Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[jimmy olsen]

Neat

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/roman-road-found-beneath-venice-lagoon-180978262/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia

Traces of Submerged Roman Road Found Beneath Venetian Lagoon

New research suggests the Italian city was settled earlier than previously believed

By Livia Gershon
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
JULY 23, 2021 1:15PM

Researchers in Italy have found the remains of a Roman road and dock at the bottom of a Venetian lagoon.

"We believe that what we found is a part of a road that connected the southern and the northern part of the Venice lagoon," Fantina Madricardo, a geophysicist at the ISMAR-Marine Science Institute in Venice, tells the Art Newspaper's Garry Shaw.

The pathway would have allowed people to travel to and from the ancient Roman city of Altinum, located at the north end of the lagoon.

As Madricardo and her colleagues write in the journal Scientific Reports, their findings suggest the area that became the lagoon was home to extensive Roman settlements long before the founding of Venice in the fifth century C.E. At the time, far more of what is now underwater would have been dry land.

"The Venice lagoon formed from the main sea-level rise after the last glaciation, so it's a long-term process," Madricardo tells Live Science's Tom Metcalfe. "We know that since Roman times—about 2,000 years—that the sea level there rose" up to eight feet.

Per Krista Charles of New Scientist, archaeologist Ernesto Canal first suggested that ancient artificial structures stood beneath the canal's waters back in the 1980s. His idea sparked vigorous debate among researchers, but technology at the time didn't allow for much exploration.


"The area is very difficult to investigate by divers because there are strong currents and the water in the Venice lagoon is very turbid," Madricardo tells New Scientist.

Venice canal
When the road was built, sea levels were much lower, leaving the area that's now Venice drier than it is today. (szeke via Flickr under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
For the study, the researchers used a multibeam sonar device mounted on a boat to create 3-D images of the landscape on the lagoon floor. As the Guardian's Angela Giuffrida reports, scuba divers in the 1980s had found what appeared to be paving stones in the lagoon. The new research was able to confirm that they were large, flattened stones similar to basoli used in the system of roads that ran throughout the Roman Empire. These rocks were placed down systematically along a sandy ridge that would have then been above water.

The team also found 12 structures, some as much as 9 feet high and 170 feet long, by the presumed route of the road, as well as what appear to have been docks. The researchers investigated them with the help of a team of divers from the local police force.

According to Haaretz's Ariel David, historians have previously suggested that large-scale settlement of the Venice area only began in the fifth century, when refugees from the declining Western Roman Empire fled there to escape invasions.

"Venice was thought to have been built in a deserted place without any previous traces of human presence," Madricardo tells Haaretz. "... Altinum was the main urban site in the region but now we believe that there were already multiple settlements in the lagoon that were connected to it and coexisted with it, so the migration to this area was a more gradual process that started earlier."

Today, a changing climate is once again altering the landscape of the Venice area. In June, Italy's National Environment Protection System issued a report warning of the "continual and irreversible" rise in sea levels that threatens the low-lying city. Last year, a set of controversial, inflatable floodgates saved Venice from a 4.6-foot tide that could have overwhelmed half the city, as Giuffrida reported for the Guardian at the time.

[jimmy olsen]

Very cool, sounds way more modern than you'd expect.

https://twitter.com/GilgameshIQ/status/1419196518515548165

Canadian Researcher and musician Peter Pringle plays the Sumerian harp of Ur, about 4,400 years old

[Savonarola]

Archaeologists Discover 2,550-Year-Old Carving of the Last King of Babylon

[jimmy olsen]

https://twitter.com/mrstrangefact/status/1415011014173626370

This 5,000-year-old prosthetic eye found near Zabol in Iran is the oldest in history. It was made from tar and animal fat and painted gold. The wearer was a 6' tall priestess.

[The Brain]

Cool.

[jimmy olsen]

Cool info about a new section of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was found in 2011

https://etc.worldhistory.org/exhibitions/giglamesh-enkidu-humbaba-cedar-forest-newest-discovered-tablet-v-epic/

[jimmy olsen]

An appropriate twitter thread considering the title of this thread

https://twitter.com/artcrimeprof/status/1440402479947005958

Currently writing about some of the most fascinating and disturbing objects I know about: Lady Layard's jewelry - made from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian cylinder seals as a wedding present from the groom, an archeologist 27 years older than the bride.

[The Brain]

Disturbing how?

[Jacob]

Disturbing how?

Using ancient artifacts to make jewelry? Probably not particularly sound in terms of archaeology?

[Maladict]

Disturbing how?

Yeah, seems par for the course in that age. It's basically Schliemann's story but less disturbing.

[The Brain]

Sounds like he's most upset about the guy marrying a 27 years younger woman.

Ed: PATHETIC

I miss Ed.

[Syt]

https://www.businessinsider.com/fossil-footprints-humans-occupied-north-america-ice-age-2021-9?r=US&IR=T

Newly discovered fossil footprints show humans were in North America thousands of years earlier than we thought

A new discovery offers definitive evidence that humans were in North America far earlier than archaeologists previously thought — a whopping 7,000 years earlier.

Fossil footprints found on the shore of an ancient lake bed in New Mexico's White Sands National Park date as far back as 23,000 years ago, making them the oldest ever found in North America. That timing means humans occupied southern parts of the continent during the peak of the final ice age, which upends our previous understanding of when and how they moved south.

The previous idea was that the first people to occupy North America crossed a land bridge that existed between modern-day Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age, between 26,500 and 19,000 ago. According to that theory, they would have had to settle near the Arctic because ice sheets covering Canada made it impossible for them to go south. Then later, once these glaciers melted between 16,000 and 13,500 years ago, the migration toward South America began. 

This new finding, however, "definitively places humans in North America at time when the ice sheet curtains were very firmly closed," Sally Reynolds, a paleoecologist at Bournemouth University in England and co-author of the new study, told Insider.

So most likely, Reynolds said, humans migrated south in multiple waves, and one of those was before the last ice age. Those early people may have even sailed down the Pacific coast.

"Then more came down after the ice receded," Reynolds said.

The finding was published Thursday in the journal Science, and the study also describes nearby tracks found from mammoths, dire wolves, and giant ground sloths — prey for ancient humans.

The oldest known footprints in the Americas

Reynolds' team found 60 human footprints between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. The researchers estimated the tracks' age by dating microscopic seeds from an aquatic plant found in layers of lake sediment that sandwiched the prints.

"It's unequivocal evidence," Reynolds said. "The layers go seeds, footprints, seeds."

The footprints are now the oldest in the Americas, taking over from a 15,600-year-old footprint found in Chile a decade ago.

Most of the tracks belonged to teenagers and children, the team found, possibly indicating the youngsters played in the area while adults hunted and gathered.

Reynolds said that before this finding, the earliest estimate as to when humans started occupying North America was 16,000 years ago.

The only clue that people might have arrived earlier is a set of stone tools and artifacts found in remote Mexican cave. Archaeologists estimated that sediment ensconcing those artifacts was 32,000 years old, but that's not a trustworthy measure, Reynolds said. Artifacts can migrate up and down through sediment layers over time.

"Footprints, by contrast, are fixed on the landscape," Reynolds said.

Humans could have traveled south by boat

Reynolds said it's not yet clear how, exactly, humans traveled to the White Sands site — though there are several leading theories.

One suggests they traveled down the west coast via an ice-free corridor of land. Another proposes that they came by boat, possibly sailing from modern-day Russia or Japan and then expanding south by hugging the Pacific Coast.

Reynolds said she also thinks it's possible our ancestors might have crossed the continent then sailed down the Atlantic coast, before trekking to New Mexico.

"There's this hovering question mark over the role of their seafaring skills," she said.

Ancient humans in North America hunted giant sloths

This isn't the first remarkable discovery to come from the White Sands site.

"Its value goes far, far beyond the date of these new footprints," Reynolds said.

Three years ago, her team uncovered a different set of human and animal tracks at the site dating back to about 15,500 years ago. Those footprints revealed an epic battle between predator and prey: A human was stalking a giant sloth.

"The human was walking right behind it," Reynolds said, adding, "and the sloth is absolutely not liking it."

Giant ground sloths went extinct some 12,000 years ago. Around the same time, up to 90% of all large-bodied animals in the world, including mastodons, prehistoric horses, and ancient giant armadillos, also went extinct.

Many archaeologists think that early humans in the Americas played an outsized role in that mass extinction there, given that it happened within a few millennia of their arrival.

"Humans show up and megafauna start dying," Reynolds said. "It seems like an obvious cause and effect relationship."

I love the artist's rendition of what the sloth hunts might have looked like.

[The Brain]

Dancing is what to do.

[Josquius]

Now that's a party

[jimmy olsen]

Fancy find under Austrian train station

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/discovery-of-a-lifetime-golden-bowl-unearthed-in-austria-180978806/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia