.

Now, nothing particularly mind blowing about that, right?

Ok, here is the weird part: the translation of "wormwood" into Russian/Ukrainian is "chernobyl."

The city's name is the same as one of the Ukrainian names for Artemisia vulgaris, mugwort or common wormwood, which is Ukrainian: чорнобиль, romanized: chornóbyl' (or more commonly полин звичайний polýn zvycháynyy, 'common artemisia').[3] The name is inherited from Proto-Slavic *čьrnobylъ or Proto-Slavic *čьrnobyl, a compound of Proto-Slavic *čьrnъ 'black' + Proto-Slavic *bylь 'grass', the parts related to Ukrainian: чорний, romanized: chórnyy, lit. 'black' and било byló, 'stalk', so named in distinction to the lighter-stemmed wormwood A. absinthium.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl