8th c. royal toilet found in Silla palace in Korea

Korean archaeologists have discovered the remains of an 8th century toilet in one of the palaces of the Silla monarchs in Gyeongju, a town of the southeast coast of Korea. The facilities were found by a team from the Gyeongju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage in the Gyeongju East Palace, a smaller building that was part of the great Dong Palace complex of the ancient kingdom of Silla (57 B.C. – 935 A.D.). It too was a royal residence and therefore only the butts of the royal family squatted over that fine hole in the floor.

Made from granite, the toilet features an oval opening in the floor about five inches long with large rectangular stones on both sides of it. The flagstones were tilted upward slightly to ensure that one’s feet would not be getting invited to the evacuation party. The hole in the floor leads to a culvert where the waste was carried away.

The Gyeongju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage said Tuesday that excavation work at a site northeast of the Dong Palace in Gyeongju uncovered a stone flush toilet and draining system inside a stone structure.

It marked the first time for a bathroom structure, toilet and draining system to all be found at an ancient site in South Korea.

The institute explained that the oval-shaped flush toilet, made out of granite, has a drain and two rectangular slab stones on both sides apparently for users to plant their feet on when they are squatting.

An institute official said it appears that human excrement was flushed down the drain by pouring water into the toilet given that the bathroom had no water inflow equipment.

After use, the toilet would be “flushed” by dumping a lot of water into the hole. This is sufficient enough to get it props for being a flush toilet, but it’s a bit of a cheat though, because pouring a bucket of water into a hole cut into granite isn’t really the mechanism we think of as a “flush toilet.”

The rush of water ensured solid waste would move briskly through the culvert which was designed to use gravity as an aid, much like a Roman aqueduct. About 23 feet away from the toilet, the culvert is a foot and a half lower in grade than it is close to it. This incline kept the water (and the many gross things it carried) flowing.

The depth of architectural and engineering analysis of waste management systems at the highest levels of social status and rank in 8th century Korea was possible at this site solely so much of the toilet and disposal structure has survived. This isn’t the first ancient toilet discovered in South Korea. (One at the Iksan royal palace dates to the 7th century; another at the Bulguksa Temple in Gyeongju from the 8th century.) Those aren’t complete, however. The palace’s draining toilet survives, but it has no foot slabs and no surviving drainage culvert. Same with the monastery.

The materials are also very different. Granite was an expensive stone, difficult to quarry and carve. It does not appear in the earlier toilet at Iksan or in the much more modest facilities of the temple. This was one ultra fancy toilet. That’s one of the reasons archaeologists are convinced it was intended for use by members of the Silla royal family. They’re hoping to find some organic remains, microscopic intestinal parasites, perhaps, that will lend new insight into the diet, health of the highest echelon of Silla society.

Lost temple of Artemis found on Greek island

An international team of archaeologists led by the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece (ESAG) in collaboration with the regional archaeological service have discovered the remains of the long-lost temple of Artemis near the village of Amarynthos on the island of Euboea in Greece.

Under the current director the excavations, University of Lausanne Professor Karl Reber, the team has been searching for the sanctuary since 2007, but they’re the new kids on the block, comparatively speaking. Researchers have been looking in vain for more than a century. The first Swiss archaeologists were invited to explore the ancient city of Eretria for the temple in 1964. Eleven years later, that initial foray cemented itself into a permanent institution when the mission was recognized by the Greek national government as the Swiss School of Archaeology in Athens. The dig has been so successful it has continued for more than 50 years. In 2014, 50 years after the first Swiss excavation broke ground in Eretria, the ESAG team could claim to have cleared the temple of Apollo, a shrine to Athena, the fortifications of the city’s western gate, a theater, luxury villas with elaborate mosaics, Roman-era public baths and a large gymnasium.

The sanctuary of Artemis Amarynthia, however, remained elusive. If it had ever been in Eretria, the Swiss team could find no trace of it. Starting in 2007, they moved further afield to study the environs of the city, territories under its control but not part of the actual city itself. At the foot of the Paleoekklisies hill just over five miles east of Eretria, ESAG archaeologists found a monumental portico dating to the 4th century B.C. that ran along the east and north boundary of an open-air structure.

This summer, the team dug survey trenches inside the portico perimeter in the hope of finding evidence from the most central location that this was indeed the much sought-after sanctuary. They were successful beyond their wildest dreams. They found the remains of a number of structures constructed between the 6th-2nd century B.C. (the period when the temple was at its most active) and an underground fountain made of architectural blocks and the recycled bases of monumental statues. Those statue bases proved to be the smoking gun that identified the temple. They were inscribed with dedicated to Artemis, her twin brother Apollo and their mother Leto.

The inscriptions and the architectural significance of the materials strongly indicate that this was the Artemis sanctuary. That was confirmed by another discovery, not as glamorous as the statue bases, more on the utilitarian side, but just as meaningful to archaeologists: multiple tiles stamped with the name “Artemidos” (meaning “of the Artemis”) inside a rectangular cartouche.

Now, after also finding artefacts with inscriptions, they are sure that they have located the site of the Artemis Amarynthia, which was the end point of the annual procession of people from the once prosperous trading city of Eretrea, 10km away. They held a festival in honour of Artemis, the untameable goddess of hunting in Greek mythology. She was worshipped as the patron goddess of Amarynthos, which takes its name from an Eretrean man who was besotted by Artemis.

“Licking Dog” found in hoard of Roman bronze

Metal detectorists Pete Cresswell and Andrew Boughton discovered a hoard of Roman bronze in Gloucestershire (the exact location is not being disclosed) that includes a figurine that is unique in Britain for its quality and size. It’s a free-standing bronze statuette of a dog with his tongue hanging out. Known as a “licking dog” figure, it is believed to have been a symbol of healing and may have some connection to the temple to Nodens, a deity of hunting, dogs and healing, at nearby Lydney Park.

Licking Dog from all views. Photo by Eve Andreski.The dog stands at attention, his expression alert and focused upward, like he knows his master has a ball and is waiting for him to throw it. Holes drilled in his paws suggest he was once mounted to a base and there are two more holes on the upper left flank that may have once held pins that were part of the mounting system. There’s also a square hole on its underbelly. Each shoulder is decorated with a sideways teardrop-shaped panel incised with what could be stylized leaf or feather designs.

Cresswell, from Gloucestershire, said: “It’s not every day you come across a hoard of Roman bronze.

“We have been metal detecting for a combined 40 years, but this is a once in a lifetime discovery. As soon as I realised the items were of historical significance I contacted the local archaeology team, who were equally excited by the find.

“It’s a great privilege to be able to contribute to local and British history.”

Archaeologist Kurt Adams, Gloucestershire and Avon Finds Liaison Officer, examined the hoard. He provisionally dated it to the 4th century (318 – 450 A.D.) and the exceptional dog is the only intact piece in the group excepting a coin or two. The other artifacts are all fragments, mostly made of copper alloy. They include pieces of a broken statue of a person wearing an elaborately draped garment, vase and furniture fittings, escutcheons shaped like animal and human heads, handle terminals, bangles, folded up banding from chests or boxes, a little spoon, a hinge and a great many bits and bobs of undeterminate origin. There’s even an inscribed copper alloy plaque broken into four pieces that when puzzled back together reads (V?)MCONIA. It is curved at the back, suggesting that it too was once mounted on something. These fragments appear to have been deliberately cut up or broken, perhaps by a metal worker collecting scraps to melt down for reuse.

Intact or fragment, these objects are of great archaeological significance and require specialized treatment for their conservation and security. They are being kept at Bristol museum for the time being to give experts the opportunity to fully document, photograph and catalogue them. Once that task is complete, the British Museum’s Treasure Valuation Committee will assess the hoard’s full market value and recommend a reward to be paid in that amount, half going to the finder, half the to the landowner.

Take a 3D tour through Rothwell charnel chapel

Rothwell charnel chapel is the UK’s most complete surviving medieval charnel house, rooms used to contain the bones of the dead to make room in cemeteries for the next generation of corpses. The charnel chapels attached to churches in the Middle Ages weren’t scary places. They were well-lit, clean, sturdily built with permanent access from the exterior (doors, stairways) so the general public could visit and pay their respects to the dead. Rothwell Parish Church built its charnel room under the church and contains the remains of at least hundreds of people who died in the Middle Ages.

It’s difficult to know how many charnel chapels existed in medieval Britain. Historians have generally thought they were fairly rare compared to their frequency on the continent, but researchers from the University of Sheffield think they have located as many as 60, or at least what little is left of them Time and the destruction wrought by the Reformation took an incalculable toll. That’s why Rothwell’s is so significant. One of only two medieval charnel chapels still remaining in situ (the other is St Leonard’s in Hythe, Kent), it is largely intact and still contains human skeletal remains placed there between the 13th and 16th centuries.

Dr Lizzy Craig-Atkins, who led the project from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology, said: “Rothwell charnel chapel is a site of major international significance. Surviving charnel chapels, with human remains still housed inside, are very rare in England. What is so fascinating about the Rothwell charnel chapel it is that it presents an ideal archaeological resource for researchers to use to advance our understanding of how the remains of the dead were treated during the medieval period.

With so little hard data to go on, many historians thought charnel houses were of minor religious import even in their heyday in England, that they were just places to store bones dug up from the intercutting of new graves or during church construction. The University of Sheffield’s Rothwell Project has upended that belief. It wasn’t until the 13th century that charnel houses and chapels began to be constructed. Before that, dug up bones were reinterred in the new grave or in mass pits. The new charnel spaces of the 13th century were the first time human skeletal remains were kept above ground in meaningful quantities. That’s a major shift in attitude and approach, and it can’t be explained in utilitarian terms because reburying the bones is a lot easier, cheaper and faster than building an above-ground space for them.

Rothwell Project researchers think this shift is connected to the doctrine of Purgatory receiving official Church recognition in 1254. Souls suffering the torments of purgation could be sped on their way to heaven by the prayers and hymns of the living on their behalf. Charnel chapels in mainland Europe are known to have had confessionals and been treated as places or repentance and forgiveness. English charnel chapels also had priests whose duty it was to hear confessions and offer absolution. The Sheffield team thinks all this is linked together, that charnel chapels, like chantries in the churches above them, provided the public with the opportunity to pray for the souls of the departed still locked in purgatory and to avoid the same fate themselves. The rejection of purgatory and confession by Protestants explains why the charnel chapels and their human remains were so cruelly disposed of during the Reformation. The bones were reburied, often in unconsecrated ground, and the rooms either walled up so no trace of them was visible from the outside or reused for random purposes rented out to local merchants for cool storage.

Unfortunately Rothwell charnel chapel is not widely accessible as an archaeological resource, no matter how valuable it might be, because it can’t accommodate human traffic (not of the living kind, anyway) due its delicate preservation conditions. The space is tight, keeping moisture and temperature steady is a challenge, and one false move could irreparably damage the structure and human remains.

In this day and age, there are other options. The Digital Ossuary is a collaboration between the University’s archaeology and computer science departments which has captured the physical space of the charnel chapel, its proportions, where the medieval access points were, high-resolution detail of the bones which will allow osteological study that was previously impossible as well as help determine conservation practices for the long-term preservation of the charnel.

“This new digital resource provides an opportunity for people all over the world to explore the site and helps us to preserve this fascinating window into the past for future generations.” […]

The new digital resource, together with research on the chapel, will be fed into undergraduate and postgraduate programmes for archaeology students at the University of Sheffield.

Archaeologists leading the project are also welcoming the input of researchers who might be interested in working with the model, which has been published via ORDA, the University’s file sharing platform.

And now, without further ado, here is the 3D flythrough of Rothwell Parish Church’s charnel chapel.

Bones of headless frogs found in 4,000-year-old jar

Archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have discovered a jar containing the skeletal remains of at least nine frogs, all of them headless, in a Canaanite tomb outside Jerusalem. The discovery was made three years ago during an archaeological excavation in advance of development in the Minhat neighborhood near the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. In 2014, the IAA team’s exploration unearthed an intact tomb from the Canaanite period, about 4,000 years ago during the Middle Bronze Age. It contained several clay vessels of different shapes and sizes, some undamaged and in exceptional condition.

According to [IAA excavation directors Shua Kisilevitz and Zohar Turgeman-Yaffe]: “For an archaeologist, finding tombs that were intentionally sealed in antiquity is a priceless treasure, because they are a time capsule that allows us to encounter objects almost just as they were originally left. At that time, it was customary to bury the dead with offerings that constituted a kind of “burial kit,” which, it was believed, would serve the deceased in the afterworld. When we removed the stone that blocked the tomb opening, we were excited to discover intact bowls and jars.

“In one of the jars, to our surprise, we found a heap of small bones. The study of the bones, by Dr. Lior Weisbrod of the University of Haifa, revealed at least nine toads. Interestingly, they had been decapitated.”

The study also identified material from plants, including date palms and myrtles, in samples taken from inside the clay vessels. These could only have been transferred into the jars shortly before they were buried in the tomb. Date palms and myrtles are not native to the area, so the Canaanites must have planted the trees themselves.

According to Dr. [Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University], in this period the date palm symbolized fertility and rejuvenation, which could explain why the ancients cultivated the trees in this environment, where they do not grow naturally. According to the scholars, these plants may have been part of an orchard planted in an area where funeral rituals were held, during which offerings of food and objects were made to the deceased. The scholars surmise that the jar with the headless toads was among these offerings.

This video from the IAA YouTube channel is in Hebrew with no English subtitles, alas, but it’s well worth watching even if you can’t understand the commentary because there’s cool footage of the intact vessels and the broken one filled with frog bones being recovered from the tomb. You can see how challenging it was to get into the narrow, deep space. IAA archaeologist David Tanami had to be upside-down and almost completely vertical to reach the opening.

The study’s findings will be presented on October 18th at the “New Studies in the Archaeology of Jerusalem and its Region” conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The presentation is open to the public.