Lost Worlds of Archaeology

 The final centuries of the Bronze Age, with all its drama, mayhem and sabre-rattling, has been under increased archaeological interest in recent years, not least because of the decipherment of ancient texts from Ugarit and other sites in the Levant, which give us a great deal of information into the fragility of the palace societies of the day. New scientific techniques, primarily isotope analysis of human skeletons, also provides the potential to track the individual movements of warriors and their families, and by extension proving or disproving the 'Sea Peoples' narrative, which has been blamed from the early 20th century for the decline of the eastern Mediterranean , in the same way that barbarians were (and still are) blamed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  There is one piece of the Bronze Age puzzle, however, that continues to elude archaeologists. This is the 'black earth' or, in Italian, terramare cultural horizon, an archaeological culture across the

 The two pachyderm species, the woolly mammoth or mammuthus primigenius , and the steppe mammoth or Mammuthus trogontherii , roamed the grasslands and plains of Eurasia for several hundred millenia, slowly dwindling in numbers due to climatic change, change in prey and predator species, and from hunting by hominids and early Homo Sapiens . The traditional story is that the last mammoths died out around 6-4,000 years ago, reduced to an inbred, isolated population on frozen Wrangel Island, a small landmass lying close to the northern shore of eastern Siberia. However, new archaeological investigations are beginning to challenge this interpretation; according to roughly calibrated dates, the woolly mammoth may have survived until around 3,900 BP in the wilderness of the Taimyr peninsula in north-central Siberia - that is, approximately 1,870 BCE.  The dates were achieved in early 2021, after years of research by Yucheng Wang, Mikkel Pedersen, Jeffery Rasic and numerous other archaeologist

The resurgence of the Sassanid Empire, in the latter decades of the 6th century CE, soon threatened to unravel to fragile order in the East established by the emperor Justinian. Although it had made great strides in bringing back the western half of the Mediterranean under imperial control, this was only made possible through a network of allies and long-Romanized populations. In the near East, Byzantium could only count on a handful of Arabic tribal confederations to shield the blows of the Sassanid King of Kings. However, there was an empire on the rise that the offered a glimmer of hope against the unconquerable Persians: the Turks. The Gokturk Empire had formed in the middle of the 6th century after a revolt in the central Asian steppe by a aristocratic clan, the Blue or Ashina Turks, against the reigning Rouran Khaganate. A fierce civil war was followed by a speedy exit of the Rouran dynastic elite, who called themselves the Avars and, as recently confirmed by genetic research, ro

Although inhabited by flourishing civilizations for thousands of years, Africa remained a vast and un-navigable continent for thousands of years to the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean. The first recorded foray along the coast of the continent was the expedition of Queen Hatshepsut to the 'land of Punt', probably located in southern Eritrea or modern-day Somaliland, about 1450 BCE; which is known from reliefs at Hatshepsut's temples and from a contemporary depiction of a secretary bird, a species which roams only in the Horn of Africa and not elsewhere. Her expedition followed the footsteps of earlier contacts, dating back to Pharoah Khufu (26th century BCE), the pyramid-builder who imported gold from the land.  The next major ambitious journey was made by Hanno the Navigator in the late 6th century BCE, a Carthaginian sailor who may have reached as far as the coast of Equatorial Guinea, and somewhere along the way captured a hairy tribe of 'Gorillai'; which is

The nomadic Huns briefly dominated most of Europe north of the Roman frontier from the 420s until the early 450s, when inter-sibling civil war following the death of Atilla caused the rapid collapse of the empire and its contraction into a small sub-tribe of the Turkic-speaking Bulgars by the early 6th century. We only know of them due to surviving Roman accounts and fragments of archaeological evidence, such as objects with the characteristic Hunnic cloisonné gold-working style, and so the northern, western and eastern extents of their territory are much more poorly understood, with both kinds of evidence scarce or non-existent.  As I touched on in a previous post, there are hints that the Huns went beyond the traditional territory assumed for them - central and eastern Europe - mostly coming from the Roman writer Priscus, who writes (in a paraphrased passage from the 9th century account of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, the  Constantinian Excerpts ), that Attila claimed he wa

The Anglo-Saxons have a reputation of being somewhat insular, at the mercy of far-travelling Vikings who plundered their coasts and set their settlements ablaze, and it is only with the conquest of England by Cnut in 1016 that they are though of as belonging to a 'north Atlantic' world connected with western Europe, Scandinavia, Greenland and the coasts of Spain.  The translation, and the addition of the travelogue of the Norse sailor Ohthere, to the 5th-century historical text of the Spaniard Paulus Orosius, the  Historiae Adversus Paganos, however, does indicate that by the time of King Alfred, there was an awareness of lands as far as north-west Russia (referencing the area of Perm or Beormas ) and the Ob river (the area around which might be called 'Fenland' by Ohthere's account).  Yet as far as knowledge of the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia goes, the consensus is that Anglo-Saxon England understood them only in Biblical terms, or from passing references in sur

So far, we've had a look at the possible historical origins of many aspects of the Heracles legend, from his behaviour to the wild and wonderful places he visits. The question remains, however, why these aspects came together into the tale of one semi-divine hero, rather than surfacing in a variety of different folk-heroes and deities. What was the motive for creating such a figure, and why did the Greeks believe in him at all? The simplest answer was that Heracles was a convenient figure to excuse and contest the colonialism of the so-called Orientalizing period, the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. Greek settlers could claim a harbour or piece of land of their choice by asserting that as Heracles had been there before, clearing it of some monster or barbarian ruler, the Greeks, being in their view descended from him, were simply inheriting what was theirs by birth right. By the same token, native communities or rival colonists could claim that Heracles had visited their ancestors, or f