Lost Worlds of Archaeology

  Sometime in the 18th century, a group of Greeks from the island of Crete met a grisly end at a lake high in the Himalayas, over 5,000 feet above sea level. The small lake, known as Roopkund or Skeleton Lake, was already home to two scatters of deceased south Asian pilgrims, presumably Hindus, who had died there in the 8th and the 11th century CE. On one of the earlier pilgrimage parties, a southeast Asian, either from modern-day Thailand or northern Burma, had joined them in their unlucky fate. None of this was known from documentary sources, local legends or excavation. Only in the last four years have aDNA and strontium analysis - pioneered by the David Reich Lab at Harvard - been able to tell this story, unravelling the genomic signature of each individual and the diet they ate.  Roopkund Lake sits close to the Indian border with Nepal, and lies on a popular mountaineering trail for local guides and foreign tourists. The skeletons, scattered about the lake, some with hair and fing

Several early shipwrecks have become famous in recent years.  For instance, the Uluburun shipwreck, an Ugaritic vessel dating to the 12th century BCE, and the Salcombe shipwreck, which sunk to the bottom of the Channel seafloor around the 9th century BCE. Being from such a prehistoric period, most or all of their hulls have since rotted away, but their precious cargo has informed much about mobility, technology and prestige economics in the Bronze Age. The wreck at Salcombe held ingots and anchor weights originally extracted from Sicily, Sardinia or northern Spain, crossing thousands of miles over sea and land to end up alongside the British coastline, while Uluburun and its earlier cousin, the Cape Gelidonya Shipwreck, was carrying luxury goods from Egypt, Mesopotamia and all corners of the eastern Mediterranean. However, the title of the earliest shipwreck, and thus the earliest direct evidence for sailing (although earlier boats have been found, such as the Old Kingdom Khufu ship, i

In a year of boiling heat, freezing cold and unpredictable storms, exploring the earliest arrivals to the British Isles after the British-Irish Ice Sheet had receded, the environment had changed and sea levels had risen substantially is more relevant than ever. The latest thinking is that after the chilly Younger Dryas period of the 12th millennium BP, and a smaller cold snap called the Preboreal Osciliation (c. 11,300 - 11,050 BP), any Upper Palaeolithic groups in the British Isles were wiped out, or at least reduced to so small a number as to not make any impact. Mesolithic hunter-foragers, coming from Germany and southern Scandinavia via the submerged forest landscape of Doggerland, arrived in an empty land at the tail end of this cold snap in the north of England, following lakes and coastlines, while another culturally-contiguous group arrived from the south, across the daunting Channel River, a few centuries later. What this means, however, that there were a few centuries that re

  Today, the Russian Far East, stretching from the Sakha region to the coastline of the pacific ocean, is seen as one of the most remote places on earth, for good reasons. Even indigenous communities that have lived there for thousands of years are currently struggling to cope with the Russian economy, the warming climate and a loss of biodiversity, forcing them to abandon traditional ways of life and worsening rates of crime, illiteracy and alcoholism. However, this was only the case until relatively recently. Far from an impoverished, subzero corner of the planet, the Far East was, as several lines of evidence tell us, a rich and hospitable place even as far back as the Pleistocene. As well as the new find of a 40,000 year old worked antler bone along the banks of the lower Ob river, suggesting the first humans (or another hominin) quickly pursued an active hunting lifestyle above the Arctic Circle, one site stands above the rest in its archaeological value. The cluster of deposits k

It was long thought that the world above the Arctic circle was empty of humans of any kind until the last few thousand years of the Palaeolithic. A few groups may have stopped there to hunt, or to take shelter on their way elsewhere, but generally the picture was that until about twenty thousand years ago Arctic Siberia was one huge glacier, a wall of ice impenetrable to both man and beast. Two weeks ago, that picture was proven wrong. In yet another archaeological breakthrough by the Russian Academy of Sciences, pieces of worked antler were found at  Kushevat ,  beside the lower reaches of the Ob river, and AMS-dated to c.40,000 BP, and complementary paleoenvironmental data suggested that unlike what was believed, the Ob river region was fully glaciated only until 60,000 years ago, making the land traversable  and liveable by humans from that point on. These grooved antlers are nothing special by themselves, and confirms that whoever was there visited the region ephemerally. However,

Göbeklitepe, Karahan Tepe, Nevalı Çori  and a number of other prehistoric ritual sites across southwest Turkey and northern Syria have attracted more than their fair share of wild theories in recent years, mostly because they seem so out of place in a period - the Pre-Pottery Neolithic - which was all about small-scale farming, gathering and staying local. Among the most out-there ideas are that their characteristic T-pillars represent alien overlords or celestial figures inspired by visitors from outer space. The importance of the sites has also made comparisons to the legends of the Annanuki, the Sumerian creator-gods, and the Biblical Garden of Eden, inevitable. A similarly far-fetched theory, however, has recently come from senior academics in the field. Semih Güneri, a retired professor from Dokuz Eylul University, has claimed on the basis of similar stone tools and genetic evidence that there was a massive, long-distance migration from Siberia to the Zagros Mountains starting aro