Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Duque de Bragança]

Not in the Biblical sense.

Hopefully.

[viper37]

Drought Has Revealed Spain's Long-Submerged 'Stonehenge'

The summer of 2019 was unusually scorching across Europe and beyond, and things have only grown more intense in the already hot and dry region of Extremadura in Spain. Months into an official drought that could be developing into a mega-drought, local farmers are facing the loss of hundreds of millions of euros. Many think this is just a sign of things to come.

Droughts, and the way that they strip the land of plant cover and drain lakes and reservoirs, for all the problems they cause, are often a boon for archaeologists. The water level of the Valdecañas Reservoir in the province of Cáceres has dropped so low that it is providing an extraordinary glimpse into the past.

"All my life, people had told me about the dolmen," says Angel Castaño, a resident of Peraleda de la Mata, a village just a couple miles from the reservoir, and president of the local cultural association. "I had seen parts of it peeking out from the water before, but this is the first time I've seen it in full. It's spectacular because you can appreciate the entire complex for the first time in decades."

The dolmen he's talking about is known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, the remains of a 7,000-year old megalithic monument consisting of around 100 standing stones—some up to six feet tall—arranged around an oval open space. It takes hours of hiking to get to the dolmen, which is now a few dozen yards away from the edge of the tranquil blue water. Visitors today are more likely to see deer than guards. Traces of aquatic plant life in the sand show that the site is dry and accessible only temporarily.

"When we saw it, we were completely thrilled," Castaño says. "It felt like we had discovered a megalithic monument ourselves."

Archaeologists believe the dolmen was likely erected on the banks of the Tagus River in the fifth millennium BC, as a completely enclosed space, like a stone house with a massive cap stone on top. And though it had been known, perhaps even damaged, by the Romans, it had faded beyond memory until German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier led an excavation of the site in the mid-1920s. Obermaier's work wasn't published until 1960, but by then the tide of the 20th century was on its way to the ancient site.

In his quest to modernize Spain, Francisco Franco's regime carried out a number of massive civil engineering projects, including a dam and reservoir that flooded the Dolmen of Guadalperal in 1963. Archaeological studies and environmental impact reports before such projects weren't regular practice at the time, says Primitiva Bueno Ramirez, a specialist in prehistory at the University of Alcalá. "You couldn't believe how many authentic archaeological and historic gems are submerged under Spain's man-made lakes."

The Valdecañas Reservoir brought water and electricity to underdeveloped parts of western Spain, but that came at a cost. "The flooding was tragic on many levels," says Castaño. "From the historic point of view, it drowned these megalithic monuments and most of the remains of a Roman city called Augustóbriga. [Portions of the ruins were relocated to a nearby hilltop.] From the human point of view, an inhabited town was flooded and people were forced to move out of their homes."

[...]

[Sheilbh]

Construction on the Brexit trading carpark (for lorries in Kent) has had to be stopped on part of the site after they discovered Anglo-Saxon remains, I think some walls from what they think might be an Anglo-Saxon village.

[Maladict]

Scientists find intact brain cells in skull of man killed in Vesuvius eruption nearly 2,000 years ago

A section of vitrified brain tissue from the remains of a young man who died in AD 79 after Mount Vesuvius erupted.

(CNN)The brain cells of a young man who died almost 2,000 years ago in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius have been found intact by a team of researchers in Italy.
The discovery was made when the experts studied remains first uncovered in the 1960s in Herculaneum, a city buried by ash during the volcanic eruption in AD 79.
The victim, who was found lying face-down on a wooden bed in a building thought to have been devoted to the worship of the Emperor Augustus, was around 25 years old at the time of his death, according to the researchers.



Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Naples Federico II who led the research, told CNN that the project started when he saw "some glassy material shining from within the skull" while he was working near the skeleton in 2018. In a paper published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, Petrone and his colleagues revealed that this shiny appearance was caused by the vitrification of the victim's brain due to intense heat followed by rapid cooling. Speaking about this process, Petrone said: "The brain exposed to the hot volcanic ash must first have liquefied and then immediately turned into a glassy material by the rapid cooling of the volcanic ash deposit."
After subsequent analysis including the use of an electron microscope, the team found cells in the vitrified brain, which were "incredibly well preserved with a resolution that is impossible to find anywhere else," according to Petrone. The researchers also found intact nerve cells in the spinal cord, which, like the brain, had been vitrified. The latest findings were published in the American journal PLOS One.

Guido Giordano, a volcanologist at Roma Tre University who worked on the study, told CNN that charred wood found next to the skeleton allowed the researchers to conclude that the site reached a temperature of more than 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit) after the eruption.
Referring to the latest findings, Giordano said the "perfectness of preservation" found in vitrification was "totally unprecedented" and was a boon to researchers.
"This opens up the room for studies of these ancient people that have never been possible," he said.
The team of researchers -- archaeologists, biologists, forensic scientists, neurogeneticists and mathematicians from Naples, Milan and Rome -- will continue studying the remains.

They want to learn more about the vitrification process -- including the exact temperatures victims were exposed to, as well as the cooling rate of the volcanic ash -- and also hope to analyze proteins from the remains and their related genes, according to Petrone.
The former task is "crucial for the evaluation of the risk by the relevant authorities in the event of a possible future eruption of Vesuvius, the most dangerous volcano in the world, which looms over 3 million inhabitants of Naples and its surroundings," Petrone said.

[Malthus]

It is fascinating to me that, according to genetic studies, the ancient population of Britain was nearly completely replaced twice.

Once when the Neolithic farmers came and replaced the pre-existing hunter-gatherer population, and again when the so-called "Beaker people" came and replaced the Neolithic population.

Interestingly, the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon invaders did *not* genetically replace the existing population, but blended with it.

What the first two replacements looked like, no-one knows. There simply appears to be no evidence yet. A gradual replacement because of superior tech?  Violent invasion? Unknown. It is just very odd that there was apparently little interbreeding with the locals by the newcomers in either case - all the weirder as, at least with the Beaker people, they were fellow agriculturalists and even used the same sites, like Stonehenge.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0871-9

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/21/arrival-of-beaker-folk-changed-britain-forever-ancient-dna-study-shows

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35344663

[Syt]

How do the Golgafrinchams factor into that replacement?

[Malthus]

How do the Golgafrinchams factor into that replacement?

Clearly, it was the Great Circling Poets of Arium who inspired the Beaker People to sail to Britain ...

[Valmy]

My guess would be infectious disease arrived with the newcomers in the previous instances.

[Admiral Yi]

Maybe the earlier groups were too damn fugly.

[mongers]

Maybe the earlier groups were too damn fugly.

Uglier than the average modern Brit, twice over. 

[Malthus]

Heh. 😄

In all seriousness though - many years ago when I was in university, the "pots or people" controversy was a big deal, namely - did the widespread "Beaker People" (known from the distinctive beaker-shaped pottery they included as burial goods) really represent a new group of people, or did the burial practices and other cultural traits diffuse across Europe with only a few folks actually physically moving?

In the olden days, there was certainly some evidence that they were different (for one, the skull shaped looked different on average - but that is hardly infallible) and later, isotope analysis of teeth showed that some individuals moved, like the "Amesbury Archer". He grew up somewhere in the Alps. But that sone individuals moved didn't answer the question ... only large scale genetic studies could do that.

[mongers]

Heh. 😄

In all seriousness though - many years ago when I was in university, the "pots or people" controversy was a big deal, namely - did the widespread "Beaker People" (known from the distinctive beaker-shaped pottery they included as burial goods) really represent a new group of people, or did the burial practices and other cultural traits diffuse across Europe with only a few folks actually physically moving?

In the olden days, there was certainly some evidence that they were different (for one, the skull shaped looked different on average - but that is hardly infallible) and later, isotope analysis of teeth showed that some individuals moved, like the "Amesbury Archer". He grew up somewhere in the Alps. But that sone individuals moved didn't answer the question ... only large scale genetic studies could do that.

He's in our Salisbury museum, very well presented and a great story.

IIRC his burial includes the earliest gold artefacts found in the UK,two small finger guards?

[Malthus]

Heh. 😄

In all seriousness though - many years ago when I was in university, the "pots or people" controversy was a big deal, namely - did the widespread "Beaker People" (known from the distinctive beaker-shaped pottery they included as burial goods) really represent a new group of people, or did the burial practices and other cultural traits diffuse across Europe with only a few folks actually physically moving?

In the olden days, there was certainly some evidence that they were different (for one, the skull shaped looked different on average - but that is hardly infallible) and later, isotope analysis of teeth showed that some individuals moved, like the "Amesbury Archer". He grew up somewhere in the Alps. But that sone individuals moved didn't answer the question ... only large scale genetic studies could do that.

He's in our Salisbury museum, very well presented and a great story.

IIRC his burial includes the earliest gold artefacts found in the UK,two small finger guards?

It's one of the things I really want to see when I can go back to England again.

Apparently, the gold artifacts were gold hair ornaments.

https://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/amesbury-archer

[The Brain]

My guess would be infectious disease arrived with the newcomers in the previous instances.

Yes. CO2 poisoning from mask wearing would explain it.

[jimmy olsen]

Neat
https://twitter.com/archaeologymag/status/1318945138794745857

From the Archives: Archaeologists working beneath Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Sun unearthed artifacts that may have been meant to consecrate its construction around A.D. 200, including a greenstone mask similar to those found in the tombs of Maya rulers.