Lost Worlds of Archaeology

Recent historical research has proven that there was, until about the 16th century, two lost islands west of the Cardigan Bay shore, near Aberystwyth, the remnants of a lost low-lying coastal landscape that was recorded by Ptolemy's observations two thousand years ago. This landscape would have been substantial, enough to support major towns, farms, ports and coastal wildlife. This land was immortalised in medieval legend as  Cantre'r  Gwaelod, ruled by the morose king Gwynddo and decieved by the wicked prince Seithenn. As this legend dates from the 12th century - and recounts local tradition - the submergence would have taken place long before then. The drowning of Cantr'er Gwaelod, which possibly inspired the drowning of  Númenor and the northernly region of Bereliand in Tolkein's Silmarillion. Image credit: Alan Lee. One clue we have towards this great inundation is found with Gildas, a monastic scholar probably writing from a secure abode either in Durnovaria (Do...

Three new papers published in Science, a multi-year research collaboration by the David Reich Institute, Max Planck and several other universities, have helped to bring the murky forces of prehistoric migration into much finer focus. The first focuses on the origins of the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Indo-Anatolian languages through new genetic data, and the last focuses on the ethnic diversity of cities around the Roman empire and in early medieval Europe, which might be the subject of a future blog post or two. The second, and arguably the most revealing, is a study on the origins of the first farmers: the Pre-Pottery Anatolian Neolithic. It's traditionally been assumed that Levantine hunter-cultivators, hailing from the Natufian culture, moved to Anatolia to build the first Neolithic societies. Gobekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe and other monumental sites have been seen as products of this transition, a 'last hurrah' of the hunters as lifestyles became more sedentary. However,...

This week, archaeologists from the University of Huelva, Seville and others discovered an absolutely monumental (pun intended) megalithic site in southwestern Spain in the Lower Guadiana basin. The cluster of sites - collectively called La Torre-La Janera - is incredibly unique in that it contains not just dolmens, not just standing stone alignments, not just stone cists, but all three. In total, more than 500 megaliths, all on what was private land, have been discovered, most only recently revealed due to extremely arid conditions in that part of Spain. It is probably not an understatement to say that even before excavation - which is due to run until 2026 - La Torre could fundamentally reshape our understanding of the megalithic phenomenon in western Europe. A different cromlech circle at  Cáceres, of a similar age and recently exposed due to a historic drought. The well-preserved megalithic complex, containing alignments, cromleches and dolmens, is not just important for it...

In either the winter of 1041 or the spring of 1042, a Viking chieftain perished in the deserts of Khwarezmia, thousands of miles from his home port of Old Uppsala, Sweden. His name may or may not have been Ingvar, the Far-Traveller, who is last recorded in sagas, local chronicles, and in surviving runic inscriptions as battling Saracens in the territory of modern Georgia. While his feats are comparatively well known in contrast to earlier Viking journeys, it is worth a look at his career to estimate how far Viking and pre-Viking raiders could have travelled.  As told in  Yngvars saga víðförla, Ingvar was the Norse trader and raider Eymundr, whose maternal great-uncle was the legendary king Erik the Victorious, although runestones raise the possibility that he was instead the son of he Christian king of Sweden, Anund Jacob. Whatever the case, the young Ingvar (or Yngvarr) rose through the ranks as a renowned warrior, and was appointed the commander of a leidang, or military com...

The origins of anatomically modern  Homo Sapiens have always been a mystery, especially as fossils discovered in the past are dated further and further back.  The current consensus is that our species emerged around 250,000 years ago, coexisting with slightly more 'archaic' human groups such as Homo Rhodesiensis in southern Africa and Homo Sapiens Idaltu in Ethiopia. However, the origins of our evolutionary common ancestor with the Neanderthals, dubbed the Last Common Ancestor or LCA (not to be confused with the last common ancestor of chimps and hominids), are starting to be revealed, an ancestral species that would not look out of place today as toddlers.  Recent research and new finds have set this origin between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago, with a subsequent branching of the 'Neandersovans' into western and eastern halves, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, dated genetically to 744,000 years ago.  Now, in a open access paper released this week, ...

Last week, a particularly spectacular discovery was published. Archaeologists working in the arid sticks of New Mexico had explored what was thought to be a Clovis-period mammoth-butchering site, only to reveal something else: that the lowest layers of mammoth bones, bearing traces of butchery marks and other modification, dated to circa 37,000 BP. To put this in context, the other oldest confirmed site in the Americas is only 22,000 years old, also in New Mexico, in the form of ghost footprints. Although it is not clear-cut evidence for direct human exploitation - the bones may have been scavenged well after the mammoths met their end - the presence of bone micro-flakes, localised burnt sediments and percussion-marked lithics all but definitely shows that people were around in New Mexico at the time. Given the sun-drenched state is thousands of miles from the coast, this raises the question: when and where did this mysterious group first originate?  Ancient and modern genomes from...

People have fished for thousands and thousands of years: there is abundant evidence for that. The Mesolithic, for instance, is defined entirely in some regions by towering shell middens, recording generations of marine exploitation. Harpoon technology, the primary method of catching fish (other than using your bare hands), have been around for at least 90,000 years, the earliest known found at Semliki in the DRC, produced by the distant ancestors of the Efé pygmies. The age of deep-water fishing, on the other hand - the act of setting offshore for deeper waters, catching larger prey and marine mammals such as whales, sharks and dolphins - is more controversial, because the technology required for it would have direct implications regarding the complexity of their culture and society.  How can archaeologists tell? The easiest piece of the puzzle to find are the remains of deep-water marine species within shell middens, species which are not known today to venture near the shore...

  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...

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 Khuf...

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 cen...

  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 deposi...