Tag: Anthropology

The Prehistory of Compassion: Neanderthals Cared Too

New research by archaeologists at the University of York suggests that it is beyond reasonable doubt Neanderthals often misrepresented as furry, primitive caveman hobbling about had a deep seated sense of compassion.

Dr Penny Spikins, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford from the universitys Department of Archaeology examined the archaeological record in search for evidence for compassionate acts in early humans. These illustrate the way emotions began to emerge in our ancestors six million years ago,which developed into the idea of ‘compassion’ we know today.

We have traditionally paid a lot of attention to how early humans thought about each other, but it may well be time to pay rather more attention to whether or not they ‘cared’, said Dr Spikins.

From Hominity to Humanity

Nowadays, ‘compassion’ which literally means ‘to suffer together’ is considered a great virtue by numerous philosophies and all the major religious traditions. But when did start to grow a desire to soother others’ distress? In the study ‘From hominity to humanity: Compassion from the earliest archaic to modern humans’, the researchers took on the unique challenge of charting key stages in the evolutionearly human’s emotional motivation to help others. They proposea four stage model for the development of human compassion:

Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion. It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive

Stage 1 – It begins six million years ago when the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees experienced the first awakenings of an empathy for others and motivation to help them, perhaps with a gesture of comfort or moving a branch to allow them to pass.

Stage 2 – The second stage from 1.8 million years ago sees compassion in Homo erectus beginning to be regulated as an emotion integrated with rational thought. Care of sick individuals represented an extensive compassionate investment while the emergence of special treatment of the dead suggested grief at the loss of a loved one and a desire to soothe others feelings.

Stage 3 – In Europe between around 500,000 and 40,000 years ago, early humans such as Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals developed deep-seated commitments to the welfare of others illustrated by a long adolescence and a dependence on hunting together.

There is evidence of the routine care of the injured or infirm over extended periods. These include the remains of a child with a congenital brain abnormality who was not abandoned but lived until five or six years old millennia later, the Spartans would have acted differently. A Neanderthal with a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye must have been cared for, perhaps for as long as twenty years.

Stage 4 – In modern humans starting 120,000 years ago, compassion was extended to strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts.

Dr Penny Spikins, lead author of the study, said that new research developments, such as neuro-imaging, have enabled archaeologists to attempt a scientific explanation of what were once intangible feelings of ancient humans and that the research was only the first step in a much needed prehistoric archaeology of compassion.

Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion. It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive, said Dr Spikins.

This apparent fragility makes addressing the evidence for the development of compassion in our most ancient ancestors a unique challenge, yet the archaeological record has an important story to tell about the prehistory of compassion.

Dr Spikins will give a free lecture, ‘Neanderthals in love: What can archaeology tell us about the feelings of ancient humans’, about the research at the University of York on Tuesday 19 October.

‘From hominity to humanity: Compassion from the earliest archaic to modern humans’ by Dr Penny Spikins, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford is published in the journal Time and Mind. The study is also available as a book, ‘The Prehistory of Compassion’, available for purchase online.

Rehabilitating the Neanderthals – Accusations Uluzzian Man Took H. Sapiens Tools Prove False

Neanderthals are not stupid For decades scientists believed Neanderthals developed ‘modern’ tools and ornaments solely through contact with Homo sapiens, and it is often said that the cavemen weren’t able to adapt their hunting techniques to the changing climate quickly enough to prevent their extinction.

A new study nowsuggests these sturdy ancients were well capable of innovating without our help, adding to the growing pool of evidence that Neanderthal man was not a primitive, clumbering caveman.

Basically, I am rehabilitating neanderthals, explainsJulien Riel-Salvatore, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Denver. They were far more resourceful than we have given them credit for.

Uluzzian Innovation

About 42,000 years ago, the Aurignacian culture, attributed to modern Homo sapiens, appeared in northern Italy while central Italy continued to be occupied by Neanderthals of the Mousterian culture which had been around for at least 100,000 years. At this time a new culture arose in the south of Italy, one also thought to be created by Neanderthals. They were the Uluzzian and they were very different.

But when southern Italy too experienced a shift in climate, and the trees were replaced by grasslands, the regio’s inhabitants faced the stark choice of adapting or dying out.

This stands in contrast to the ideas of the past 50 years that Neanderthals had to be acculturated to humans to come up with this technology. When we show Neanderthals could innovate on their own it casts them in a new light. It ‘humanizes’ them if you will.

The evidence suggests the Uluzzian began using darts or arrows to hunt smaller game to supplement the increasingly scarce larger mammals they traditionally hunted. Riel-Salvatore identified projectile points, ochre, bone tools, ornaments and possible evidence of fishing and small game hunting at Uluzzian archaeological sites throughout southern Italy.

These innovations are not traditionally associated with Neanderthals, suggesting they evolved independently, likely as a reaction to the dramatic changes in climate. But more importantly, they emerged in an area geographically separated from modern humans.

My conclusion is that if the Uluzzian is a Neanderthal culture it suggests that contacts with modern humans are not necessary to explain the origin of this new behaviour. This stands in contrast to the ideas of the past 50 years that Neanderthals had to be acculturated to humans to come up with this technology, he said. When we show Neanderthals could innovate on their own it casts them in a new light. It ‘humanizes’ them if you will.

The Neanderthal as Intelligent Being

We credit dolphins, monkeys and even pigs with ‘intelligence’, but common perceptionis only to oftenthatof the Neanderthals as thick-skulled, primitive ‘cavemen’. Yet, the Neanderthal weren’t ‘dumb’.

For starters, they had larger cranial capacities than our own species, andmammalian DNA retrieved from Neandertal stone tools suggests theysuccesfully huntend largegame.Neanderthals evenused a primitive form of make-up, although not if this was for ornamental or symbolic reasons (likely both).

Click To Watch Video

MEanderthal iPhone app – Morph yourself (and your friends) into a caveman!

If you’re non-African there’s a good chance 1 to 4% of your DNA is ‘Neanderthal’. But how would we look if we were 100% ‘prehistoric man’? Find out with this free app for iPhone and Android.

CLICK TO WATCH

Also,a study comparing the amount of cutting-edge, production efficiency and life time of Neanderthal tools (flint flakes) with the narrow flint blades used by more modern human argued that there was no technical advantage to the blades. Upper Paleolithic technology was not necessarily better, just different. (If you think ofotherexamples, !)

Where did the Neanderthals go?

The powerfully built (and steroid-fuelled, if you like) Neanderthals were first discovered in Germanys Neander Valley in 1856. The oldest remains with Neanderthal characteristics date to about 130,000 years ago. These Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record in Asia about 50,000 years ago and in Europe about 20,000 years later. Why the Neanderthal vanished remains unclear.

The ‘interbreeding hypothesis’ suggests that they were a subspecies that bred with Homo sapiens, disappearing through absorbtion. An alternative scenario is that Neanderthals were a separate species and got replaced by the Homo sapiens overrun by more advanced modern humans arriving in Europe from Africa.

Riel-Salvatore rejects that the Neanderthals were exterminated by modern humans. Homo sapiens might simply have existed in larger groups and had slightly higher birthrates, he said.

A recent study shows the Neanderthals share between 1 and 4 percent of their genetic material to the people of Asia and Europe. It has been suggested it is due to interbreeding between Neanderthals and the ancestors of non-Africans after they left Africa. But even if we did to some extent sleep with the ‘primitive caveman’, the populations that remained100% Neanderthal were probably out-competed and marginalized to extinction.

Riel-Salvatore’s research, to be published in Decembers Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, isbased on seven years of studying Neanderthal sites throughout Italy, with special focus on the vanished Uluzzian culture.

Utah Locals Continued Eating Beaver Despite Invention of Early Flour

Holly Raymond also worked on the excavation as a master's student. She now works at a private archaeology firm. Almost 10,000 years ago, in Utahs Escalante Valley, a new recipe was added to the prehistoric cookbook: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds.In those times,what else would the early chefs put on your plate..err… rock?

Archaeologists from the Brigham Young University are publishing what they’ve learned from five summers of excavations at the ‘North Creek Shelter’. The site,on the northern Colorado Plateau in southern Utah,has been occupied by humans on an off for the past 11,000 years, and is one of the oldest of such archaeological sites in Utah.

In the upcoming issue of the journal Kiva, they describe the stone tools used to grind sage, salt bush and grass seeds into flour. Those seeds are tiny, a single serving would have required quite a bit of seed gathering.

Ten thousand years ago, there was a change in the technology with grinding stones appearing for the first time, anthropologist Joel Janetski said. People started to use these tools to process small seeds into flour.

The invention of rudimentary pastry didn’t mean North Creek Shelter’s carte du jour turned vegetarian only. Prior to the appearance of grinding stones, the menu contained duck, beaver* and turkey. Sheep became common only later on. And deer was a staple at all levels of the dig.

The North Creek Shelter is located at the base of a sheer sandstone cliff on the same property as the Slot Canyon Inn, which now contains an exhibit about the researchers findings.

Besides animal bones and early grinding stones, the researchers also unearthed projectile points, bone beads and fremont figurines while getting to the bottom of the archaeological site.

* Never tried. Googling ‘How does beaver taste’ (probably not the most brilliant search query, I admit)resulted in “beaver should be considered a delicacy”. According to the ‘Northern Cookbook’, the meat is dark red, fine grained, moist and tender and similar in flavour to pork (if you removed the castor and musk glands correctly). You can roast the animal in its own skin, or cook up a broth. Served hot or cold, beaver feet resembling pigs’ feet are at their best boiled. Here are two1960 recipies on Flickr. I’m adding it under ‘squirrel‘ on the ‘not so sure if I ever want to try this’ list.

Man’s First Domesticated Animals Were Tools Before Food

Almost 32,000 years ago, man got its first puppy. Today still, humans have a special connection with animals, regardless if they are sitting on our laps, or – point on our plates. Why is it in our nature to accept of all kinds of creatures into our families and homes? What came first, the carbonade that would stay put, or the steadfast companion in the pursuit for game? And what if our first prehistoric attempts at art were no mindless doodling or sacred effigies, but an early publication of ‘Useful Beasts for Dummies’?

In a paper describing a new hypothesis for human evolution based on our tendency to nurture members of other species, palaeoanthropologist Pat Shipman argues that the human-animal link goes well beyond simple affection. She proposes that, over the last million years, the interdependency of early man with other animal species the animal connection” played a crucial in human evolution.

“Establishing an intimate connection to other animals is unique and universal to our species,” said Shipman. “No other mammal routinely adopts other species in the wild no gazelles take in baby cheetahs, no mountain lions raise baby deer,” Shipman said. “Every mouthful you feed to another species is one that your own children do not eat. On the face of it, caring for another species is maladaptive, so why do we humans do this?”

Shipman, a professor of biological anthropology at Penn State University, suggests that the animal connection was prompted by the invention of stone tools 2.6 million years ago. “Having sharp tools transformed wimpy human ancestors into effective predators who left many cut marks on the fossilised bones of their prey,” Shipman said.

Every mouthful you feed to another species is one that your own children do not eat. On the face of it, caring for another species is maladaptive, so why do we humans do this?”

This putour ancestorsin direct competition with other carnivores for prey.Humans who learned to observe and understand the behaviour of both their potential prey and competitors, were more successful at obtaining large amounts of meat without a doubt an evolutionary advantage.

The majority of early prehistoric art depicts animals. Shipman sees this as evidence that the evolutionary pressure to develop an external means of storing and transmitting information symbolic language came primarily from the need to share and handle what we knew about other species.

Though we cannot discover the earliest use of language itself, we can learn something from the earliest prehistoric art with unambiguous content. Nearly all of these artworks depict animals. Other potentially vital topics edible plants, water, tools or weapons, or relationships among humans are rarely if ever shown,” Shipman explains.

Shipman concludes that detailed information about animals became so advantageous that our ancestors began to nurture wild animals a practice that led to the domestication of the dog about 32,000 years ago.

Surely, if insuring a steady supply of meat was the point of domesticating animals, as traditionally has been assumed, then dogs originally ferocious wolfs – would be a very poor choice as an early domesticated species? “Wolves eat so much meat themselves that raising them for food would be a losing proposition,”the professorpoints out.

Instead, Shipman suggests, the primary reason for domestication was to transform the animals we had been observing for millennia into living tools during their peak years, then only later using their meat as food. “As living tools, different domestic animals offer immense renewable resources for tasks such as tracking game, destroying rodents, protecting kin and goods, providing wool for warmth, moving humans and goods over long distances, and providing milk to human infants” she explains.

Domestication is a process that takes generations and puts selective pressure on abilities to observe, empathize, and communicate across species barriers. Once accomplished, the domestication of animals offers numerous advantages to those with these attributes.

“The animal connection is an ancient and fundamentally human characteristic that has brought our lineage huge benefits over time,” Shipman summarises. “Our connection with animals has been intimately involved with the evolution of two key human attributes tool making and language and with constructing the powerful ecological niche now held by modern humans.”

Pat Sherman’s paper is to be be published in the August 2010 issue of the journal Current Anthropology. In addition, Shipman has authored a book for the general public, titled The Animal Connection.

Ancient Stone Monument to Napi Discovered on Canadian Prairies

A stone effigy monument, in the shape of a Blackfoot creator god named Napi, has been discovered in southern Alberta south of the Red Deer River near the hamlet of Finnegan.

One day Old Man determined that he would make a woman and a child; so he formed them both the woman and the child, her son of clay. After he had moulded the clay in human shape, he said to the clay, “You must be people …

They walked down to the river with their Maker, and then he told them that his name was Na’pi, – Old Man.

-From Blackfoot Lodge Tales, George Grinnell, 1892

The Blackfoot are a people that have inhabited the prairies since ancient times. The effigy dates to somewhere between AD 1000 and AD 1500. It would have been constructed before the time of European contact.

Napi is a deity credited with creating the Blackfoot people and the landscape they inhabit. According to Blackfoot tradition hes like the creator, said archaeologist Meaghan Porter, who investigated the site.

She said that the imageis made out of rocks and its in the outline of a man it has arms and a torso, head and legs as well as genitalia. Itsroughly five meters by five meters long. Therocks are about the size of a fist, they have a mix of black, grey and tan colours. Porter doesn’t think these colours were chosen deliberately I think thats just the rocks that were available,shesaid.

Some of the rocks have been fire-broken. This means that they have a red color and are fractured apart and jagged. They look like this because someone, back in antiquity, exposed them to heat whether this was done for religious reasons is unknown. Im not entirely sure, said Porter, again, it could just be that those were the rocks available.

Only nine stone effigies like this have been documented in all of Alberta.

Why was it created?

Archaeologists have found other sites near the area. One of them is a camp, located about one kilometre away, which is about 400 meters by 400 meters in size. Archaeologists found bone remains, hearths, more fire broken rock and even obsidian material that comes from a volcano.

“As he lay on his back, stretched out on the ground, with arms extended, he marked himself out with stones”

My hypothesis currently is that this Napi effigy (is) kind of a central focal point for other sites the area is significant, said Porter.

Blackfoot stories mention effigies like this. In 1892 anthropologist George Grinnell published a story about Napi, that he –

Made the Milk River (the Teton) and crossed it, and, being tired, went up on a little hill and lay down to rest. As he lay on his back, stretched out on the ground, with arms extended, he marked himself out with stones,–the shape of his body, head, legs, arms, and everything. There you can see those rocks today.

A vulnerable site

The site is quite vulnerable. Sadly some of the rocks had already been moved from their original location by thetime the effigy was documented.

Themonument could easily be destroyed if more of the rocks were moved. As such the team has been cautious about not releasing information or pictures that will give away its precise location. They did release a diagram that shows what the site looks like its pictured here. Porter also published an article about the find in the journal Alberta Archaeological Review and discussed the work at the 2010 Canadian Archaeological Association annual meeting.

The person who reported this find, a rancher, is also very protective of the site. He was concerned that energy development in the area might affect it. The ranchers grandparents, who homesteaded in the area told him to watch over the effigy, wrote Porter in her journal article. The energy company, EnCana, decided to stop development and even agreed to finance the mapping and study of the site. It is now protected under Alberta heritage law.

Reconstruction of Mexico Ice Age Woman suggests Several Migration Waves

la mujer de las malmas underwater skeleton and reconstruction Scientists have made a reconstruction of a 10,000 year old ancient woman, based on the skeletal remains found near Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Surprisingly, the reconstruction resembles people from Southeastern Asia,rather than Northern Asia.

In 2002, divers discovered the remains of an Ice Age woman at an underwater cave 4.5 km from Tulum, on the Ycutan Peninsula. The well-preserved remains 90% complete are estimated to be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old.

Based on the skeleton, experts have now reconstructed what Mujer de las Palmas (The Woman of the Palms) must have looked like with surprising results. The body structure, skin and eyes are similar to those of Southeast Asia people. According tothe scientists, this reinforces the hypothesis of multiple migration waves to the Americas, not just from Northern Asia but also from the Central and Southern areas. Additional, local ‘micro-evolution’ was just as important as migration.

Based on the skeleton remains, anthropologists and archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology (INAH) concluded the woman named Mujer de las Palmas, after the cave where she was discovered- was 1m52 tall, weighed approximately 58 kilos and was between 44 and 50 years old at time of death.

After extensive study of the skull, the researchers found that its physical features do not correspond with the characteristics of Mexican indigenous population, nor with ancient inhabitants of America. Her face is more similar to people from Southeast Asia, says Alejandro Terrazas, anthropologist at the National University of Mexico.

Terrazassays this indicates that American Continent was populated by several migratory movements, rather than by one or two waves from Northern Asia that arrived through Bering Strait, as most theories say happened.

History is not that simple, there were a lot of movements, Terrazas explains. What Mujer de las Palmas reveals is that there were more migrations from Southern and Central Asia that resulted in a local evolution in America, producing a great diversity of populations that already existed when the Clovis Culture developed (13,500 years ago).

Our position at present, based on the study of Mujer de las Palmas, is that the model of two migrations of Paleoamericans and Amerindians is very limited, he continuous.

Yet, the anthropologist cautioned that although the scientific reconstruction is based on skull measurements and calculations of the muscle and other tissue that once covered her face – one can never be completely sure.

Ten millennia ago, the Yucatan area was very different from the peninsula we know today.The landscape was more desert prairie than jungle, and the Las Palmas cava was not yet flooded. Animals as well as people would havesought shelter and water in the caves.

The reconstruction of la Mujer de las Palmas is on display at the ‘Altered Planet: Climate Change and Mexico’ exhibition in Guanajuato, together with virtual reconstructions of central Mexico’s other ‘oldest remains’: el Hombre de Tepexpan (about 4,000 years old), la Mujer del Pen (more than 10,000 years old) and el Hombre del Metro Balderas (also about 10,000 years old).

CSI Nemea: Alberta University Anthropologist Investigates Ancient ‘Murder’

University of Alberta professor of anthropology Sandra Garvie-Lok is on a CSI-style hunt for answers to a 1,500-year-old crime. Her victim: John Doe, an unidentified male with severe cranial trauma, killed at the ancient Greek city of Nemea during the Slavic invasion of Greece in the 6th century AD. The verdict: murder, most likely but how and why?

Robbery has already been ruled out the unfortunate soul, whose cadaver was discovered crushed in a small, graffiti-stained tunnel entrance, had cash and other possessions on him. Was he perhaps slain in battle, seeing as he appears to have been an eye-witness to the merciless Slavic attack on the Byzantine Greek city? Possibly, but he doesnt appear to have been a soldier rather, Doe was a poor peasant farmer who either caught an unlucky blow as the slaughter raged around him or was left with no other choice but to take up arms and desperately join the fight to defend his home.

Its a tough case to crack, and will probably never be solved. But its just the kind of challenge that anthropological investigator like Garvie-Lok a specialist in osteology, the study of bones thrives upon.

This kind of connection to peoples lives is why I got into this, she said, in a University of Alberta press release. I really do feel while Im studying the bones that Im touching someone elses life, Im reaching out to the past. Thats why I like this job.

A Terrifying and Brutal End

Invasions of the Greek peninsula in the 5th and 6th centuries AD by barbarian tribes saw the Greek provinces of the Byzantine Empire rocked by an orgy of violence, rape and pillaging. Slavs, Eurasian peoples who spread across the continent from their Central and Eastern European homelands roughly after the 5th century BC, and Avars, another group of nomadic eastern European peoples possibly of Asian origin, were especially nasty.

The Slavs and Avars were pretty brutal, said Garvie-Lok, who was called in to examine her deceased subject by a University of California, Berkeley team who have been working at Nemea since 2004.

It must have been sheer terror that led Doe to end his days squeezed into such a sorry hovel. If he was hiding in that unpleasant place, added the anthropologist, whose findings were recently published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, he was probably in a lot of danger. So, he hid out, but he didnt make it.

Yet, evidence namely the few coins and other possessions Doe was carrying suggests that he perhaps wasnt purely acting in desperation, but may have been acting quite rationally.

It was common in Greece when things fell apart like this for people to bury coins under a rock or inside a wall, hoping that whoever was coming through wouldnt find it and maybe they could collect the coins and move on after things calmed down. Of course, things didnt calm down for this guy.

Gallop-By Spearing or Last Ditch Defence?

The potential for deriving clues as to how and why a person died from centuries-old human remains have been well-proven recently by CT-scan investigations on the mummy of King Tut. They delivered the convincing verdict that Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun was killed by an infection (sickle-cell disease specifically, according to the latest research) to a wound sustained days before his death.

That he was hiding with his possession when he died is a pretty clear reflection that, for him, his world was ending.

While the head injury the Nemea tunnel victim sustained was serious, it wasnt the fatal blow well never know which wound killed him. Likewise, we can never be certain as to the circumstances under which it was struck. It may have been simple bad luck a gallop-by spearing, and a case of wrong place, wrong time, as Garvie-Lok puts it or the inevitable fate of an amateur fighter engaged in a last ditch struggle.

It was unusual for leaders of the Byzantine Empire to conscript, which suggests that if Doe did take up arms, it was because it was the only option he had to protect his family, possessions and community. Or he was pressed into service because everything was just going south, we cant be sure, says Garvie-Lok.

Either way, that he was hiding with his possession when he died is a pretty clear reflection that, for him, his world was ending.

Open Verdict

There wont be any suspect, trial and conviction at the conclusion of this case. Not simply because of the obvious fact that the killer also perished many centuries ago, but also because no anthropologist investigating a historic death can ever reach a conclusion with any certainty.

As viewers of TV cop shows such as The Wire or CSI will well know, two things are vital to a homicide being solved a fresh, uncontaminated crime-scene, and the option of questioning a suspect and forcing them into a confession. Neither, of course, are possible in Garvie-Loks investigation.

She dislikes the forensic cop show comparison the whole weve-got-the-answer-in-12-hours thing as she puts it and cautions that her work is much more laborious and time-consuming. A clear-cut, open and shut verdict is never going to lie at the end of a trail of clues just a stack of probabilities.

In this job, youre always talking about likelihoods, she said. Until we develop a time machine, we cant go back and know for sure.

Long-lost Bones Belong to Saxon Queen Eadgyth

This is the most exciting archaeological story of 2010. Once again the University of Bristol is leading the world in research. And I am lucky enough to be going back to my favorite university today to hear this groundbreaking new evidence of Princess Edith’s legend.

Scientists will announce that bones excavated in Magdeburg Cathedral in 2008 are those of SaxonQueen Eadgyth (‘Edith of England’) who died in AD 946. Crucial scientific evidence came from teeth preserved in the upper jaw. The bones are the oldest surviving remains of an English royal burial. The original excavations (view the 2006-2009 excavation here) were carried out by a joint team of the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt, and Martin-Luther-Universitt Halle-Wittenberg.

Click the images to see them inlarge size

Eadgyth was the granddaughter of Alfred the Great and half-sister of Athelstan, the first acknowledged King of England. She was sent to marry Otto, King of Saxony in AD 929, and bore him at least two children before her death aged around 36.

She lived most of her married life at Magdeburg and was buried in the monastery of St Maurice. Her bones were moved on at least three occasions, before being interred in an elaborated tomb in Magdeburg Cathedral in 1510.

It was this tomb that was opened by German archaeologists in 2008, a tomb long expected to be empty…But instead it contained a lead box carrying the inscription EDIT REGINE CINERES HIC SARCOPHAGVS HABET… (the remains of Queen Eadgyth are in this sarcophagus…). (the inscription is visible in this slideshow)

When the box was opened partial skeletal remains were found, alongside textile material and organic residues. The challenge facing archaeologists was to show that the remains, which had been moved so often and could easily have been substituted with others, were indeed those of Queen Eadgyth.

Anthropological study of the bones at the University of Mainz, by Professor Kurt Alt, confirmed the remains belonged to a single female, who had died aged between 30 and 40. One of the femur heads showed evidence that the individual was a frequent horse rider. Isotope analysis of the bones suggested that she enjoyed a high protein diet, including a large quantity of fish. All these results suggested a high level of aristocraticy.

The crucial upper jaw evidence came from a technique which measures the strontium and oxygen isotopes that are mineralised in the teeth as they are formed. The value of these isotopes depends on the local environment, and its underlying geology, that is then locked into the teeth. Samples of the teeth were studied at the University of Bristols Department of Archaeology and the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Mainz. “By micro sampling, using a laser, we can reconstruct the sequence of a persons whereabouts, month by month, up to the age of 14,” says Dr Alistair Pike of Bristol University.

Eadgyth seems to have spent the first eight years of her life in southern England, but changed her domicile frequently,” adds Bristol’s Prof Mark Horton. Eadgyth must have moved around the kingdom following her father, king Edward the Elder during his reign. When her mother was divorced in 919 – Eadgyth was between nine and ten at that point – both were banished to a monastery, maybe Winchester or Wilton in Salisbury.”

This is too exciting for words – but don’t worry: I’m going armed with my camera and will be sure to catch all the action from the talk, alongside interviews with archaeologists in the know. I’ll also be tweeting live from the event so keep an eye out!

The bones will be reburied in Magdeburg Cathedral later on this year, exactly 500 years after their last interment in 1510.

Reimagining Stonehenge – Rejecting the Three Phases

The three phases of Stonehenge? Wrong. In fact you can throw your three phases out the window – it just doesn’t work any more. “We were wrong about Stonehenge,” says anthropologist Mary-Ann Craig during today’s HKTV live lecture. “(Three phases) doesn’t explain it properly: we need phase 3.1; 3.2 and then 3.2b, it doesn’t seem to work.”

Mary-Ann’s lecture on the history of Stonehenge and the mystery of stone circles was an instant hit with the HK office, and our many viewers online. Personally I was fascinated by the idea that Bluestonehenge, a stone circle discovered just last year, may have been a place for women – whose remains have never been confirmed at Stonehenge. Mary-Ann points to the myriad modern religious links between rivers, fertility and femininity. “It’s possible (women) were cremated and instead of their ashes being buried at the stone structure, they were thrown into the river.”

Watch live streaming video from rezzable at livestream.com

I also found amazing the idea that Stonehenge could have been made to segregate society, rather than embrace the wider community: “Neolithic farmers weren’t being quite so nomadic,” says Mary-Ann. “They were carving up territory. The monuments say, ‘you’re one of us,’ and ‘you’re not.'”

View video highlights alongside times here

The lecture came in two short halves – both of which you can see right here – where Mary-Ann not only talks on radical new ideas about Stonehenge but shows you examples of groundbreaking archaeology in Heritage Key’s very own Stonehenge Virtual – check out the screenshot above. And with the summer solstice coming up don’t forget you can see it from your own home just by logging on. What do you think about Mary-Ann’s theories?

Watch live streaming video from rezzable at livestream.com

Questions

At the end of the lecture Mary-Ann took some of your questions which were flying in via Twitter. Skip to video highlights here.

Ellie asked:”What’s the difference between an anthropologist and an archaeologist?”

Mary-Ann: “Anthropology is the study of people…archaeology is the material culture of human beings.”

Behave1223: “Was Stonehenge a kind of castle?”

Mary-Ann: “No, I wouldn’t say it was fortified, it’s not like an Iron Age hillfort. This is more about sacred realms, rituals and non-human power. So not a castle, but definitely a structure that harnesses power.”

Jack_Curly: “How big do you think the society of Stonehenge was?”

Mary-Ann: “In the Mesolithic they were probably in groups of around a hundred, then Neolithic you start to build bigger communities – maybe 10,000 in the area?”

Video Highlights

Video 1:

6m00s: How the three phases of Stonehenge can’t work.

10m40s: The first Stonehenge structure was actually a stone structure.

18m00s: Did Bluestonehenge belong to women?

20m00s: The mystery of the Marlborough sarsens.

Video 2:

3m20s: Mesolithic living wasn’t much fun

7m00s: Avebury, Sanctuary et al – made to keep the neighbours out?

8m00s: Banks and ditches – how Stonehenge kept in its occupants.

Summer solstice is just days away: how will you celebrate? If you’re planning on visiting Stonehenge then make sure you check out Ann’s vital guide. If you can’t make it to Wiltshire then take a look at these alternatives. And keep checking into HKTV: we’ll have our next live lecture this Friday!

Queen Cleopatra: More than Egypt’s Sex Kitten

The exhibition ‘Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt’ premired this weekend at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Blogs and major newspapers have been in awe about the exhibition, featuring the amazingphotographs from the underwater excavations by Franck Goddioand articles about Cleopatra’s glamour and quite disastrous – love life. There’s nothing but praise for the ‘beautiful queen’ and mass coverage on the two quests for her tomb, where she rests with lover Mark Antony. But a true must-read before visiting the exhibition is Rosemary Joyce’s critical blog entry on how we perceive the last Queen of Egypt. She protests quite rightly against how Cleopatra is hardly recognized as historical subject because she ruled Egypt, but rather because of the mythology of her doomed love affair, and the breathless treatment of a ruler as a sex kitten.

Rosemary Joyce is professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley and author of the book ‘Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender and Archaeology’ that I’m currently reading. In the book she accessibly explains how archaeology in the past, and today, focuses too much on a male / female division of society, which leads to simplified models and incorrect generalisations. She demonstrates that sex, nor gender, were necessarily how men and woman in ancient cultures distinguished themselves, and makes a good case for less generalisation and more individuality. A reoccurring theme in the book handles noble Maya woman, and the theory that their importance was not limited to producing future rulers, but thatthey had political influence and powerful roles in their society.

Though Joyce hardly mentions Egypt in her book, the parallels are definitely there: we talk about Pharaohs and the rulers as male, and the princesses and wives as hardly worth mentioning, unless to figure out who was King Tut’s mummy… err.. mommy.

As Rosemary Joyce puts it on her ‘Ancient Bodies’ blog:

Discussions of ancient queens almost always display a concern with how they came to power that assumes women ruling were abnormal. This in turn leads to an emphasis on their relations with powerful men the fathers they succeed, the sons for whom they serve as regents, or as in Cleopatras case the men with whom they were sexually involved.

There are a few ‘exceptions’ to the fact that women in Ancient Egypt are forgettable: Nefertiti, known for her beauty, Hatshepsut, known for dressing up like a man and Cleopatra, known for seducing two Roman rulers. Still, all three of them have achieved more than that, and in their times were probably not just regarded as ‘mother of’, ‘wife of’ or ‘lover of’. Joyce on Cleopatra during her reign:

She was regarded asa ruler: the political leader whose strategies make her an excellent example of how independent kingdoms tried to contain the expansion of the Roman empire. Because she cannot be reduced to a type a generic woman she serves as a possible way into the thorny thicket of treating women (and men) in the past as actors with their own motivations, not reducible to generic categories.

Personally, I wonder why were are still ‘romancing Cleopatra’. Surely as an aspiring sole ruler she must have realised how advantageous an affair with the most powerful Roman alive would be? And with him gone, she needed protection once more. Pure political choices, rather than genuine love and romance? Although Antony may not have been the best bet, should Queen Cleopatra not be given more credit for being a cunning political strategist, and less pity for her doomed love affairs?

Looking forward to read your opinions on this! 😉