The History Blog

Five years ago excavations in the UK city of Colchester uncovered what archaeologists at first thought was an oddly wide road, but then quickly realized was actually a 2nd century A.D. chariot racing circus. This was a major discovery. Not only is it the only Roman circus ever found in the UK, but it’s the only one north of the Alps.

Nothing remains above ground except stones taken for later building, but for almost 2,000 years the 350m outline has remained remarkably intact, under fields and 19th-century army land. The stable blocks that held up to 2,500 horses for a day’s racing may lie under derelict Victorian cavalry stables and barracks. [...]

Since then CAT has traced long stretches of the perimeter, which had banked seats holding up to 15,000 people. In the central reservation they found bases of start and finish posts, and water pipes proving the circus was grand enough to have the elaborate fountain lap markers shown in Roman mosaics.

They also found scraps of beautifully decorated carriage harness right up against the wall – evidence of an F1 style crash when a driver lost control of his team and spun off into the barrier.

The remains were reburied for their protection. Unfortunately, they are located underneath said Victorian army barracks, gardens and public roads, so unless the community can raise £200,000 ($312,000) by the end of February to buy the Victorian garden site from developers, the circus will remain underground and be built upon.

Then they have to come up with another £550,000 ($860,000) to buy the barracks building itself. They tried to get a million pound grant from Heritage Lottery Foundation, but despite the international importance and rarity of the site, the bid was refused. It was just too high a price, ultimately. The HLF could fund tons of smaller projects for that money.

If they are able to buy the site, the next step will be to build a vistor center on the grounds of the barracks, right next to the starting gates of the circus. The boundaries and divider of the track will then be built up into knolls so the entire area can be walked and people can get a sense of the size of the structure, which in its heyday accommodated 15,000 fans.

Go to the Save Colchester’s Roman Circus blog for more news about the fundraising appeal and to donate to the cause.

St. Antony’s Monastery was founded by followers of the saint in 356 A.D. right after he died. Although St. Antony founded several monasteries during his lifetime, none of those survive today.

The monastery, only a mile and a quarter away from the cave over the Red Sea where St. Antony lived his extraordinarily long and ascetic life, is the oldest active Christian monastery in the world, and has just been reopened to the public after an 8-year, $14.5 million restoration.

In the government-sponsored project, workers renovated the fortress-like ancient wall surrounding the monastery and the walls of its two main churches — the 14th century Church of the Apostles and the 6th century Church of St. Anthony. They also renovated monks’ quarters and a 6th century tower into which monks would retreat during attacks by marauding Bedouin tribes throughout the Middle Ages. [...]

Amid the renovations, archaeologists from the American Research Center in Egypt discovered the remains of the original monks’ cells dating back to the 4th century under the Church of the Apostles. After they were excavated, archeologists in 2008 covered them with thick glass so that visitors to the church can see them below their feet. ARCE also renovated stucco paintings in Church of St. Anthony.

The wall paintings had been obscured by years of accumulated soot, candle grease, oil and dust. The oldest of these paintings date to the 7th and 8th centuries, and are attributed to a Coptic master artist known as Theodore. The others are from the 13th century and while we don’t know who the artist was, they appear to be Byzantine in style.

The monastery complex also includes a library with 1700 handwritten documents. There used to be many more, but the Bedouin who sacked the monastery in 1454 used them as fuel for their fires.

The reopening comes at a crucial time in Egyptian sectarian politics. A shooter opened fire in a church on Orthodox Christmas Eve (December 6th) killing seven people. Zahi Hawass emphasized during the unveiling of the monastery renovation that the shooting was a criminal act that can happen “between two brothers”, that Egypt was as committed to protecting its Coptic and Jewish heritage as it is committed to its Muslim heritage.

Mitochondrial DNA testing performed on a tooth from a 2000 year-old skeleton unearthed in a cemetery in Southern Italy has returned surprising results: East Asian ancestry. From Oxygen isotope tests we do know that he was not born in Italy, but we don’t know whether he himself was born in East Asia or whether he was descended from East Asians on his mother’s side.

Rome at the time had no direct contacts with the Far East, although East Asian goods like silk and spices did get to the Empire via trading routes in the Near East. This the first hard evidence we have of East Asians living in the heart of the Roman Empire.

According to Tracy Prowse, assistant professor of Anthropology, and the lead author on the study, the isotopic evidence indicates that about 20% of the sample analyzed to-date was not born in the area around Vagnari. The mtDNA is another line of evidence that indicates at least one individual was of East Asian descent.

“These preliminary isotopic and mtDNA data provide tantalizing evidence that some of the people who lived and died at Vagnari were foreigners, and that they may have come to Vagnari from beyond the borders of the Roman Empire,” says Prowse. “This research addresses broader issues relating to globalization, human mobility, identity, and diversity in Roman Italy.”

He was certainly no Magus from the East bearing riches. He was buried with only one pot and it’s a local piece. There’s nothing in the pot that suggests its owner was East Asian, so the isotopic and mitochondrial DNA analysis are the only indicators of this remarkable anomaly.

Somebody else — somebody with more and fancier grave goods — was even buried on top of him later.

“This multi-faceted research demonstrates that human skeletal remains can provide another layer of evidence in conjunction with archaeological and historical information,” says Prowse.

The cemetery is in the settlement of Vagnari in Puglia. The area was populated from 4 B.C. onwards, but in the 1st century A.D. it became personal property of the Roman Emperor run by a resident administrator. Vagnari was an industrial site, used for making tile and smelting iron. Its workers were both craftsmen and slaves. We don’t know which one our East Asian friend was.

Yesterday Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum reopened its Greek and Roman gallery after a year and a half of renovations. One of its most prized items on display is an unspeakable cool folding multi-tool device that puts a Swiss Army knife to shame.

The tool features a knife, a spoon, a three-tined fork, a spike, a spatula, and a small pick. The spike may have been used as an escargot extraction device (snails were a very popular food in ancient Rome), and the pick may have been a toothpick. Archaeologists think the spatula may have helped pull sauce out of narrow-necked bottles.

It was made out of silver sometime between 200 A.D. and 300 A.D. Roman folding knives are not uncommon, but most of them are made out of bronze and have fewer parts. This is the ultra-deluxe version, and so probably belonged to a wealthy person who traveled a lot, like a merchant.

There are many other one of a kind items in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Greek and Roman collection. It’s widely considered one of the best small museums in the country, and the building itself is a gem of elaborate Neo-Classical architecture. It has been fully restored preserving its historical features, but also adding extensive modernizations like a whole new lighting system that brings the many carvings and reliefs to new life.

Along with the gallery, the collection has been meticulously conserved, so there are pieces on display now that have never been seen before. For a fascinating glimpse into the renovation process, see this Project Progress blog written by the museum curators and staff. Sadly they seemed to have stopped making new entries in August of last year, but there are still some great pictures and descriptions of how it all went down.

The silver denarius was found by a metal detectorist ten years ago in Hallaton, Leicestershire, but it was just one of 5,000 coins in a hoard that included a rare Roman cavalry parade helmet, a decorated silver bowl and the remains of over 300 pigs probably consumed during a ritual feast, so it has taken a decade to date it.

The Leicestershire County Council bought the Hallaton hoard and created a special gallery for it at the Harborough Museum in Market Harborough. The coins have been in storage since they were brought to the museum while museum researchers carefully dated and catalogued them. The somewhat worn silver coin dates to 211 B.C., that’s 4 years older than the previous record-holder.

The Hallaton Treasure is the greatest number of Iron Age coins ever found in Britain. Archaeologists think the site was a shrine built by the Corieltavi tribe, but they don’t know how such an ancient coin came to be in their possession. Most of the 5,000 coins date to the mid first century A.D., around the time of the Roman invasion.

Some archaeologists have however speculated that such Roman Republican coins found their way into Britain before the Roman conquest in 43 AD and were evidence of exchange through trade or diplomacy.

Professor David Mattingly of the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History said: “This hoard has changed our view of just how significant the East Midlands were in this period and this coin is a good example.

“It indicates there was contact between this region and the Roman Empire despite the distance between the East Midlands and the parts of Britain the Romans arrived in, like Colchester and Chichester.”

He added: “It was minted in Rome at the time of the Hannibalic wars and here it is turning up after what must have been quite a long journey.”

The silver denarius would have been a day’s wages for a soldier or an unskilled worker. It features a helmeted goddess — possibly Roma — on one side, and the twins Castor and Pollux riding galloping horses on the other. The wear suggests it passed through a great many hands in its long lifetime before it went to ground in the 1st c. A.D.

The coin has a place of honor in the Hallaton Hoard display at the Harborough Museum, and is scheduled to go on tour within the UK this year.

A study performed on Chinese fossils has established for the first time the color of a dinosaur. Sinosauropteryx, a fast, dog-sized carnivore, was covered in orange “dino fuzz” with white stripes on his tail.

The team identified fossilized melanosomes—pigment-bearing organelles—in the feathers and filament-like structures of fossil birds and dinosaurs from northeastern China.

Found in the feathers of living birds, the nano-size packets of pigment—a hundred melanosomes can fit across a human hair—were first reported in fossil bird feathers in 2008. [...]

These earlier findings proved it was possible for melanosomes from dinosaur times to survive in fossils.

But until now no one had found the pigments in dinosaurs—other than birds, which many paleontologists consider to be dinosaurs. And no one had used melanosome shape and density to infer color.

The team used a scanning electron microscope to examine the feathered dinosaur fossils found in Liaoning Province, China. There has been some question as to whether “dinosaur feathers” were actual precursors to feathers as we know them today, or were instead fossilized internal collagen.

This study puts the controversy to bed quite conclusively. Under the electron microscope, the filaments are full of melanosomes much like modern feathers are. Since melanosomes contain the pigment melanin (hence the name), feather color can sometimes be deduced based on the type of melanin.

The two most common types of melanin found in modern birds are eumelanin, associated with black and grey feathers, and phaeomelanin, found in reddish brown to yellow feathers.

Melanosomes of both types were found during the new study, providing “the first empirical evidence for reconstructing the colors and color patterning” in dinosaurs and Chinese fossil birds, Zhang and his colleagues write.

For example, the 125-million-year-old early bird Confuciusornis was found to have color variation between blacks and browns in a single feather. And dark areas in Sinosauropteryx’s tail were “absolutely packed with phaeomelanosomes,” said Benton—a finding that led the team to propose that the dinosaur’s tail was striped with “chestnut to rufous [reddish brown] tones.”

That’s not the final word on dinosaur style, though. Some of the most glorious plumage gets its color from diet. Flamingos are pink because of the carotenoid proteins in the plankton they eat, for instance.

Still, this opens up a lot of doors to move beyond speculation on the question of dinosaur coloration. It’s not just feathered fossils that can provide information, but other melanin-rich tissues like skin and hair.

French archaeologists excavating a Neolithic grave south of Paris have found evidence of a successful, infection-free amputation performed 6,900 years ago during the Linearbandkeram period when European hunter-gatherers were just settling down to subsistence farming. Considering that they didn’t even have blades back then, that’s pretty damn impressive.

The amputee was elderly, someone of stature in the community, and he lived for at least months, possibly years, after the surgery.

The patient was important: his grave was 2m (6.5ft) long — bigger than most — and contained a schist axe, a flint pick and the remains of a young animal, which are evidence of high status.

The most intriguing aspect, however, was the absence of forearm and hand bones. A battery of biological, radiological and other tests showed that the humerus bone had been cut above the trochlea indent at the end “in an intentional and successful amputation”. Mrs Buquet-Marcon said that the patient, who is likely to have been a warrior, might have damaged his arm in a fall, animal attack or battle.

“I don’t think you could say that those who carried out the operation were doctors in the modern sense that they did only that, but they obviously had medical knowledge,” she said.

The surgical tool would have been a sharpened flint. Archaeologists speculate that pain-killing plants would have been used to keep the patient still during the amputation. Antiseptic plants such as sage could have kept the wound from getting infected.

Neolithic people are known to have practiced trepanation — the surgical removal of a piece of skull — but that’s a more rudimentary kind of medicine. The earliest evidence of Stone Age trepanation is on 7,000-year-old skulls. They were performed by scraping away the bone with sharpened flint or obsidian stones. Later trepanations were done by primitive drilling tools, also made from sharpened rocks.

But it’s a big step from scraping or drilling a few holes in the skull to severing a forearm with its major arteries and nerves without killing the patient. This find suggests Stone Age farmers were significantly more medically advanced than previously realized.

For more information on this find including details of the forensic examination of the remains, see this article in the journal Antiquity.

Cyprus police raided a huge antiquities smuggling ring in southern city of Limassol that was set to sell dozen of antiquities worth an estimated $15.5 million. This is the biggest antiquities smuggling bust in Cyprus history.

Artifacts include urns, gold figurines and coins, some thought to be as much as 4000 years old. They were found in various homes, backyard sheds and vehicles belonging to the suspects, some in scarily casual arrangements.

The Cypriot police were alerted to the ring when one of its alleged members tried to sell some treasure to a man who ended up being an undercover Greek policeman. The Greek police then contacted the Cyprus authorities.

Ten Cypriots were arrested during the raids over the weekend, and authorities were searching for another five suspects, including a Syrian man, police spokesman Michalis Katsounotos said. The suspects face charges of illegally possessing and trading in antiquities.

Police said the smugglers had planned to sell the artifacts in Cyprus, but would not identify the buyer. Authorities also said they were investigating where the artifacts had been obtained.

Katsounotos said this was Cyprus’ largest antiquities smuggling case in terms of the amount of recovered artifacts, their archaeological value and the number of arrests.

Most of the artifacts are urns primarily found around the southern coastal towns of Limassol and Paphos, Hadjicosti said. Some of the coins could date to Hellenistic and Roman times.

Some of the most valuable artifacts are a miniature gold coffin and gold figurines. These don’t appear to be Cypriot in origin. The wee coffin looks like an Egyptian sarcophagus.

Other artifacts may have been looted from the Turkish north of Cyprus. (The spokesman wasn’t terribly forthcoming on that subject. Don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Cypriot police made a big deal out of the cooperation of the Greek police.)

Mark your calendars, folks. The first episode of BBC’s Radio Four and the British Museum A History of the World in 100 Objects debuts tomorrow. That’s already today for those of you across the Atlantic.

The theme of the first 5 episodes is “Making Us Human” and they covers objects that define us as human, made between 2,000,000 and 8,000 B.C. Tomorrow’s inagural object is the Mummy of Hornedjitef.

This is the mummy of Hornedjitef an Egyptian priest who was buried in a coffin, within a second, outer coffin. Examining his body using CAT scans and X-rays revealed that he suffered from arthritis and osteoporosis suggesting he was a mature man when he died. The embalmers have placed four packages inside his torso, probably his lungs, liver, stomach and intestines. He lived over a thousand years after Tutankhamun and Ramesses the Great at a time when Egypt was ruled by Greek kings.

There’s tons of information on the brand spanking new website on each of the 99 objects that have already been selected for broadcast. For those of us out of Radio Four’s range, the programs will be posted as podcasts.

The website also has a neat feature where individuals upload objects of their own and explain their significance. Just get a good quality digital picture and click the yellow Add Your Own Object icon in the upper right of the page. A moderator will check to be sure it’s not pr0n then approve it.

You can view all the images in the series plus the ones uploaded by individuals and find out more about them using this Flash map. Click on Contributor in the menu on the left and choose Individuals to see only the pictures uploaded by people.

The radio program is just 15 minutes a day, but I’ve already spent hours browsing the site. It’s addictive.

A 1000-year-old stele engraved with the image of a Mayan ruler was found in the Lagartero archaeological area of Chiapas, Mexico. Archaeologists found the bas relief late last year while excavating the 10th section of Pyramid 4 in Lagartero.

The stele depicts the ruler standing above a man at his feet, probably representing a seizure of power.

Archaeologist Sonia Rivero Torres, who heads the Lagartero archaeological project, said that the stele or commemorative monument – the first to be found complete on the site – measures 2 meters (6 1/2 feet) long, 55 centimeters (22 inches) wide and 6 centimeters (2 1/3 inches) thick.

The stele was sculpted in metamorphic rock, known locally as “heart of stone.”

“In the pre-Colombian monument the profile image of a Mayan ruler is seen standing over a bench carrying a bag of incense in one hand and dressed in a loincloth bound with a sash and wearing sandals and a feather headdress.

“At his feet, lying on his back on the bench, lies another, smaller person with his torso opened as a sign of sacrifice or of being overthrown,” the archaeologist said.

It was found during the excavation of a stone casket which turned out to be empty, probably looted in pre-Columbian times.

A little further down in the pyramid, archaeologists found earthenware pots, a polychrome plate, a black vase with a zoopmorphic lid with a collection jade objects insides, including two earflaps, a turtle and a bead necklace.

Earlier, archaeologists found a box full of vessels of different shapes, zoomorphic vases and even a few human bones were recovered.

Lagartero was occupied for almost a thousand years, between 300 A.D. and 1200 A.D., and is a 2 1/2 acre ceremonial center. The area was a crux of trade between what are now Mexico and Guatemala as well as a religious and cultural capital. Not only have the pyramids provided rich finds, but the grounds have turned up a ball-playing court too.

Authorities plan to open the archaeological area for visitors some time this year.