Archaeology

National Geographic News, June 15, 2009

Given away by strange, crop circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise.

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

For such a site to have lain hidden for so long is "completely amazing," said Wickstead, of Kingston University in London. Archaeologist Joshua Pollard, who was not involved in the find, agreed. The discovery is "remarkable," he said, given the decades of intense archaeological attention to the greater Stonehenge region.

Short URL: http://snipr.com/khe9i

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090615-stonehenge-
tombs-crop-circles.html

Denbighshire Visitor [UK], Jun 10 2009

AN excavation within the ramparts of the Penycloddiau Iron Age
hillfort has confirmed that a Bronze Age burial mound sits at the
summit, dating back at least 3,500 years.

Between May 11 and 22 archaeologists from the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT) excavated a mound found on the northern end of the hillfort. The mound had been heavily eroded by the Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail which runs through the centre of the hillfort and across the top of the mound.

In 2008 a trial excavation took place to find out if the mound was natural geology or human-made. The excavation showed the mound may have been a burial mound dating so further investigation was required. This year, although no dating evidence was found, archaeologists could distinguish the mound as being Bronze Age by looking at how it had been constructed amongst other clues. One of the most obvious discoveries of the excavation was the ‘robbers’ trench’ (a large hole where the burial should have been), including a rectangular shape cut into the bedrock directly underneath the trench.

Short URL: http://snipr.com/k2ams

http://www.denbighshirevisitor.com/news/denbighshire-news/2009/06/10/
bronze-age-burial-mound-discovered-105722-23826027/

BBC, 11 June 2009

At least 45 dismembered skeletons have been discovered in a burial
pit by archaeologists digging on the site of a planned £87m relief
road in Dorset.

The burial site on Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth is thought to date from late Iron Age to early Roman times. Skulls, rib cages and leg bones, thought to be from young men, were arranged in separate parts of the pit. Archaeologists said they appeared to have been victims of a "catastrophic event" like an execution or disease.

The skeletons were discovered during the earthwork operation for the
Weymouth Relief Road. David Score, Oxford Archaeology project manager
at dig, said it was a "remarkable burial pit".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/dorset/8094935.stm

See also 24 Hour Museum [UK]:
http://www.culture24.org.uk/history/archaeology/art69369

The Times [UK], June 10, 2009

A prehistoric complex, including two 6,000-year-old tombs, has been
discovered by archaeologists in Hampshire.

The Neolithic tombs, which until now had gone unnoticed under farmland despite being just 15 miles from Stonehenge, are some of the oldest monuments to have been found in Britain.

Archaeologists say they will hold valuable clues about how people lived at the time and what their environment was like.

The discovery is also close to Cranborne Chase, one of the most well researched prehistoric areas in Europe. “It’s one of the most famous prehistoric landscapes, a Mecca for prehistorians, and you would have thought the archaeological world would have gone over it with a fine tooth comb,” Dr Helen Wickstead, the Kingston University archaeologist leading the project, said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6463970.ece

See also BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/8095537.stm

Part of a Neanderthal man's skull has been dredged up from the North Sea, in the first confirmed find of its kind.

Scientists in Leiden, in the Netherlands, have unveiled the specimen - a fragment from the front of a skull belonging to a young adult male.

Analysis of chemical "isotopes" in the 60,000-year-old fossil suggest a carnivorous diet, matching results from other Neanderthal specimens.

The North Sea is one of the world's richest areas for mammal fossils.

But the remains of ancient humans are scarce; this is the first known specimen to have been recovered from the sea bed anywhere in the world.

For most of the last half million years, sea levels were substantially lower than they are today.

Significant areas of the North Sea were, at times, dry land. Criss-crossed by river systems, with wide valleys, lakes and floodplains, these were rich habitats for large herds of ice age mammals such as horse, reindeer, woolly rhino and mammoth.

Their fossilised remains are brought ashore in large numbers each year by fishing trawlers and other dredging operations.

According to Professor Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum, some fishermen now concentrate on collecting fossils rather than their traditional catch.

"There were mammoth fossils collected off the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts 150 years ago, so we've known for some time there was material down there that was of this age, or even older," Professor Stringer, a museum research leader, told BBC News. Indeed, some of the fossil material from the North Sea dates to the Cromerian stage, between 866,000 and 478,000 years ago.

It had been "only a matter of time", he said, before a human fossil came to light.

Professor Stringer added: "The key thing for the future is getting this material in a better context.

"It would be great if we could get the technology one day to go down and search (in the sea floor) where we can obtain the dating, associated materials and other information we would get if we were excavating on land."

Private collection

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were our close evolutionary cousins; they appear in the fossil record some 400,000 years ago.

These resourceful, physically powerful hunter-gatherers dominated a wide range spanning Britain and Iberia in the west, Israel in the south and Siberia in the east.

Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and replaced the Neanderthals after entering Europe about 40,000 years ago.

The specimen was found among animal remains and stone artefacts dredged up 15km off the coast of the Netherlands in 2001.

The fragment was spotted by Luc Anthonis, a private fossil collector from Belgium, in the sieving debris of a shell-dredging operation.

Study of the specimen has been led by Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

"Even with this rather limited fragment of skull, it is possible to securely identify this as Neanderthal," Professor Hublin told BBC News.

For instance, the thick bony ridge above the eyes - known as a supraorbital torus - is typical of the species, he said.

The fragment's shape best matches the frontal bones of late Pleistocene examples of this human species, particularly the specimens known as La Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie 1.

These examples, which were both unearthed in France, date from between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.

The North Sea fossil also bears a lesion caused by a benign tumour - an epidermoid cyst - of a type very rare in humans today.

The research links up with the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain 2 (AHOB 2) project, which aims to set Britain's prehistory in a European context. Dutch archaeologist Wil Roebroeks, a collaborator on this study, is also a member of the AHOB 2 research team.

Carnivorous diet

Dr Mike Richards, from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, analysed different forms, or isotopes, of the elements nitrogen and carbon in the fossilised bone. This shed light on the types of foods eaten by this young male.

The results show survived on a diet dominated by meat.

"High in the food chain, (Neanderthals) must have been quite rare on the ground compared to other mammals," said Wil Roebroeks from the University of Leiden.

The results of the stable isotope analysis fit with what is known about other examples of this species, though other research suggests that in Gibraltar, on the southern coast of Iberia, some Neanderthals were exploiting marine resources, including dolphins, monk seals and mussels.

Researchers decided against carbon dating the specimen; this requires the preservation of a protein called collagen.

Professor Hublin explained that while there was some collagen left in the bone, scientists would have needed to destroy approximately half of the fossil in order to obtain enough for direct dating.

Professor Roebroeks told BBC News: "Dutch scientists - geologists and archaeologists alike - are hoping this find will convince governmental agencies that the Netherlands needs to invest much more in that... archive of Pleistocene sediments off our coast - and off the coast of Britain."

He said this submerged repository contained "high resolution information on past climate change and its environmental consequences, points of reference for how rivers 'worked' before any human interference and now, as this find shows, remains of people who once roamed these landscapes."

Extreme ways

Chris Stringer said that studying the landscape beneath the North Sea was crucial for a better understanding of prehistoric movements of humans into the British Isles.

"We have Neanderthals at Lynford (in Norfolk) 60,000 years ago, though we only have stone tools. This specimen might indeed be the kind of Neanderthal that was crossing into Norfolk around that time. It will help us understand our British sequence when we can much more precisely map what's under the North Sea," he said.

Professor Hublin said the individual was living at the extreme edge of the Neanderthals' northern range, where the relatively cold environment would have challenged their capabilities to the limit. Neanderthal remains have been found at only two sites this far north.

"What we have here is a marginal population, probably with low numbers of people," Professor Hublin explained.

"It's quite fascinating to see that these people were able to cope with the environment and be so successful in an ecological niche which was not the initial niche for humans."

While these hunting grounds would at times have provided plentiful sources of meat for a top carnivore, Neanderthals living in these areas would also have been at the mercy of fluctuations in the numbers of big game animals.

Periodic dips in populations of mammals such as reindeer could have caused local extinctions of Neanderthal groups which hunted them, Dr Hublin explained.

A gladiator's helmet left behind in the ruins of Pompeii is the centrepiece of an exhibition to be unveiled in Melbourne today.

The 2,000-year-old bronze helmet is one of 250 items brought together at the Melbourne Museum to illustrate life in the ancient city.

Museum manager Brett Dunlop says the helmet survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and was recovered 200 years ago.

'A large number of gladiators' helmets and shin guards and shoulder guards were found in what was most likely a storeroom in the gymnasium area,' he said.

'Most definitely the gladiators who were able to would have fled away when the volcano was erupting and a large number of pieces of their equipment were left behind.'

The helmet would have been worn by 'murmillo', a type of gladiator during the Roman Imperial age.

The distinguishing feature of the murmillo was the high crest of his helmet which, together with its broad rim, was shaped somewhat like a fish.

The murmillo took his name from this fish-shaped helmet; the word comes from the Greek word for a type of saltwater fish.

Otherwise, he wore a loincloth, belt, short greaves on the lower parts of his legs, a linen arm protector to protect his right arm, and the curved rectangular shield of the Roman legionary.

He also carried the legionary's short, straight sword, or gladius, from which gladiators derived their name.

The murmillo usually fought gladiators styled after ancient Greek fighters, with whom he shared some of the same equipment (notably arm guards and greaves).

A number of ancient authors, including Valerius Maximus and Quintillian, assert that he also regularly battled the net fighter. It would certainly have been a logical pairing, contrasting a slow but heavily armoured gladiator with a fast but lightly equipped one.

Examples of the pairing between murmillones and other gladiator types can be seen in frescos and graffiti in Pompeii.

In one well-preserved example, a murmillo named Marcus Atillus, who is credited with one match and one victory, is depicted standing over the defeated figure of Lucius Raecius Felix, a gladiator with 12 matches and 12 victories.

His opponent is shown kneeling, disarmed and unhelmeted. The graffiti records that Felix survived the fight and was granted his freedom.