The History Blog

Villagers installing a water pipe a few weeks ago in the town of Piedra Labrada in the southwestern Mexico near the Guatemalan border unearthed a granite stele depicting a player of the Mesoamerican ball game. The figure is 5’4″ high including the head which archaeologists believe was deliberately severed from the body during a ball game ritual. He’s a bow-legged fellow with his arm crossed over his chest. He is accessorized with a helmet, a yoke around his waist and round stones, possibly the precious greenstones known as chalchihuites, hanging from his ears.

The statue was discovered in the north section of the town on the grounds of the biggest ball game pitch, an L-shaped court about 130 feet long. There are five ball courts in Piedra Labrada. Around twenty sculptures of snake heads, shells and anthropomorphic figures were found in three of them, but this is the first sculpture found in the north field and the only one that depicts a ball player.

The Mesoamerican ball game was not simply a sport. The basic game fielded two teams who sought to put a rubber ball through a stone circle by bouncing it off their hips, but it was also an immensely important religious ritual with a number of ceremonial functions. Among these rites was a ritual marking the end of a calendar cycle during which sculptures were painted red and then ceremonially “killed” by having their heads struck off. The decapitated statues would then be buried around the court.

The age of the stele is hard to pinpoint because Piedra Labrada has not been thoroughly excavated. Since the recent digs began a year and a half ago, archaeologists have been mapping the site. The pre-Hispanic town is 1.24 square miles in area. In addition to the five ball fields, almost 50 medium-sized buildings (10-16 feet high) have been identified as well as public plazas and sculptures. The sculptures that have been found thus far appear to be Mixtec (an indigenous ethnic group who have a documented history going back to 940 A.D.) in design, and their placement in the ancient town is in keeping with Epiclassic characteristics which could turn the clock all the way back to 600 A.D.

Given the breadth of these discoveries, the many buildings, the ball courts, the big public squares, and now the unique ball player statue, there’s little doubt that Piedra Labrada was an important Mesoamerican city, a ritual center if not a political and population center. Archaeologists have submitted a proposal to the Archaeology Council of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) for an extensive excavation project that might reveal more information about the ancient city, its dates of use, the people who worshiped there. They’re hoping to unearth ceramics that can be dated and analyzed to determine their origin.

If the project is authorized, it will be the first major archaeological exploration in the Costa Chica area of the Guerrero region. Since many of the pre-Hispanic sites in this area are intact, there is a wealth of new information about the Mixtec and other local Mesoamerican groups to be discovered. For now the stele is being kept in the municipal police station, which is probably the safest place. Until someone bribes a cop.

Last week, archaeologists from the National Institute of Culture and History’s Institute of Archaeology were called to the site of main temple at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize after learning that heavy equipment was damaging the 2,300-year-old structure. They arrived to find the onetime pyramid, turned by time into an overgrown mound about 100 feet tall, had been brutally whittled away by backhoes. Dump trucks were on site to carry out the limestone bricks, each one carved by hand with stone age tools by ancient Mayans, which apparently make good rubble for road fill.

Nohmul is one of only four important pre-classic Mayan sites in northern Belize and its central temple and namesake (Noh Mul means “big hill”) is one of the tallest in the country. The entire complex covers an area of about 12 square miles in the middle of sugar cane fields. There are 81 buildings, all of them mounds today, which were home to an estimated 40,000 people between 500 and 250 B.C. The main temple, in addition to having a public ceremonial and administrative function, may have also housed the High Priest or important nobles. You can see one of several chambers the Maya built into the structure torn open at the top edge of the destruction. Archaeologists found fragments of monochrome pottery typical of the pre-classic period all over the mangled site.

All of the buildings are on private property, but they are protected by law as ancient monuments. Unfortunately, the statutory protection does not stop unscrupulous fiends from using them as gravel quarries. As Dr. Allan Moore from the Institute of Archaeology put it in a local 7News story, “Belize is 8,867 square miles of jungle. We are only around 16 personnel in the department. We can’t be in the Chiquibul and at the same time being at La Milpa.” They have to rely on tip-offs, and by the time they respond, it’s often too late.

The construction companies are well aware of the advantage this paltry ratio of enforcers to surface area confers. There are tens of thousands Mayan mounds dotting the landscape; gutting them for use as rubble has become an endemic problem. This is a deliberate choice made by the builders. Although the mounds look like hills covered in plant growth rather than the clean pyramids we associate with Maya architecture, they are very well known as Maya structures. It’s not like the construction companies innocently think they’re clawing away at a hill only to find a wealth of limestone bricking. It’s the bricks they’re targeting.

The construction company in this case was identified. Archaeologists saw the name of D-Mar Construction on the equipment, a company owned by one Denny Grijalva, a United Democratic Party candidate for representative of his district, Orange Walk Central. Nohmul is in Orange Walk North. Interesting that the party platform includes rebuilding access roads to major tourist sites. It would seem counterproductive to build those roads using the major tourist sites. Then again, following election laws appears to be a sore point for Mr. Gijalva, so what’s a little cultural patrimony destruction?

When questioned by the 7News team, Grijalva denied knowing anything about his backhoes tearing down an ancient Mayan temple in the district next to the one he is running to represent.

Grijalva … referred us to his foreman who never answered at least a dozen calls we made to him. Then Grijalva said he would be there in twenty minutes, we waited fourty and left – we had been stood up.

Interestingly, Grijalva told us that when his foreman got there, he would apologize on behalf of the company, D-Mar’s and the Deputy Prime Minister, Gaspar Vega. Vega’s name comes in because Noh Mul is in Orange Walk North, and the roadfill is reportedly being used in nearby Douglas Village. Of course, we never met the foreman, but we have learned that after we left with the Archeologists, he did arrive and removed the heavy equipment.

How giving of them to remove their means of illegal demolition once the archaeological authorities and police were on site. Police are now investigating the temple destruction. Let’s hope there are real consequences — ie, prison — for Grijalva and anyone else who was in on this monstrosity.

As for the temple itself, there is no way to restore it. There’s just too little of it left. Archaeologists expect it to lose all structural integrity and collapse when the rains come.

At this point, Leicester should probably just become a pedestrian-only city and tear up every patch of tarmac they have. The archaeological unit of the University of Leicester has made another unusual find under a city parking lot: a Roman-era cemetery that includes both pagan and Christian burials. Surveying the small site at the corner of Oxford Street and Newarke Street slated for future development, archaeologists unearthed 13 sets of human remains of mixed age and sex. Some of them were buried east to west in a supine position, a traditional Christian style of burial, whole others were buried north to south on their sides with grave goods in the pre-Christian tradition. The burials date to around 300 A.D.

The area, now in the historic center of Leicester, was in Roman times 142 yards outside the south gate of the city walls. By Roman custom, all burials took place outside the perimeter to ensure the dead would not pollute the living. Cemeteries would grow outside the city, usually near major roads to ensure easy access for the families to return to the graves regularly for ritual libations and commemorative feasts.

Indeed, the cemetery extends considerably past this one parking lot. Land on Newarke Street to the east and north of the lot has been excavated before and Roman burials were discovered, so archaeologists were not surprised to find more bodies under the asphalt, but the previously uncovered burials east and north of this one were all Christian. This is the first mixed section found.

Two burials are especially strong examples of their diverse religions.

“One in particular appears to have been buried in a Christian tradition, facing east and wearing a polished jet finger ring on their left hand which has a possible early Christian Iota-Chi monogram etched onto it, taking the initial letters from the Greek for Jesus Christ. If so this would represent rare evidence for a personal statement of belief from this period.

“In contrast a nearby and probably near contemporary grave appeared to indicate very different beliefs. This grave had a north-south orientation, with the body laid on its side in a semi-foetal position, with the head removed and placed near the feet alongside two complete pottery jars that would have held offerings for the journey to the afterlife. This would seem to be a very pagan burial, so it is possible from the variety of burials found that the cemetery catered for a range of beliefs that would have been important to people living in Leicester at this time.”

The digging is done, but the learning has just begun as the artifacts and bones are now beginning the process of cleaning and analysis. Once the finds have been cleaned and stabilized, archaeologists and other scientists will run a variety tests to determine the age and sex of the remains and any possible cause of death writ in the bones. Isotope analysis on the teeth will give us information on how they lived — their diet, where they came from — and osteological examination will tell us what kind of work stress their bodies were under, how well-nourished they were, how healthy. The team also took soil samples from the abdominal areas of the skeletons just in case some ancient digestive tract parasites could be gleaned from them.

The Roman burials were the most exciting find, but they weren’t the only ones. Remains of a medieval suburb were unearthed, including a 12th-13th century quarry, cesspits and garbage dumps that were once dug in people’s backyards. Those pits, as unglamorous as they may be, are replete with archaeological gems in the form of pottery fragment, bone, poop and all kinds of discarded day-to-day objects that can tell us a great deal about the daily life of medieval Leicester. Archaeologists also found a 17th century ditch that was part of the city’s defensive fortifications during the English Civil War.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to return two 10th-century Khmer statues looted from Cambodia during the chaos of the early 1970s. The matching sandstone statues, known as the Kneeling Attendants, were donated to the museum in four pieces during the 80s and 90s. According to a statement released by the Met, museum officials were recently presented with new research proving that these statues were looted from the Koh Ker archaeological site 80 miles northeast of Angkor Wat some time after 1970.

The Met has refused to specify what this new evidence is, but the bases of the statues with the feet still on them that looters left behind were discovered in 2007 and witness statements from surrounding villagers establish that the statues were virtually untouched as recently as 1970. As usual, both Cambodia and the Met are going through the motions of pretending the museum did nothing wrong when they accepted these artifacts without an ownership history even though anybody can tell just from the pictures that the statues were crowbarred or chiseled off their pedestals. The knees bear clear marks of their brutal removal.

The acquisition itself was in theory a donation. According to the Met’s website, the head of this figure was donated in 1987 and the body in 1992, both by collector Douglas Latchford. The head of the second figure was donated by Raymond G. and Milla Louise Handley in 1989, the body by Douglas Latchford in the same 1992 gift. Conservators reattached the heads to the bodies and in 1994 put the Attendants on either side of the doorway to the museum’s South and Southeast Asian Art gallery.

Martin Lerner, the Met’s Southeast Asian Art curator from 1972 to 2004 and the person in whose honor Latchford donated the pieces, noted in the 1994 recent acquisitions issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin:

“The most significant gift to the South and Southeast Asia collections in 1992 was undoubtedly a rare pair of large Cambodian kneeling male figures dating to the first half of the tenth century … It is particularly gratifying that the monumental bodies join up with heads already in the collection.”

My, what a gratifying coincidence. It’s almost as if somebody deliberately broke the statues to sell them piecemeal so they could be put back together a few years later while still granting the buyers plausible deniability. Spoiler: somebody deliberately broke the statues to sell them piecemeal so they could be put back together a few years later while still granting the buyers plausible deniability. This is a common practice in the penumbra where the antiquities underworld and reputable intstitutions/collectors meet. It could have been the looters who crowbarred the statues off their bases at the Prasat Chen temple in Koh Ker, or it could have been the middlemen who sold all four of the pieces to Spink & Son, London dealers who specialize in Asian art.

Mr. Latchford has a different story about how these statues made their way to the Met. According to this New York Times article, he never actually owned the statues; he was just a conduit for the Met’s wishes.

“Spinks had had the pieces for some time,” Mr. Latchford said, “and they had not sold, so in honor of the curator, who was Martin Lerner, they requested that I would provide financial aid to donate them, and that’s what I did and why they are in my name.”

Mr. Latchford said that he did not know where Spink had gotten the items, that he never took possession of them, and that he does not have any documents from the transaction. He recalled spending about £10,000. A spokesman for Spink said it no longer has any of the paperwork from that era.

So if he bought all three of them at the same time at the museum’s request, then the Met’s acquisition information is false. The article also placed the Handley donation in 1987, while the Met says it was in 1989, two years after the first Latchford donation. Meanwhile, Spink is selling heads alone over the course of years even though it has the bodies in stock. I’m calling it right now: shady. Shady Sadie serving lady.

The Met is wise to unload their questionably-acquired pieces now before the law gets involved. I can’t help but wonder if that consideration underpins the decision even more than this mysterious “new research.” Sotheby’s is in the cross-hairs of the US Attorney right now over a statue looted from the same temple in Koh Ker.

Koh Ker was briefly the capital of the Khmer empire (928–944 AD) and the explosion of building in the city produced a wealth of exceptional carving, including the two Kneeling Attendants, Duryodhana, a 500-pound sandstone sculpture of a warrior that once stood in front of the western pavilion of Prasat Chen, and a matching statue of his arch-enemy Bhima, who stood across from him posed in perpetual conflict. These four were part of a group of 12 statues that have all been looted from the temple since the late 60s/early 70s. Bhima is now in the permanent collection of the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Pasadena (listen to the child’s audio tour on the website to hear some serious irony), although perhaps not for long since the Cambodian government has asked the US to help them recover Bihma, just as they have asked the US to help them recover Duryodhana from Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s has been trying to sell Duryodhana, which appropriately means “difficult to fight with,” for its Belgian owner since 2011, but two auction attempts have been blocked. The first was in March 2011 when Cambodia sent a letter claiming the statue had been illegally removed and requesting it be withdrawn from sale. The second was in April 2012 when U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara filed a civil suit in federal court seeking forfeiture of the statue on Cambodia’s behalf on the grounds that it was looted and exported in contravention of cultural patrimony laws from 1953 and that Sotheby’s knew all along it was stolen.

Sotheby’s denies everything, of course. They say they have no evidence the statue was stolen and that anyway the 1953 French colonial laws are ambiguous, and there’s no clearly stated cultural patrimony law that gives the current nation of Cambodia “ownership of everything a long-defunct regime made and then abandoned 50 generations ago.” So apparently anyone can just walk in and out of Cambodia with armfuls of Khmer artifacts because they were “abandoned.” Another shamelessly disingenuous argument Sotheby’s had made in retort is that they “have never seen nor been presented with any evidence that specifies when the sculpture left Cambodia over the last 1,000 years,” like the world has been swimming in 500-pound Cambodian statues since the turn of the first millennium but for some inexplicable reason this one just hasn’t appeared anywhere on the market, in museums or in collections until 975 years later. Absurd and offensive, not to mention that it contradicts their ludicrous abandonment argument since if they were looted and shipped out of country up to a thousand years ago, obviously they were not abandoned for 50 generations.

The government has archaeological research pointing to the statue’s being in country until the early 1970s, and even juicier, they have an email trail showing Sotheby’s conspiring to obscure the truth of its provenance. In emails between Emma C. Bunker, a scholar of Khmer art hired by the auction house to write the catalog entry, and a Sotheby’s official, Bunker straight up tells them it was stolen.

The complaint [starting on page 11] quoted a e-mail from the scholar warning an unnamed Sotheby’s official about attempting to sell the statue at auction: “The Cambodians in Phnom Penh now have clear evidence that it was definitely stolen from Prasat Chen at Koh Ker, as the feet are still in situ.”

Ms. Bunker said in an interview that she had urged Sotheby’s not to sell the statue at public auction but rather privately, to attract less attention. But, she said, she did so only after Sotheby’s officials assured her they had clear provenance on the statue. “They swore — swore — to me they had proper information,” she said. “They didn’t have the all-clear.”

They did have a sworn statement submitted to United States Customs and Border Protection by the owner stating that “to the best of my knowledge” the statue “is not cultural property documented as appertaining to the inventory of a museum or religious or secular monument or similar institution in Cambodia,” but given that Bunker told Sotheby’s exactly where it came from, that “to the best of my knowledge” is just a pathetic cover to keep the owner out of legal trouble.

A recent ruling allowed the auction house to keep the statue while the case is winding its way through the system, but all attempts to dismiss the lawsuit have thus far failed. Sotheby’s says the Met’s decision to return their looted Koh Ker statues has no bearing on their case, and maybe it doesn’t from a legal standpoint. It may be an indicator of the way the wind is blowing, though.

A robot named Tláloc II-TC, equipped with an infrared camera and laser scanner, has discovered three new chambers underneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent pyramid in the Mesoamerican metropolis of Teotihuacan. He was sent down a tunnel 390 feet long that was discovered 50 feet below the surface of the temple in 2003. The tunnel had been filled with debris by the ancient Teotihuacans to block access, an effective technique since despite centuries of looting and archaeological excavations nobody had managed to breach it. It’s been a decade since the subterranean conduit was discovered and five years since excavations began, and archaeologists have only able to get a glimpse of what’s on the other side in the past few months.

They first discovered two side rooms dubbed the North Chamber and the South Chamber 236 and 242 feet respectively from the entrance. The human archaeologists couldn’t get any further than that, so they deployed Tláloc II-TC to travel another 65 feet. The terrain was uncongenial, to say the least, with the floor in some parts of the tunnel caked in sludge a foot deep. Tláloc is neither light as a feather nor stiff as a board. He weighs 77 pounds and his articulated tank-track feet kept getting stuck in the thick mud. Archaeologists believe the Teotihuacans intentionally dug down to the water table in order to build a space that recreated the conditions of the underworld.

Despite the navigation difficulties, Tláloc’s sensors never failed. They revealed that the tunnel has a semicircular vault and is a constant size and shape until it reaches the entryways of three previously unknown chambers. The rooms are blocked by a wall or large stone so Tláloc wasn’t able to go inside, but his scanner detected spaces that are deeper than 16 feet. The scanner can only record a maximum of five meters (approximately 16 feet) in depth. It can detect that there’s more than that to be found only it can’t find out exactly how much until it’s inside the chambers.

They’ll need to clean out the tunnel to make it accessible to puny humans before they can reach the chambers Tláloc has found. The team hopes these rooms, hidden deep underground and deliberately made so unreachable not even highly motivated thieves and archaeologists were able to explore them for almost 2000 years after they were closed, might contain something of inestimable significance to Teotihuacan society, perhaps even the graves of the city’s founders.

Meanwhile, archaeologists exploring North Chamber and South Chamber have discovered some unusual artifacts. They look like yellowish clay lumps ranging in diameter from 1.5 to five inches, but they’re man-made with a core of clay covered in iron pyrite. When new, they would have been spherical and the pyrite exterior, which has oxidized into duller jarosite, would have been shiny gold. The adobe walls of the chambers were also enhanced for shininess. They were coated with a powder compound of magnetite, pyrite and hematite which would have made this dark underground space gleam.

The lumps/spheres must have been left in the space before the tunnel was closed 1800 years ago. What function they may have played is unknown at this juncture, but the prevailing hypothesis is that they were special ritual offerings of some kind. No other such artifacts have been discovered before, but many other offerings — pottery, wooden masks inlaid with rock crystal and jade — were also found in the chambers so it seems likely the balls had the same job. The pottery and masks have been dated to around 100 A.D.

The Temple of the Feathered Serpent, also known as the Temple of Quetzalcoatl after the feathered serpent deity of the Aztecs who moved in to the city in the 14th century A.D. long after the original Teotihuacans had mysteriously abandoned it in the 8th century, is the third largest of Teotihuacan’s temples. The largest is the Pyramid of the Sun under which a similar tunnel was discovered in the 1970s. That excavation was less than scientifically rigorous, however, and much of the precious context information was lost. The clean, deliberate nature of this multi-season exploration, on the other hand, will ensure all of the data that can be retrieved will be retrieved. This will hopefully reveal important new information about the religious life of Teotihuacan.

A section of ancient Thessaloniki discovered during subway construction in 2006 and threatened with removal to accommodate the state company in charge of building the rail will remain in place where it was found. This is a big turn-around from four months ago when the ancient remains were slated to be moved far out of the way to make station construction easier.

In January, the Central Archaeological Council acceded to demands from the Attiko Metro company and decreed that the antiquities unearthed at the site of the future Venizelos subway station would be removed in their entirety to the Pavlos Melas camp in western Thessaloniki. Attiko Metro said it was not technically feasible to conserve the remains properly and build the station around them, and the General Director of Public Works supported them, as did the Deputy Minister of Education, Religious Affairs, Culture and Sports. The subway line is already four years behind schedule thanks to the excavation and the implosion of Greece’s finances; the government feared further delays might endanger the entire project.

Archaeological organizations responded to the ministerial decree with swift and public outrage. Polyxeni Veleni, the Director of the 16th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, described it poetically: “It is our Parthenon. Would you like to see Parthenon on Mount Taygetus?” (That’s a mountain on the south Peloponnese between Sparta and Kalamata, about 100 miles southwest of Athens.) The municipal leaders of Thessaloniki agreed. The city already lost much of its ancient history to hasty development after World War II, and thus the second most important city in the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople has little of its illustrious past to show for it.

This discovery is a window into that history, and it’s not the kind of find that can be dug up and shipped to a museum. It’s like a core sample of the city, a large section that preserves 83 yards of the 3rd century A.D. Roman marble-paved main street built over the Greek one from 300 B.C. that passed through the center of the city, the remains of buildings, columns, foundations from the 6th through the 9th centuries A.D., a monumental Roman-era gate and pieces of large public buildings from the 7th century that are rare finds anywhere in the Byzantine world.

This was the heart of the city, the crossroads that the main public buildings, smaller retail structures and the public market clustered around for centuries. The daily life of Thessalonians is literally inscribed into the stone. The marble slabs of the road are marked by wheel ruts from years of cart travel and some of them have children’s board games etched into the surface, a kind of permanent hopscotch pitch.

The headlines are calling it Thessaloniki’s Pompeii because apparently any extensive ruin of an ancient city is a Pompeii now, but what’s great about this discovery is not that it’s frozen in time, but rather an illustration of many phases the city went through from ancient Greece, to Roman rule to Byzantine and up to the present considering that the modern Egnatia street up top follows the path of the Roman decumanus below. Then there are the artifacts:

Working ahead of the rail construction drills, archaeologists have recovered over 100,000 objects in the area, including over 50,000 coins.

Vessels, lamps, vials and jewels of various types have also been found — in keeping with the area’s trading character — in addition to 2,500 graves of Hellenistic and Roman times.

Removing 2,500 graves and monument chunks of road, gate and building foundations seems a lot less technically feasible to me than leaving them where they are. The municipal council and the local university submitted alternate plans that would keep 84% of the discoveries (all of the big stuff, basically) in place and ultimately Attiko Metro acquiesced to the new plan. The rail station will be built around the chunk of ancient Thessaloniki giving tourists a fascinating and conveniently located new attraction.

Archaeological from Wessex Archaeology excavating a gravel quarry in Berkshire discovered a rare 4,400-year-old Beaker burial 18 months ago. The news was kept under embargo until Friday to give the team time to analyze the bones and grave goods, both of which make the grave even more rare: beads made of folded sheet gold and the likelihood that the person buried was female.

Beaker burials — Copper Age graves from around 2,500 B.C. characterized by the ritual inclusion of a fine pottery drinking vessel known as a beaker — are extremely rare in south-east England. Gold has only been found in a small fraction of the already small number of Beaker burials, and those graves held male skeletons. Only the most important people in Beaker society were buried with gold and they were not surprisingly male.

Although researchers were not able to confirm this with complete certainty due to damage to the bone caused by the acidic soil which makes radiocarbon dating and DNA testing impossible, osteological examination indicates the skeleton is that of a woman who was at least 35 years of age when she died. The gold from Beaker burials is some of the earliest gold ornamentation discovered in England, and this is the earliest known woman in England to have been found buried with gold.

She was buried in high style. Five tubular (80s flashback!) beads made from folded pieces of sheet gold were found, once part of a necklace. Black disc beads of a jet-like material called lignite were also part of the necklace. Archaeologists found thirty lignite beads and 29 fragments of amber beads, so this was an elaborate necklace indeed. Lignite beads were also discovered near her hand, perhaps from a matching bracelet.

Larger perforated amber rounds were found in a row down her body. They were probably extremely fancy, extremely expensive buttons going down the front a Copper Age version of a cardigan.

Lastly, a large pottery beaker with nicely even stripes probably applied using a comb-like stamp was placed on her hip, an unusual position for the beaker in the Beaker burials. They are usually found by the feet or shoulders.

All of this elegance and quality strongly suggests the woman was someone of impeccably high status.

Archaeologist Gareth Chaffey of Wessex Archaeology, who is directing the ongoing excavation, said that the woman unearthed at the site “was probably an important person in her society, perhaps holding some standing which gave her access to prestigious, rare and exotic items. She could have been a leader, a person with power and authority, or possibly part of an elite family – perhaps a princess or queen.”

Lead isotope analysis performed on the gold found that it was mined in south-east Ireland and southern Britain. The lignite beads are from Eastern England and the amber buttons probably from the Baltic, although it may have been local amber found on beaches. Scientists hope that further analysis will answer some questions about how the gold was procured and traded along existing trade routes.

This find is not the only significant discovery achaeologists have made since they began excavating Kingsmead Quarry in 2003. During the Copper Age and for thousands of years after that, the quarry was in a floodplain on the shore of the Thames. Its convenient access to water ensure it was inhabited by many subsequent generations. The excavations have found evidence of human occupation steadily from the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages.

The quarry is owned by the CEMEX building materials company. They have funded the ongoing excavation to the tune of £4 million ($6,000,000), and it certainly had paid off in terms discoveries. More than 28 hectares of the quarry have been excavated now. There are ancient artifacts, Neolithic houses, entire landscapes that have been exposed to expert eye. The plan is to continue digging for another two years.

Wessex Archaeology and CEMEX will be displaying some of the discoveries, including the gold beads, at an event at Wraysbury Village Hall, Berkshire, on Saturday April 27th between 10.30 AM and 3.30 PM. Admission is free. Visitors not only get to see the artifacts in person, but they also get to meet the archaeologists working on the project and examine a skeleton.

They hope to have the Beaker artifacts on display in a museum by the end of the year.

The remains of a large commercial harbour complex dating back to the Fourth Dynasty 4,500 years ago have been discovered at Wadi el-Jarf, a town on the Red Sea shore 110 miles south of Suez city, Egypt. Inscriptions and radiocarbon dating of pottery date the site to the reign of the pharaoh Khufu (aka Cheops). The port was one of a network on both sides of the Gulf of Suez used to transport limestone blocks from the quarries and copper and turquoise from the mines in south Sinai back to the Nile Valley. It’s the earliest found to date, the oldest commercial port found in Egypt and according to Sorbonne Egyptologist and excavation director Pierre Tallet, the oldest commercial port ever found anywhere, predating any others by 1,000 years.

Archaeologists from the French Institute for Archaeological Studies (IFAO) found a long L-shaped quay that starts on the beach and runs east under water for 525 feet before turning southeast for 394 feet. It appears to have been a breakwater structure that protected moored ships from the strong winds and powerful north-south currents of the Red Sea coast. Inside the protected area researchers found 24 pharaonic anchors. Made out of limestone, the anchors are carved into triangular, rectangular and cylindrical shapes with a hole in the upper section. Many of them were found in pairs which suggests deliberate placement rather than haphazardly discarded ship accessories. That’s why researchers believe they were stationed permanently in the water so that ships in transit could be moored to them.

This is an exciting find because although Egyptian anchors have been discovered before, most of them date to the Middle Kingdom and had been put to new uses. These are the first ancient anchors found in situ where they did their original anchor duty. It’s the oldest and largest collection of early Bronze Age anchors ever discovered.

The harbour complex continues inland. Even more anchors (99 of them, to be specific) were found in the remains of a light camp installation about 650 feet from the shore. There were hieroglyphic inscriptions on some of the anchors which Tallet believes were the name of the boat to which they once belonged. There’s a mound of limestone blocks nearby which was probably used as a visual landmark.

A mile and a quarter inland from the mound are the remains of an isolated rectangular building about 200 feet long and 100 feet wide. The building is divided into 13 elongated cell-like rooms. Its function is unknown but we do know it’s the largest pharaonic building found on the Red Sea coast.

Just over two and a half miles from the shore at the at the foot of the mountains are groups of camps and what may be defensive surveillance installations. The largest of them has a complex of rectangular structures with cell-like rooms that were probably living spaces for the workers.

Three miles from the shore, just south of the camps is a system of 25 to 30 galleries carved into the bedrock. The galleries are not a new find; they were first discovered in 1823 by British Egyptologists Sir John Garner Wilkinson and James Burton who thought they were catacombs. There was no follow-up until 1954 when French researchers François Bissey and René Chabot-Morisseau began to explore the area only to be stopped before they really got going by the Suez crisis. Tallet’s team used Bissey and Chabot-Morisseau’s notes and Google Earth satellite images to find the site when their project began in 2008.

Excavations began in 2011 on four of the galleries. The team found that the galleries were not catacombs; they were storage facilities used to keep dismantled boats safe from the elements. Pieces of ropes, textiles, large pieces of wood, fragments of cedar beams, a piece of boat timber nine feet wide, the end of an oar were discovered in the galleries. The galleries range in length from 52 feet to 112 feet and are an average of 10 feet wide and seven feet high. They were not carved haphazardly at different times, but according to a pre-planned layout. Access to the galleries was protected by causeways of monumental stone blocks. The entrances were closed and opened by an elaborate portcullis system of large limestone blocks similar to the ones used during Fourth Dynasty funerary structures. The blocks were inscribed with the Khufu’s name written in red ink.

Inside the storage galleries archaeologists made another major find: hundreds of papyrus fragments, 10 of them in very good condition. These are the oldest papyri ever found. They’re a social history bonanza, describing the administration of the harbour complex during the 27th year of Khufu’s reign. There are monthly reports on the number of harbour workers, on how they were supplied with bread and beer. Perhaps most riveting of all the papyri is a diary that describes the work of gathering limestone for the construction of the Great Pyramid. From the Discovery News slideshow of the finds:

[I]t’s the diary of Merrer, an Old Kingdom official involved in the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

From four different sheets and many fragments, the researchers were able to follow his daily activity for more that three months.

“He mainly reported about his many trips to the Turah limestone quarry to fetch block for the building of the pyramid,” Tallet said.

“Although we will not learn anything new about the construction of Cheops monument, this diary provides for the first time an insight on this matter,” Tallet said.

I love how it’s a fully graphed out table, a spreadsheet in hieroglyphics. The papyri are now in the Suez museum where they will be conserved, catalogued and studied.

The harbour complex was definitely Khufu’s baby, used during his reign and for a few decades later. Pottery evidence indicates that the installations were occupied primarily during the first half of the Fourth Dynasty. There are some traces that parts of the complex were still in use in the beginning of the Fifth Dynasty, 72 years after Khufu’s death, but after that it was abandoned.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have used digital imaging to examine in greater detail the carvings on the back of Hoa Hakananai’a, an Easter Island statue in the British Museum. Eight feet high with the oversized head, prominent eyebrow ridge, long nose, longer ears and downturned mouth characteristic of the moai (meaning “statue” in the Rapa Nui language), this particular specimen some unusual features. Most of the moai — 834 out 887 — were carved out of tuff, a soft volcanic stone that is easily carved. This is one of only 13 that was made of hard basalt, a much more difficult material to carve, which suggests this statue was commissioned by someone of wealth and rank. Its body was once painted in red and white, but all the paint was lost during the long ocean voyage from Easter Island to England in 1868.

The back of the statue is covered in intricate ceremonial imagery connected to the birdman cult, a religion that grew on the island starting around 1400. Hoa Hakananai’a was made around 1000-1200 A.D., so those carvings were added hundreds of years later. By the 17th century with the culture under pressure from ecological disaster, the ascendance of the birdman seems to have come at the expense of the moai and the traditional ancestor worship that generated them. The monoliths began to be toppled. There were still some standing when Captain James Cook crew arrived in 1774 — a landscape painted by William Hodges, Cook’s artist, depicts several standing moai wearing their red stone hats — but only a few. The last report of upright statues came in 1838. When Hoa Hakananai’a was removed from Rapa Nui in 1868, there were none left standing.

In the transitional period between the moai and the birdman, at least some of the old statues were carved with symbolism from the upstart cult. The soft tuff statues were easily eroded, so little evidence remains on their bodies. The carvings on the basalt statues, therefore, are important sources of information about the profound cultural changes on Easter Island from the 15th century onward. Yet, they have not been thoroughly studied by archaeologists, not even Hoa Hakananai’a who has been sitting in the British Museum for 145 years.

Imaging technology can help bridge that knowledge gap. The University of Southampton researchers deployed photogrammetric modelling, wherein an object is photographed hundreds of times from different angles to create a composite digital model that can be viewed in 360 degrees, and reflectance transformation imaging which takes hundreds of high resolution pictures under different angled lights to illuminate details with light and shadow, a far more agile digital version of an analog archaeological practice done with flashlights and head tilts.

Using these techniques, Mike Pitts and the team made some fascinating discoveries, perhaps the most significant being the apparently simple recognition that a carved bird beak is short and round, not long and pointed as previously described: this allowed the two birdmen on the back to be marked as male and female, unlocking a narrative story to the whole composition relating to Easter Island’s unique birdman cult. They also realised that the statue is one of the few on Easter Island that did not stand on a platform beside the shore. It is now believed to have always stood in the ground, where it was found, on top of a 300 metre cliff.

Mike comments: “Study of the tapering base suggests that rather than being the result of thinning to make it fit into a pit, as often suggested, it is more likely part of the original boulder or outcrop from which it was carved. This may also explain why, as we now see it in the British Museum, it appears to lean slightly to the left – its uneven end resulted in its being incorrectly set into its 19th century plinth.”

There are several phases of carving on the back, separated by centuries. The carving around the waist of three bands is a maro, a symbolic loincloth which, along with the ring just above it, were part of the original design. Later, once it was half-buried in debris, four komari, inverted V shapes representing female genitalia, were carved from top to bottom on the back of the right ear.

Even later than that, the central story of the birdman — a male fledgling with an open beak reaching out of the nest while two birdmen with the head of a bird and human hands and feet stand watch on either side of him — was carved on the back. The human-bird hybrid on the right has a rounded beak, indicating femaleness. That suggests the two birdmen are actually the chick’s mom and dad. Underscoring the gendering of the birdmen, the female is on the side of the komari, while the male is flanked by a carving of a ceremonial dance paddle called an ‘ao, a symbol of male authority.

The digital imaging has also revealed a rounded shape near the bottom half of the female birdman which could be the egg the fledgling has just hatched from, and the remains of what may have been fingers around the statue’s navel that were later removed.

Creating digital models of such complex surfaces is a complex process. The project is ongoing, so the team hopes to reveal even more details as they continue to work on it.

The full body scanners that have contributed so much to the hell that is modern air travel have just redeemed themselves in my eyes. Dr. J. Bianca Jackson of the University of Rochester used terahertz spectroscopy, the same electromagnetic radiation lying between kitchen microwaves and the infrared in your remote control that looks through your clothes at airports, to examine a fresco from the Louvre’s Campana collection. Underneath Trois hommes armés de lances (Three men armed with lances), a surface fresco in Roman style that was applied to an ancient wall in the 19th century, she found a face, part of what is probably an original Roman-era fresco.

This an important breakthrough because the body scanning technology found something that none of the other imagining technologies — X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, microscopy — in use today were able to detect. An analysis using X-ray fluorescence first confirmed that there might be something under the surface, but there were no specifics. It could have been anything — a textural change, a different material beneath the plaster — or nothing at all.

“No previous imaging technique, including almost half a dozen commonly used to detect hidden images below paintings, forged signatures of artists and other information not visible on the surface has revealed a lost image in this fresco,” Jackson said. “This opens to door to wider use of the technology in the world of art, and we also used the method to study a Russian religious icon and the walls of a mud hut in one of humanity’s first settlements in what was ancient Turkey.”

Terahertz spectroscopy is well-suited to conservation use because it’s a such a mild form of radiation it doesn’t harm the object being studied even in the smallest way. With so many systems used for conservation purposes, there’s a price to pay in deterioration of the artifact being conserved. Even X-rays and ultraviolet, non-invasive though they are, still cause some damage on a molecular level.

There’s no way at present to determine the date of the newly discovered face, but the art history strongly suggests it’s an original Roman fresco. Trois hommes armés de lances is one of three fragmentary ancient frescoed walls at the Louvre that were acquired by Giampietro Campana, a 19th century collector who was director of the Vatican pawnbroking charity Monte di Pietà and an amateur but very much accomplished archaeologist. His access to Papal properties gave him the opportunity to excavate in the heart of ancient Rome and Etruria. He made several major discoveries like the columbarium of Pomponius Hylas which he published in scholarly journals.

He also paid attention to artifacts that nobody before him had considered worthwhile. The terracotta reliefs used as decorative architectural elements along the roof edges and walls of public buildings still bear his name — Campana reliefs — because in the mid-19th century when archaeology was in its infancy, diggers were looking for big treasures, important works of art, jewelry, fancy things, not roof tiles. Campana alone recognized their historical and aesthetic significance.

He loved the splashy stuff too, mind you. From his excavations and from extensive purchases he built a private collection of sculpture, pottery, gold, jewels, that was one of the greatest ever assembled. His palazzo at the corner of Via del Babuino and Piazza del Popolo, which if you know Rome at all is a location TO DIE FOR, also served as his personal museum, although only people with letters of introduction were allowed to visit and only one day a week. One of those visitors, who probably needed no letters of introduction, was Pope Pius IX who went to see Campana’s collection in 1846.

Notwithstanding his expertise and genuine scholarly bent when it came to archaeology, Campana, or rather his restorers, had a very heavy hand by our standards. Hell, even by 19th century standards they systematically blurred line between restoration and fraud. The three men armed with spears are actually composites. They were created by (rather sloppily, actually) sticking together random fresco fragments. The fragments were all genuinely ancient, but it was a restorer who created the composition, assembled and stuck the pieces together to make them look like a full sized fresco. The restorer does not appear to have attempted to integrated the old picture into the new, as the placement of the newly found fresco proves.

There is very little documentation of the Campana collection. We don’t know who restored what or what the intent was. It’s unlikely to have been larceny by false promise, if I may invoke my Law & Order-derived legalese. Campana wasn’t much of a seller. He liked to buy and keep. What’s more likely is that the original painting was covered up with this chunky plaster mosaic just to make it look better, more important, more handsome, more worthy of its rarified surroundings in the Campana museum.

Giampietro Campana never did get his museum made. In November of 1857, he was arrested for embezzlement of which he was guilty beyond any sliver of a shadow of doubt. In July of the next year, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in the galleys and to pay a massive fine. His sentence was commuted to exile. On 28 April 1859, Giampietro Campana gave his collection, much of which he had used as collateral on loans, to the Papacy, keeping only the furniture.

To reimburse Campana’s creditors (starting with itself) the Church did something so short-sighted, so wrong, so stupid I can barely stand to write it: they auctioned off his entire collection. England bought some of it for its new Kensington museum. Russia bought almost 500 antique vases, statues and jewelry for the Hermitage. The lion’s share went to Napoleon III who got first dibs on anything in the catalog before the sale started. He bought everything that was remaining: 11,835 artifacts for 4.8 million francs. Most of that massive collection went to the Louvre where today it has a room of its own, the Campana gallery. The only thing from the Campana collection that the Pope kept was 400 Roman and Byzantine gold coins.

Campana returned to Rome after the Unification of Italy in 1870. He died ten years later, his epic collection scattered to great museums around the world. After his death, his palazzo on the Piazza del Popolo was razed and built over.