Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[garbon]

Well guess what?

I tried to find a history of ownership before I posted...and failed. 

I stumbled upon its name and then found that CNN article.

[jimmy olsen]

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c23vnxx3nz8o

Pretty much only posted to say...



I am sympathetic to an idea that such/certain relics can reach a point of historical importance where it would justified that they be seized under eminent domain.

I'm surprised that's the earliest one known.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Ritual cannibalism in bronze age Somerset :

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/16/something-horrible-somerset-pit-reveals-bronze-age-cannibalism

....they still vote Tpry even to this day 

[Legbiter]

Bronze Age British Ate Their Enemies According to Gruesome Discovery

A study of early Bronze Age bones in Britain has revealed a shockingly violent and barbaric end for dozens of unfortunate individuals.

The remains, excavated from the Charterhouse Warren site in southwest England, show evidence of close quarters blunt force trauma, dismemberment, and cannibalism, all of which took place before the bodies were thrown down a 15-meter (49-foot) shaft.

It's evidence of "a level and scale of violence that is unprecedented in British prehistory," according to the international team of researchers behind the study – and raises plenty of questions about what actually went on here.

It seems to roughly line up with the time of the Bell Beaker population replacement.



A lot of bashed skulls and chewed bones. Man it's been rough for those anthropologists who built careers out of imagining the ancestral past as basically hobbits who never went anywhere and peacefully transferred pottery styles via slow diffusion.

[Legbiter]

Ritual cannibalism in bronze age Somerset :

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/16/something-horrible-somerset-pit-reveals-bronze-age-cannibalism

....they still vote Tpry even to this day 

The past is a serial killer's basement.

Kinda reminds me of the Herxheim death pit but still a lot smaller in scale.

The archaeological site of Herxheim, located in the municipality of Herxheim in southwest Germany, was a ritual center and a mass grave formed by people of the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) culture in Neolithic Europe. The site is often compared to that of the Talheim Death Pit and Schletz-Asparn, but is quite different in nature. The site dates from between 5300 and 4950 BC. The site contained the scattered remains of more than 1000 individuals from different, in some cases faraway regions. Whether they were war captives or human sacrifices is unclear, but the evidence indicates that they were roasted and consumed.

Herxheim death pit.

[Richard Hakluyt]

They are snapshots of course, isolated in a long period of time. It is possible that thee sorts of incidents were very rare. On the other hand, how many people have we got checking ancient bones for evidence of cannibalism? Maybe we would discover it is commonplace if we look harder.

[Sheilbh]

Ritual cannibalism in bronze age Somerset :

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/16/something-horrible-somerset-pit-reveals-bronze-age-cannibalism

....they still vote Tpry even to this day 

I checked - Lib Dems (Tessa Munt's seat). Of course

I could be wrong but I think there's been a few discoveries in ancient sites recently that basically look like all the men and boys of a community were massacred and possibly cannibalised in some locations. Again not an expert but a few sites in different places that seem like artifacts of something incredibly brutal.

[The Minsky Moment]

Ritual cannibalism in bronze age Somerset :

I checked - Lib Dems

Where they are eaters, there must be those who eaten.

[jimmy olsen]

Ritual cannibalism in bronze age Somerset :

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/16/something-horrible-somerset-pit-reveals-bronze-age-cannibalism

....they still vote Tpry even to this day 

Nothing on this scale of violence has previously been found in early bronze age Britain or any other time in British prehistory, according to Rick Schulting, the lead author and a professor of scientific and prehistoric archaeology at the University of Oxford. This was likely to make the Charterhouse Warren massacre an exceptional event, even in its time, he told the Guardian.

"For the early bronze age in Britain, we have very little evidence for violence. Our understanding of the period is mostly focused on trade and exchange: how people made pottery, how they farmed, how they buried their dead," he said. "There have been no real discussions of warfare or large-scale violence in that period, purely through lack of evidence."

There's tons of evidence for mass violence in bronze age Europe, the Near East and Asia.

I suspect there was just as much in Britain, even if the vagaries of the archaeological record haven't left much proof.

[crazy canuck]

One of the things that is different is hill forts didn't start proliferating in England until the Iron Age, which has led to an inference that the Bronze Age was relatively more peaceful.

[mongers]

One of the things that is different is hill forts didn't start proliferating in England until the Iron Age, which has led to an inference that the Bronze Age was relatively more peaceful.

Indeed. 

[mongers]

Roman Empire's lead pollution was high enough to lower IQs, study says

Silver fueled the rise of the Roman Empire. But the ancient process of mining and extracting silver was also making the air thick with lead, scientists found.
January 8, 2025
By Leo Sands

Silver fueled the rise of the Roman Empire as its coin-based currency accelerated trade, filled tax coffers and funded military conquests.

But the empire's mining and extracting of silver was also releasing so much lead into the air that it was probably making the population slightly stupider, one study has found.

"To get the silver out of the ore, you have to crush it," Andreas Stohl, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Vienna and a co-author of the study, said Tuesday. "It's a dusty business — and this dust contained a lot of lead."

The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the mining and smelting activities released enough of the neurotoxin into the atmosphere that it would have caused "widespread cognitive decline" — which could have reduced the typical person's intelligence quotient (IQ) by up to three points.

"The concentrations were high enough to cause cognitive decline, especially in children," Stohl said in a phone interview.

The findings would make Rome's roughly 200-year golden age, or Pax Romana, one of the earliest examples of industrial pollution harming human health at scale. The study also could add fuel to a fraught and long-standing debate about whether mass lead poisoning could have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

"Ancient texts and archaeological evidence indicate substantial lead exposure during antiquity that potentially impacted human health," the researchers wrote. "Although lead exposure routes were many and included the use of glazed tablewares, paints, cosmetics, and even intentional ingestion, the most significant for the nonelite, rural majority of the population may have been through background air pollution from mining and smelting of silver and lead ores that underpinned the Roman economy."

To conduct their research, the scientists analyzed the presence of lead in ice cores from the Arctic — preserved there from the time of the Pax Romana, which began in 27 B.C.

They found that as Roman smelters were releasing lead into the atmosphere, the amount of the neurotoxin deposited in the Arctic spiked. The tiny particles of lead found in the ice had drifted from Europe on air currents, they said.

By reconstructing air currents using atmospheric models, the scientists were able to estimate how much lead pollution was being released across Europe at the time: 3 million to 4.3 million kilograms (about 6 million to 9 million pounds) each year.

Relying on modern epidemiological studies, the researchers estimated that blood lead levels among children probably increased by 2 to 5 micrograms per deciliter. (This aligns with a 2021 analysis of tooth enamel from Roman skeletal remains, which also pointed to pervasive childhood exposure to lead.)

The authors estimated that the exposure was enough to reduce the typical IQ by 2.5 to three points across the empire, based on data from modern studies that show a link between childhood lead exposure and cognitive decline. The impact was probably even greater for those living close to silver mines, they found.

"To my knowledge, it is probably the earliest example in history" of industrial-scale pollution causing harm to human health, Jorgen Peder Steffensen, a professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen who helped analyze the ice cores as part of the study, wrote in an email Tuesday.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no level of lead exposure is safe for children. Even low levels can cause lifelong harmful effects, including cognitive and nervous system damage and a lower IQ.

Airborne lead pollution levels have fluctuated throughout human history. They most recently soared after the Industrial Revolution and with the widespread use of leaded gasoline in the 20th century.

During the peak era of leaded gasoline in the United States — from the late 1960s to the early 1980s — lead pollution was so heavy that the average level for a child was about 15 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. Such levels corresponded to a decline in IQ of nine points, the study noted.

Full item here, worth a read:
WP article

[crazy canuck]

I wonder how much better the classical writers would've been if they hadn't had reduced IQs in their childhood.

[Maladict]

Jos was right after all. Cars will be seen as the root cause of the end of Western civilization by future historians.

[Barrister]

Jos was right after all. Cars will be seen as the root cause of the end of Western civilization by future historians.

The article (and your comment) reminds me of one of my favourite theories - that the 90s drop in the crime rate was caused by banning leaded gasoline in the 1970s.