Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Sheilbh]

Not quite archaeology but intersting:

Secret doorway in Parliament leads to historical treasure trove
By Brian Wheeler Political reporter

A forgotten passageway used by prime ministers and political luminaries - and closed up by Victorian labourers - has been uncovered in Parliament.

Historians working on the renovation of the House of Commons found the lost 360-year-old passageway, hidden in a secret chamber.

The doorway was created for the coronation of Charles II, in 1660, to allow guests access to a celebratory banquet in Westminster Hall, the building next to the modern day Commons chamber.

It was used by generations of MPs and political notables, such as the diarist Samuel Pepys, as the main entrance to the Commons but was blocked up before being concealed within the thick walls of the ancient building.

It was briefly rediscovered in 1950, during repairs to bomb damage, but then sealed off again and forgotten about - until now.

"To say we were surprised is an understatement - we really thought it had been walled-up forever after the war," said Mark Collins, Parliament's Estates Historian.

Liz Hallam Smith, historical consultant to Parliament's architecture and heritage team, said: "I was awestruck, because it shows that the Palace of Westminster still has so many secrets to give up.

"It is the way that the Speaker's procession would have come, on its way to the House of Commons, as well as many MPs over the centuries, so it's a hugely historic space."

The current occupant of the Speakers chair, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, said: "To think that this walkway has been used by so many important people over the centuries is incredible. I am so proud of our staff for making this discovery."

A brass plaque, erected in Westminster Hall in 1895, marks the spot where the doorway once was but, says Dr Hallam Smith, "almost nothing was known about it".

It lay behind thick masonry, on the hall side, and wooden panelling, running the full length of a Tudor cloister, on the other side.

Up until three years ago, the cloister had been used as offices by the Labour Party, and before that, a cloakroom for MPs.


The west Cloister where the door to the chamber was discovered

It was Dr Hallam Smith who discovered evidence of small, secret access door that had been set into the cloister's panelling, during Parliament's last major renovation in 1950.

"We were trawling through 10,000 uncatalogued documents relating to the palace at the Historic England Archives in Swindon, when we found plans for the doorway in the cloister behind Westminster Hall.

"As we looked at the panelling closely, we realised there was a tiny brass key-hole that no-one had really noticed before, believing it might just be an electricity cupboard."

The team turned to Parliament's locksmith for help and, with some difficulty, he was able to open the wood panel door, to reveal a tiny, stone-floored chamber, with a bricked-up doorway on the far wall.

They discovered the original hinges for two wooden doors 3.5m high, that would have opened into Westminster Hall.

They also found graffiti dating back to the rebuilding of Parliament, in a neo-Gothic style, following the fire in 1834 which destroyed much of the medieval palace.

The scrawled pencil marks, left by men who helped block the passageway on both sides in 1851, read: "This room was enclosed by Tom Porter who was very fond of Ould Ale."


Pencil graffiti dating back to the 1850s is still visible

It then names the witnesses of "the articles of the wall" - evidently architect Sir Charles Barry's masons who had joined bricklayer's labourer Thomas Porter in a toast to mark the room's enclosure.

The men can be traced in the 1851 census returns as Richard Condon, James Williams, Henry Terry, Thomas Parker and Peter Dewal.

Finally the graffiti notes: "These masons were employed refacing these groines...[ie repairing the cloister] August 11th 1851 Real Democrats."

This reference to "real democrats" suggests the group were part of the Chartist movement, which campaigned for every man aged 21 to have a vote, and for would-be MPs to be allowed to stand even if they did not own property.

"Charles Barry's masons were quite subversive," said Dr Hallam Smith.

"They had been involved in quite a few scraps as the Palace was being built. I think these ones were being a little bit bolshie but also highly celebratory because they had just finished the first major restoration of these beautiful Tudor cloisters."


Part of the bricked-up doorway in the hidden chamber

The team are keen to trace the descendants of Tom Porter and his colleagues, and have already discovered that the workers lived in lodgings near Parliament.

There was another surprise for the team when they entered the passageway - they were able to light the room.


The bulb that still worked after 70 years

A light switch - probably installed in the 1950s - illuminated a large Osram bulb marked 'HM Government Property'. The team is eager to learn more about the history of this hardy bulb.

Dr Collins said further investigations made him certain the doorway dated back at least 360 years.


The plaque in Westminster Hall may not be entirely accurate, the team believes

Dendrochronology testing revealed that the ceiling timbers above the little room dated from trees felled in 1659 - which tied in with surviving accounts that stated the doorway was made in 1660-61 for the coronation banquet of Charles II.

This is in contrast to the words on the brass plaque in Westminster Hall, which state the passageway was used in 1642 by Charles I, when he attempted to arrest five MPs, which the researchers believe is not accurate.

Dr Collins said the plans that led to their discovery will now be digitised as part of Parliament's Restoration and Renewal programme.

"The mystery of the secret doorway is one we have enjoyed discovering - but the palace no doubt still has many more secrets to give up," he added.

"We hope to share the story with visitors to the palace when the building is finally restored to its former glory, so it can be passed on down the generations and is never forgotten again."

[Malthus]

Heh I was kinda hoping they would find some actual skeletons in there. 

[jimmy olsen]

It's awesome what we can detect these days

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-proteins-unwashed-dishes-reveal-diets-lost-civilization-180970481/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia

Diets of a Lost Civilization
Material pulled from ceramic sherds reveals the favored foodstuffs in the 8,000-year-old city of Çatalhöyük in Turkey

By Lorraine Boissoneault
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
OCTOBER 8, 2018

remnant artifacts where humans once lived, learning about changes over time. With ceramics, she says, "you either love it or you don't."

That divide over sherds is especially notable at Çatalhöyük, a famous Neolithic town in Anatolia, Turkey. Rosenstock worked as one of the principal investigators at the West Mound area of Çatalhöyük, where the population appears to have declined and then disappeared around 5700 B.C. Compared to the East Mound—the more famous part of the prehistoric city—the West Mound is flush with pottery.

"You have like one sherd per bucket of earth that you dig [on the East Mound]," Rosenstock says. The population then shifted to the West Mound "around 6000 B.C." and the amount of pottery "explodes to kilos and dozens of kilos of ceramics that you dig out of the soil."

Broken bits of bowls and jars remain, some with decorations such as vibrant red stripes. But for the most part, Rosenstock remained uninterested in the shattered vessels—until another researcher noticed something odd. Calcified deposits were found in the ceramic vessels but nowhere else. If those deposits showed up on other objects, like bones or human-made tools, they would likely have been a product of the environment where they were buried. But deposits found exclusively on the inside of the ceramics pointed to another explanation.

"It was really clear that this must have to do with the stuff that was inside this bowl," Rosenstock says. She wasn't sure what to do about the strange finding until she learned about the work of Jessica Hendy. An archaeologist from the University of York, Hendy's research involves extracting proteins from dental calculus on fossilized teeth and analyzing the molecules to learn about the diets of ancient humans. When Rosenstock approached Hendy to discuss applying the same method to the flaky material on the inside of the Çatalhöyük ceramics, Hendy was eager to dive in.

Potsherd Food
Examples of calcified deposits from modern and ancient vessels at Çatalhöyük. a Examples of CaCO3 accretions from a modern tea water pot with extensive calcified deposits used near the research project compound Çatalhöyük, b a close-up of calcified deposits, c a relatively intact vessel (not analyzed in this study) demonstrating bowl shape and extent of calcified deposits and d a selection of four sherds analyzed in this study showing deposits adhering to the inside surface of the ceramic sherds. (Jessica Hendy et al.)
The results of that years-long collaboration are described in a new paper in Nature Communications, revealing just how effective dirty dishes can be in helping archaeologists decode the past.

"This is the oldest successful use of protein analysis to study foods in pottery that I'm aware of," Hendy says in an email. "What's particularly significant is the level of detail we were able to see from the culinary practices of this early farming community."


The potsherds yielded proteins from numerous plants—barley, wheat, peas and bitter vetch—as well as the blood and milk of several species of animal, including cows, sheep and goats. Of even greater interest to the researchers was the precision with which they could identify the proteins. They didn't just see barley, but could identify the specific signature of endosperms, the edible part of the plant. The material was stored in ceramic containers in a way that suggests it was probably used to make some kind of porridge.

The milk offered even more insight, as the researchers could distinguish whey from other parts of the liquid—and in one jar they found only whey, indicating the ancient Anatolians were actively transforming the milk into something like cheese or yogurt. "Here we have the earliest insight into people doing this kind of milk processing," Hendy says. "Researchers have found milk in pottery in earlier times, but what's exciting about this find and this technique is that we can see actually how people are processing their dairy foods, rather than simply detecting its presence or absence."

Caroline Solazzo, who works on protein analysis in textiles at Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute, was impressed by the study. "The work was done by a very good team of experts in ancient proteomics studies," Solazzo says. "It seems that proteins can be better extracted from the accumulation of visible residues in the crust than from the ceramic wall, which is an interesting result for future studies of this type."


To identify the proteins, Hendy and her team took samples from the potsherds and put them through a mass spectrometry machine. This "shotgun" approach is different from past protein analyses, which involved looking for specific proteins rather than doing a catch-all examination. Proteins are made of specific chains of amino acids. Some proteins, like osteocalcin (which is found in bone), are made of only a couple dozen amino acids, while others form chains of thousands of the building blocks. To decipher the protein puzzle left behind in the jars from Çatalhöyük, Hendy and her team compared their results to a database of known proteins.

Reliance on a reference catalogue is one of the hurdles of this type of research, because the analysis is only as good as the database. Such archives tend to contain lots of data on commercially significant species like wheat, Hendy says, whereas less common plants remain underrepresented. Due to gaps in the data, the researchers couldn't identify everything in the batch—but they still managed to unlock a wealth of information.

Hendy and Rosenstock aren't the first ones to use proteins as windows into ancient life. In 2008, researchers looked at proteins trapped in clay pots that belonged to the Inupiat of Alaska around 1200 A.D. They found signs of seal muscle in the vessel, providing evidence of the Alaskan native's diet. And bioarchaeologist Peggy Ostrom managed to extract proteins from the 42,000-year-old leg bone of a horse discovered in Juniper Cave, Wyoming.

The question of how long such proteins survive is hard to answer at this point, because the technique is so new. Rosenstock and Hendy speculate that the proteins survived in their potsherds thanks to limescale buildup on the vessels (think of the white buildup around your faucets or tea kettles). But scientists won't know just how long proteins can survive until they pull samples from many more sites of different ages and different environments.

"We would love to use this technique to identify the diverse cuisines of past societies and how culinary traditions have spread around the world," Hendy says.

As for Rosenstock, she'd like to learn more about whether certain foods at Çatalhöyük were always eaten together for reasons of nutrition—the way rice and beans create a more nutritious meal together due to the combination of amino acids. She also says that after this exciting discovery, her mind is finally changed about potsherds. "It got me really interested in ceramics, in the end."

[Maximus]

Neolithic well is allegedly oldest human built wooden structure ever discovered:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/04/europe/wooden-well-oldest-czech-republic-scli-intl-scn/index.html

Must have been well-built.

[Syt]

I showed the well story to my coworker whose wife is a archaeologist specialized on neolithic times. She replied that there's one as old in Austria, but that Austrian archaeologists are shit at PR

[crazy canuck]

Neolithic well is allegedly oldest human built wooden structure ever discovered:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/04/europe/wooden-well-oldest-czech-republic-scli-intl-scn/index.html

Must have been well-built.

deep

[Maladict]

One of the few upsides of climate change.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/16/spectacular-artefacts-found-as-norway-ice-patch-melts

[Syt]

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-israeli-archaeologists-find-hidden-pattern-at-gobekli-tepe-1.8799837

Israeli Archaeologists Find Hidden Pattern at 'World's Oldest Temple' Göbekli Tepe

Neolithic hunter-gatherers who erected massive monoliths in central Turkey 11,500 years ago had command of geometry and a much more complex society than previously thought, archaeologists say

The enigmatic monoliths built some 11,500 years ago at Göbekli Tepe have been puzzling archaeologists and challenging preconceptions about prehistoric culture since their discovery in the 1990s. Chiefly, how could hunter-gatherers with a supposedly primitive societal structure build such monumental stone circles on this barren hilltop in what is today southeastern Turkey? How could a largely nomadic society at the dawn of agriculture marshal the resources and know-how to create what its discoverers have dubbed the oldest known temple in the world?

If anything, a discovery by Israeli archaeologists suggests the Göbekli Tepe construction project was even more complex than previously thought, and required an amount of planning and resources thought to be impossible for those times. Their study of the three oldest stone enclosures at Göbekli Tepe has revealed a hidden geometric pattern, specifically an equilateral triangle, underlying the entire architectural plan of these structures.

This implies that, in contrast to the prevailing assumption among Göbekli researchers until now, these three circles were planned as a single unit and possibly built at the same time, say archaeologists Gil Haklay and Avi Gopher of Tel Aviv University.

Thus, thousands of years before the invention of writing or the wheel, the builders of Göbekli Tepe evidently had some understanding of geometric principles and could apply them to their construction plans, concludes the study published in January in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

"The initial discovery of the site was a big surprise and we are now showing that its construction was even more complex than we thought," says Haklay, an Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist and a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University.

The first phase of construction at Göbekli Tepe, or "potbellied hill" in Turkish, has been dated to between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago. This is the earliest part of the Neolithic, also known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (or PPNA), around the time people in the Northern Levant began domesticating plants and animals, launching the Agricultural Revolution.

The site's builders erected several concentric stone circles, setting into the walls massive T-shaped pillars that reached almost six meters in height, many of which were decorated with reliefs of animals and other motifs. These circles appear to have been built around pairs of pillars positioned roughly in their center.

Only four circles from the PPNA, dubbed enclosures A, B, C, and D, have been excavated so far, but surveys have shown there are at least 15 more scattered around the hill, as well as half a dozen other similar unexplored sites across southeastern Turkey.

An unexpected pattern

The new study focused on enclosures B,C, and D, which are known to be slightly older than A. Based on the assumption that such a massive construction project would have been beyond the capacities of the small, non-sedentary groups that usually comprise hunter-gatherer societies, most scholars have assumed that all the circles at Göbekli Tepe had to have been built gradually over a long period of time.

"There is a lot of speculation that the structures were built successively, possibly by different groups of people, and that one was covered up while the next one was being built. But there is no evidence that they are not contemporaneous," Haklay tells Haaretz.

Haklay, who formerly worked as an architect, applied a method called architectural formal analysis, which is used to trace the planning principles and methods used in the design of existing structures.

Using an algorithm, he identified the center points of the three irregular stone circles. Not surprisingly, those points fell roughly mid-way between the pair of central pillars in each enclosure. What was surprising, however, was that those three points could be linked to form a nearly perfect equilateral triangle. Specifically, the vertices are about 25 centimeters away from forming a perfect triangle with sides measuring 19.25 meters each.

"I certainly did not expect this," Haklay recalls. "The enclosures all have different sizes and shapes so the odds that these center points would form an equilateral triangle by chance are very low."

The finding confirms previous research by Haklay and Gopher at other sites showing that architects in the Neolithic or even in the late Paleolithic didn't build shelters and homes haphazardly but had the ability to apply rudimentary geometric principles and create standard units of measurement.

At Göbekli Tepe, the discovery of the pattern is evidence of a complex abstract design that could not be realized without first creating a scaled floor plan, Haklay says. At a time when the invention of writing was millennia away, this could be accomplished, for example, by using reeds of equal length to create a rudimentary blueprint on the ground, he suggests.

"Each enclosure subsequently went through a long construction history with multiple modifications, but at least in an initial phase they started as a single project," the archaeologist concludes. "The implication is that a single project at Göbekli Tepe was three times larger than previously thought and required three times as much manpower – a level that is unprecedented in hunter-gatherer societies."

Suddenly, social stratification

The construction would have required hundreds or maybe thousands of workers and could be taken to mark the birth of a more stratified society, with a level of sophistication previously seen only in later, sedentary groups of farmers, says Gopher, an archaeology professor at Tel Aviv University and Haklay's PhD advisor.

"This is where it starts: The sharing instinct of hunter-gatherer societies is reduced and inequality is growing; someone is running the show – I don't know if it's shamans or political leaders, but this is a society that has an architect and somebody who initiates a project like this and has the power to make it happen," Gopher says.

The new study is "an amazing contribution to the understanding" of this enigmatic site, says Anna Belfer-Cohen, an archaeology professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an expert on late prehistory. However, given that there are many stone circles at Göbekli Tepe and other sites nearby that have yet to be excavated, we don't know if the same conclusions can be applied to all these enclosures, cautions Belfer-Cohen, who did not take part in the study.

"These three enclosures may have been built together, but it doesn't mean that the others were not constructed as single units, perhaps by different groups," she says. "We have only uncovered the tip of the iceberg of this phenomenon, but it is more likely that there were many different groups that considered this entire area sacred and converged on it to erect the enclosures, rather than a single group that went crazy and just constructed these complexes day and night."

The new world order

How and why Neolithic hunter-gatherers would mobilize the massive resources needed to build Göbekli Tepe and other sites like it is the subject of much speculation. While some researchers have interpreted the structures as residential spaces, most archaeologists see little evidence of this and consider the sheer monumentality of the complex and the richness of its iconography as evidence of a ritual purpose.

The massive T-shaped pillars and the reliefs on them – animal and human-like - have been interpreted as totems: perhaps representations of protective spirits, possibly long-deceased ancestors, some of whom were believed to take on animal form. The idea that the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic images may represent the venerated dead was reinforced by the recent discovery of modified skull fragments buried at the site, which many researchers consider to be evidence of ancestor cults (similarly to the interpretation of stone masks found throughout the Levant from about 9,000 years ago).

The identification of the hidden geometrical pattern strengthens the interpretation of Göbekli Tepe as a cultic site, say Haklay and Gopher. The southern side of the triangle runs through the central stone pillars of enclosures B and C, creating a base for the polygon. The axis perpendicular to this line runs through the entire site and ends in the center of enclosure D, which can be interpreted as the top of the pyramid.

This suggests that the builders understood and wished to represent the idea of a hierarchy, perhaps intending to crystalize the new order of a less equal and more stratified society, Haklay and Gopher maintain.

The stratification was not limited to human relations: it suggests a change in the perceived relationship between humans and nature, the archaeologists suggest. That's because of what is found at the top of the triangle, at the center of enclosure D.

While the site's signature T-shaped pillars have all been interpreted as stylized human figures, the central monoliths of enclosure D are the only ones that are clearly anthropomorphic, bearing reliefs of hands, a belt, and possibly a loincloth. Placing these human depictions at the top of this triangle would have been a powerful message, and represented an ideological departure from the animal-centric canons of Paleolithic art.

"In Paleolithic art humans are rare, and this is true here as well, but you start to see change, the beginning of an anthropocentric world view in which animals and plants are no longer equal to humans but are subordinated to them," Gopher tells Haaretz.

In other words, Göbekli Tepe may have been designed, consciously or unconsciously, to represent and perhaps explain humanity's growing ability to manipulate its environment, which, in the coming centuries, would lead to the first domesticated crops in this very region, the researchers say.

"The end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is more of an ideological transformation than an economic or technological one," Gopher maintains. "Hunter-gatherers cannot domesticate anything, it's against their world view, which is based on equality and trust. Once that ideology changes, the entire structure of society is transformed and a new world is born."

[The Brain]

"Hunter-gatherers cannot domesticate anything, it's against their world view, which is based on equality and trust. ..."

They told Gopher this? Can Love Boat be trusted?

Also, who domesticated the first domesticated animals and plants?

[Syt]

Also, who domesticated the first domesticated animals and plants?

Traitors, obviously.

[Tamas]

"Hunter-gatherers cannot domesticate anything, it's against their world view, which is based on equality and trust. ..."

They told Gopher this? Can Love Boat be trusted?

Also, who domesticated the first domesticated animals and plants?

Yeah it is impossible to take any of this seriously after the guy in charge of the study is such a naive douche.

[The Brain]

This guy is obviously a fantasist, but even more generally I think it's a bit ridiculous how people with training (who should know better) project their own wishes on the noble savages of prehistory, instead of looking at the evidence.

One thing that may have contribued slightly (even if it's not the main cause, which is retardism), is that people's impressions of hunter-gatherers are colored by those groups who remained into modern eras, typically in very resource-poor environments that made nomadism and small groups essential. The sedentary hunter-gatherers who lived on prime real estate (which was often later taken over by agriculturalists) may have more closely resembled agriculturalists than some people suggest.

IIRC one place where sedentary hunter-gatherers remained into modern times is the Pacific Northwest. My understanding is that they weren't exactly Kumbaya Central.

[Tamas]

This guy is obviously a fantasist, but even more generally I think it's a bit ridiculous how people with training (who should know better) project their own wishes on the noble savages of prehistory, instead of looking at the evidence.

One thing that may have contribued slightly (even if it's not the main cause, which is retardism), is that people's impression of hunter-gatherers are colored by those groups who remained into modern eras, typically in very resource-poor environments that made nomadism and small groups essential. The sedentary hunter-gatherers who lived on prime real estate (which was often later taken over by agriculturalists) may have more closely resembled agriculturalists than some people suggest.

IIRC one place where sedentary hunter-gatherers remained into modern times is the Pacific Northwest. My understanding is that they weren't exactly Kumbaya Central.

The ridiculous myth of the Noble Savage is indeed annoying, and dare I say, damaging.

[Sheilbh]

Extraordinary discovery in Mexico:

We've just found the largest and oldest Mayan monument yet
Humans 3 June 2020
By Michael Marshall

The oldest and largest known monument built by the Mayan civilisation has been found in Mexico. Called Aguada Fénix, it is a huge raised platform 1.4 kilometres long.

Aguada Fénix was built around 1000 BC, centuries before the Maya began constructing their famous stepped pyramids. Its design suggests that early Mayan societies were fairly egalitarian and didn't have a powerful ruling class.

The Mayan civilisation flourished in the Americas before European colonisation. The Maya built huge cities and had an advanced knowledge of astronomy, but their civilisation collapsed around 800 AD.

Daniela Triadan at the University of Arizona in Tucson and her colleagues have described for the first time how they conducted an airborne survey using lidar, a remote sensing method that uses lasers to create a 3D map of the surface below, to scan the ground in Tabasco state in south-east Mexico.

They found 21 sites for conducting Mayan ceremonies, all centred on rectangular earthen platforms running roughly north to south.

Aguada Fénix is the largest. The main rectangular platform is made of soil and is 1413 metres long, 399 metres wide and 10 to 15 metres high. It is surrounded by smaller constructions, including additional platforms, causeways and reservoirs.

From ground level, the artificial nature of Aguada Fénix isn't obvious, says Triadan. "You think you're just walking uphill on natural terrain." But the lidar revealed its true scale. "We were like, holy cow," she says.

Building Aguada Fénix was a huge task. The team estimates that between 3.2 and 4.3 million cubic metres of earth were used, requiring 10 to 13 million person-days of work. "It would have taken probably thousands of people," says Triadan.

However, there is no evidence that people were coerced into doing the work. Triadan says Aguada Fénix may have been built by semi-nomadic people drawn from many kilometres around who collaborated and worked together. Other ancient monuments, including Göbekli Tepe in Turkey and Poverty Point in Louisiana, seem to have been built in the same way.


The flat and open design of Aguada Fénix seems to have been built with egalitarianism in mind. "The whole construction itself seems to be this communal open space," says Triadan.

There is no sign of monuments made for members of a powerful ruling class, such as large statues, Triadan says. In contrast, later Mayan pyramids were built by a society that had acquired a powerful ruling class who stood at the top of the pyramid, meaning others had to look up to them.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2343-4

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2245181-weve-just-found-the-largest-and-oldest-mayan-monument-yet/#ixzz6OUFxVMil

[The Brain]

However, there is no evidence that people were coerced into doing the work

Out of curiosity, to what extent is such evidence typically... er... in evidence at other ancient sites?