Two horses found in Bronze Age tomb in Kazakhstan are the earliest evidence of horsemanship on the archaeological record, 700 years earlier the previous oldest evidence of horseback riding. Evidence of horse breeding goes back to around 2000 B.C., but before this find, the oldest evidence of horse riding dated to around 900 B.C.
The horse burials were discovered in a tomb in the Novoil’inovskiy 2 Cemetery on the banks of the Tobol River in the Eurasian Steppes. The burial ground contains about 30 kurgan mounds dating to the Late Bronze Age — radiocarbon analysis dates the tomb complex to 1890–1774 B.C. — when the area was occupied by the Petrovka, also known as the Andronovo, culture. In kurgan 5, archaeologists unearthed two graves, the first containing a heap of human bones and four articulated skeletons, the second a pair of articulated horse skeletons. They were identified as domestic horses, distinguishable from their wild cousins by their forehead width, slender limbs and the length of their phalanges and metacarpals. One of them was a stallion, one a mare. The male was about 20 years old when he died; the female about 18.
The horses had been carefully arranged in the grave, their left forelegs cut off and extended forward, the front right lefts bent to connect to the shoulders. Their hind legs extend backwards. These were not positions that could be achieved in nature. People had to cut through ligaments and joints and bind the limbs. Researchers believes this somewhat gruesome tableau was intended to depict a running team of horses.
The Bronze Age Andronovo peoples are known to have raised horses for meat, but the wear patterns on the teeth of both horses and cranium of the stallion are consistent with the wearing of a bridle with mouth and cheekpieces. Three cheekpieces made of bone were buried with them and use-wear analysis indicates they were used to bridle horses. Andronovo people also used horses to pull chariots, but the cheekpieces have never been found in chariot burials. These horses were ridden, not used for food or harnesses to vehicles.
This find indicates that horsemanship was already well-established in the steppe during the Bronze Age when these horses were buried as the tack was fully developed.
The Rooswijk was a Dutch East India Company (VOC) trade vessel that sank off the coast of Kent on January 10th, 1740, on its way to Batavia (modern-day Jakarta). The 135-foot three-masted ship set out on what would have been only its second voyage to the Dutch East Indies when it fell victim to the notoriously treacherous Goodwin Sands, nicknamed the Great Ship Swallower. None of the 237 crew members on board survived.
The wreck of the Rooswijk was discovered in 2000 by local diver Ken Welling. The remains are owned by the Dutch government, but as the shipwreck lies in British territorial waters, its management is up to the UK. In 2007 it was designation a legally protected wreck under the Protection of Wrecks Act which prohibits private parties from disturbing the site. Access to protected wrecks is strictly controlled by Historic England. A 2016 survey found the wreck was at high risk from forces both environmental — shifting sands, erosion, shipworm — and human — unauthorized sports diving — so the cultural heritage ministries of both countries developed a project called #Rooswijk1740 to excavate, manage and thoroughly study the site. This is the first Dutch East India wreck to be researched and explored scientifically in such depth.
Excavations began in 2017 with a focus on recording everything in the debris field and recovering select material for conservation in laboratory conditions, thorough documentation and analysis. An enormous number of objects have been recovered, including the ship’s armaments (flintlock pistols, piles of lead shot, 23 of its 24 cannons, piles of cannon balls), coins (mostly Mexican reals, aka ‘pieces of eight’), silver ingots, personal items (nit comb, pewter vessels, a chest full of thimbles) and assorted cargo (chests of sabre blades, stone blocks, sheet copper).
There were other types of coins on board besides the pieces of eight, key evidence that the Rooswijk crew were doing brisk business in silver smuggling. These coins are ducatons, older Netherlands issue, not the internationally accepted currency of the pieces of eight that was the only officially sanctioned silver cash on board. The Rooswijk‘s silver ingots and reals would have been used to buy spices and porcelain in Jakarta, and to maintain its buying power the VOC strictly prohibited the transportation of any other silver on its ships. The wreckage proves that the crew and/or passengers paid that injunction no heed. They just hid their coins, stuffing them in shoes and belts. Some of the coins found on the dives were pierced with small holes used to sew them into the lining of clothes.
All objects recovered from the wreck are triaged and recorded at a warehouse in Ramsgate. They then move on to further conservation and documentation at a Historic England laboratory after which any objects salvaged from the Rooswijk are returned to its owner, The Netherlands.
Historic England ‘s research capabilities have just gotten a major upgrade courtesy of a £150,000 grant from the Wolfson Foundation. HE used the grant to install a state-of-the art high-resolution walk-in X-ray facility in Portsmouth that will allow researchers to scan large, thick concretions to identify artifacts trapped in the rock-hard mixtures of sand, rock, corrosion materials and ocean debris. Concretions can take years to remove and are so dense conventional X-rays often cannot may or not be removable in their entirety. The high-powered movable X-ray tube in the new facility penetrates fully through even the heaviest corrosion, so besides assuaging our curiosity with instant effect, the X-rays will be invaluable aids in conservation.
Because a large part of the goal of #Rooswijk1740 is sharing the discoveries and new-found knowledge with the broader pubic, they have really gone all-out on creating a rich store of digital content about the shipwreck. You can do a virtual tour with annotations of the entire shipwreck site here. Many recovered artifacts have been scanned and the 3D models uploaded to Sketchfab. It’s all gold, but I’m particularly enamored of a series of 3D models made at different stages in the excavation of a large concretion. There are models from 12 stages (1-6, 8-13) so far: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. They also put together a two-part short film about the wreck and its excavation.
In the eternal battle between cat people and dog people, the latter definitely win as far as the archaeological record is concerned. Many dog burials have been found in archaeological contexts, but cats, be they domestic or wild, are very rare discoveries.
So when the 1,000-year-old remains of a domesticated cat were unearthed in Dzhankent, Kazakhstan, it was a surprising find, not just because of the overall infrequency of archaeological cat burials, but because there is no evidence of widespread cat ownership in Kazakhstan until the 19th century when the Kazakh steppe was conquered by and eventually absorbed into the Russian Empire. Throughout the Central Asian steppe, most feline remains consist of single bones scattered over a large area, their domestication status unclear. Steppe societies were largely pastoral and semi-nomadic, and cat domestication tends to go hand-in-hand with urbanization and agricultural settlement where stores of grain were in need of feline protection.
Located on the marshes of the northeastern coast of the Aral Sea, Dzhankent was founded in the 7th century and by late 9th, early 10th century had developed into a well-populated town overlooked by a citadel and defended by a perimeter wall. Its growth is linked with movement along the bristling caravan route network of the Silk Road.
The skeletal remains of the cat was found in the fill of an abandoned house at the intersection of the citadel and city walls. They were well-preserved with no weathering or evidence that the bones had been marked, cut, gnawed on or in any way altered post-mortem. The find site was a midden and contained large numbers of discarded animal and fish bones, but the cat’s bones were articulated so it seems it was buried in the trash pile, an “expedient burial” with no associated ritual. Radiocarbon analysis of the femur returned a date range of 775-940 A.D. making it the earliest domestic cat found on the Silk Road.
The cat was at least a year old at the time of death, and bone wear suggests it was older. Nuclear DNA extracted from the bones found that the cat was male and while its species could not be ascertain with certainty, its genome bears the highest affinity to the domestic cat (Felis catus). Isotope analysis found enriched nitrogen values indicative of a diet high in marine protein.
An examination of the tomcat’s skeleton revealed astonishing details about its life. First, the team took 3-D images and X-rays of its bones. “This cat suffered a number of fractures, but survived,” says [Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg’s Dr. Ashleigh] Haruda. Isotope analyses of bone samples also provided the team with information about the cat’s diet. Compared to the dogs found during the excavation and to other cats from that time period, this tomcat’s diet was very high in protein. “It must have been fed by humans, since the animal had lost almost all its teeth toward the end of its life.” […]
According to Haruda, it is remarkable that cats were already being kept as pets in this region around the eighth century AD: “The Oghuz were people who only kept animals when they were essential to their lives. Dogs, for example, can watch over the herd. They had no obvious use for cats back then,” explains the researcher. The fact that people at the time kept and cared for such “exotic” animals indicates a cultural change, which was thought to have occurred at a much later point in time in Central Asia. The region was thought to have been slow in making changes with respect to agriculture and animal husbandry.
The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports and can be read here.
Snail shells have revealed that the Cerne Abbas Giant, the figure of a naked man sporting a club and a 30-foot phallus cut into chalk hillside in Dorset, is medieval at the oldest.
Martin Papworth, senior archaeologist at the National Trust, and environmental archaeologist Mike Allen said two species of snail that appeared for the first time in Britain in the Roman period – thought to have been brought over from France as food – were not found at the site.
However, microscopic species, found for the first time in the medieval period during the 13th and 14th Centuries, have been discovered in the samples.
“They arrived here accidentally, probably in straw and hay used as packing for goods from the continent,” Mr Allen said.
These remarkably content-rich snail shells also revealed changes in vegetation growth on the Giant over time. At some point the grass was allowed to grow over the chalk outline, but he was back to full potency by the Victorian period.
Cerne Abbas first appears on the historical record in the 17th century. A note in a November 4th, 1694, churchwarden record from St. Mary’s Church records three shillings spent “for repairing ye Giant.” Antiquarian interest in the Giant really picked up steam in the 18th century. John Hutchins wrote in The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (1774) that the Giant was said to have been cut by order of Lord Holles, then the owner of the land, perhaps as an obscene parody of Oliver Cromwell. Local old people, Hutchins reported, “averred it was there beyond the memory of man.” F. J. Darton wrote in English Fabric – A study of Village Life (1935) that the Giant was the work of farmers who banded together to keep soldiers from looting their properties during the Civil War. They had no firearms and so used clubs against would-be raiders. They cut the Giant as a symbol of their strength and resistance.
Renown archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie surveyed the Giant in 1926 and concluded that it dated to the Bronze Age. His sole evidence was the presence of a nearby Bronze Age settlement. General Pitt Rivers, the owner of the Giant before he donated it to the National Trust in 1919, believed it was a Roman-era cult figure of Hercules with his club. Eighteenth century antiquarian Dr. William Stukeley was certain the Giant represented the “famous and first Hercules, the Phoenician leader of the first colony to Britain when they came hither for Cornish tin.” Other theories place its origin in the pre-Roman Iron Age, a representation of a Celtic god or the Anglo-Saxon god Helith/Helis.
We should find out just how wrong they were in a few months. Soil samples were taken from the giant’s elbows and feet in March are to be analyzed using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a technique that can determine when the minerals in the soil were last exposed to sunlight. The soil testing was delayed by the pandemic and results are now expected in the autumn. If all goes well, the OSL results will narrow down the date to a reasonably tight range.
The medieval shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral has been recreated and the videos released 800 years to the day since his body was translated to the cathedral on July 7th, 1220. A project three years in the making, researchers teamed up with digital modelling experts to create CGI models of the four main loci of pilgrimage in Canterbury Cathedral as they would have appeared to pilgrims in the early 15th century, a period for which there are numerous sources about the practices and operation of the shrine. What’s unusual about these video models is that the focus not just on the recreated the spaces, but also on how pilgrims of different classes interacted with the shrine, relics and cathedral.
Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was slain by four knights on December 29th, 1170, in the main hall of Canterbury Cathedral. Eyewitness Edward Grim wrote that the top of his skull was cut off and his brains scattered on the floor. The shock of this brutal assassination of a cleric on hallowed ground reverberated throughout Europe, and Becket was quickly considered a martyr. He was canonized a saint two years and two months after his death. In 1174, King Henry II, whose angry exclamation contra Becket had spurred the knights to commit this sacrilege, had to submit to a public act of penance at Becket’s tomb which had already become one of Christendom’s most important sites of pilgrimage.
He was buried under the floor of the eastern crypt covered by a stone slab. Two holes in the stone allowed pilgrims to kiss the tomb. The cult of Becket exploded and pilgrims visited the tomb in huge numbers over the next five decades. On the 50th anniversary of his death, July 7th 1220, Becket’s remains were translated to a new shrine in Trinity Chapel. The crown of his skull was kept in a gold reliquary in the Corona Chapel. The place of his martyrdom in the northwest transept and the original tomb were also sites of pilgrimage.
The shrine and Thomas Becket’s bones were destroyed by order of another Henry, eighth of his name, in 1538. Henry VIII went at Becket extra hard during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, even ordering the obliteration of his name, damnatio memoriae-style.
Using pre-Dissolution sources including first-hand accounts of pilgrims, archaeological materials (pilgrim badges, architectural features) and later scholarship, researchers recreated the physical sites and determined sums received at the four different stations and how well-trafficked they were. The Trinity Chapel shrine was the primary attraction, receiving by far the majority of the offerings. The Corona Chapel received the second highest sums (about 6-17%), the Martyrdom Chapel about 1-7% and the original tomb about .5-11%. The videos include people to convey how pilgrims made their offerings and moved around the sites.
Here is the digital reconstruction of Trinity Chapel, ca. 1408, viewed from the southwest.
Various pilgrim activities are taking place in the movie. A monk stands by the shrine and invites pilgrims to lay their offerings on the altar, including a merchant couple who present their child and give a candle in thanks for his deliverance from sickness, and a sea captain who gives a ring after surviving a storm. To the left of the screen, lower-status pilgrims have the miracle-stories in the windows explained to them by a clerk. Behind the shrine another monk points out the gems and precious objects to a higher-status merchant and his wife, encouraging them to add a gift of their own. In the niches around the marble tomb base other pilgrims pray to St Thomas on their knees.
This is the reconstruction of the Corona Chapel.
The Corona Chapel held a golden head reliquary, containing a piece of St Thomas’s skull that had been hacked off at his martyrdom. This reliquary had been remade in gold and studded with jewels in 1314. The popularity of pilgrim badges showing the head suggest it was a popular attraction within the Cathedral, but its small size and high value meant most pilgrims would only have been able to see it from afar.
The movie below shows the Countess of Kent, who has been invited by the Prior to a private ceremony. He removes the head reliquary from its display case, opens the top to reveal the relic inside, and offers it to the Countess to kiss. Her retinue of ladies-in-waiting look on, and pilgrims may have congregated outside the chapel to catch a glimpse of proceedings.
Third is the Martyrdom Chapel, site of Becket’s murder.
Here there was a small altar that had a reliquary containing the point of the sword which had cut into his head. The flagstones were said to bear the marks of his final footprints, and pilgrims came to kiss them.
The scene shows a mass on the morning of the Feast of the Martyrdom (29th December). On the eve of the feast a handful of hardy pilgrims were allowed to stay overnight in the Cathedral, swapping stories about Becket and eating and drinking around a fire. At dawn they went to the first of three Masses in the Martyrdom.
Last but not least is the original tomb where Thomas Becket’s body was kept for 50 years.
Even after the Translation, the now-empty tomb continued to be venerated as a site which had held the saint’s body – mostly likely by the long-term sick, who could stay without causing disruption to the activities in the cathedral.
A number of particularly ill or disabled pilgrims sit in long vigils around or at the empty tomb, while a clerk looks on to protect the valuables and aid those in need. To the left, a group of lower-class carers have formed a support group to discuss issues in caring for their sick relatives. As at the main shrine, a number of offerings in wax or crutches and other proofs of cure can be seen hanging around the tomb as proof of the saint’s power.
Two horses found in Bronze Age tomb in Kazakhstan are the earliest evidence of horsemanship on the archaeological record, 700 years earlier the previous oldest evidence of horseback riding. Evidence of horse breeding goes back to around 2000 B.C., but before this find, the oldest evidence of horse riding dated to around 900 B.C.
