Remnants of brain, skin found in destroyed Bronze Age city

Archaeologists have discovered preserved brain and skin tissue on the skeletal remains of a man at the Bronze Age settlement of Tavşanlı Höyük in western Turkey. The deceased died in a major attack on the settlement that took place around 1700 B.C. and his body burned when the city was set on fire. The high heat carbonized and preserved the brain inside his skull and a section of skin between his chest and abdomen. Only four or five instances of preserved brain remnants have been found in Anatolia, and this is the first time carbonized human skin has been discovered in Turkey.

The archaeological team was excavating a mudbrick and wood structure from the era of the attack, identified by a large fire layer. Within the layer, they found the skeletal remains of two men, one younger (aged 15-18), one older (aged 40-45) under the rubble of the house. The older man had been trapped in the middle of the room, pinned by a wooden shelf and dozens of earthenware pots that collapsed on him when the building fell. The young man was at the door, perhaps trying to escape, when he was crushed by collapsed rubble.

Because of his location at the entrance to the building, the young person’s skeleton was exposed to much higher temperatures than the older man’s. The high degree of heat whitened some of his bones and carbonized the skin and brain.

In the presentation prepared by the excavation director, Prof. Dr. Erkan Fidan, who is also the Department Head of Archaeology at Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University, and the deputy director of the excavation, Dr. Nihan Naiboğlu, who is an Assistant Professor at Nişantaşı University, it was stated that Tavşanlı Mound, with its 8,000-year history, is the oldest settlement in Kütahya and one of the largest Bronze Age settlements in Western Anatolia, covering an area of 45 hectares. It was also mentioned that Tavşanlı Mound was likely the capital of the region….

The attack on the settlement was very sudden and it seems like the northeastern edge was particularly vulnerable to attack. All of the weapons — daggers, spearheads, arrows — found there are in the destruction layer. Archaeologists believe the settlement was besieged by a greater military power and the entire city was burned to the ground.

This excavation project began in 2021 and is planned to continue for at least 30 years. The team hopes to discover who attacked the city and why in future dig seasons.

Unfinished lion’s head spout found in Selinunte

Unfinished lion's head simen, 5th century B.C. Selinunt project Ruhr University Bochum, Marc Klauss/Leah Schiebel.Excavations at the ancient Greek colony of Selinunte in Sicily have unearthed a rare marble lion’s head sima, a decorated spout meant to drain water from the roof of an ancient temple. It dates to the 5th century B.C.

Almost two feet high, the figure is larger than usual for this type of architectural feature. It is also unfinished. The water outlet is not yet installed. The back of the mane and the top decoration is also incomplete.

It was discovered on a street near the ancient eastern harbor, an area known for its workshops. The lion was destined for one of Selinunte’s many temples, but never made it to the roof. It would have to have been a very fancy temple, however, as most simen of this era were made of terracotta.

“This marble was imported to Sicily from the Greek islands – probably from Paros,” says Jon Albers. “All in all, only nine temples from the 5th century BC are known to have a sima made of Greek marble in all of southern Italy and Sicily.” The roofs were mainly discovered in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

“The newly found Sima from Selinunte cannot be compared to any of these temples and is therefore part of a tenth temple with such a marble roof,” concludes Jon Albers. The researchers cannot yet decide whether the object was once intended for the well-known Temple E in Selinunte or for another monumental temple that is still unknown today. […]

Through this condition, the find allows us to to better understand the manufacturing processes for such architectural parts,” says the archaeologist happily. “Since the find comes from the port zone and the immediate vicinity of the workshop district of Selinunte, it allows further conclusions to be drawn about the city’s trade contacts and the technical skills of the ancient inhabitants of Selinunte.”

2,000-year-old child’s shoe found in salt mine

Archaeologists with the German Mining Museum Bochum have unearthed a child’s leather shoe that is more than 2,000 years old and in excellent condition. It is complete to an exceptional degree, even preserving a section of the flax laces and showing how the shoe was originally tied. The design of the shoe dates it to around the 2nd century B.C.

It was found in the Dürrnberg, an ancient rock salt mine, near Salzburg, Austria, where archaeologists have been excavating since 2001 to study the life and work of Iron Age miners. Thanks to the preservative effect of the salt, organic materials that would usually decompose survive in the mine. Indeed, the excavation team discovered more organic remains next to the shoe, including a wooden shovel and a scrap of fur with lacing that was likely part of a hood.

Leather shoes have been discovered in the Dürrnberg before, but this is the first child’s shoe. It is poignant evidence that young children were working in the mine. The shoe is a Euro child size 30, so about a 13 or 13.5 US child’s size, for a foot about 7.5″ long. Today this size would be worn by a child around seven years old.

“For decades now, our research activities on the Dürrnberg have repeatedly provided us with valuable finds in order to scientifically develop the earliest mining activities. The condition of the shoe that was found is outstanding,” says the head of the research area, Prof. Dr. Thomas Stoellner. “Organic materials usually decompose over time. Finds such as this children’s shoe, but also textile remains or excrement, such as those found on the Dürrnberg, offer an extremely rare insight into the life of the Iron Age miners. They provide valuable information for our scientific work.” […]

Excavations will continue over the next few years. The aim is to explore the full extent of the mine and thus to obtain the most comprehensive information possible about the work of the Iron Age miners and their way of life. In addition, they hope to find out what size the mining galleries on Dürrnberg were. In this way, mining archaeological excavations and research methods provide important insights into areas of life that cannot yet be documented and researched from other sources.

Recreating the Colossus of Constantine

Fragments of the Colossus of Constantine (ca. 313 A.D.) in the courtyard of Palazzo dei Conservatori. Photo courtesy Musei Capitolini.In the entrance courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori at the top of the Capitoline Hill in Rome, visitors are greeted by the gigantic head, hands, forearm, shin, knee and feet of the Emperor Constantine. They are what remains of a colossal acrolithic statue of Constantine that once sat ponderously in the western apse of the Basilica Nova, the great civic building started by Maxentius in 307 A.D. and completed by Constantine after his victory over Maxentius in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 A.D.

The head, arms and legs of the colossus were carved out of white marble. The body of the emperor, posed seated and enthroned, was made of a wooden framework over a brick core. The body was then bronzed, possibly gilded, in a glittering contrast to the marble extremities. The head alone is more than eight feet high. Extrapolating from the surviving fragments, the intact statue was an astonishing 40 feet high.

The statue was built between 312 and 315 A.D., with the facial features and hands reworked (there are two right hands) around 325 A.D. It was destroyed in Late Antiquity, its bronze looted and melted down, the marble parts broken and abandoned in the ruin of the basilica. The marble pieces were rediscovered in 1486 and placed in the courtyard of Palazzo dei Conservatori by Michelangelo when he was building Piazza del Campidoglio in 1536–1546.

In 2022, the Factum Foundation in collaboration with the Musei Capitolini and supported by the Fondazione Prada, embarked on a new digitization project to document the fragments and recreate a full-scale replica of the Colossus of Constantine for a new exhibition. In March of 2022, the ten fragments in the courtyard were recorded in ultra-high resolution with photogrammetry and LiDAR technology. The data was used to create a 3D model of the fragments and fill in the missing blanks.

Factum Arte experts worked with museum curators to recreate the statue’s original pose (back when it had one right hand and one left hand) and draping of the paludamentum cloak that covered the emperor’s body. Existing (much smaller) statues of emperors and gods in the same enthroned pose were used as references. By May, the team was ready to go from digital modeling to physical reconstruction.

It was decided to visually distinguish the facsimile fragments from the digitally reconstructed body and cloak.

The recorded digital data of each fragment was rematerialised as 1:1 3D prints, which were used to make positive casts in reinforced resin. The surface was coated with a custom gesso mix and painted to resemble the original marble, weathered by the exposure to the elements. The result was perfect facsimiles of the original fragments.

The recreated sections of the body were made in polyurethane, coated in several layers of resin mixed with marble powder and mica, to achieve a clean neutral marble-white colour. The cloak was made in milled polystyrene, coated with acrylic resin mixed with bronze powder, over which a distressed gold foil gilding was applied.

The final tally was 30 sections of the Colossus. They were craned into the exhibition room at the Fondazione Prada in Milan where the statue was assembled for the exhibition Recycling Beauty.

This video gives a glimpse into the digital reconstruction process.

In this video, archaeologist Darius Arya goes into detail about the history of the Colossus, its original context in the Basilica Nova and visits the recreation. It’s awe-inspiring to see the iconic fragments put back together.

Maya nose ornament made of human bone found in Palenque

Archaeologists have discovered an intricately carved Maya nose ornament made of human bone at the Archaeological Zone of Palenque in southern Mexico. The curved nose ornament would have been worn by priests and rulers during religious ceremonies to embody K’awiil, Mayan god of maize and fertility.

It is small at just 6.4 cm long by 5.2 cm wide (2.5 x 2 inches) and 5 cm thick at its thickest point on the bottom of the piece. It was created from the anterior section of distal tibia, where the leg and ankle form a joint. The natural crest of the tibia is a neat match for the center line of a nose.

The bone’s curvature also projects over the bridge of the nose, eliminating the separation from forehead to nose and giving the wearer a straight profile that came to a point like an ear of corn. The Maya elite practiced deliberate cranial deformation, flattening and elongating the foreheads of babies while their skulls were still soft, to reproduce this god’s head shape. Adding a nose ornament to an already-elongated and flattened head created a profile with a continuous and almost perfectly straight line.

It is carved with exceptional detail and precision. On the left side, the carving depicts the profile of a man wearing a headdress, wristbands, a necklace of spherical beads and ear plugs with a pendant. The man’s left arm bears the Maya glyph for “darkness” or “night.” His right arm extends over the center crest and continues on the right side of the nose ornament where it holds a long, thin rod vertically. At the bottom of the rod is a representation of a skull placed on top of a bundle of cloth.

The crest of the bone with which the nasal ornament was made appears as the limit of a portal that the character crosses to communicate with the gods and ancestors, a common scene in Mayan art from the Classic period (250-900 AD).

“Another aspect to highlight is the bundle that the character carries. Funeral bundles were a common practice among the ancient Maya, which are present in the iconography”, indicates [director of the Palenque Archaeological Project (PAP), Arnoldo González Cruz].

He explains that the nose ornament was part of the attire of the elite of the city, because it appears in several sculptural representations, such as the sarcophagus of the Temple of the Inscriptions, the Oval Tablet of House E and the Throne of Temple XXI, being carried by the ajaws [kings] Yohl Ik’nal, Sak K’uk’, Pakal I and Pakal II.

The object was discovered during conservation work at the palace complex in the heart of the ancient Mayan city. It had been buried in a pit under a stucco floor as part of a ritual deposit made to mark the completion of a building in the Late Classic period (600-850 A.D.). It was buried in dark earth with seeds, the bones of fish, turtles and small mammals, pieces of a bone awl, obsidian blades and large pieces of charcoal.