The History Blog

The remains of a spider monkey have been discovered in the pre-Hispanic central ceremonial complex of Teotihuacan, Mexico. Spider monkeys were exotic animals not native to the arid highlands of Central Mexico, and this one was likely a diplomatic gift from Teotihuacan’s Maya neighbors. Radiocarbon dated to the second half of the 3rd century A.D., the spider monkey is the earliest example of a primate in captivity in the Americas, and the first evidence of gift diplomacy between Teotihuacan and the Maya city-states in the Early Classic period (250-550 A.D.).

Located about 25 miles northeast of what is now Mexico City, Teotihuacan was a religious, cultural and commercial center in the Mexican Highlands from the 1st century until its collapse around 500 A.D. At its peak in 450 A.D., it was the largest and most populous city in the ancient Americas with a conservative population estimate of 150,000. Half of the people in the Valley of Mexico lived in Teotihuacan.

It was not ruled by dynastic kings like the Maya polities. We don’t really know what form of government ran Teotihuacan, but we know it had powerful warlords because in the late 4th century, one of them conquered the Maya power center of Tikal 600 miles away. Maya inscriptions record Teotihuacan contact with the Mayan world reached as far as Honduras, perhaps even conquering city-states there, and certainly spreading its cultural presence, notably its characteristic obsidian crafts and architectural styles.

The complete skeleton of the spider monkey was unearthed at the Plaza of Columns Complex of Teotihuacan. It is a sacrificial offering deposited at the temple with its hands tied behind its back and feet tethered together. This type of binding was common among human and animal sacrifice victims buried alive. Next to it were found the complete skeletal remains of a golden eagle, the skull of a puma, several rattlesnakes and ritual objects (greenstone figurines, shell artifacts, obsidian blades). The monkey was female and between five and eight years old at the time of death. Analysis of the remains found that it was captured before the age of three and lived in captivity for more than two years after that. It ate a diet of maize, arrowroot and chili pepper, all of which had to have been prepared for it by humans. Before its arrival in Teotihuacan, it lived in a humid environment and ate plants and roots.

This finding allows researchers to piece evidence of high diplomacy interactions and debunks previous beliefs that Maya presence in Teotihuacán was restricted to migrant communities, said [anthropological archaeologist Nawa] Sugiyama, who led the research.

“Teotihuacán attracted people from all over, it was a place where people came to exchange goods, property, and ideas. It was a place of innovation,” said Sugiyama, who is collaborating with other researchers, including Professor Saburo Sugiyama, co-director of the project and a professor at Arizona State University, and Courtney A. Hofman, a molecular anthropologist with the University of Oklahoma. “Finding the spider monkey has allowed us to discover reassigned connections between Teotihuacán and Maya leaders. The spider monkey brought to life this dynamic space, depicted in the mural art. It’s exciting to reconstruct this live history.”

The find has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and can be read in its entirety here.

The House of the Vettii, one of the largest and richest homes in Pompeii, prodigiously endowed with a fresco of Priapus that has become an icon of the city, reopens to the public on Tuesday after years of complex restoration.

The House of the Vettii was the home of Aulus Vettius Restitutus and Aulus Vettius Conviva, freedmen brothers who made a fortune as wine merchants and ascended the social ladder. Restitutus was a candidate for aedile, a magistrate responsible for holding public games and the maintenance of public buildings. Conviva was an Augustalis, a priest of the cult of the deified Augustus, a position of civic importance that was more akin to a magistracy. In this role he would have funded major public works projects.

The Vettii bought the house, originally built in the 2nd century B.C., after the earthquake of 62 A.D. It was in a tony neighborhood that many of the wealthy homeowners had left rather than rebuild. When the rich moved out, the nouveau-riche moved in. Freedmen who had made big bucks in trade like the Vettii were a prime example of the trend. They bought the aristocratic villa, repaired it and expanded it, adding a huge peristyle garden with statues and fountains. Every room was lavishly painted with frescoes on mythological motifs, telegraphing their wealth and the new status it bought them. Priapus, his massive phallus balancing on a scale against a bag of money, welcomed visitors in the vestibule of the house. Two large bronze strongboxes were placed in the atrium so everyone who got past Priapus would be confronted with the the most literal possible representation of the wealth of the Vettii.

The frescoes are mostly in the Pompeiian Fourth style, a combination of the previous three styles (faux marble veneers from the first, architectural trompe l’oeil from the second, ornate, stylized ornament from the third). The Vettii frescoes provide unique insight into the transition between the Third and Fourth style of mural painting. There is also a remarkable series of striking black and red frescoes depicting groups of cupids performing a variety of tasks, mythological ones like celebrating a festival of Bacchus and a festival of Vesta, sure, but of particular note are the representations of daily work, including the gathering and pressing of grapes, buying and selling the wine, dyeing and cleaning clothes in a fullery, picking flowers and making garlands for sale, making perfumed oil and making coins. The cupids are also captured at leisure, hunting on goat-back, racing in chariots pulled by deer and taking part in an archery contest.

The room adjacent to the kitchen was painted with a series of explicit erotic frescoes. It may have been a visual menu of options offered by an enslaved prostitute Eutychis who advertises her services for two asses (plural of as, the lowest-value Roman coin) on a graffito at the entrance of the house.

The domus was first excavated between late 1894 and early 1896. In the 1950s reinforced concrete roofs were added to the peristyle to protect the architectural remains from the elements. It was no longer protecting it, however. On the contrary, the flat concrete roof was unsound and directly contributing to water infiltration and damage.

Already affected by works in 1995, when the problem created by the concrete roofs of the 50s was evident, the house was partially reopened in 2016, after 12 years of closure and then closed again after 3 years for further restoration. Interventions that involved the roofing but also the paintings, with the removal of the patina created by previous restorations.

The old concrete roofs have now been replaced with sloped roofs formed from hollow blocks on metal frameworks. The wooden roofs added in the 1990s are still functional but needed refurbishment, and a new rainwater drainage system was devised to integrate the new roofs with the existing drainage system.

Conservators also cleaned and conserved the wall and floor decorations and the fixtures of the garden. It was a painstaking process of cleaning, regrouting and integrating interventions from different periods with the aim of recovering the legibility of the images and colors.

Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old ice mummy found by hikers in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, is one of the oldest and best preserved mummies in the world. Much of his soft tissue, including his tattooed skin, survived, as did his clothing, quiver of arrows and other equipment, some of it damaged. Since his discovery, the prevailing theory explaining this exceptional state of preservation is that after a violent conflict, Ötzi fled to what is now the Tisenjoch Pass in the fall and froze to death in the gully where his remains were soon covered with glacier ice. In the deep freeze, the man and his belongings, damaged in the conflict before his flight, were preserved until they emerged from the thawing ice in 1991.

A new study published in the journal The Holocene by an international team of scientists has found the prevailing theory is wrong on pretty much all counts: Ötzi didn’t die where he was found; it wasn’t autumn; he was not quickly covered in ice nor did he stay frozen under a glacier the whole time; his equipment was not damaged before he died, but rather by natural activity in the millennia since. The study examined data recovered from other glacial archaeological sites, analyses of the finds assemblage and radiocarbon dates from the Alpine gully to investigate Ötzi’s archaeological context.

Glacial archaeology didn’t exist when Ötzi was found. His discovery, followed by several glacial melt-offs over the next decade, spurred the development of the new archaeological discipline, and in the last 20 years archaeological knowledge of high-altitude ice fields has expanded geometrically. Backed by the data, processes and knowledge of glacier archaeology, the new research into Ötzi’s death and mummification found that Ötzi died in the spring or summer when there was snow on the ground. His body and possessions only fell into the gully where they were found when the snow melted. For at least 1,500 years after his death, there were several smaller melt events that exposed Ötzi’s body and artifacts until around 3,800 years ago when the gully was finally sealed by an ice field of stationary “cold ice.”

This re-interpretation of the depositional and post-depositional history of the Ötzi find is not the clear narrative provided by the original interpretation, which combined a series of serendipitous circumstances to preserve a unique moment of the past. Maybe this is why the original story is still being told, even after scientific publications (from 1995 onwards) have repeatedly indicated that it was unlikely.

Ötzi continues to be the most important archaeological find from ice, even after glacial archaeological finds have appeared in the thousands. However, the find circumstances are not as special as originally imagined. Artefacts of organic materials dating from the Neolithic to the Roman period have now been found in nearby passes. In addition, the find circumstances of Ötzi are quite normal for glacial archaeology. The chances of finding another prehistoric human body, in a similar topographical setting as the Tisenjoch, should therefore be higher than previously believed, since a string of special circumstances is not needed for the preservation of this type of find, and relevant locations are now affected by heavy melt events.