Month: March 2023

Late Roman, early Saxon cemetery found near Leeds

Ancient, Medieval

An ancient cemetery that contains burials of both late Roman and early Saxon funerary traditions has been discovered in the town of Garforth, near Leeds. The excavation has unearthed the remains of more than 60 men, women and children from the significant transitional period between the end of Roman rule in 406 A.D. and the formation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the 6th-8th centuries.

There’s a clear distinction between the Roman graves, which were aligned east-west and the Saxon ones, aligned north-south. The Saxon burials contain typical grave goods like weapons and pottery that are different from the funerary offerings typical of the Roman burials. There are also a few burials that appear to indicate early Christian beliefs.

The most notable find was a lead coffin from the late Roman period. It contained the skeletal remains of an adult woman. Lead coffins were expensive, both in raw materials (large sheets of lead) and the expertise to craft them, so she must have been a member of the elite.

The cemetery was discovered last year, but was kept under wraps to give archaeologists the chance to excavate the site secure from would-be looters. An archaeological investigation was triggered before development of the site due to the proximity of late Roman stone buildings and early Anglo-Saxon structures. Some ancient remains were expected to be found, but the discovery of a large cemetery from such a historically significant transitional period came as a happy surprise.

After the retreat of Roman forces from Britain, what is now West Yorkshire was part of the Kingdom of Elmet, a British kingdom rather than an Anglo-Saxon one. Even bounded by Anglian kingdoms to the north and south, Elmet was unusually long-lived for a Brittonic kingdom, extending well into the 7th century when it was finally annexed by the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. This is the first Anglo-Saxon cemetery ever discovered in West Yorkshire.

David Hunter, principle archaeologist with West Yorkshire Joint Services, said: “This has the potential to be a find of massive significance for what we understand about the development of ancient Britain and Yorkshire.

“The presence of two communities using the same burial site is highly unusual and whether their use of this graveyard overlapped or not will determine just how significant the find is. When seen together the burials indicate the complexity and precariousness of life during what was a dynamic period in Yorkshire’s history.

“The lead coffin itself is extremely rare, so this has been a truly extraordinary dig.”

The excavation is now complete, and researchers will now focus on analysis of the skeletal remains. Bones will be radiocarbon dated to establish the timeline of the burials. Stable isotope analysis will also be performed to determine the geographic origins of the deceased. About half of the burials were younger than adult age, and there were several double burials, so researchers will be looking for evidence of disease as well.

Hiker stumbles on Roman site high in Bernese Alps

Ancient

A surprising wealth of Roman artifacts believed to be votive offerings have been unearthed at a remote site high in the Alps in the Bern Canton of Switzerland. It was an intrepid off-piste hiker who discovered the site while climbing the Ammertenhorn peak in the summer of 2020. He came across a Roman bronze coin and informed the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern which then carried out excavations at the find site, a high plateau 8500 feet above sea level.

In two dig seasons since the hiker’s lucky discovery, archaeologists have found a hundred more Roman coins struck from the 1st century to the 5th century A.D. The earliest is a coin of Tiberius 22-30 A.D.; the newest a coin of eastern emperor Arcadius (r. 395-408 A.D.). The team also unearthed 27 rock crystal stones, 59 Roman shoe hobnails, a fibula from the 1st century B.C. and a fragment of a bronze votive plate shaped like a leaf.

“We do find single Roman coins occasionally in the Alps, but this site is unusual because of the amount of coins and the location,” Regula Gubler, the study’s scientific project manager, told Newsweek. “More common would be finds—coins, brooches—on mountain passes. This site however, is far from human habitation, today and in Roman times, at 2,590 meters above sea level [nearly 8,500 feet], and definitely not a pass.” […]

“We are only at the beginning of the investigations, but we think it is a holy place, where people went to deposit votive offerings—mainly coins, but also other objects—asking the deities for things or thanking them,” Gubler said. “I guess a kind of pilgrimage.”

Comparable assemblages of these types of objects, particularly coins and rock crystals, have been found at Roman sanctuary sites, left as votive offerings by the devout. The rock crystals left at this site are naturally occurring on the mountain. They were likely not brought up there, but rather found and deposited. According to Pliny the Elder, rock crystals are ice that was frozen in the most intense cold. Alpine rock crystal, therefore, was the most highly prized of all. The prevalence of local rock crystal may have been part of the reason the location was seen as sacred.

A site so hard to reach had to provide a powerful motivation to draw visitors. Even today archaeologists had to fly their supplies up and hike for hours from the closest trails and roads. The breathtaking location of the plateau — between the sharp snow-covered Ammertenhorn peak and the Wildstrubel massif — also may have inspired religious awe.

We know that there was a Roman sanctuary in Allmendingen near Lake Thun just 12 miles away from the find site. From the 1st century A.D. until the Burgundian conquest of around 400 A.D., the Gallo-Roman population worshipped at an important cultic temple complex there. Votive inscriptions dedicated to Minerva, Mars, Diana, Mithras as well as local gods like Caturix and Rosmerta have been found in Allmendingen, and the Alps themselves were also invoked as deities. An altar base discovered in 1926 bears an inscription that dedicates the altar to the Alpine goddesses by the people of the “regio lindensis” (“lake region”).

The researchers will continue to study the site to find out more about its potential historical significance.

“It is an interesting site because it shows that the Roman population of the region didn’t only worship the mountains from afar, but also went up and close to them to deposit votive offerings,” Gubler said.

Unusual Roman cremation burial magically sealed with bent nails

Ex Cathedra

A 2nd century cremation burial in the ancient mountain-top city of Sagalassos, southwestern Turkey, contained a never-before-seen combination of deliberately bent nails, covering tiles and a layer of lime. These features, found individually in other burials in the ancient Mediterranean, collectively suggest the use of magic to keep the deceased from interfering with the living.

Founded in the late 5th century B.C. when the region was part of the Achaemenid Empire, by the 2nd century B.C., Sagalassos was an urban center of the Hellenistic Attalid Kingdom that was bequeathed to the Roman Republic with the death of King Attalos III in 133 B.C. Augustus incorporated it into the Roman province of Galatia in 25 B.C., and the city thrived in the Roman Imperial era. Major public buildings, city squares and streets were constructed and a new pottery industry mass-producing what became known as Sagalassos Red Slip Ware prospered, transforming Sagalassos into the pre-eminent city of the region. Under Hadrian the city saw another boom of public construction. The library, nymphaeum, Temple of Apollo and the enormous baths were built starting under Hadrian. The baths were completed and the theater built under Marcus Aurelius.

The city declined in importance in late antiquity, but continued to produce its eponymous pottery into the 7th century A.D. when it was severely damaged by an earthquake. It was much reduced in population after that and became largely agrarian until it was finally abandoned altogether in the 13th century when its fortress was destroyed by the Seljuk sultanate. Many of its remains were left undisturbed in subsequent centuries, and the Catholic University of Leuven has been systematically excavating the site since 1990.

In 2010, KU Leuven’s Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project embarked on a new exploration of the northeastern periphery of the city. The area was originally dedicated to agricultural terracing, but as the city expanded in the Hellenistic period, it began to be used for funerary purposes. The excavation ultimately uncovered inhumation and cremation burials dating from the late Hellenistic (c. 150–25 B.C.) continuously through the Late Roman (c. 300–450/475 A.D.) period.

The unusual cremation burial was in situ, the human remains burned on a pyre and then buried. The distribution of the charred bone remains indicate they were not collected or moved, which is atypical for 2nd century cremations.

Usually the cremated bones were moved into a cinerary urn before burial. Instead, here the pyre was covered with 24 flat bricks arranged in four rows. The undersides of the tiles were discolored from the heat, meaning they were placed on top of the pyre while the embers were still smoldering. The bricks were then covered with a thick layer of solidified lime, not the thin, temporary layer typically used to cover the cinerary remains before they were recovered for burial. This lime layer over the bricks permanently sealed in the cremated remains as much as a solid coffin or tomb would have.

Grave goods found include a 2nd century coin, a few small ceramic vessels dating to the 1st century, two blown glass vessels and a hinged object. Stratigraphy indicates they were buried in the first half of the 2nd century A.D., a time when these types of artifacts were common in burials.

Not at all common are 41 broken and bent nails found along the edges of the burn area. Twenty-five of the nails were bent deliberately at a 90° angle and the heads twisted off. Sixteen were deliberately bent or twisted but still complete with their heads. They could not have been used for a practical purpose (for example, in the construction of the pyre) and their distribution around the pyre’s perimeter points to them having been placed.

“The burial was closed off with not one, not two, but three different ways that can be understood as attempts to shield the living from the dead — or the other way around,” study first author Johan Claeys(opens in new tab), an archaeologist at Catholic University Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium, told Live Science in an email. Although each of these practices is known from Roman-era cemeteries — cremation in place, coverings of tiles or plaster, and the occasional bent nail — the combination of the three has not been seen before and implies a fear of the “restless dead,” he said. […]

Claeys thinks that the man in this strange cremation grave was likely buried by his next of kin in a ceremony that would have taken days to prepare and carry out. The set of beliefs that encouraged people at Sagalassos to bury this man in an unconventional way are best understood as a form of magic(opens in new tab), or an act intended to have specific effects because of a supernatural connection. It is possible that his odd burial was made to counteract an unusual or unnatural death; however, the researchers found no evidence of trauma or disease on the bones. Unfortunately, even though the “magic cremation” overlaps in time with other graves, Claeys said that “it cannot be established with certainty whether or not any family members were buried nearby,” as DNA is usually destroyed by high temperatures in ancient cremations.

“Regardless of whether the cause of [the man’s] death was traumatic, mysterious or potentially the result of a contagious illness or punishment,” the researchers concluded in the study, it appears to have left “the living fearful of the deceased’s return.”

The burial findings have been published in the journal Antiquity and can be read here.

4,000-year-old pyramid complex found in Peru

Ancient

An excavation of ancient mounds on the Cerro Colorado hill on the outskirts of Barranca, a port city on the central coast of Peru, has unearthed a monumental temple complex more than 4,000 years old.

A joint team of archaeologists from Peru and Poland excavated two of the four known mounds on Cerro Colorado. The initial small-scale surveys quickly encountered dried bricks and stone blocks. More extensive excavation unearthed a brick and stone pyramidal building. The blocks were bound by a mixture of grass and mortar. It was the grass of the mortar that was radiocarbon dated to between 2500 and 2200 B.C.

This was a period when agriculture became widespread among Andean cultures via contact with Amazonian peoples who had established agriculture-based communities thousands of years earlier. With farming came urban settlements and monumental structures, including temple pyramids. The largest Andean pyramidal temple constructions from the 3rd and 2nd millennium B.C. are at the ancient site of Caral 20 miles southeast of Barranca. The discovery of the Cerro Colorado temples expands the known geographic range of these complexes to the Pacific ocean.

Even after the cultures that built them fell and the pyramids’ original religious functions were abandoned, the sites were still recognized as sacred for millennia. In the recent excavation, archaeologists discovered burial bundles at the top of the highest mound. Radiocarbon dating of organic remains from the burials date them to between 772 and 989 A.D., at least 3,000 years after the pyramids were built, when the area was part of the Wari Empire.

One of the graves contained the remains of a young boy around six years of age when he died. His intentionally deformed skull marks him as a member of the elite, as does the extraordinary textile his body was wrapped in: a ten-foot-long rectangle decorated with zoomorphic motifs that is unique in the archaeological record of the Andes. His burial at the peak of the ancient mound also attests to his high social rank.

The colonial clergyman and researcher of South American cultures, Antonio de la Calancha (1584–1654), vividly described the surroundings of the city of Barranca. De la Calancha said it was full of sorcerers and witches.

“He even went so far as to say that there was a ‘witchcraft university’ in Barranca. He also mentioned a temple where these sorcerers would gather to meet a ‘demon’ who would then scold them for praying in Spanish and dealing with Spaniards in general” – [excavation co-leader bioarchaeologist Łukasz] Majchrzak said. The Europeans of the time referred to the pre-Columbian gods as demons.

“The unique location of our site, the lack of analogous places in Barranca, and finally our finds indicate that the temple mentioned by the chronicler was located on Cerro Colorado” – emphasized the archaeologist.

According to him, this means that pre-Columbian religious traditions were continued there more than a hundred years after the start of the conquista. This means that Cerro Colorado has been a place of worship for almost four thousand years.

Is this Vitruvius’ basilica?

Ancient

The remains of a large, luxurious public building from the Roman era have been unearthed in the northern Italian city of Fano. Located just opposite the ancient city’s forum, the remains consist of at least five rooms with more than six feet of the walls’ height preserved. The walls are five feet thick and coated in lime mortar. Marble slabs decorate the sides. The floors are also adorned with large slabs of expensive imported marble in green and pink.

The building dates to around 2,000 years ago. A fragment of an inscription that still bears traces of its original rubrication (the red pigment rubbed into the letters to make them stand out against the marble) was found. Only two letters are preserved on the fragment: a V on one line and an I on the line below it.

The location across from the site of the ancient forum, the scale of construction and the richness of the marble inlays of the floor and walls mark it as a major Roman public building of the Augustan era (1st c. B.C. – 1st. c. A.D.) There’s even an outside chance that this is the much-sought Basilica of Vitruvius, a civic building designed and constructed by the 1st century B.C. architect, military engineer and author of the seminal treatise De Architectura.

Vitruvius, who served under Julius Caesar in the 50s and late 40s century B.C., wrote De Architectura in the 20s B.C. It is considered the first book on architectural theory and is the only one from antiquity to survive today. After its rediscovery and publication in 1486, it became the primary reference for European Renaissance architects. In all ten books of the treatise, Vitruvius records only one building that he designed and executed personally: the Basilica of Fano, completed in 19 B.C. in what was then the Roman city of Fanum Fortunae (named after a now-lost temple of Fortune). It was located at a strategic trade junction where the Via Flaminia met the Adriatic and was an important urban center worthy of the innovative architectural grandeur of the Vitruvius’ basilica. In Book V.1.6-10, Vitruvius describes the basilica, listing its features and measurements in detail and extolling its distinctive proportions and symmetry which were markedly different from the typical Roman basilica of his time.

It was destroyed in the Gothic invasion of Fanum Fortunae in 540 A.D. Architects and artists have been recreating it in illustrations and models since the 15th century and many attempts have been made to find archaeological traces of the basilica to no avail. Chances are, this will be another false alarm, and even if it is a real candidate, getting firm evidence either way will be extremely challenging.

Excavation of the site will continue as soon as funds can be secured. A 2021 geophysical scan of the whole street, felicitously named Via Vitruvio, found indications of numerous walled spaces of different forms and dimensions under the street, but they are likely from various different eras, not a single Roman building.