Archaeology 20120304

July/August 2009www.archaeology.org A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America March/April 2012

HMS Investigator : Diving an Arctic Shipwreck

The Source ofRome’s LostAqueduct

PLUS:Pyramid of the Sun,New Viking Ruler, First Fish Hooks,Sex Pistols Graffiti

Return to theTrail of Tears

Coronado’sDeadly Siege

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24 Saga of the Northwest PassageDiscovering evidence of an ill-fated mission in the frigid waters of the Arctic

BY ALLAN WOODS

32 New Life for the Lion ManUsing recently uncovered fragments, archaeologists may be able to finally piece together one of the world’s oldest works of art

BY JARRETT A. LOBELL

34 Rome’s Lost AqueductSearching for the source of one of the city’s greatest engineering achievements

BY RABUN TAYLOR

41 Coronado’s Deadly Siege

Hundreds of metal artifacts pinpoint the possible site of a bloody battle between conquistadores and a Puebloan people

BY JULIAN SMITH

46 Th e Pearl TradeArchaeologists excavating on the shores of the Persian Gulf search for what may prove to be the source of the world’s longest-lived economy

BY ANDREW LAWLER

CONTENTSMARCH/APRIL 2012

VOLUME 65, NUMBER 2

features

24 Parks Canada archaeologists examine the top-yard truss of HMS Investigator, a polar vessel that sank after becoming trapped in ice in 1853. It is not known why this piece of the ship was buried on shore.

1

Cover: The grotto of Santa Fiora,

where the Roman aqueduct Aqua Traiana

may have had its source.

COURTESY OF RABUN TAYLOR

departments

16

4 Editor’s Letter

6 From the President

8 Letters Remembering a coal-mining past, alternate uses

for a fulacht fi adh, and is this a cave painting of a

rhinoceros or an elephant?

14

10

16

10

■ More from this Issue Head to www.archaeology.org/investigator to take a video tour of the shipwreck and to see a slideshow of paintings of the

vessel done by a crewmember. To see footage of archaeologists tracing the source of

Rome’s Aqua Traiana, go to www.archaeology.org/aqueducts

■ Interactive Digs Read about the latest discoveries at the Minoan site of

Zominthos in central Crete; at Johnson’s Island, a Civil War site in Ohio; and at

El Carrizal in Veracruz.

■ Archaeological News from around the world—updated by 1 p.m. ET every weekday. And sign up for our e-Update so you don’t miss a thing.

■ Stay in Touch Visit Facebook to like ARCHAEOLOGY or follow us on Twitter at

@archaeologymag.

9 From the Trenches Archaeologists uncover artifacts from the

dedication of Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Sun, new

fi nds at Stonehenge, DNA verifi es the authenticity

of Paleolithic dappled horses, and the

Sex Pistols were here.

22 World Roundup Infant remains tell how common breastfeeding

was in nineteenth-century England, a luxury Swiss

watchmaker is inspired by the Antikythera mechanism,

where diplomats visiting Japan once dined, and

drought reveals remains of space shuttle Columbia.

53 Letter from Tennessee Excavations at the untouched site of a U.S. Army

fort are providing a rare look at the Trail of Tears,

along which thousands of Cherokee were forcibly

moved to Oklahoma.

68 Artifact A coin from a more than 1,000-year-old Viking hoard

reveals the name of a previously unknown king.

on the webwww.archaeology.org

®

Follow your own path in Texas. To plan your own Texasadventure or to order your FREE Texas State Travel Guide, Accommodations Guide and Texas Map, visit TravelTex.com.

Our Need to Know

Our need to know who we are pushes us to discover what we’ve been. Some answers come to us from a variety of quarters and in a variety of ways in this issue.

In “Saga of the Northwest Passage” (page 24), reporter Allan Woods takes us to Mercy Bay in the high Arctic, the locus of activity surrounding the excavation of HMS Investigator. This vessel originally set out in 1850 to rescue other ships of the British Navy that were looking for the Northwest Passage. Instead, Investigator became trapped in ice and eventually sank. Now a Parks Canada underwater team is bringing her crew’s heroic story back to life.

Human endeavor could be seen as operating on an equally grand scale in the engineering works of the Roman Empire. Archaeologist Rabun Taylor, in “Rome’s Lost Aqueduct” (page 34), writes of his team’s search for the sources of the monumental Aqua Traiana far north of Rome—and offers an invaluable primer in hydraulics in “How a Roman Aqueduct Works.”

By contrast, artifacts of the slightest, most delicate sort are beginning to tell a tale in the Persian Gulf. As archaeologists unearth evidence of pearl diving and trade going back some 7,000 years, contributing editor Andrew Lawler’s story, “The Pearl Trade” (page 46), tells us that human fascination with pearls for personal ornamentation may have been the region’s first economic driver – long before the age of oil.

In “Letter From Tennessee: Return to the Trail of Tears” (page 53), writer Marion Black-burn brings us word of excavations in the Cherokee National Forest. There, archaeolo-

gists from two universities and the U.S. Forest Service are uncovering evidence of both the trail itself and Fort Armistead, one of the many stops along the way for the 13,000 Cherokee who were forcibly relocated out of the Appalachians in 1838. The work is instrumental in keeping evidence of this chapter in United States history from being lost forever.

And, in “New Life for the Lion Man” (page 32), by executive editor Jarrett A. Lobell, we are treated to what a more than 30,000-year-old work of art would have looked like as archaeolo-gists endeavor to restore it. We aren’t ashamed to say that we fell in love with “Lion Man.”

Of course there’s more – from new evidence of a Viking king to the latest findings of Coronado’s ignoble expedition, from new discoveries at Teotihuacan to the preservation of punk rock graffiti.

ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 20124

EDITOR’S LETTER

Editor in Chief

Claudia Valentino

Executive Editor Deputy Editor

Jarrett A. Lobell Samir S. Patel

Senior Editors

Nikhil SwaminathanZach Zorich

Editorial Assistant Intern

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Creative Director

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Contributing Editors

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David Freidel, Tom Gidwitz, Andrew LawlerStephen H. Lekson, Jerald T. Milanich,

Jennifer Pinkowski, Heather Pringle, Angela M. H. Schuster, Neil Asher Silberman

Correspondents

Athens: Yannis N. StavrakakisBangkok: Karen Coates

Islamabad: Massoud AnsariIsrael: Mati Milstein

Naples: Marco MerolaParis: Bernadette ArnaudRome: Roberto Bartoloni,

Giovanni LattanziWashington, D.C.: Sandra Scham

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EACH YEAR AT ITS annual winter meeting, the Archaeologi-cal Institute of America observes a moment of silence in honor of members who have died during the prior year.

It stands as a moving tribute to individual achievement and as a reminder of our collective identity as an organization devoted to archaeology. I would like to remember just a few of these indi-viduals here. As you will see, people come to archaeology from many quarters and contribute to it in many ways.

William Lawrence “Larry” Lehman III (1950–2011), a longtime member and president of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Society, exempli-fied the volunteer spirit that infuses our AIA societies. He taught

history and logistics management at Richland College in Dallas, and in its Rome Study Abroad program. Lehman, who was also a business consultant, first became interested in archaeology when he enrolled in a summer course at the field school run by Greg Warden, at the Etruscan site of Poggio Colla, near Florence. Thereafter, from 2002 to 2007, Lehman brought his considerable talents to the position of operations manager for the site.

Frederick A. Cooper (1936–2011), a member of the Minneapolis Society, taught at the University of Minnesota for most of his academic career. An inspiring professor beloved by his many students, he was awarded the AIA’s first Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1996. Although best known for his work on the Temple of Apollo at Bassae in Greece, a study to which he devoted more than 20 years, he also wrote on such decidedly non-Greek and nonarchitectural topics as Duccio’s iconic painting, the Maestà. In his many field projects in Greece—among them the Bronze-Age Palace of Nestor at Pylos, and the Heroon at Messene—Cooper combined a broad knowledge of antiquity with deep technical expertise in surveying.

The death of Lewis Binford (1931–2011) in April made national headlines. Father of the “new archaeology,” Binford moved the discipline beyond a narrow focus on collecting and cataloguing artifacts by applying the scientific method to the study of the human past. He is also known for using anthropological theory to solve archaeological problems. His pioneering study of caribou hunting among Alaskan Eskimos, and what it tells us about ancient hunters, constituted a new approach, which we now call ethnoarchaeology. In his later years, in order to understand how cultures might be shaped by factors such as climate change, Binford constructed a database using information from more than 300 traditional cultures.

Dedication, passion, and innovation defined the lives of these different individuals. For each of them, archaeology was a central concern, and each responded to the discipline in his own way. Together, their lives exemplify the breadth of archaeology and the many ways in which it touches people’s lives.


FROM THE PRESIDENT

Elizabeth Bartman

President, Archaeological Institute of America

Archaeological Institute of America

Located at Boston University

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First Vice President

Andrew Moore

Vice President for Outreach and Education

Pamela Russell

Vice President for Professional Responsibilities

Laetitia LaFollette

Vice President for Publications

John Younger

Vice President for Societies

Thomas Morton

Treasurer

Brian J. Heidtke

Chief Executive Officer

Peter Herdrich

Chief Operating Officer

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GOVERNING BOARDSusan Alcock

Michael AmblerCarla Antonaccio

Cathleen AschBarbara BarlettaDavid Boochever

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Lynne LancasterRobert Littman

Elizabeth Macaulay-LewisHeather McKillop

Shilpi MehtaNaomi Norman, ex officio

Maria Papaioannou Eleanor PowersPaul Rissman

Glenn SchwartzDavid Seigle Chen Shen

Charles Steinmetz Douglas Tilden

Claudia Valentino, ex officio Shelley Wachsmann

Ashley WhiteJohn J. Yarmick

Past President

C. Brian Rose

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Dedicated and True


LETTERSMining Memories of West VirginiaAs a native West Virginian, I trav-eled U.S. 119 many times and crossed Blair Mountain (“Mountaintop Res-cue,” January/February 2012). Being the granddaughter of two coal miners, I have experienced life in coal camps or company communities. I remember miners, black from head to foot, and widows struggling.

The mountains may be forever—the coal is not. Alternative and sustain-able energy is possible and profitable without destroying the environment to reap profits from finite resources in such a manner.

Beverly Henderson

Jackson, OH

Alternative Uses for Fulachtaí FiaI am a weaver, and the first thing that came to mind when I saw the photo of the fulacht fiadh (“Mystery of the Fulacht Fiadh,” January/February 2012) was that they might have been used as retting (soaking) ponds for making flax into linen.

Kristine Franklin

Hibbing, MN

The Irish of the day were concerned with cattle and hunting. One of the big threats to large animals in boggy areas is losing the animal in the bog. The ani-mals, domestic or wild, try to go to open water to drink but then get trapped. So why not make a simple structure that gathers water short of the dangerous areas? These troughs would likely get stale after a period of time and become havens for all sorts of nasty parasites. Why not drop in a few hot rocks and purify the water?

Brian and Wendy Connolly

Pittsburgh, PA

ARCHAEOLOGY welcomes mail from readers. Please address your comments to ARCHAEOLOGY, 36-36 33rd Street, Long Island City, NY 11106, fax 718-472-3051, or e-mail letters@arch a eology.org. The editors reserve the right to edit submitted material. Vol ume precludes our acknowledging individual letters.

I would suggest that these constructions were used for the tanning of leather. Many of the site characteristics you mention—local water source, soaking tub, wood ashes, heated rocks, and local botanicals, like peat or tree bark—are all important in tanning. Also, the isolation from dwellings coincides with traditional locations of tanneries because of the stench of the process.

Kelvin Kreymborg

Denver, CO

Rhinoceros? Or Elephant?In “Drawing Paleolithic Romania” (Janu-ary/February 2012), we ran a photo from Coliboaia Cave and wrote that it “clearly shows a rhinoceros.” Many readers wrote us to dispute our (and the researcher’s) inter-pretation. Here are a few of the comments:

The drawing looks much more like an elephant with its trunk raised. The points that may look like rhinoceros horns are probably tusks.

Cinda Glenn

Cincinnati, OH

Perhaps the rhinoceros is behind the elephant.

John P. Taylor

West Plains, MO

Cave art expert Jean Clottes responds:We always interpret images with what we know best, which may be misleading when out of context. In the Ice Age, there were no elephants in Europe, only mammoths—and Paleolithic artists did not draw them like that. In particular, they always showed the big hump of the mammoth’s head in strong relief. The Coliboaia rhino head is quite typical of the way they rendered rhinos, with their two horns and sketchy ears.

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LATE-BREAKING NEWS AND NOTES FROM THE WORLD OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeologists working in a tunnel beneath Teotihua-can’s Pyramid of the Sun

have unearthed two caches of arti-facts that may have been meant to consecrate the massive building’s construction around A.D. 200. The ancient city, which lies about 40

miles north of Mexico City, was once a major spiritual center with the Pyramid of the Sun as its largest monument. The research team, led by Alejandro Sarabia of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, expanded a tunnel that was originally excavated in the 1930s and dug additional tunnels out to the sides. The tunnels revealed a small artifact cache near the center of the pyramid and another larger cache about 125 feet away. The excavations

also uncovered four sacrifi cial buri-als, three of them holding children, in diff erent locations.

The cache at the center of the pyramid contained a pyrite and slate disk with a human fi gure made of obsidian placed on top of it. Projectile points as well as seashells and a few stone blades surrounded the fi gure. The larger cache comprised 11 clay pots dedicated to a rain god, obsidian and stone blades, projectile points, the bones of an eagle, and fragments of feline and canine

Under the Pyramid of the Sun

www.archaeology.org 9

A greenstone mask and projectile points (above) were part of an offering found in a tunnel at the base of Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Sun (left). The pyramid is one of the largest monuments in Mesoamerica.

FROM THE TRENCHES


Around A.D. 630, in western El Salvador, the volcano Loma Caldera erupted, burying the buildings, roads, and fields of a Maya farming community in up to 20 feet of ash. As with other cities and villages that have suffered this fate, this town, today affectionately known as Joya de Cerén (“the jewel of Cerén”) is incredibly well preserved. Though the site is in a tropical environment—a setting not conducive to the preservation of organic materials—archaeologists have discovered individual corn kernels, food residue in pots, two species of ants, and thatched roofs with the remains of mice in them, alongside buildings and massive amounts of pottery. The only thing

missing from the site are the bodies—the fates of the residents of Joya de Cerén remain a mystery. Discovered in the mid-1970s, the site has been excavated exclusively by Payson D. Sheets of the University of Colorado at Boulder. According to Sheets, when tourists ask Salvadorans what the biggest tourist attraction in the country is, they jokingly reply, “Guatemala.” Sheets hopes that sites such as Joya de Cerén, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993, will take their place alongside the Maya hotspots of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The siteJoya de Cerén dates to the Maya Classic Period (A.D. 300–900) and differs from most well-known Maya sites because it is predominantly a

nonelite site—a place where about 200 ordinary Maya lived, worked, and prayed. According to Sheets, the Maya of Joya de Cerén lived surprisingly well. So far, 11 buildings have been found, including living quarters, storehouses, workshops, kitchens, religious buildings, and a community sauna. A quarter of the pottery found there is of a multicolored variety imported from the Copán Valley. Casts of crops and fully stocked shelves entombed by ash have been found, confi rming that people there grew corn and manioc as staples. A big surprise came this summer when Sheets and his team discovered a sacbe, a formal road that heads south from the town’s religious complex. The site is easy for visitors to navigate. There are walkways and well-trained guides, as well as a restaurant/café, modern bathrooms, a gift shop, and an air-conditioned museum.

While you’re thereJoya de Cerén is just a 45-minute taxi ride from the capital of San Salvador, and your driver will be happy to wait for you while you tour the site. Three miles south is the Maya site of San Andres, the primary elite center in the Classic period, with pyramids, an elevated sacred plaza, and a modern visitor’s center. Back in San Salvador, the David J. Guzman National Museum of Anthropology is a must-see. And for adventurous types, the surfi ng in this part of El Salvador is considered among the best in the world.

—MALIN GRUNBERG BANYASZ

skeletons. Among the most intriguing artifacts were three carved greenstone fi gurines that depict human beings and a greenstone mask similar to those found in the tombs of some especially wealthy Maya rulers. It was the fi rst such mask to be found in a ritual set-ting at the site and does not appear to have been part of a grave.

The excavations also revealed that other buildings had stood on the site before the pyramid was built. The team happened upon the walls of three diff erent buildings and another

wall that may have surrounded a plaza or ceremonial space, providing some information about the early phases of construction at the site. Saburo Sugi-

yama of Arizona State University and Aichi Prefectural University in Japan, the archaeologist who directed the excavations, expects even more intrigu-ing fi nds will be discovered beneath the pyramid. “There is a good chance of fi nding the tomb of a ruler in the next year or two,” he says.

—ZACH ZORICH

Within a cache of artifacts, archae-ologists discovered clay pots with decorations dedicated to a rain god similar to Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain.

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At the beginning of the second century A.D., the emperor Trajan founded Plotinopolis

(“Plotina’s city”) in honor of his wife, Plotina. It soon became an impor-tant Roman city in the eastern area of Greece, known in antiquity as Thrace. Like most Roman cities of its day, Plotinopolis had a public bath structure. Digging where he believes the baths were located, archaeologist Matthew Koutsoumanis has recently unearthed the large and well-preserved mosaic that once covered the bath building’s fl oors. Thus far, 104 square feet of mosaics have been uncovered, which Koutsoumanis believes is about one quarter of the entire fl oor surface.

He hopes to have the entire mosaic exposed by spring 2012.

The mosaics, which date to the second half of the second or the early-third century A.D., show vari-ous scenes from Greek mythology, including the stories of Leda and the swan and the labors of Hercules, as well as a great variety of intricate multicolored geometric patterns. “Finding these mosaics has been really thrilling,” says Koutsoumanis, who has been digging at Plotinopolis for more than 15 years. “It feels like totally new, exciting information is there for us every day, just waiting to be discovered.”

—NIKOS ROUPAS

Roman Bath Tiles

Inside a kiln whose roof had collapsed, archaeologists excavating at the site of Villers-Carbonnel on the banks of the

Somme River in northern France, uncovered a rare terracotta female fi gurine. According to project archaeologist Françoise Bostyn, the discovery is exceptional due to both the completeness and rarity of this type of female representation at Middle Neo-lithic sites. Bostyn believes that the fi gurine, which shows evidence of burning, broke into pieces during fi ring. It is likely that her team was able to recover all the fragments

because the object was never removed from the kiln. The fi gurine, which measures just over eight inches long, was created by the Chassey culture, named for the site where evidence of the culture was originally found. The Chassey culture fl ourished in central and southern France between 4200 and 3600 B.C. Similar fi gurines have been found at other Chassey sites. According to Bostyn, the stylistic unity of these female represen-tations probably refl ects some sort of shared ideology and can be considered a mark of the cultural identity of the Chassey people.

—JARRETT A. LOBELL

French FemmeFROM THE TRENCHES

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Stonehenge and its surrounding area continue to off er new infor-mation about how the prehistor-

ic site was used. A ground-penetrating radar survey led by Vincent Gaff ney of the University of Birmingham has revealed evidence of two large pits that, when viewed from the Heel Stone, a small standing stone near the entrance to the site, align with sunrise and sunset on the summer solstice. The pits may have held wooden posts or standing stones, and the area between them and the Heel Stone may have been used for summer solstice rituals.

Some of the stones from the site were the subject of a diff erent study, by geologists Rob Ixer

of the University of Leicester and Richard Bevins of National Museum Wales, to determine where they came from. The researchers used a technique

called “petrography,” a common tool for geologists for more than 100 years. It involves looking at extremely thin slices of rock under a microscope and describing the way the minerals that compose it blend with one another to form a unique texture—as distinctive as a fi ngerprint. By comparing rock fragments from some of the site’s “bluestones” (a generic term used to describe stones outside the site’s iconic center) to samples from a rhyolite outcropping at Preseli Hills in West Wales (above), Ixer and Bevins were

able to narrow down the area where at least one stone had been quarried to a six-by-15-foot space. The information could lead archaeologists directly to the places where Neolithic people cut the rock that was made into Stonehenge up to 5,000 years ago. The geologists have examined about 700 pieces of rock from Stonehenge but have only completed analysis on a few pieces of rhyolite. “I’ve been at this for 20 years,” says Ixer, “but it is really just the beginning.”

—ZACH ZORICH

New Discoveries at Stonehenge

Weaving with Dog Hair

The oral history of the Coast Salish people—a collection of tribes that have inhabited

the Pacifi c Northwest and the west coast of Canada for more than 10,000

years—includes mentions of a Pomer-anian-like dog that was bred specifi -cally so its woolly hair could be used in textiles. Analysis of protein fragments from blankets more than 85 years old, one of which was obtained in 1803 by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, seems to support the stories.

Of nine Coast Salish blankets examined, scientists found that dog hair was used in fi ve. Goat hair, on the

other hand, was in all of them. “In a situation when the goat hair supply was limited, the yarn was made to the right thickness by adding dog hair, allowing a larger supply of yarn,” explains Susan Heald, coauthor of a study published in Antiquity and a senior textile conservator at the Smithson-ian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which sup-plied three of the samples.

The dog hair seems to have been incorporated into com-mon nonceremonial blankets and disappears from them not

long after contact with European explorers, who arrived in the late-eigh-teenth century with cheaper textiles.

—NIKHIL SWAMINATHAN

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16

Two 11-square-foot pits dug in Jerimalai Cave on the east end of East Timor, an island

nation off northwestern Australia, have provided some of the earliest evidence of fi shing technology. Though there is little evidence of fi shing activity beyond 10,000 years ago, fragments of fi sh hooks found in the cave date to between 16,000 and 23,000 years ago, making them the oldest ever recovered. A more complete hook dating to 11,000 years ago was also found at the site.

The inch-long hooks, all of which were made of shells from sea snails, would have been used to catch shallow-water fi sh, such as grou-per and snap-per, says Sue O’Connor, an archaeolo-gist at Austra-lian National University, who coauthored a study on the fi nds in Science. “They would have had a fi ber line attached to the shank, and bait put on the hook,” she explains. “Then, they would be cast or lowered into the water and left stationary.”

Fish bones were also found in the deposits. Off shore species, such as tuna, account for nearly 50 percent of the remains dating to earlier than 7000 B.C. After that, shallow-water and reef species start to dominate, likely due to warmer climate and the proliferation of reef habitat. The vari-ety of the bones depicts the humans of the time as skilled seafarers capable of fi shing many species in both shallow and deep water.


Reeling In Evidence of Early Fishing

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Petroglyphs found near the vil-lage of Qurta in southern Egypt have been confi rmed as the

fi rst known Paleolithic artwork in North Africa. They were dated using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence on sand that had piled up against the rock face where the images were carved. The team of archaeologists from Belgium, Australia, and the United States showed that the carvings are at least 15,000 years old and possibly much older. Before this research, the idea that Egypt had any Paleolithic rock art had been controversial.

The site consists of at least 179

fi gures deeply carved into sandstone. Many depict animals in a more natu-ralistic style than was used in later petroglyphs at sites nearby. Some of the most remarkable petroglyphs are less naturalistic—stylized images of people

with large buttocks, similar to ones made in Europe around 14,000 years ago. According to Dirk Huyge of Belgium’s Royal Museums of Art and History, these images could be evidence of an indirect link between very distant cultures. Since 2005, when the team fi rst pub-lished descriptions of the art at Qurta, four or fi ve other

sites with images made in a similar style have been identifi ed about 45 miles south of the site. “One fi nd pro-vokes another,” says Huyge. “Qurta has opened up a whole new area of Paleolithic art research.”

—ZACH ZORICH

Denmark Street, in London’s West End, contains a series of terraced houses dating to

the late seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the street was

notorious for poverty and prostitution, and by the twentieth, it had become a hub for musicians, music shops, and live venues. The Rolling Stones and David Bowie have histories there, and Steve Jones, founding guitarist of the seminal punk band The Sex Pistols, squatted at 6 Denmark Street, once home to a silversmith. Archaeolo-gists interested in the his-tory of antiestablishment, working-class punk music and culture have docu-mented drawings on walls there by Sex Pistols mem-ber John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) in the 1970s—profane graffiti and caricatures of himself (right), Jones, band man-ager Malcolm McClaren (left), bassist and singer

Sid Vicious, and others. The cartoons and graffi ti are representative of early punk in their rude, rebellious themes and could also represent a move by Rotten to take control of the band, of which he was not an original member. “This very archaeological record off ers something visceral and immediate, generating

unique insight,” wrote independent archaeologist Paul Graves-Brown and the University of York’s John Schofi eld in their paper about the site in the journal Antiquity. “We could sense their pres-ence as unruly ghosts, lounging on the sofas and writing on the walls,” though not all of them are dead just yet.

—SAMIR S. PATEL

FROM THE TRENCHES

Egypt’s Art Before the Pyramids

Rock Art Goes Rotten


Genetic material from the bones and teeth of wild horses, some of which died more than

20,000 years ago, has answered a long-standing debate about some Paleolithic cave artists: Were these ancient painters realists, depicting the natural world they saw around them, or did they portray more imaginative representations?

One of the paintings in question, The Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle, in a cave in southern France, is a nearly 25,000-year-old depiction of horses with spotted coats. While spots are seen in many modern horses, they were believed to be a product of later domestication and thus would not have coexisted with humans in the Paleolithic.

That belief turned out to be wrong.

Dappled Horse Paintings Decoded by DNA

An international team of scientists examined ancient DNA from predo-mesticated horse remains found in Europe and Siberia. The team found gene variants common to domesticated spotted horses in more than 20 percent of their samples. Though the fi nding doesn’t rule out some ancient creative

license, the artists could have seen spot-ted horses in the wild. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report, “At least for wild horses, Paleolithic cave paintings were closely rooted in the real-life appearance of the animals.”


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In a grisly discovery, Peruvian archaeologists have found the remains of at least 62 people who appear to have been ritually sacrifi ced about 1,000 years ago. Some were tied at their extremities, dismembered, or decapitated, while oth-

ers showed bone trauma, suggesting each had been thrown from a great height. The burials lie beneath a wide plaza, stretching between mud-brick mounds in the Batán Grande site near the city of Chiclayo. The location amid ancient ceremonial mounds, as well as the deliberate ways in which people were butchered, may indi-cate that the sacrifi ce was part of a religious ritual, says archaeologist Carlos Elera, director of El Museo Nacional de Sicán, who made the discovery in July 2011. “They were in very forced positions, suggesting sacrifi ce, but for now, we can only guess to what end,” according to Elera. Numerous food off erings, such as shellfi sh, and llama and dog bones, were found nearby. The bodies were arranged in two roughly concentric circles, perhaps evidence of two separate mass burials, says Elera. The plaza was a center of civic and religious life for the Sicán culture, which reached its apogee from about A.D. 900 to 1150.

—ROGER ATWOOD

A transparent calcite crystal found 30 years ago on a ship that sank in the English Channel in 1592

could help explain how Vikings were able to sail from Norway to North America 1,000 years ago without mag-netic compasses.

The sailors likely relied on the sun and the stars as their guides. Now researchers from France’s University of Rennes have demonstrated how a crystal called an Iceland spar (found in Iceland and Scandinavia, among other places), which was recovered from the shipwreck, could be used—even on a

cloudy day—to ascertain the sun’s posi-tion to within a few degrees.

When light passes through the crystal, it is double refracted—the light is split in two, creating an eff ect similar to a 3-D movie viewed without light-polarizing glasses. According to the authors, as a person holds up the crystal to the sun and rotates it, there’s a particular angle at which the two beams of light appear equally bright. By holding the spar at the same orientation and scanning a cloudy sky for a point where the beams line up, Vikings could locate the sun through cloud cover. “Vikings could have exploit-ed the high sensitivity of the human eye to small contrasts,” the authors write in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.


Mysterious Mass Sacrifi ce

Th e Vikings’ Crystal Compass?

FROM THE TRENCHES

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WORLD ROUNDUP


ALASKA: In a pit house

dating to around A.D. 1200,

archaeologists uncovered

a cast-bronze buckle that

appears to be East Asian

in origin and older than the

house in which it was found.

The oldest known cast bronze

in Alaska, the artifact may

have been part of a horse

fitting, perhaps traded in from

as far away as Manchuria. It

was probably used as a charm

or noisemaker by

a local Inupiat

shaman.

GRENADA: People on the tiny island

of Carriacou may have feasted on

animals imported from South America

over 1,000 years ago. Remains of

South American animals, including

piglike peccaries, armadillos, and

guinea pigs—none of which are native

to the island today—were excavated

from prehistoric middens. The find

suggests regular contact between

natives and people on other islands

and the mainland, but because the

bones are scarce, archaeologists think

only a select, high-status few got to

eat these exotic treats.

ENGLAND: Using

stable isotope

analysis, researchers

examined remains of

infants from the crypt

at Christ Church in

Spitalfields, London,

to study breastfeeding

in the 18th and 19th

centuries. They

found that prolonged

breastfeeding was common in the 19th century

among this relatively well-off population,

which does not necessarily agree with the idea

that more women were entering the workforce

at the time as a result of industrialization. The

breastfeeding mothers of these infants may

have had the means to hire wet nurses—or

they may have been homebound due to an

economic downturn.

semaker by

l Inupiat

an.

SWITZERLAND: High-end Swiss watchmaker

Hublot has created a wrist-mounted version of the

Antikythera Mechanism, the mysterious 2,000-year-

old astronomical machine recovered from a Greek

shipwreck in 1901. It contains 495

precision elements in a 3x4-centimeter

package. The manufacturers claim

that it is the first watch inspired by

an archaeological finding. Would a

wrist-mounted sundial count?

A

ered from a Greek

5

imeter

m

by

d a

PAKISTAN: Life in the

4,500-year-old Indus city of

Harappa is thought to have been

relatively peaceful. A new analysis

of human remains excavated

at the site found that while the

overall level of violence in the city

was on the low side for a state-

level society, it was not evenly

distributed. Some communities

endured much higher levels

of trauma, inflicted on women

in particular, suggesting a

potentially brutal social hierarchy.

TEXAS: The last issue

of ARCHAEOLOGY detailed

sites at risk (“Top Ten

Discoveries of 2011”),

including those exposed

by the drought in Texas.

In addition to wrecks and

human remains, receding

waterlines revealed

a mysterious 4-foot

aluminum sphere. NASA

officials confirmed that it

was a fuel-cell tank from

the space shuttle Columbia,

which was destroyed

during reentry in 2003.

Along with other remains

from the shuttle, it can

teach us something about

the effects of high-speed

atmospheric reentry.

23

By Samir S. Patel

www.archaeology.org

JAPAN: An excavation at a train yard

in Dazaifu has revealed the remains

of two large, prestigious buildings,

as well as expensive eating utensils

and pottery. The finds, including tin

and copper

alloy spoons,

Chinese and

Korean pots,

and Nara

tricolored

ware (the

finest

tableware in

Japan at the time), date to the 8th

and 9th centuries. The assemblage

appears to identify the site as a

diplomatic facility, mentioned in

ancient documents, that housed and

fed envoys from China and Korea.

OMAN: It’s often

thought that

modern humans

emerged from

Africa through the

Arabian Peninsula

by hugging its

shores, which may

have protected

them from swings in

climate. However,

100,000-year-old

stone tools found

in the Dhofar

Mountains suggest

that some people

traveled over the

now arid—though

once wet—interior.

The find adds

another layer of

complexity and

understanding

to the path that

modern humans

took on their way

around the world.

CHINA: A cracked skull may be the

oldest known evidence of interpersonal

aggression among modern humans. A

CT scan of the skull, which is around

130,000 years old and known as Maba

Man, revealed evidence of severe blunt

force trauma, possibly from a clubbing.

Remodeling of the bone around the

injury, however, shows that he survived

the blow and possibly was well cared

for after his injury—

for months or

even years.

s injury—

s or

s.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA: The

seafaring Lapita, who

settled the South Pacific

more than 3,000 years ago,

were not thought to have

lived in Papua New Guinea.

Findings from a new dig there have overturned that idea.

The remains of several villages, including stone tools,

shell ornaments, and thousands of pottery fragments

have been discovered. The site is both unusually deep—

including pre- and post-Lapita sequences—and perhaps

the largest Lapita landscape yet discovered. According

to researchers, the site opens a whole new chapter in

Pacific history.

PAP

se

se

mo

were

lived in

Findings from a new dig there

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Discovering evidence of an ill-fated mission in the frigid waters of the Arctic

by Allan Woods

Saga of the Northwest Passage


It was well past midnight this past July and the round-the-clock Arctic sun was shining on Mercy Bay. Exhausted Parks Canada archaeologist Ryan Harris was experiencing a rare moment of rest on the rocky beach, looking out over the bay’s dark, ice-studded water. Around him, a dozen red-and-yellow tents lined

the shoreline—the only signs of life. Every day for the previous two weeks, work had started by mid-morning and continued nonstop for 16 hours. Night and day had little relevance in the murky, near-freezing waters. Along with Parks Canada’s chief of underwater archaeology, Marc-Andre Bernier, Harris has overseen more than 100 dives at this remote inlet of Banks Island in Aulavik National Park, exploring the wreck of HMS Investigator, a British vessel that has sat on the bottom of the bay for more than 160 years.

Harris and a small team of archaeologists had discovered Investigator in 2010 and returned in 2011 with a larger team to dive, study, and document the wreck, which holds a critical place in the history of Arctic exploration. Twenty-fi ve feet below the surface, Investigator sits upright, intact, and remark-

Archaeologists from Parks Canada set up camp at remote Mercy Bay, in the high Arctic,

to explore the wreck of HMS Investigator, a British polar vessel that became trapped in ice

in 1853 and later sank.

ably well preserved. Silt covers everything below the main deck, entombing the offi cers’ cabins, the ship’s galley, and a full library. The archaeologists had intended to leave the wreck and its artifacts where they had lain since the polar ship was abandoned, trapped in ice, on June 3, 1853. Artifact recovery was not part of their original plan, but that plan changed after their fi rst few dives.

The team was instantly surprised by the number of artifacts they saw—muskets, shoes, and hunks of copper sheathing rested on Investigator’s upper deck, dangled off the hull, or lay haphazardly on the sediment. Leaving these artifacts behind in Mercy Bay would have made them vulnerable to the icebergs that regularly scour the bay’s fl oor, including the ones the six-man dive team had been dodging since their arrival.

Each piece fi shed from the water was a clue to life at sea aboard a ship during a period of British fervor for Arctic exploration. The captain of Investigator, Robert McClure, was originally sent to fi nd and rescue two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, that Sir John Franklin had led into the Arctic in 1845 to discover the long-sought Northwest Passage connect-


IN JULY 2010, AFTER months of study to pinpoint Investiga-tor’s resting place, the actual discovery of the wreck took just a few minutes. Harris was in the bay in an infl atable

boat testing sonar equipment when the wreck came into range. The four hours of video gathered on that trip showed that the ship was, in essence, frozen in time, protected by the cold water and opaque, light-blocking ice cover. It would be a year before they could return with cold-water diving equip-ment to have a closer, more detailed look. Over that year, the

ing the Atlantic and Pacifi c oceans. Investigator’s voyage ended, without sight or word of Franklin’s ships or crew, when it was set upon by ice in Mercy Bay. After 39 months at sea, the list-ing ship sat, slowly being crushed on all sides, for three frigid years—with no Inuit encounters, no British search parties, and no relief. For much of that time, McClure and his crew of 60 were desperate and under constant threat of starvation, until a surprising rescue in the spring of 1853. Fifty-fi ve men survived the ordeal.

A sonar image (top left) shows the intact, iceberg-scoured wreck of Investigator. Archaeologists found much of the ship’s protective copper sheathing (top right), including numerals to

indicate its load based on how low it sat in the water. Visible sheathing was measured (right). Among the artifacts retrieved was a long musket (above) that may have belonged to one of

the Royal Marines aboard the ship.


“We had not really envisioned the number of artifacts that were visible and exposed on the deck. So, basically, we had to improvise,” says Bernier.

Someone ripped the lid of a large black storage case off its hinges to use as a cradle to lift a bent and corroded musket from the frigid waters. A large food cooler was loaded with a shredded, twisted, oxidized sample of the copper sheathing used by the British navy to reinforce their Arctic fl eet for con-tact with icebergs. To protect a fragile rectangle of encrusted felt—a novel addition to Investigator that was intended to keep the ship watertight—Harris fashioned a cover out of absorbent chamois, ripped up an old black T-shirt to place underneath it, and sandwiched the artifact between fl oorboards taken from the boat that had shuttled them between land and the wreck. The artifacts then made a more than 4,000-mile journey, by helicopter, Twin Otter plane, and commercial airliner, to the Parks Canada conservation lab in Ottawa, where they are being conserved and studied today.

IMPROVISATION WAS ALSO CRITICAL for McClure’s Arctic odyssey, according to diaries and other accounts written by McClure and his crew. In January 1850, Investigator

and the offi cers, sailors, and marines on board set sail from Devonport, England. But the ship lagged behind its traveling companion, HMS Enterprise, which cleared out resupply ports along the way. In Honolulu, McClure heard rumors that his mission would be called off if he continued to fall behind. So he made a gamble, abandoning the traditional 60-day route into the Arctic, and followed an untested course due north through the gauntlet of the Aleutian Islands. He trimmed a month from his journey.

Parks Canada team pored over photographs and examined glowing gold ultrasound images that showed timber from the wreck scattered across the upper deck like matchsticks. They sought and received the blessing for a more intensive exploration of the wreck site from the 136 residents of Sachs Harbour, an Inuvialuit (Inuit from the western Arctic) com-munity on the southwestern tip of Banks Island, the closest permanent community, some 125 miles away. In addition to the underwater work to document the wreck, archaeologist

Henry Cary led a land-based survey and excavation team of Inuvialuit archaeologists, conservation offi -cers, and park staff . It fell upon Cary to shuttle the 8,820 pounds of equipment up to the 74th parallel, including tents, a three-week sup-ply of food, two boats, diving gear, compressors, recording equipment, surveying tools, and 20 barrels for collecting fresh drinking water.

The archaeologists came prepared for delays, nasty weather, and polar bears—but they weren’t prepared for the number of artifacts that needed recovery. Harris, Bernier, Cary, and their crews had packed cameras, lasers, and measuring tapes to document the sites but fewer items to help them retrieve, excavate, or transfer artifacts. Recovering the wreck’s fi nds quickly used up their small tool-kit for stabilizing artifacts: foam padding, tongue depressors, and gauze bandages.

On this map of the western Canadian Arctic (above), the red line follows Investigator’s path as it sailed into Prince of Wales Strait and then backtracked around Banks Island to Mercy Bay. The green line shows the crew’s course out of the Arctic after rescue. Investigator crewman Lieutenant Samuel Gurney Cresswell painted the ice-bound ship (right).

and the officers, sailors, andb d l l d

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db b


assistance on Melville Island, but they found no provisions or sign of rescue. They left a message in the hope that search par-ties might visit there. Both health and spirits began to wane, but there were a few reasons for optimism. As the ship’s supply of venison was depleted, Sergeant John Woon (later decorated for valor on the mission) felled two musk oxen—647 pounds of fresh meat. And as the symptoms of scurvy started to appear, they discovered a stash of wild sorrel and prepared salads to push back the disease.

“This was a totally alien landscape to them and yet, at the same time, men at least 10 or 15 years younger than me had been to India, Australia. They had sailed all over the world. So the idea of a new landscape was nothing unusual for them,” says Cary, who is 35. “But I think being stuck there would have played on their emotions.”

McClure watched his men grow sicker and weaker. In September 1852, losing hope, he devised a plan to send half the crew away for a better chance at rescue, while he and the remaining 30 would wait in Mercy Bay for another year

McClure pushed into the Prince of Wales Strait, which separates Banks and Victoria islands, and then set off with a six-man crew across the ice on a sled, hoping to fi nd a path through to the Northwest Passage. After days of travel, on October 26, 1850, his team spotted open water (now known as McClure Strait), and well-known Melville Island beyond. This was it: the Northwest Passage. But actually navigating the ship there would prove much more diffi cult. After McClure and his crew spent a winter stuck aboard Investigator in the Prince of Wales Strait, on the southeast side of Banks Island, McClure doubled back to circumnavigate the island in search of the open water he had seen from the sled. By the end of the sum-mer of 1851, McClure had sailed into the strait that now bears his name and reached the Bay of God’s Mercy (now Mercy Bay) on the north side of Banks Island, in the middle of the Northwest Passage. In the bay, ice set in and did not give way.

Almost immediately, the men were put on two-thirds rations, though they found deer and Arctic hare to hunt on shore. In the spring of 1852, McClure sent a sled team to seek

An underwater archaeologist floats beside

the Investigator wreck.


Cary was examining not only what materials McClure’s men brought to the north and stashed, but also what items were taken (or left behind) by Inuits who later mined the cache for clothing, or materials for hunting and cooking.

The itemized list that McClure left at the site states there were seven pairs of boots in the cache. Of those, the soles of six pairs of those boots were left behind, unused by visiting Inuits. This suggested to Cary that the soles were of no prac-tical use to the Inuit. By contrast, cans appear to have been coveted. Joe Kudlak, an Inuit patrolman with Parks Canada, found a tin can believed to have originated with Investigator a few miles south. An identical specimen was found at a kill

before abandoning the ship. At the same time, unbeknownst to McClure, HMS Resolute, another British polar ship, had arrived at Melville Island and had found the message McClure’s crew left earlier that year, outlining Investigator’s predicament and position. It was the fi rst word anyone had received from McClure in years and reason enough to send a search party to Mercy Bay.

On April 7, 1853, as McClure prepared to send his teams out in search of help, the fi rst of Investigator’s crew suc-cumbed to scurvy. McClure and his fi rst lieutenant walked along the shores of Mercy Bay, trying to fi gure out how to dig a proper grave in the permafrost for Boatswain John Doyle. In the distance, they saw what McClure later described as an image of one of his own men being pursued by a bear. As the apparition approached, it took on the shape of Lieutenant Bedford Pim of Resolute.

“The heart was too full for the tongue to speak,” McClure later wrote.

IN JULY 2011, HELICOPTER malfunctions kept Bernier, Harris, and the fi nal load of

equipment from reaching Mercy Bay for three days. For Harris, the logistical challenges were frustrating. For Bernier, they were agony. He had sat out the 2010 trip when Investigator was fi rst discovered, so he was dying for a look at the wreck. A second aircraft was called in and fi nally got everyone and everything to camp. Harris and Jonathan Moore, a British-born underwa-ter archaeologist, slipped into the water above Investigator for the fi rst time at 10:22 p.m. to assess the site, check for safety hazards, and decide what could be done. In 2010, the water had been crys-tal clear, so the wreck was visible from the surface. This time the water was hazy and murky, per-haps because of heavy runoff from the melting snow and ice. The two divers could see only 10 or 15 feet in front of them.

“As we proceeded toward the hull, it gradually started to loom out of the haze,” Harris says. “It’s really an exceptional shipwreck to behold, just sitting in this stately fashion, upright on the sea fl oor. It’s been heavily impacted by ice grinding down on top of it over the years, but it’s held together impres-sively well. It’s quite majestic.”

While the divers explored the wreck, Cary led the search for remains of the McClure expedition on land. In 2010, his team had found a depot of supplies, known as McClure’s cache, which the crew left on the shore of Mercy Bay as an insurance policy for waylaid sailors like themselves. In studying the cache,

Archaeologists documented and excavated terrestrial sites, including McClure’s cache (top), where the crew stashed supplies, and a stone cairn (above) that the crew erected as a signal for passing ships.


IN THE OTTAWA LABORATORY where the materials recov-ered so far are being studied and analyzed, other rich stories of McClure’s era and his adventures are emerging.

The bent, broken, and corroded musket, for example, likely belonged to one of eight Royal Marines aboard the ship. The iron, copper, and wood specimen is still soaking in a bath of deionized water months after being recovered, but it’s in good enough shape to see the markings on the butt plate.

“1842, we believe, is the likely date of manufacture,” according to Harris.

“It’s kind of worn,” says Parks Canada conservator Flora Davidson, who runs the chemical baths used to remove the saltwater from the artifacts and preserve the metals. Also visible is the marking “W&D,” which the researchers believe shows that the owner of the gun was posted to the Woolwich Division of the Royal Marines, stationed at the Woolwich Dockyards in London.

“Possibly, the record might exist to attribute this particular weapon to an individual, which makes it kind of exciting,” Harris says.

Each piece of copper sheathing affi xed to the hull of Investigator is marked not only with its place and date of production, but also with a broad arrow, showing it to be property of the British navy. The same arrow shows up on fasteners, bolts, and the tiniest tacks, as well as on X-rays of a wooden rope pulley that Bernier raised from the wreck. Initially, the pulley was covered in mud, but after some cleaning, the archaeologists noticed that it also contained several strands of cord. The lab showed that the cord contained not just hemp, which was the primary choice of material for rope back then, but also wool—“Rogue’s Wool,” to be precise. They believe the fabric, now a muddy brown color, was originally red, identifying it as the offi cial rope of London’s Deptford Dockyard.

Also in the lab, in a shallow basin, is what Harris refers to as a “potentially one-of-a-kind artifact.” Soaking in water in the basin is the gray, rectangular sheet of thick, coarse felt, stained with bright orange patches of rust and little bolt

site for musk oxen 15 minutes away by helicopter. Still others have been found cut up and refashioned by Inuit into blades and other cutting tools that incorporate bones, antlers, and other more traditional Inuit materials.

Cary also used the writings of Johann Miertsching, a Mora-vian missionary who had spent time with Inuit in Labrador and was part of Investigator’s crew, to locate the whalebone rem-nants of a Paleoeskimo camp site dating back 2,500 years. A new translation of those writings, plus a magnetometer, which measures magnetic fi elds, also helped the team in 2010 fi nd the graves of the three crew members who died at Mercy Bay. The bodies of John Eames, John Boyle, and John Kerr were all found lying in a north-to-south line facing east, in keeping with the Anglican tradition. Because of the permafrost, the earth at the graves was still raised. The graves might have been dug and fi lled in yesterday, Cary says, underlining for him the power and permanence of the Investigator story.

“It hasn’t changed in 150 years. When you’re standing at McClure’s cache, the landscape that the men of Investigator would have looked out at from the ship and from the shore is exactly the same. There’s been absolutely no change whatso-ever,” he says. “And when you’re at the Paleoeskimo site, you realize there’s been no change for 2,500 years.”

In the 2011 fi eld season, Cary and his crew strapped a high-resolution digital camera to the bottom of a helicopter and photographed the area with the goal of testing the accu-racy of a topographic map made in 1853 by Stephen Court, the second master aboard Investigator. They also collected several terrestrial artifacts, including the head of a barrel believed to have belonged to the British military and a quartz knife made at the Paleoeskimo site.

“It was just sitting there,” Cary says of the discovery.They also recovered a large bell-shaped iron truss, fi rst

located decades ago, that is believed to have supported Inves-tigator’s topsail. It was found on the beach, buried under loose rock on the shore. No one knows how it got there, but the clamp section, once round, is now oval—a testament to the crushing power of Arctic sea ice.

Archaeologists retr ieved a double-sheave pulley from the ship’s rigging. An X-ray of the artifact reveals the British broad arrow stamped onto the spokes of both of the pulley’s brass sheaves.


THE IRONIES OF INVESTIGATOR’S tale are that what began as a rescue mission required a rescue of its own, and that the expedition eventually achieved the tasks that had

been set for Franklin and the now-lost HMS Erebus and HMS Terror (for which Parks Canada is also searching). However, Franklin and those earlier lost ships have long overshadowed McClure, his crew, and their accomplishments. The 55 members of Investigator’s crew who returned home to England received a hero’s welcome and a 10,000 pound reward—half for McClure and half distributed among the others. Despite their initial acclaim, their eff orts were largely forgotten. The Investigator crew returned to a country that had largely tired of Arctic exploration. It was felt that these expeditions had eaten up too much time, too much money, and too many men. Perhaps a cold death might have secured them more enduring fame.

McClure and his crew, however, understood their achieve-ment. It is known that while stuck in the ice, they celebrated every October 26 (when McClure fi rst saw the strait now named after him) as the day that they had discovered the Northwest Passage. What’s more, because they had entered the Northwest Passage from the west and were rescued from the east, those men were the fi rst—by ship, foot, sled, and ship again—to make it all the way through the legendary northern route between the oceans.

“Our goal,” Harris says, “is to remove Investigator from the margins of history.” ■

Allan Woods is a writer and reporter at the Toronto Star. For

video of the Investigator wreck and a slideshow of paintings of

the ship, go to www.archaeology.org/investigator

holes. Harris’ black T-shirt, brought into service as a pro-tective pad, peeks out from beneath it. The material is not unlike today’s felt—a pressed textile—however, this sturdy stuff would have been used to waterproof ships. There are stories of damaged vessels limping back to England only to discover that their felt was all that had been keeping them afl oat. Drawings of Investigator show that the felt was placed beneath the wood on the upper deck and all along the rein-forced hull. This is a rare fi nd, as few similar samples from the period have been discovered or preserved.

Under the microscope, the felt yields a particularly Cana-dian surprise. It is woven from the guard hairs of beaver pelts—known for their water resistant qualities—suggest-ing that at least one North American pelt had made a round trip to England and back again. Now the team at the Parks

Canada lab is looking into how the textile was produced—by hand or machine—and examining the properties that made it so well suited to service in the Arctic.

“Not too many of these have been found, so we’re, in a way, breaking new ground and asking questions that have never been asked before,” says Bernier.

“Yeah,” Davidson interjects. “You keep on bringing in these strange things, and when I consult my colleagues, they just say, ‘Good luck with that.’”

Archaeologists from Parks Canada, on the shore of Mercy Bay, examine the felt sheet recovered from the Investigator wreck site. A rare artifact, the hearty fabric was applied along the inside of Investigator’s hull and beneath her upper deck to insulate the vessel and make her more watertight.

ON AUGUST 25, 1939, archaeologists working at a Paleolithic site called Stadelhole (“stable cave”) at Hohlenstein (“hollow rock”) in southern Germany, uncovered hundreds of mammoth ivory fragments. Just one week later, before they could complete their fi eld-

work and analyze the fi nds, World War II began. The team was forced to quickly fi ll the excavation trenches using the same soil in which they found the ivory pieces. For the next three decades, the fragments sat in storage at the nearby City Museum of Ulm, until archaeologist Joachim Hahn began an inventory. As Hahn pieced together more than 200 fragments, an extraordinary artifact dating to the Aurignacian period (more than 30,000 years ago) began to emerge. It was clearly a fi gure with both human and animal characteristics. However, only a small part of the head and the left ear had been found, so the type of creature it represented remained a mystery.

Between 1972 and 1975, additional fragments from excavation seasons in the 1960s, which had been stored elsewhere, and still others picked up from the cave’s fl oor, were taken to the museum. Yet it took until 1982 for pale-ontologist Elizabeth Schmidt to put the new pieces together with Hahn’s earlier reconstruction. Schmidt not only cor-rected several old errors, but also added parts of the nose and mouth that made it clear that the fi gurine had a cat’s head. Although the artifact is often called

Lowenmensch (the “lion man”), the word mensch is not specifi -cally male in German, and neither the gender of the animal nor of its human parts is discernible. Five years later, to conserve the fi gurine, the glue that held it together was dissolved. It was then carefully put back together, revealing that only about two thirds of the original had actually been recovered.

This changed in 2008, when archaeologist Claus-Joachim Kind returned to the site at Hohlenstein. Kind removed the old backfi ll from the hastily concluded excavation of 1939. Over the next three years, Kind’s team found several hundred more small mammoth ivory fragments. “In 2009, when we found the fi rst ones, it was a huge surprise,” says Kind. “But this is exactly the spot where the fragments of

the fi gurine were originally found, so I knew right away that some belonged to the lion man. It had clearly been dam-aged during the earlier excavations. Only the larger pieces were collected and the smaller ones left behind,” he adds. Kind was able to fi t several of the new pieces to form part of the back and neck, and a computer simulation of the lion man was created, showing the placement of several more previously unattached fragments. “At the end of the 2011 season, all the backfi ll will have been removed. There will be no more pieces left,” says Kind. “We hope that the lion man will fi nally be complete.” ■

Jarrett A. Lobell is executive editor at

ARCHAEOLOGY.


Using recently uncovered fragments, archaeologists may be able to fi nally piece together one of the world’s oldest works of art

by Jarrett A. Lobell

New Life for the Lion Man

For more than 70 years, archaeologists have been piecing together the “lion man” out of mammoth ivory fragments unearthed in a southern German cave. The figurine (right) is currently on display in the City Museum of Ulm, in Germany. New p ieces are being fitted onto the back of the figurine (left). Digital images (bottom, left and right) are helping archaeologists envision the way the figure will look when it is complete. Newly found fragments (red) and ones found previously that have never been placed (green) are shown as they will be fitted during a complete restoration this year.


FEW MONUMENTS THAT survive from antiq-uity better represent Roman pragmatism, ingenuity, and the desire to impress than the aqueducts built to fulfi ll the Romans’ seemingly unslakable need for water. Around the turn of the second century

A.D., the emperor Trajan began construction on a new aqueduct for the city of Rome. At the time, demands on the city’s water supply were enormous. In addition to satisfying the utilitarian needs of Rome’s one million inhabitants, as well as that of wealthy residents in their rural and suburban villas, water fed impressive public baths and monumental fountains throughout the city. Although the system was already suffi cient, the desire to build aqueducts was often more a matter of ideology than absolute need.

Whether responding to genuine necessity or not, a new aqueduct itself was a statement of a city’s power, grandeur, and infl uence in an age when such things mattered greatly. Its creation also glorifi ed its sponsor. Trajan—provoked, in part, by the unfi nished projects of his grandiose predecessor, Domitian—seized the opportunity to build his own monumental legacy in the capital: the Aqua Traiana (“Aqueduct of Trajan” in Latin). The aqueduct further burnished the emperor’s image by bringing a huge volume of water to two of his other massive projects—the Baths of Trajan, overlooking the Colosseum, and the Naumachia of Trajan, a vast open basin in the Vatican plain surrounded by spectator seat-ing for staged naval battles.

Upon its completion, the Aqua Traiana was one of the 11 aqueducts that, by the end of the emperor’s reign, car-ried hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day. It was also one of the largest of the aqueducts that sustained the ancient city between 312 B.C., when Rome received its fi rst one, and A.D. 537, when the Goths besieged the city and reportedly cut every conduit outside the city walls. At the time of its dedication in A.D. 109, the Aqua Traiana ran for more than 25 miles, beginning at a cluster of springs on the northwestern side of Lake Bracciano before heading southeast to Rome. How-ever, for all the aqueduct’s importance to the city, its sources and the architecture that marked them have eluded archaeologists despite centuries of searching. Now, thanks to an unusual set of circumstances that preserved them, the Aqua Traiana’s sources are being brought to light at last. And for the fi rst time, a well-preserved, monumentalized aqueduct source associated with a Roman aqueduct has been identifi ed.


Searching for the source of one of the city’s greatest

engineering achievements

by Rabun Taylor


Archaeologist Katherine Rinne stands beside a large ancient Roman springhouse that may belong to the lost “Carestia”

spring, one of the possible sources of the Aqua Traiana.

Rome’s Lost Aqueduct


aqueduct. These ancient remains were built in a style charac-teristic of the second century A.D., with concrete walls faced with either brickwork or opus reticulatum—stone squares set in a precise diagonal grid. Both above- and belowground, the water channel was vaulted with plain concrete and lined below

the vault with opus signinum, a cement that the Romans had used for centuries

to waterproof fl oors, cisterns, and aqueducts. By contrast, the parts of the Acqua Paola still fl ow-ing today show no evidence of ancient masonry. In fact, a coat-ing of modern cement entirely

obscures what may lie in the walls underneath. The best evidence for

the marriage of old and new is in the “dead” sectors of the Acqua Paola, remote branches that no longer contain water and have been mostly ignored by scholars looking for evidence of the Aqua Traiana’s sources. In the nine-teenth and early-twentieth centuries, the landscape around Lake Bracciano consisted of more open pasturage than today’s dense thickets that cover fi ercely guarded private lands on the lake’s slopes. But even then, sustained searches yielded few

IN 2008, DOCUMENTARY film-makers Ted and Mike O’Neill began a project to reinves-

tigate Rome’s aqueducts. The O’Neills started to review the existing scholarship on the aque-ducts and their sources. To these self-described “archive rats,” the results weren’t at all satisfying. Scholars had repeatedly ignored or misinterpreted valuable evidence from descriptive documents dating from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries—for example, Carlo Fea’s History of the Waters of Rome of 1832. Soon, the Aqua Traiana became the focus of their research, since they knew it had enjoyed an extensive revival centuries after its construction. During the Middle Ages, the aqueduct had fallen into ruin. In the early 1600s, Pope Paul V—an ambitious builder much like Tra-jan some 1,500 years before him—undertook construction of a massive new aqueduct. At that time, some standing remains of the Aqua Traiana were probably still visible here and there in the countryside. Many of the original springs were still fl owing. And it may have been possible to locate buried sections of the aqueduct by following its path underground.

The pope tasked his engineers with locating the still-fl owing springs, buying the land on which they were located, and connecting them to the planned aqueduct. Once again, waters were brought to Rome from the slopes above Lake Bracciano, this time under the name Acqua Paola (“Paul’s Waters” in Italian). Despite the pope’s public assertion that he had relied on the sources and remains of an ancient aqueduct to build the Acqua Paola, nobody had ever been able to verify this claim, much less associate the remains of the Renaissance aqueduct with those of any ancient aqueduct.

Several above- and belowground sections of the Aqua Traiana are known today, but few of them were directly incorporated into the pope’s

the vault the R

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obunde

the mar

e-ese results

A team, including (from left to right), filmmakers Ted and Mike O’Neill, and archaeologists Rabun Taylor and Katherine Rinne, is trying to pinpoint the Aqua Traiana’s source. The emperor Trajan issued a bronze sestertius with his likeness (obverse) to celebrate the aqueduct’s completion. The reclining god (reverse) represents the aqueduct, and the arch suggests the grottos at its sources.

OrioloRomano TREVIGNANO

ROMANO

Hybrid Duct ofTraiana/Paola

LegendHydrologic Feature

Acqua Paola

Verified Aqua Traiana

Verified Acqua Paola/ Aqua Traiana

Unverified Aqua Traiana

MANZIANA

ANGUILLARASABAZIA

LAKE BRACCIANO

BRACCIANO

LAKE MARTIGNANO

Roman Bath

Monte di Rocca Romana

Hybrid Duct of Traiana/Paola

Aqua Traiana Bridge

Roman Cistern

Acqua Paola Bridge

Santa Fiora

Fosso della Fiora

Fosso della Calandrina

Trajanic Bricks

Fosso dei Bagni

PISCIARELLI

Aqueduct Continues to Rome

Fosso Bocca di Lupo

!

0 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000Meters

.Fosso

A project map shows a portion of the aqueduct’s infrastructure and path.


ANCIENT AQUEDUCTS WERE essentially man-made streams conducting water downhill from the natu-ral sources to the destination. To tap water from a

river, often a dam and reservoir were constructed to create an intake for the aqueduct that would not run dry during periods of low water. To capture water from springs, catch basins or springhouses could be built at the points where the water issued from the ground or just below them, connected by short feeder tunnels. Having fl owed or fi ltered into the springhouse from uphill, the water then entered the aque-duct conduit. Scattered springs would require several branch conduits feeding into a main channel.

If water was brought in from some distance, then care was taken in surveying the territory over which the aque-duct would run to ensure that it would fl ow at an accept-able gradient for the entire distance. If the water ran at too steep an angle, it would damage the channel over time by scouring action and possibly arrive too low at its destina-tion. If it ran too shallow, then it would stagnate. Roman

aqueducts typically tapped springs in hilly regions to ensure a suffi cient fall in elevation over the necessary distance. The terrain and the decisions of the engineers determined this distance. Generally, the conduit stayed close to the surface, following the contours of the land, grading slightly downhill along the way. At times, it may have traversed an obstacle, such as a ridge or a valley. If it encountered a ridge, then tunneling was required. If it hit a valley, a bridge would be built, or sometimes a pressurized pipe system, known as an inverted siphon, was installed. Along its path, the vault of the conduit was pierced periodically by vertical manhole shafts to facilitate construction and maintenance.

Upon arrival at the city’s outskirts, the water reached a large distribution tank called the main castellum. From here, smaller branch conduits ran to various districts in the city, where they met lower secondary castella. These branched again, often with pipes rather than masonry channels, supply-ing water under pressure to local features, such as fountains, houses, and baths. —R.T.

How a Roman Aqueduct Works

Unlike the Aqua Traiana, substantial remains of the Aqua Claudia, begun by the emperor Caligula in A.D. 38 and completed by Claudius in A.D. 52, still stand outside of Rome. The aqueduct traveled for more than 40 miles from its source and provided the city with an ample water supply.


the Madonna of the Flower. Although the church had a long, well-documented history, it is almost unknown to scholars. Church records appear in the archives of the Orsini family, the local bishopric, and the hospital of Santo Spirito in Saxia at Rome, which controlled the property from as early as 1238. These documents contain a wealth of information about the church—that it was a hermitage, for example, and that it pos-sessed a miracle-working portrait of the Virgin Mary. To judge from ledges for lamps hacked into the walls, it would seem that the hermits actually lived in the grotto itself.

traces of the older aqueduct. As recently as the 1970s, archaeologists from the British School at Rome conducted an intensive survey of the area. They were able to document previously unknown fragments of the aqueduct, yet they found no structures that could be identifi ed as marking a source.

AFTER MONTHS OF SEARCHING through archives, the O’Neills realized that scholars had been missing important

clues that could lead to sources of the Aqua Traiana and perhaps even to some ancient Roman architecture signaling their presence. Although the post-Roman names of three springs—Matrice, Carestia, and Fiora, near the town of Manziana, on the west side of Lake Bracciano—appear in reports written by the Acqua Paola’s engineers, it was always thought that none of these springs had ever contrib-uted to that aqueduct. The Santa Fiora spring had been in constant use for decades by the Orsini family, the dominant local landowners, to power their profi table lakeside mills. But the O’Neills wondered if any of the three had also supplied the Aqua Traiana almost 1,500 years earlier. A few antiquarians in the 1700s and 1800s had claimed as much, but they had said little to help later scholars identify the sources.

While a spring named “Matrice” exists today, it has clearly been in use since pre-Roman times. The spring emerges from an Etruscan irrigation tunnel called a cuniculus, which dates to the sixth or fi fth century B.C., but it bears no visible evidence of Roman remains. Because the name “Carestia” is unknown in the region today, the O’Neills focused on the Fiora as the possible source of the Aqua Traiana. They knew that Pope Paul’s engineers, Luigi Bernini and Carlo Fontana, had measured the fl ow of the Fiora’s water in the seventeenth century, and it had been the most copious of all the springs in the region at that time. After a quick glance at some maps, including the most recent ones, they noticed a spot labeled “Santa Fiora.” To the O’Neills’ surprise, however, they could not initally fi nd any detailed description of this place anywhere, whether in modern or older documents, so they resolved to fi nd it for themselves.

Late in 2008, with the assistance of local offi cials, the O’Neills gained entrance to the site called Santa Fiora, which lies on a small farm at Manziana. What they saw, hidden within a dense stand of trees, astonished them. Under a huge overhanging fi g tree, an almost perfectly preserved artifi cial grotto peered out from the hillside. Just up the hill, they saw traces of a structure that had once stood directly over it. Subsequent visits to the archives would reveal that this was a thirteenth-century church called Santa Fiora, dedicated to

An arch leading to the right-hand chamber at the Santa Fiora springhouse (top left) has been walled in, leaving only a small entrance near the crown. The right-hand chamber or springhouse (top right) connects directly to the conduit of the Aqua Traiana. One corner where the conduit exits the chamber is rounded to assist water flow. Farther downhill, the conduit (above) shows the variety of brickwork, opus reticulatum, and waterproof cement used by Roman engineers.


springhouse. The room’s concrete vault also preserves traces of the original blue fresco, along with a cylindrical light shaft at the center, creating an impressive space that could have been seen from the central chamber. Some distance along the downhill tunnel, the brickwork changes to opus reticulatum, the Aqua Traiana’s signature diagonal grid pattern of masonry. At this point, the thick waterproof opus signinum lining also begins. At the juncture of these two points, a large vertical manhole shaft, now blocked far above, penetrates the tun-nel’s barrel vault. According to the landowners, this sector of ancient aqueduct was still serving Manziana until 1984—yet it has remained eff ectively unknown to archaeologists.

A 1718 map in the state archives at Rome represents Santa Fiora as a modest church with cropland, an orchard, a court-yard, a well with a water-lifting device in an adjacent tree, and a tiny hut near the access road. But not everything is quite as it may seem on the map. The well, which is labeled “well of running water,” must be the large manhole that penetrated the aqueduct tunnel, with its water source being the aqueduct itself. Today, the sturdy masonry hut, whose label reads “hatch for water going to Bracciano,” is still in place near the road fronting the property. Inside the hut, a stairway leads down to the junction of the Aqua Traiana and a modern conduit, perhaps dating to the eighteenth century, that was built for the town of Bracciano. This conduit originates at another nearby spring. For all his power, the pope could not convince the Orisini family to hand over the Fiora.

Although only the central chamber opens to the exterior, the grotto is divided into three side-by-side chambers of dif-ferent sizes and shapes, each having its own vault and light shaft. Originally, broad archways pierced the walls dividing the chambers. With the exception of a neatly preserved stone arch across the front of the grotto, almost the entire structure was made of ancient Roman concrete, brick, and mortar. Traces of the original sky-blue fresco also remained on the vaults. A niche centered in the back wall of the middle chamber would have once held a standing statue. It was the focal point of the entire original space and was clearly intended to inspire rever-ence in the visitor. Although the identity of the statue, which does not survive, is unknown, the likeliest candidates are either Trajan or the resident nymph representing the local waters.

On the wall directly above the niche is a Renaissance-era stucco frame bearing the Orsini family symbol, a fi ve-petaled fl ower. The correspondence to the name Santa Fiora may be coincidental because the church predates the presence of the Orsini in this area, but the family would have made the most of it. In fact, this frame probably enclosed a frescoed image of the Madonna della Fiora, the wonder-working portrait of the Virgin mentioned in parish records. These records report that the fresco was gradually destroyed by humidity.

A surprise also lay in the third right-hand chamber, which can be entered through a small rectangular door just below the crown of the right arch. On the other side of the door, the fl oor falls away to its original level, revealing a pristine Roman

A 1718 map of the Santa Fiora church and its surroundings indicates several remains of the aqueduct’s hydraulic system.


more about their construction his-tory than the living branches, as they can be examined in cross-section. The team can even crawl along the channels to look for ancient masonry. It has become clear that little of the Acqua Paola’s conduit in these areas was built from scratch. Instead, the aqueduct was a hybrid that sat directly on the remains of the Aqua Traiana wherever possible. In the southernmost branch of the Acqua Paola, on a farmstead at Pisciarelli (the colorful appellation for regions that “piss forth” water), the team found indisputable evidence that the Aqua Traiana had already been there 15 centuries earlier. The lower sec-tions of the conduit, and the manhole shaft piercing it, are built in precise alternating bands of Roman brick-work and opus reticulatum. Across a remote ravine to the north, the team also encountered two aqueduct bridges. One, in the characteristic style of the Acqua Paola, was intact but dry. Yet just downstream, a mas-sive riven chunk of the Aqua Traiana’s bridge lay on its side, exposing its opus signinum fl oor. Part of a Roman arch teetered over the bank above.

Violent fl oods must have washed this bridge out long before the pope’s engineers arrived, forcing them to build a stronger bridge just upstream. About a hundred feet of undamaged conduit along the bank revealed the same hybrid construction as the Pisciarelli sector—the fl oor, walls, and opus signinum lining of the Aqua Traiana were reused wherever possible, and new vaulting was applied where it was needed.

Despite the presence of the sources in the heart of Italy, it is remarkable that they, and indeed many of the remains of one of Rome’s greatest aqueducts, had eluded archaeologists’ best eff orts to fi nd them. Yet the surprising discoveries from the past few years are beginning to uncover a piece of Roman history that has been ignored, misunderstood, and even completely unknown since the Middle Ages. One part of this history arose from a pope’s desire to elevate his stature and emulate one of antiquity’s great builders, even reusing some of Trajan’s earlier aqueduct in the process. Another is the small church of Santa Fiora, which refl ects the desire to preserve the holiness of the spring that once fed the Aqua Traiana. As the O’Neills’ search continues, there is no doubt even more of this history will be revealed. ■

Rabun Taylor is associate professor of classics at the University

of Texas at Austin. For video of the Aqua Traiana project, go to

www.archaeology.org/aqueducts

IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, the team focused on identify-ing the lost source called “Carestia,” said to be near the church of Santa Maria della Fiora. A 1716 map from the

Orsini Archives at the University of California, Los Angeles, had provided an essential clue to its location—an isolated aqueduct section, drawn northeast of the church, labeled “channel that captured the lost waters called the Carestia, and that conducted them to the Fiora.” Now knowing to search in the dense forestland to the northeast, the team soon identifi ed another artifi cial Roman grotto that is nearly the Santa Fiora’s equal in size and architectural conception. Here, the vaulted ceiling has split, its cylindrical light shaft neatly sheared in half. The top of a central statue niche peeks out above the forest fl oor.

Most recently, the team’s objective has shifted to the “dead” branches of the Acqua Paola—those that have fallen into disre-pair because they are too remote to maintain. Since these dead sections are dry and sometimes even broken, they can reveal

Little remains of a collapsed bridge of the Aqua Traiana (top) in the ravine called the “Fosso della Calandrina.” A hybrid sector (above right) of the Aqua Traiana has a 17th-century vault and an ancient Roman floor and walls. The channel atop a bridge of the aqueduct (above left ) has fallen into a creek, revealing its opus signinum interior.


IN A DIRT LOT FIVE miles from downtown Albuquer-que, Matthew Schmader, the city’s archaeologist, kneels to examine a sharp fl ake of obsidian. “This could have been from a weapon one of the native troops brought up from Mexico,” he says, referring to the sixteenth-century Spanish expedition led by

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. Cars hum past on Coors Boulevard, and a breeze ripples cottonwood leaves along the Rio Grande River, half a mile east. If the weather is good, and sometimes even if it’s not, chances are Schmader will be hard at work in this city-owned property surrounded by housing developments.

Hundreds of metal artifacts pinpoint the possible site of a bloody battle between conquistadores and a Puebloan people

by Julian Smith

A rich assembly of metal artifacts from the site of Piedras Marcadas in New Mexico reveals the location of a violent episode during Francisco Coronado’s expedition. Top row: piece of copper armor, belt or strap loop, the tip of a belt or scabbard, piece of lead shot Middle row: broken dagger tip, “caret head” nail, chain-mail link, two crossbow bolt heads, ornate belt loop Bottom row: needle, lead button

“The site is pretty much the most important thing that has happened in the past 20 years relative to our understanding of Coronado,” Schmader says. The ground is littered with pottery fragments and hundreds of red marker tags staked in the dirt. Each tag represents a metal artifact—the tip of a crossbow bolt, a broken buckle—from Coronado’s 1540 to 1542 expedition. The fi rst major organized expedition into what is now the southwest United States, it ended in fi ghting and failure, setting an ominous example for future relations with the region’s native inhabitants.

Schmader stands up, brushes his knees and smiles. “It never fails to amaze me every time I’m here,” he says. “I feel like I was handed a gift from the archaeology gods.”

Coronado’s Deadly Siege


The expedition spent about 14 months living in the pueb-los along the northern Rio Grande of New Mexico. At least a dozen pueblos, collectively called Tiguex (“TEE-wesh”), occupied the wide valley between the Sandia Mountains and the volcanic escarpment across the Rio Grande, where the cities of Albuquerque and Bernalillo are today. It was the most fertile, prosperous, and densely populated region the Coronado expedition had seen yet and had been occupied for more than 500 years. Details of the inhabitants’ lives were recorded in a letter sent back to Coronado by a group of advance scouts.

The people seem excellent, more like farmers than warriors. They have much food: corn, beans, melons, and [turkeys] in great abundance. They dress in cotton, [bison] hides, and long robes made of [turkey] feathers. They wear their hair trimmed short. It is the old men who have most authority among them.

BY MOST STANDARDS, THE Coronado expedition was a disaster. Conquistadores funded the venture themselves for the modern equivalent of $30 million, hoping to fi nd

more native civilizations as wealthy as the Inca and the Aztecs to trade with or conquer. Coronado put up his wife’s Mexican estates as collateral. It was a massive undertaking: 375 European soldiers, along with their porters, African slaves, wives and chil-dren, 1,200 to 2,000 Mexican soldiers, and more than 1,000 horses and 5,000 head of livestock.

In a little over two years, the expedition traveled from Mexico City into southeast Arizona, across New Mexico, and on to central Kansas before turning around, a round trip of almost 4,000 miles. They encountered thriving native cul-tures but found nothing like the fabled Seven Golden Cities of Cibola, which were rumored to exist on the Great Plains.

Much of the expedition’s exact route is still a mystery. There are only fi ve major confi rmed Coronado sites: four in New Mexico, including Piedras Marcadas, and one in Texas. The numerous written chronicles of the journey are often contradictory or vague regarding names and descriptions, and it can be hard to isolate artifacts from Coronado’s party among centuries of later Spanish activity.

An archaeologist sifts dirt in search of artifacts at the site of Piedras Marcadas. Most of the site’s artifacts have been found on the ground’s surface.


three major sections of room blocks surrounding open plazas. Where the signal is more muddled, he explains, is where sections with multiple stories col-lapsed, leaving larger piles of bricks.

The fi rst metal arti-fact, a wrought iron nail, turned up on the sur-face in 2007. Schmader immediately recognized it as a sixteenth-century artifact because of its distinctive faceted “caret head.” Richard and Shirley Flint, who have written or edited six books about the expedition, confi rmed it as a probable Coro-nado artifact. Schmader’s team scanned the site with metal detectors, making multiple sweeps to make

sure they found everything. What they discovered astonished them: more than 1,000 sixteenth-century metal artifacts—more than in all other Coronado sites put together.

Along with nails, wire fragments, and pieces of copper sheeting, they found personal items, such as copper aglets (tips to clothing laces), broken belt loops, a link of chain mail, a copper awl, cast lead buttons, and a fi nely made purse hinge. Almost all the items were found on the surface or buried less than three inches deep, satisfying the current-day Puebloans’ request for no excavation. Then there were the weapons: 32 lead balls, some mushroomed from impact; a steel dagger tip; and 21 copper crossbow bolt heads, many bent or broken out of their wooden shafts.

By the 1540s, crossbows were being phased out in favor of the arquebus, an early musket. The Coronado expedition car-ried both, but it was the only expedition known to use copper bolt heads from metal mined in Mexico. (Spanish expeditions from the 1550s to the 1580s used harder iron bolt heads, and by the end of the 1500s, the arquebus had become the projectile weapon of choice.) Isotopic analysis of the lead artifacts at Pie-dras Marcadas came back virtually identical to ones found at the Coronado site in Texas. “There’s really no dispute [that] this was a Coronado site,” Schmader says, and so far nobody has argued.

RELATIONS WERE friendly at fi rst. But since the interlopers

had come from the tropics, they were unprepared for the Rocky Mountain winters, and they soon wore out their welcome with demands for food, clothing, and shelter. During the winter of 1540 to 1541, the expedition occupied the pueblo of Alcanfor after evicting its residents. Accusa-tions of assaults on Puebloan women were the fi nal straw, and in January 1541, the tribes rose up in what came to be called the Tiguex War.

After several one-sided skirmishes, according to Spanish chroniclers, the Puebloans barricaded themselves in the “strongest” pueblo, called Moho, and abandoned the others. During a two-month siege, Coronado’s soldiers tried numerous times to take the village by force. The chronicler Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, who was on the expedition, wrote that “…they threw down such quantities of rocks upon our men that many of them were laid out, and they wounded nearly a hundred with arrows, several of whom afterward died on account of the bad treatment by an unskillful surgeon....”

When Moho fi nally fell, all the Tiguex pueblos were abandoned. They were resettled after the expedition left, but diseases brought by subsequent Spanish immigrants rav-aged the region. Coronado returned to Mexico City bankrupt and badly injured after a fall from his horse and was offi cially denounced for the abuse of natives during his expedition. He never embarked on another and died in 1554.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS HAVE known about Piedras Marcadas since the 1920s, but it was in private hands until the city acquired the land in 1988. Still, tribal represen-

tatives from the nearby pueblos of Isleta and Sandia identi-fi ed it as an ancestral site and requested that no large-scale excavations take place.

As Schmader leads the way across the site, it’s impossible not to step on pottery fragments, as dense as a mosaic in places. “We estimate there’re about 500,000 fragments on the ground in just an acre or two,” he says. Wide, low mounds ripple the surface, none more than a few feet high. To see if these were the remnants of adobe walls, in 2002, Schmader and others started to map the site using electrical resistivity (ER). This consisted of sticking two metal probes into the ground 18 inches apart, then measuring the speed and strength of an electrical current sent between them. The technique works well for locating collapsed or buried adobe walls because of the contrast in resistivity between the clay bricks and sandy soil. Schmader pulls out a map of the site made from the ER surveys, showing

A technique called electrical resistivity has been used to reveal the outlines of the pueblo walls without requiring labor-intensive and culturally sensitive excavations.


says Glenn Foard, a battlefi eld archaeologist from the Univer-sity of Huddersfi eld, who has visited the site. “I can see how important this and other sites of the Coronado expedition will be to advancing our understanding of the way in which European technology of war was actually applied in the Ameri-cas.” Charles Haecker of the National Park Service’s Heritage Partnerships Program, who worked at the site in 2008, calls it “extremely signifi cant” for the same reason. “It shows physical evidence of how the Spanish conducted their methods of war-fare: You get your enemies into an enclosed space like a plaza, control the entries and exits, and slaughter them.”

During the siege, the Spanish also diverted the spring that supplied Moho with water. As Nájera wrote in his chronicle, “The lack of water was what troubled the Indians most. They dug a very deep well inside the village but were not able to get water, and while they were making it, it fell in and killed 30

persons.” For Schmader, the strongest evidence that Piedras Marcadas is Moho is a large crater at the western side of the central roomblock’s plaza. Surrounded by dirt on three sides, it measures 55 feet by 75 feet across and four to six feet deep. The ceramic artifacts found in the piles of dirt around the crater are the same age as undisturbed artifacts on the surface, suggesting the soil was removed over a short period of time toward the end of the site’s occupation, between 1540 and 1600.

THE OVERARCHING QUESTION becomes: Was Piedras Marcadas the besieged pueblo called Moho? Accord-ing to Schmader, it fi ts the description in several

key ways. It is the largest known Contact-period pueblo for 50 miles along the Rio Grande, two to three times as big as the next largest village. He estimates that it had 1,000 ground-fl oor rooms and several hundred more second- and third-story rooms, possibly 1,500 in all. The total population could have been over 3,000.

Schmader thinks the wealth of artifacts at the site and the way they are distributed suggests at least one large battle took place. Many items are broken, including bullets and bolt heads, implying they were used in combat. Since the expedition was so far from home, its members had to carry or make everything they needed. They didn’t throw anything away if they could help it, Schmader says. “You walked 3,900 miles—you saved everything.”

The artifacts appear to be concentrated outside the walls, as if they were lost or broken during a struggle to enter. Schmader walks to the south of what was the central roomblock and points to a concentration of marker tags near the wall mound. “I think the Pueblo people barricaded themselves inside this roomblock and fortifi ed it. The Spanish attacked from south to north, hurled themselves against the walls, but they couldn’t break through.” Other apparent clusters of artifacts in the southeastern corner of the central plaza and inside an above-ground kiva may indicate other areas of fi ghting.

“The evidence…suggests that there is meaningful patterning in the distribution of bolt heads and indeed of other artifacts,”

Archaeologist Matt Schmader sits at the bottom of an excavation pit located inside what he believes may be a well that collapsed, killing 30 people—an incident mentioned in Coronado’s expedition chronicles.


Dark clouds are gathering over the Sandia Mountains, and a chill wind carries the fi rst snowfl akes of a late fall storm. It looks like Schmader will have to wait until spring to fi nish the last two pits. In the meantime, he’s trying to secure funding for more remote sensing and metal detector surveys. When the artifact analysis is complete, the goal is to put the items on display at the city museum. With any luck, the story they tell will be deciphered by then. “It’s easy to map artifacts and read documents,” Schmader says. “It’s much harder to put it all together in a way that makes sense.” ■

Julian Smith is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.

Other Coronado experts disagree with Schmader’s assessment. Richard Flint points out that two chroniclers describe Moho as being en un alto, or “on a height,” which made it hard to subdue. And it was close enough to the river that some of the besieged Puebloans slipped out at night, ran a short distance to the Rio Grande, and tried to swim across. “[T]here were few who escaped being killed or wounded,” Nájera recorded. Piedras Mar-cadas is half a mile from the river and barely above the fl oodplain. “It’s some pueblo we don’t know from the documents is my guess,” Flint says, adding that the pit may have been dug by ranchers or pothunters. In his opin-ion, the most likely candidate for Moho may be an unexcavated mesa-top site near San Felipe Pueblo, 30 miles north, called Basalt Point, a smaller, more defensible location that’s closer to the river.

The question of matching Piedras Mar-cadas to a specifi c site mentioned in the chronicles is important, says Clay Mathers of The Coronado Institute, in Albuquerque, who has helped interpret the site’s artifacts. Identifying one location makes it possible to pinpoint others. For example, the pueblo of Alcanfor, where the expedition spent fi ve months, is described as being “three or four leagues” (about 12 miles) from Moho. A site called Santiago sits on a bluff above the river about 11 miles northeast of Piedras Marcadas. “If Piedras Marcadas is Moho, then Santiago is probably Alcanfor,” Mathers says. On the other hand, excavations in the 1930s at San-tiago didn’t turn up any residential debris, as you’d expect in a place the expedition occu-pied for so long. “If Santiago isn’t Alcanfor, then that’s one more argument that Piedras Marcadas isn’t Moho,” Mathers says. “It’s kind of a domino eff ect.”

The answer to the puzzle may lie at the bottom of the mysterious crater. If it can be established as the collapsed well—especially if any bodies are unearthed—the argument would be over. This summer, Schmader dug an eight-foot-deep test pit in the crater, small enough to meet the current Puebloans’ request for no large excavations. At the bottom, he found an 18-inch-thick layer of adobe “defi nitely derived from the collapse of large adobe walls.” Mixed in were pottery sherds contemporary to the site’s fi nal occupation, from around 1525 to 1600. Schmader is digging two more test pits that have produced evidence indicating that the original hole was dug inside a square structure with parts of two walls missing. Many similar villages had square kivas in their plazas, Schmader says. “My best guess is that they dug the emergency well inside a kiva to hide their eff orts from the Spanish, and it collapsed when they undermined a wall.”

Pottery sherds (top) lay in dense clusters on the ground surface at Piedras Marcadas, possibly indicating that a large Puebloan population lived there. A researcher (above) conducts an electrical resistivity survey in search of the remains of adobe walls.


Archaeologists excavating on the shores of the Persian Gulf

search for what may prove to be the source of the world’s

longest-lived economy

by Andrew Lawler

FOR AT LEAST 7,000 years, people have settled along the shores of the Persian Gulf, in what one scholar calls “one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet.” Despite its lack of natural resources, such as water or fertile soil, what the Gulf region did have was the world’s most reli-

able source of fi ne pearls, until they began to be grown artifi -cially a century ago. The long history of pearls and pearling in the Persian Gulf was, as a result, largely forgotten due to the collapse of the natural pearl industry in the early 1900s. Soon, the region came to be known only for exporting oil, despite the fact that some of the cities lining the Gulf ’s coast actually owe their early origins to pearls.

The luminescent gems have been prized as a symbol of luxury since antiquity. The ever-increasing demand for the tiny spheres not only attracted people to the Gulf ’s Arabian shores, but also provided the raw material for an economy that may have been one of the most enduring in the world. Nearly all that was known about the ancient pearling industry came from scattered mentions in texts that date only as far back as the fourth century B.C. However, archaeologists working at sites from Kuwait to Oman are now discovering evidence of ancient pearls, pearling, and the pearl trade. Because of this, they are beginning to understand the role the gem played in the region at Neolithic villages, Bronze Age centers, and wealthy cities of the eighteenth century. Says Robert Carter, an archaeologist at the University College London’s new campus in Doha, Qatar, “The societies of the Gulf were shaped by the pearl oyster and trade from the earliest days.”

The Pearl Trade


The once-thriving 18th- and 19th-century pearling center of Zubarah sits on the

northeast coast of Qatar. At its peak around 1800, the city was surrounded by a 1.5-mile-

long wall with 21 still-visible round towers and had a population in excess of 5,000.


pearl—the best odds on earth. While beds along the Indian coast generally produced pearls only once every seven or eight years, the Persian Gulf waters provided a more regular supply, Bari notes, making these pearl oysters a more reliable resource. The reason for this remains unclear but is likely linked to the unusually warm, shallow, and highly saline nature of the Gulf.

Their rarity made pearls fabulously expensive in the ancient world. “The topmost rank of all things of price is held by pearls,” wrote the Roman historian Pliny the Elder in the fi rst century A.D. Cleopatra invited Marc Antony to attend a meal—the ancient world’s most expensive feast—that cost the fantastic sum of 10 million sesterces. When he was seated, the Egyptian queen ordered a goblet fi lled with vinegar. “She took one ear-ring off , and dropped the pearl in the vinegar, and when it was wasted away, swallowed it,” reported a horrifi ed Pliny. The other earring is said to have been split and used as earrings on a goddess’ statue in Rome’s Pantheon more than a century later.

The origin of pearls was a matter of mystery and conjecture to ancient writers. Pliny claimed that pearls rose to the sea’s surface and swallowed dew to achieve their luster and beauty, while other authors suggested that lightning hitting an oyster produced the gem. One of the fi rst clear references to the pearl trade comes from Androsthenes, a Greek geographer, who circumnavigated Arabia at Alexander the Great’s behest in the fourth century B.C. Androsthenes referred to an unusual

OF COURSE, ONE DOES not have to go to the Persian Gulf to fi nd pearls. They grow in cold or warm water, salty or fresh, in a wide variety of mollusks, and come in an

array of sizes and colors. They are found in such disparate loca-tions as Scandinavian fjords and the Mississippi River. Some of the largest come from the Pacifi c Ocean, while a number of the most extensive beds are off the coast of India. What always gave the Persian Gulf the advantage over competitors such as India was a fortunate combination of quality and quantity. The perfectly round white pearls we expect today are extremely rare in nature. Typically, only one in 10,000 oysters holds this type of pearl, says Hubert Bari, a French gemologist who has studied pearls extensively. But according to Bari, round white pearls are found twice as often in the Gulf as elsewhere. And one oyster in 400 there may contain at least some kind of

Persian Gulf pearling spans centuries: A more than 7,000-year-old pearl excavated at As-Sabiyah (left) is the earliest pierced pearl ever discovered. And both mother-of–pearl (far left) and pearls have been found in Zubarah’s 19th-century marketplace.

Excavations at As-Sabiyah in Kuwait have revealed a Neolithic center, including a workshop where pearls were strung.


4500 B.C., in which a woman’s pearls were found strung on a necklace. She also had a single pierced pearl on her chin bone. “The pearls were probably gathered locally from the oysters that were part of the inhabitants’ diet,” says Hans-Peter. Like Carter, Uerpmann suspects that pearling may already have started to become a sophisticated venture at this early time, when the fi rst proto-cities in Mesopotamia were forming. “The tech-nologies for diving, such as [seaworthy] boats and the use of diving weights, were certainly known,”

he says. Reed and wood degrade quickly in this climate, however, and dating the few ancient stone weights found along the Gulf is diffi cult since they were often reused and typically are not found in dateable contexts. Both Uerpmann and Carter say that there are not yet enough data to prove a thriving pearl trade existed, although intriguing evidence to support their claims is being discovered. Fishhooks begin to appear in trenches from this period, as do objects made of mother-of-pearl. Tübingen’s Philip Drechsler, who is digging at a Neolithic site on the Saudi Arabian coast, says that 90 percent of the shells his team fi nds are from pearl oysters.

If pearls were, in fact, being systematically gathered at this time, as Carter and Uerpmann both suspect, the gems may be associated with the oldest long-distance maritime trading network in the ancient world. As part of that net-work, in exchange for pearls, Mesopotamian merchants may have traded a type of pottery, fi rst found at the site of Al-Ubaid in modern Iraq. Colorful Ubaid pottery is found at sites dotted along the Arabian shores of the Gulf, includ-

type of shellfi sh that produces a stone “which is very expensive throughout Asia and is sold in Persia and other inland regions for its weight in gold.” Isidorus of Charax, a geographer, who lived around the beginning of the fi rst century A.D., described men on rafts bringing up shells from the deep that produced large pearls.

EXCAVATED ANCIENT PEARLS PREDATING the Roman Empire are nearly as rare as early references. In addition, as archaeological

artifacts, pearls present great challenges. Their small size makes them easy for excavators to miss without careful sieving. They are also fragile and can degrade rapidly in the ground. Like many gems, pearls are often passed down in jewelry, and the stones are sometimes reused over generations, making them diffi cult to date. Unlike mining or pottery mak-ing, pearling leaves behind relatively few artifacts. As to the historical record, the diffi cult job of gathering oysters from the depths of the sea usually took place well out of sight of scribes and all but the most adventurous ancient travelers. Apart from a few tiny pearls found during excavations in Bahrain in the 1990s, there was almost no archeaological evidence of ancient pearling in the area until recently.

That began to change a decade ago. Just north of Kuwait City, on a fl at and uninviting stretch of coast called As-Sabiyah, 30 miles from the Iraqi border, a team co-led by Carter was exploring the remains of a shell jewelry workshop in a Neo-lithic village. Taking extra care to pick out all the beads and worked stone, excavators uncovered a tiny pearl only one-fi fth of an inch wide, with a delicate incision. “It probably would have been missed in a normal excavation,” Carter recalls.

Radiocarbon dating of organic material found with the pearl placed the workshop at 5300 B.C., making the gem the oldest one yet found in a dated archaeological context. At the same site, the team also uncovered the remains of a reed boat covered in barnacles. The two discoveries—the oldest-known seafaring vessel and the oldest-known pierced pearl—off ered preliminary evidence that the people of the Persian Gulf had found a way of life that formed the basis of the region’s economy until the early twentieth century.

Since the discovery at As-Sabiyah, archaeologists have dis-covered a number of pearls at other ongoing excavations from Kuwait to Oman. A Danish team uncovered two unpierced pearls while working on the Kuwaiti island of Failaka, just off -shore from As-Sabiyah, which likely date to around the second millennium B.C. A pearl dating to about 5000 B.C. was found in a grave in Umm al-Quwain in the United Arab Emirates, at the eastern end of the Gulf. Farther east along the coast of Oman, near the capital city of Muscat, three perforated pearls were discovered still clasped in the hands of a recently excavated fourth-millennium B.C. skeleton.

At Al-Buhais in Sharjah, a United Arab Emirate near Dubai, Hans-Peter and Margarete Uerpmann, from Germany’s Tübin-gen University, found a remarkable tomb, dating to around

Pearls were very popular in the ancient Roman world. A second-century A.D. funerary portrait from the Egyptian city of Antinopolis shows a woman wearing impressive pearl earrings and a gem and pearl necklace.

Iran

SaudiArabia

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Oman

KuwaitCity

Riyadh

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Doha

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MusandamPeninsula

Strait ofHormuz

Gulf ofBahrain

Bandar ’Abbas

As-Sabiyah

Gulf ofOman

Bahrain

Qatar

Kuwait

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Emirates

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Zubarah

Al-Buhais


MOST OF THE PEARL trade took place on boats and in small villages and encampments. In Bahrain, evidence has been swallowed up by rapid urban

development. Thus, fi lling in the later years of pearling is diffi cult. One promising project is the University of Copen-hagen’s excavation of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city of Zubarah, on the fl at and arid northeast coast of Qatar. There, Alan Walmsley and his deputy director Tobias Richter lead 50 Western excavators and 60 South Asian and African workers on a decade-long project—lavishly funded by the oil-rich Qatari government, which plans to restore the site. Since 2009, the team has been fi nding some of the fi rst solid archaeological evidence for the pearl trade, beyond just the gems themselves, in the form of a once-thriving city.

The sandy peninsula on which Zubarah sits divides the upper and lower Gulf. Even today, it seems an unlikely place to settle. Water is scarce and barely potable. (Zubarah means “bitter water.”) There are no trees. In summer, temperatures frequently soar above 120 degrees, while in winter, a strong, cold wind blows across the sea. Yet, for a few brief decades starting in the late eighteenth century, the city was the larg-est, wealthiest, and most cosmopolitan settlement along the Persian Gulf. Abandoned long ago, the ruined city is, today, a vast fi eld of lumpy mounds of soft limestone and a local beach rock that quickly crumbles. But it is also the most complete and best-preserved pearling town in the Persian Gulf. The crescent-shaped settlement encompasses 150 acres facing a sandy beach, protected on the landward side by swamp and a massive wall. Within the confi nes are the remains of mosques, a fort and palace, stately homes of rich merchants, and humble huts along the shore. “This was the Gulf ’s most important trading hub,” says Richter. “Zubarah off ers an unparalleled opportunity to study one of the most intense periods in the pearling trade.”

An Arab chieftain founded Zubarah in 1762 as the waning Persian Safavid Empire lost control over the Gulf. Arab tribes eagerly stepped into the power vacuum. Set up as a tax-free port, Zubarah rapidly attracted both pearlers and merchants from as far away as Basra in today’s Iraq. Despite the city’s prosperity, there are only fl eeting mentions in historical records and no known contemporary accounts of life in the city. There is only a passing mention of an earlier Zubarah by a 1638 chronicler, who writes of a sleepy port town with 150

houses and a motley assortment of 700 inhabitants. Using satellite photos and on-site surveys, archaeologists

have identifi ed more than 500 houses encircled by a stone wall, which spans more than one-and-a-half miles, punctuated by 21 round towers—evidence of the city in its heyday in the late- eighteenth century. A nearly 500-foot-square inland fort was built to protect the city’s only water source, and a wide canal was dug to that site in order to load casks of water onto small boats. Small date plantations nearby provided some

ing As-Sabiyah. It may have been a novelty item to Arabians, who are not known to have made pots before that time. Until more Iraqi sites are carefully excavated, it is too early to say for certain how pearls may have functioned in this network. Several Mesopotamian tablets dating to the third and second millennia B.C. refer to a coveted stone called “fi sh eyes,” which may be a reference to pearls, although scholars do not agree on the translation of this phrase.

What is certain is that by the Roman and Byzantine peri-ods, the Persian Gulf was famous for providing pearls to the rich and powerful in Rome and Constantinople, and then, later, to Islamic courts in Damascus, Baghdad, and Isfahan. Though texts throughout this long era indicate that Arabians practiced pearling, a dearth of Roman-era burials in the area, coupled with the Muslim tradition of burying the dead without jewelry, leave a gap in the archaeological history of pearling. According to some brief texts, the Sassanian Empire, which collapsed with the coming of Islam in the seventh century A.D., sought to control the pearling trade and its profi ts from its heartland in Iran. They also mention that pirates made occasional raids on ships carrying the precious cargo. By the eleventh century A.D., texts claim sultans from eastern Saudi Arabia took half the pearls found by divers in Bahrain. A century later, travel-ers of the time say Julfar, at the far eastern end of the Gulf, was a major pearling center and that 300 pearl fi sheries were scattered across the region. By the time Columbus sailed to America, Bahrain had emerged, perhaps not for the fi rst time, as the preeminent pearling center, with 1,000 boats at its wharves and beaches.

One of the nine courtyards (left) that surrounds Zubarah’s large main palace, whose size and grandeur are an indication of the city’s power and wealth during its heyday.


Copenhagen team has also found postholes that likely mark the huts and tents in which pearlers and fi shermen lived. “The poorer houses were close to the beach,” notes Richter. “And photos [of Qatar] from the early twentieth century show similar palm-leafed dwellings in which more modern Bedouin pearlers may have lived.” By contrast, Walmsley and Richter have also found properties far from the beach, where wealthy merchants inhabited large compounds with private courtyards. The excavation also shows that Zubarah’s residents enjoyed services such as organized garbage removal. They also used public spaces, including squares and a spacious marketplace, to socialize and conduct business, making it a city more modern than medieval.

Although by the early nineteenth century Zubarah ceased to be a player in the industry, the demand for pearls continued to escalate with a growing class of Western consumers. This was the pearling heyday for the Persian Gulf. By 1835, one British traveler estimated that the Gulf ’s pearl trade was worth 400,000 British pounds. By 1900, there were 5,000 pearling boats plying the Gulf, employing 30,000 men, and the value of pearls shipped from Bahrain alone nearly matched what the entire Gulf ’s production had been in 1835. A survey conducted shortly after the turn of the last century found that a quarter of the entire population was engaged in pearling.

The massive demand for pearls eventually prompted Japanese scientists to develop a way to grow them without having to fi sh them out of the sea in huge numbers. By the 1920s, high-quality white cultured pearls fl ooded the market. The Depression was a second blow, and by World War II, the Persian Gulf ’s great pearling industry had dried up. Oil soon provided an even more lucrative resource, drawing settlers and merchants to the Gulf once again, and renewing the old pearling centers, which had fallen on hard times. Meanwhile, Carter, Walmsley, Richter, and others continue to search for the hidden history of pearls in a region where some of its major cities—Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Kuwait City—have skyscraper-fi lled skylines. “The pearling centers are still there,” says Carter. “But now they have become capitals.” ■

Andrew Lawler is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.

foodstuff s for inhabitants and passing ships—dozens of date presses have been found in the city. At its peak, around 1800, Richter estimates that as many as 6,000 people crowded Zubarah’s houses, streets, marketplace, and beach.

Zubarah’s boom years, however, were limited. “Ultimately, given the shallow harbor and the lack of fresh water, the city wasn’t sustainable,” says Richter. The ambitious canal project was never completed. Wealth attracted jealous rivals. Accounts say a 1782 attack by resurgent Persians was repulsed. The sultan of Muscat burned the city in 1811, and a British captain records the site as a ruin in 1824. Richter says that excavations confi rm that rapid decline. The settled town suddenly con-tracted to one-fourth its size and population after the initial swell. The site was eventually abandoned, but from the 1820s until the 1990s, Qatar and neighboring Bahrain argued and occasionally fought over who owned this stretch of coast. The dispute left the site largely off -limits for archaeologists until now. Only a few small excavations had been conducted there until Richter’s project began.

Among the artifacts discovered so far is a pearler’s box—a wooden container holding smaller boxes to sort diff erent shapes and sizes of pearls—more than a dozen stone diving weights, and a number of massive boat anchors. Pearling may have accounted for only a portion of Zubarah’s trade, but its location near some of the best pearling beds in the region hints at the importance of the gem to the city’s economy. Carter notes that the demand for pearls emanat-ing from places such as China and Europe began to mount in the late eighteenth century, matching Zubarah’s rise. The

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An excavator at Zubarah uncovers a rare wooden pearling box used by merchants to sort pearls by size, shape, and color.

Heavy weights, like these from Zubarah, were tied to pearl divers to help them descend into the Persian Gulf to gather pearls.

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Long time we travel on way to new land. People feel bad when they leave Old Nation. Women cry and made sad wails. Children cry and many men cry, and all look sad like when friends die, but they say nothing and just put heads down and keep on go towards West. Many days pass and people die very much.

—A Cherokee account from The Oklahoman, 1929, cited by John Ehle in Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation, 1988

It’s easy to miss this subtle groove, covered in pine straw and vines, worn in the ground of eastern

Tennessee. In the summer of 1838, about 13,000 Cherokee walked this path from their homes in the Appalachian Mountains to a new, government-mandated homeland in Oklahoma. They traveled over land and water and were held in military camps along the way. Unlike other settlers heading west, who saw in America’s open expanses the hope of a new life, the Cherokee traveled with

a military escort. They left behind highly coveted land that was, even as they walked, being divided up among white land speculators.

The Trail of Tears was a journey of some 900 miles that took approxi-mately nine months to complete. After they were rounded up from their villages and homes, the Chero-kee were assembled in large intern-ment camps, where some waited for weeks before heading out in waves of approximately 1,000, following diff er-ent paths, depending on the season.

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by MARION BLACKBURN

LETTER FROM TENNESSEE


Forest litter conceals a shallow groove in Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee—the Trail of Tears.


the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), and Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, held the fourth fi eld season at the site. The same archaeologists also have been conducting excavations about 35 miles east, across the North Carolina border, at the sites of long-forgotten homesteads where fugitive Cherokee found refuge and community.

“Any [Cherokee] who came from North Carolina came through here,” says archaeologist Brett Riggs, an adjunct associate professor at UNC, of the Fort Armistead site. “We have an archaeological site and records that speak directly to it.”

Spindly hardwoods and pines surround the clearing. The archaeologists began their

efforts in 2006 at the invitation of USFS officials, who had just purchased the property from private owners. Artifacts have been found throughout the immediate area, but the main digs of the 2011 field season focused on a space at the northern end about the size of two city buses. Exposed cut stones set in powdery soil, chimney

fading from collective memory, tak-ing with it any chance to understand the relationships between refugees and soldiers, and cultural informa-tion about the Cherokee them-selves—what they carried, how they traveled, why they died.

That now stands to change. In eastern Tennessee, archaeologists are excavating the site of Fort Armistead, a U.S. Army encampment that served as a holding area and one of the fi rst stops for North Carolina Cherokee on their forced journey west. Hidden deep in Cherokee National Forest, the site has managed to escape the damage or destruction that has visit-ed nearly every other signifi cant trace of the trail and camps.

Fort Armistead lodged as many as 3,000 Cherokee over several months in 1838. Today, the site sits on about four acres of a mountaintop clearing. It consists of foundation blocks, collapsed piles of chimney stones, trash pits, and window glass—plus an enigmatic stone pipe—all settled gently into the ground, covered by only a thin layer of dirt, leaves, straw, and moss. For four weeks in the sum-mer of 2011, archaeologists from

As many as 4,000 died along the way from dehydration, tuberculosis, whooping cough, and other hard-ships—by some accounts, a dozen or more were buried at each stop. Some escaped along the way and were caught and returned to the march like criminals. Still others refused to leave, hiding out in the mountains, joining others on small farms where, stripped of tribal connections and burdened with unclear legal status, they faced an uncertain future.

Despite all our historical knowl-edge of the forced removal, there has been little study of the archae-ology of the trail, the internment camps along the way, and the farms that sheltered those who stayed behind. The military forts that held the Cherokee in crowded, unsani-tary conditions have been largely consumed by development or oth-erwise lost. The homesteads back East, where resistors lived under constant threat of arrest, went undocumented. Buildings, roads, farms, and fl oods have claimed almost all of these sites. In addi-tion to a lack of material evidence, there has long been an uneasy, even contentious, relationship between Native Americans and archaeolo-gists. Through neglect and distrust, this sad chapter has been at risk of

Archaeologists Lance Greene and Duane Esarey (top) discuss the excavation of Fort Armistead. Archaeology student Joseph Gamble (above) uses a fine brush to remove powdery soil from the foundation of the quartermaster’s house at the site.

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who would not be able to modernize. It was also cast as a measure to pro-tect Natives from more violent eff orts to claim the land on which they lived. However, it clearly overlooked that many tribes throughout the South-east lived in villages and towns and were adept pastoralists, farmers, and entrepreneurs, with strong spiritual ties to their lands. President Andrew Jackson, a land speculator himself, championed the controversial act and stood to profi t from it. In the ensuing decades, the legislation stoked moral outrage that also helped fuel the abo-litionist movement.

The Cherokee fought eviction through offi cial channels, eventually winning support for independent sta-tus from the U.S. Supreme Court—a decision that prompted Jackson to say, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can.” Harassment, uncer-tainty, and eroding negotiating lever-age ultimately fatigued the Cherokee. In 1835, a minority Cherokee group agreed to relocation, or removal, under the terms of the Treaty of New Echota. Deportation might then have seemed a kind of escape. The treaty included $5 million for the tribe, along with compensation for the land and possessions they abandoned.

The Cherokee, which white Amer-icans called one of the Five Civilized Tribes, considered themselves Ameri-can and wanted to join the growing country as participating members. In 1827, the Cherokee ratifi ed a consti-tution modeled after the American one. They also assumed some aspects of American culture, in an eff ort to acculturate and escape the fate they had seen befall other Southeastern tribes, such as the Choctaw, the fi rst tribe to move to the West in 1830, or the Seminoles, who violently resisted removal from Florida.

The fort was near a corridor that already served as a major source of cultural interaction, where diff erent tribes traded, especially the Cherokee and the Creek (also known as the Muscogee). Cattle and pig rustlers, slave traders heading to South Carolina, gold miners, trappers, and hunters all came through along this route, known as the Unicoi Turn-pike. Indeed, soldiers stationed at the fort often appropriated goods (including whiskey) for themselves, Riggs says. For the next several years, the fort was irregularly staff ed and maintained.

Prior to the Civil War, trade and land speculation in the South often put businessmen and speculators at odds with Native Americans who occupied the land they coveted. The federal response to this problem was the Indian Removal Act, which passed by a narrow margin in 1830. The law marked a monumental shift for the young nation by offi cially claiming Native lands for its expand-ing population and farming needs. The act granted the Natives money and land in the West if they left their homes in the South. To sell the act to the public, the federal government asserted that Native Americans were primitive migrants—hunter-gatherers

blocks, and the remains of fire pits compose what was once the barracks area. Another foundation there prob-ably supported the quartermaster’s residence, and a pit across the site likely served as a powder magazine. “You are right in the footsteps of the Cherokee,” says Quentin Bass, an archaeologist with the USFS. “[Fort Armistead] is the only example of a removal-era fort that essentially hasn’t been disturbed since the sol-diers left. It’s the dream for an archaeologist—to find an untouched site to explore and preserve.”

These undisturbed remains of apparently substantial structures suggest that the federal government poured signifi cant staff and resources into the fort during its military occu-pation. Beyond the barrack founda-tions, in a sunny opening in the tree cover, is a key public place, the fort’s parade ground. Wide dirt roads lead right and left beyond that, and a gen-tle slope leads down to a creek.

Fort Armistead was formally estab-lished in 1832, ostensibly to protect local Cherokee from gold prospectors. It was the only U.S. outpost in the Cherokee Nation, whose land at that time extended from western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee south through Georgia and into Alabama.


The remains of Fort Armistead are surprisingly undisturbed. Archaeologist Bill Jurgelski is able to use an ordinary vacuum to remove the fine layer of dirt that covers much of the site.

“The Cherokee were trying to play by American rules,” says archaeolo-gist Lance Greene, who worked with Riggs at UNC and now works at the Fort Armistead dig. “They were form-ing their own national government. A large part of the population had converted to Christianity. They sang Christian hymns as they were march-ing. There’s still an image of savage Indians living in tepees, but maybe the Cherokee, more than anybody, made an attempt [to acculturate]. But ultimately it failed.”

Despite the apparent Chero-kee desire to join instead of fi ght, the federal government began a military buildup in preparation for what it assumed would become a long, bloody confl ict. As part of this militarization, they reactivated

Fort Armistead in 1836 and occu-pied it with soldiers who marched there from Florida. By the summer of 1838, more than 7,000 federal and state troops were stationed throughout the Cherokee Nation—a remarkably high concentration for America’s nascent military.

“What drove their idea of a pro-tracted confl ict in North Carolina was the unanimous opposition to the Treaty of New Echota and strong activism to prevent its ratifi cation, and then to have it annulled,” Riggs says. “There were rumors afoot that

there would be a guerilla war in North Carolina. The military was poised for an eventuality that never happened.”

There was no insurgency and little resistance when the military began the roundup of the Cherokee in June and July 1838. Most of them gathered what belongings they could and came togeth-er in their town squares or waited for a soldier’s knock on the door (though some did seek refuge in the mountains). Coming together as they accepted their fate became a fi nal act of preservation for their families, communities, and val-ues, Riggs says. “They were trying to promote the cohesion of their group,” he adds. “They were making a politi-cal statement, a moral statement. They believed very strongly in the ideals of this country and the moral imperative to treat everybody fairly.”

For Cherokee living in North Carolina, Fort Armistead was the fi rst stop outside their home state. It held as many as 800 to 1,000 for stays of two or three nights. These included not only the Cherokee, but also those traveling with them, including Creek and African Americans, some of them slaves. They continued on to a series of other outposts (there were up to


These stones, surrounding the remains of a tree that grew through the site later, comprise a fire ring at the soldiers’ barracks at Fort Armistead.

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these structures, suggesting a highly organized and militarized approach to the removal of the Cherokee. In addition, the stone most likely was brought from up to fi ve miles away, indicating extensive manpower was likely needed for the construction.

“The structure was even more substantial than we thought,” Greene says. “It’s almost a solid rock fl oor. If you have something that heavy, then you’re almost building it as a founda-tion for a cannon. But they didn’t have that fi repower at the camp. They may have overbuilt some of the structures to keep the soldiers occu-pied. They must have had a stone-mason who was skilled enough to do

for many archaeological sites in the Southeast. “Many of the anomalies that we were seeing on the surface, which I thought were small piles pushed up by a bulldozer, were melted chimneys and cellar pits that had been fi lled in [by settling debris].” Riggs says the site is in “as nearly pristine condi-tion as you fi nd in the East.

“When you start, you are immedi-ately within an archaeological feature. You have to approach it with kid gloves from the outset,” he adds.

The 2011 dig season, which also included Bass and students from Lee University, focused on several large architectural features, primar-ily the quartermaster’s house and the enlisted-men’s quarters. The foundation stones easily emerged from the surrounding dirt, lying so near the surface that in many cases soil could be removed by vacuum. The archaeologists discovered a sur-prising solidity and permanence to

30 forts or stops along the trail) in Tennessee, including Fort Cass, the main holding site, near present-day Charleston, which was known for its especially unbearable conditions. In summer 1838, when drought made river levels so low that a planned river route became impossible—and heat made an overland course deadly—the march was delayed until fall, leaving thousands of Cherokee to languish there to face disease and death.

Once the Cherokee were moved and soldiers left in 1838, Fort Armistead was

abandoned. From the Civil War peri-od through the turn of the century, the site was privately owned, until it was purchased by the USFS in 2005, and archaeological exploration began the next year.

“We poked around and realized that, in fact, the site had never been plowed,” Riggs says, a common fate

Archaeologist Lance Greene crouches in the deep pit that once served as the powder magazine for Fort Armistead. A wooden floor, found at its bottom, kept the explosive powder dry.

58

(continued on page 64)

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COVER—Courtesy Rabun Taylor; 1—Courtesy Parks Canada; 2—Courtesy Susan O’Connor, Wikimedia Commons, Courtesy Payson D. Sheets, University of Colorado at Boulder; 4—Courtesy Parks Canada, Edward Eastaugh; 8—Courtesy Jean Clottes and Chauvet Cave Project; 9—Courtesy INAH, iStockphoto; 10—Courtesy INAH, Courtesy Payson D. Sheets, University of Colorado at Boulder; 12—© Dominique Bossut, Inrap; Courtesy Matthew Koutsoumanis; 14—Wikimedia Commons, Courtesy National Museum of Wales, Courtesy Donald E. Hurlbert; 16—Courtesy Susan O’Connor; 18—Courtesy D. Huyge, RMAH Brussels (2), Courtesy Paul Graves-Brown (2); 19—bpk, Berlin/Wolfgang Ruppert/Art Resource, NY, iStockphoto; 20—EPA/Landov, Wikimedia Commons; 22—(clockwise from top left) Courtesy Jeremy Foin, University of California, Davis, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Commons, Images of Asia , Courtesy Hublot, Courtesy Nacogdoches, Texas, Police Department; 23—(clockwise from top left) Courtesy Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Science; Courtesy Nobumasa Inoue, Board of Education of Dazaifu, Japan, Courtesy Jeffrey Rose, University of Birmingham, Courtesy Steve Morton, Monash University; 24-25—Courtesy Parks Canada, Edward Eastaugh; 26—Courtesy Parks Canada; Courtesy Parks Canada, Brett Seymour, NPS; Courtesy Parks Canada, Brett Seymour, NPS; Courtesy Parks Canada, Brett Seymour, NPS; 27—Courtesy Parks Canada; Lieutenant Samuel Gurney Cresswell, Courtesy Toronto Public Library; 28—Courtesy Parks Canada, Brett Seymour, NPS; 29—Courtesy Parks Canada, John Lucas Jr., Courtesy Parks Canada, Edward Eastaugh; 30—Courtesy Parks Canada, Brett Seymour, NPS, Courtesy Parks Canada, Louis Barnes, Courtesy Parks Canada; 31—Courtesy Parks Canada, John Lucas Jr.; 32—Courtesy Claus-Joachim Kind (2); 33— Lion-man statuette, Inv. Ulmer Museum Prä Slg. Wetzel Ho-St. 39/88.1, Photo Thomas Stephan, © Ulmer Museum; 34-35—Courtesy Rabun Taylor; 36—Ted O’Neill, © The Trustees of the British Museum, Courtesy Michael McCullough; 37—Wikimedia Commons; 38—Courtesy Rabun Taylor (2), Courtesy Ted O’Neill; 39—Courtesy of the State Archive, Rome; 40—Courtesy Rabun Taylor (3); 41-45—All Courtesy Matt Schmader; 46-47—Courtesy University of Copenhagen; 48—Courtesy Rob Carter (top and pearl), Courtesy University of Copenhagen (mother of pearl); 49—Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY; 50—Courtesy University of Copenhagen; 51—Courtesy University of Copenhagen (2); 53—Courtesy Natalie Jackson; 54—Courtesy Marion Blackburn (2); 56—Courtesy Marion Blackburn; 57—Courtesy Natalie Jackson; 58—Courtesy Marion Blackburn; 64—Courtesy Natalie Jackson; 68—© The Trustees of the British Museum


comprising the United States’ second largest tribal nation. But the small band of Cherokee who stayed behind left a smaller but still significant legacy in southern Appalachia.

It is estimated that about 400 Cherokee remained in North Carolina after the others were removed. They hid in the mountains where, unable to trade publicly, they found ways to sur-vive by cooperating with one another. They often lived together in home-steads, and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, which today numbers about 10,000, descends from residents of those homesteads.

In Andrews, North Carolina, just over the border from his work at Fort Armistead, Greene is excavating a farm once owned by John Welch, a Chero-kee, and his white wife, Elizabeth. After removal, the state took over their land. John avoided relocation to Oklahoma because of his marriage, and Elizabeth repurchased the farm, where they further defi ed the Indian Removal Act, Greene says. There, they sheltered about a hundred Cherokee refugees. At the homestead site, Greene has found bones of rabbit, deer, and small game animals, such as songbirds. Among

that work. The stone is cut to make very tight joints. They’ve done some fi ne stone work.”

The seemingly grand military scale of the fort was not necessary to control the Cherokee, the demeanor of whom has been described as subdued and orderly. The fort grounds ordinarily used for drills may instead have served as a sleeping and cooking area for the internees. Direct evidence of Cherokee at the fort—or anywhere along the Trail of Tears for that matter—is vanishingly rare. Yet one fi nd at Fort Armistead not only confi rms the Cherokee pres-ence in the area before their removal, but also suggests what sort of artifacts might be unearthed that could help reveal how the Cherokee and the sol-diers stationed there interacted.

The broken remains of a carved stone Cherokee pipe were discovered at the site of the soldiers’ barracks. The pipe, which was probably discarded before it was fully carved, was found in a deposit with military regalia that date it to a time before removal. So while it says little about the experience of the Cherokee as they were interned there, it implies that before removal, “you had Cherokees coming in and hanging around the fort,” Riggs says.

“To fi nd evidence of their presence is amazing,” Greene adds. “[The sol-diers and Cherokee] are dealing with each other on a face-to-face basis. It brings up those questions, makes you think about what happened on the ground. How could you explain this?”

Other fi nds in 2011 include ceram-ics, such as pearl ware, and glass dating the site to the removal period. A fac-eted blue glass bead, from the 1820s or 1830s, emerged from the foundation stones (and may, in fact, be of Cherokee origin). Also, more than 4,200 distinct metal objects have been documented.

The excavation and study of the site of Fort Armistead is begin-ning to flesh out the story of

those who left. Now, the Cherokee, whose capital is Tahlequah in eastern Oklahoma, number some 300,000—

the food traces, there is a notable lack of long bones, which Cherokee often cooked and cracked open for the mar-row. Greene says this is a signifi cant cultural marker—the family continued many Cherokee practices. “One of the strongest signs of that is the food remains,” he says.

The Welch settlement and others, perhaps hundreds yet undiscovered, will help explain the diff erent experi-ences and separate paths of the two groups of Cherokee split by the trauma of removal. “In a broad sense, for all Cherokees, the removal is a watershed event,” Greene says. “It’s tied to the broader tribal history of tragedy and trauma.” It divided the tribe, but also, he suggests, forged the resilience and character of the modern Cherokee.

In 1987, Congress designated the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, about 2,200 miles across

nine states. Fort Armistead is on the trail and is a remarkably fragile site. Hidden cameras, motion monitors, and a high-tech security system pro-tect it from looters and unauthorized visitors. Among the visitors allowed at the site are Cherokee from Okla-homa, whose ancestors surely passed through the fort.

For archaeology student Beau Carroll, a Cherokee who grew up in western North Carolina, excavating at the site of Fort Armistead allowed him to experience a deeper connec-tion with his past. He remembers his late great-grandmother telling him of being sent to boarding school, as many Cherokee children were, where she was instructed to follow white American traditions. She cried when she remembered it, he says. Working at the site gave him “an indescribable feeling, a really sad feeling.

“When I’m working, the archaeolo-gist in me gets really excited,” says Car-roll. “I forget where I am. But then I take a break and look at that trail, and I can’t believe what happened.” ■

Marion Blackburn is a freelance writer

based in Greenville, NC.

64

High-tech security, including cameras and motion detectors, has been installed at the fragile and significant site of Fort Armistead. The site’s location remains a secret.

(continued from page 58)

More than , people attended the 113th AIA/APA Joint Annual Meeting

held in Philadelphia from January 5th through the 8th, 2012, making it the largest meeting in AIA history. Th e four-day conference brought together archaeologists, classicists, epigraphers, heritage specialists, and members of the public interested in learning about the latest archaeological research and discoveries. Th e program included more than 60 sessions and symposia, approximately 300 papers, and several special events that dealt with a wide variety of topics, including recent fi eldwork in the Mediterranean and Near East regions, ancient urbanism, religion, architecture, and pottery.

Th e meeting’s inaugural event was an outstanding opening-night lecture

entitled “Uncorking the Past: Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages,” presented by Patrick McGovern, scientifi c director of the Biomolecu-lar Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. McGovern’s long involvement with the archaeology of fermented bever-ages has produced several publica-tions on the manufacture and role of spirits and other alcoholic beverages in the ancient world. His preoc-cupation has also resulted in col-laborations with a national brewery to produce ales inspired by ancient brewing recipes. Th e lecture and ensuing reception were hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Th ere were special events, includ-

ing a plenary on death and burial organized by AIA president Eliza-beth Bartman. Th e plenary, fi rst in a series of programs that will examine traditional archaeological topics in light of new methodologies and techniques, featured archaeologists from across the globe and examined death and burial in Hellenistic Etru-ria, medieval Italy, Mesoamerica, the American Midwest, and California.

Other sessions at the meeting focused on cultural heritage and the importance of protecting resources, especially in areas aff ected by confl ict. A special workshop, sponsored by the Site Preservation Committee, initiat-ed a new project that will defi ne best practices and produce a document that can be used as a primer for those interested in undertaking preserva-tion and conservation initiatives at archaeological sites.

In addition to the sessions for pro-fessionals, several programs, including the 12th Annual Archaeology Fair, were tailored specifi cally for the gen-eral public. Th e AIA is committed to public outreach and provides infor-mation and opportunities for mem-bers of the public to interact with archaeologists and experience fi rst-hand what archaeologists do through programs like the fair. Th e event

EXCAVATE, EDUCATE, ADVOCATE www.archaeological.org

Philadelphia Meeting Sets Attendance Record

65

Attendees of the opening-night lecture offered at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology gather at a reception given afterwards.

The Annual Meeting is only one of the many programs orga-nized and presented by the AIA.

Th e second half of the 116th AIA Lecture Season launched in Janu-ary. Th is year, over 100 speakers will present approximately 300 lectures at 109 AIA Local Societies. One of our featured lecturers, supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, is Yannis Lolos of the University of Th essaly. Lolos specializes in land-scape archaeology, the archaeology of the Hellenistic city, and Greek and Roman architecture and topography. He will travel to seven local AIA societies and speak about his excit-ing work at the ancient Greek city of Sikyon, in the northern Peloponnese,

and on the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that connected the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire.

While excavations at Sikyon have typically focused on the city’s famous sculpture, painting, and major architectural monuments, a 15-year regional survey project led by Lolos is documenting the rich and diverse human presence and activity in the city from the earliest times to the modern era.

Th e Via Egnatia was the fi rst Roman highway built east of the

Adriatic Sea. Its construction was initiated by the proconsul of the Roman province of Macedonia, probably in the mid-140s b.c. Th e almost 700-mile-long road crossed many nations and important cities in what are now modern Albania, F.Y.R.O.M., Greece, and Turkey. Th ough large parts of this artery have been destroyed, some sections

are still visible. In his lecture, Lolos will follow the Via Egnatia from west to east and track its history through the centuries.

Visit www.archaeological.org/lectures for a full listing of the 2011/2012 Lecture Program. Contact your local AIA Society, or call 617-358-4184 ([email protected]) for more information on events near you.

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was held at the Franklin Institute on January 7th and was attended by an estimated 1,000 people. Fair par-ticipants were able to visit with 10 diff erent archaeological and cultural organizations who let visitors try on the armor of a Roman soldier, learn about Maya mathematics, throw an atlatl, make cordage and stone pen-

dants—and much, much more!Th e AIA/APA Joint Annual

Meeting provides a forum for mem-bers of the archaeological commu-nity to interact with one another and with colleagues in other related disciplines. Th e meeting highlights the latest research, initiates and pro-vokes important discussions, allows

for the creation of new partnerships, encourages scholarship, and generally provides an invigorating environment for people who are fascinated by the ancient world and the discipline of archaeology. We invite all of you to join us in Seattle from January 3rd through the 6th, 2013, for the 114th AIA/APA Joint Annual Meeting!

AIA Award Winners Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement: Lawrence Richardson Jr.Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology: David PeacockMartha and Artemis Joukowsky Distinguished Service Award: Shelby BrownBest Practices in Site Preservation Award: Donald Haggis and Margaret MookConservation and Heritage Management Award: James McCredieOutstanding Public Service Award: David GillExcellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award: Mary HollinsheadJames R. Wiseman Book Award: Michael DietlerFelicia A. Holton Book Award: Jack BrinkGraduate Student Paper Award: Allison Emmerson, University of Cincinnati and Margaret M. Andrews, University of Pennsylvania

A Glimpse into the Ancient Balkans

Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award winner, Mary Hollinshead, surrounded by some of her students.

call: 800-748-6262 • web site: www.aiatours.org • email: [email protected]

Fascinating itineraries with expert lecturers

“Experience, travel - these are as education in themselves.” ~ Euripides, ca. 480 – 406 B.C.

ARTIFACT

68 ARCHAEOLOGY • March/April 2012

Part of a hoard of more than 200 silver artifacts, this coin tells a surprisingly

complete story about kingship at a time when Vikings from Scandinavia

vied with the resident Anglo-Saxons for control of northwest England. The

coin’s obverse (front) bears the inscription AIRDECONUT, which schol-

ars believe is an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Scandinavian name “Harthacnut,” a previ-

ously unknown Viking ruler. He is the fi rst new Viking monarch identifi ed since 1840.

The reverse has the letters DNS, an abbreviation of the Latin word dominus (“ruler”), and

REX, Latin for “king.” The use of Latin and the words’ cross-like arrangement is evi-

dence that, by only a few decades after the Vikings began settling in Britain in the mid-

ninth century, they had converted to Christianity.

Despite the Viking ruler’s adoption of the Anglo-Saxon’s religion, the hoard—

a collection of jewelry, ingots (molds for metal casting), and coins, all weighing more than

two pounds and constituting the fourth largest Viking hoard ever found—indicates that

territorial clashes had not ended. The collection, which would have been valuable enough

to buy a herd of cattle or sheep, was likely buried for safekeeping. It was not retrieved until

last year, when a metal detectorist discovered the hoard in a lead container lying slightly

more than one foot underground. He reported the fi nd to local archaeological authorities,

and the artifacts were taken to the British Museum to be cleaned, analyzed, and conserved.

WHAT IS IT

CoinDATE

ca. A.D. 900

MATERIAL

Silver DISCOVERED

Silverdale, Lancashire, northwest England, September

2011

SIZE

Roughly an inch in diameter

Tunisia (17 days)Join Prof. Pedar Foss, DePauw U., on our in-depth Tunisian tour. We begin in Tuniswith Phoenician Carthage and the fabulousmosaic collection at the Bardo Museum.Tour highlights include the Roman city ofDougga, the underground Numidian capitalat Bulla Regia, Roman Sbeitla, the Islamicpilgrimage center of Kairouan and theremote areas around Tataouine andMatmata, unique for underground cities and fortified granaries. Our journey takes us to picturesque Berber villages, colorfulbazaars and lovely beaches.

Journey back in time with us. We’ve been taking curious travelers on fascinating historical study tours for the past 36 years. Each tour is led by a noted scholar whose knowledge and enthusiasm brings history to life and adds

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For more information, please visit www.archaeologicaltrs.com, e-mail [email protected], call 212-986-3054, toll-free 866-740-5130. Or write to Archaeological Tours, 271 Madison Avenue, Suite 904, New York, NY 10016.

And see history our way.

2012 tours: Malta, Sardinia & Corsica • China: Sacred Landscapes • Greece • Oman • Sicily & So. Italy • Morocco • EgyptChina: Silk Road • Lebanon • Israel • Ethiopia • Chile & Easter Island • Gujarat India • Sri Lanka • Maritime Turkey...and more

Peru (17 days)Discover the intriguing empires ofthe Inca, Lambayeque, Mochica,

and Chimú peoples with Prof.Gregory Zaro, U. of Maine.Touring includes visits to Lima’s

museums, the Moche tombs ofSipán, Trujillo, Túcume, Chan Chan,

the largest adobe city in the world, as wellas Cuzco and the sacred Urubamba Valley.Tour highlights include Cerro Sechín,renowned for its unique stone carvings, the early temple-fortress of Chankillo and amazing Caral, the oldest city in theAmericas plus, two days at Machu Picchu.

Classical Provence (14 days)Journey through the color-drenched countryside of Provence with Prof. Ori Z.Soltes, Georgetown U. As we travel fromMarseille to Arles, Avignon, Vaison-la-Romaine and Lyon, we will visit some of thebest-preserved Roman monuments in theworld. Our tour also includes an opportunityto walk in the footsteps of Van Gogh andGauguin. Fields of flowers, tile-roofed villages and gourmet meals enhance thiswonderful experience.

Caves and Castles (17 days)Explore the Paleolithic cave art of northernSpain and southwestern France with Prof.Roy Larick, Cleveland State U. Beginning inBurgos, tour highlights include Atapuerca,the caves of Tito Bustillo, El Castillo, Gargas,Altamira II, Le Mas d’Azil, Lascaux II, PechMerle and Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum.During our five-day stay in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac we will also visit the DordogneValley’s castles and medieval villages. Bygood fortune, these sites are found in anarea renowned for fabulous food and wine.

archaeological toursLED BY NOTED SCHOLARS

superb itineraries, unsurpassed service

Southern Spain (15 days)Megaliths, Moors & Conquistadors Spain evokes lovely white towns and thescent of oranges, but it is also a treasury ofancient remains including the cities left bythe Greeks, Romans and Arabs. Aswe travel south from Madrid withProf. Ronald Messier, MiddleTennessee State U., to historicToledo, Roman Mérida and intoAndalucia, we explore historicalmonuments, Moorish architecture,Córdoba’s great cathedral, thesplendor of the Alcazar in Sevilleand end our tour in Granada withthe opulent Alhambra.

Archaeological Toursled by noted scholars

Invites You to Journey Back in Time

April 26-29, 2012Davidson, NC

at theMAYA lago

sECOND annual

www.mayaatthelago.com

school

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Archaeology 20120304