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Топ 10 открития за 2008 година - Част 2
Archaeology | Публикувана на Пон Дек 22, 2008 12:47 pm
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For some archaeology buffs, 2008 will always be the year of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And we have to admit we were glad to see Indiana back in action again after a 20-year absence (we loved it when he name-checked legendary Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe). But we did have some quibbles with the film; let's just say we're not big fans of the theory that aliens invented agriculture and leave it at that.
We also got more letters on our "Indy Spirit Awards" (May/June 2008), a list of archaeologists who embody the adventurous ethos of Indiana Jones, than we have for any other story in years. Most of them took us to task for failing to mention one or another larger-than-life archaeologist. We got enough background from these letters for a decade of profiles.
But as much as crystal skulls were the year's most prominent "artifacts," we're more likely to remember 2008 as the Year of the Earliest North American Coprolites (ancient human feces), or perhaps the Year of the Imperial Roman Marble Heads (two were unearthed in central Turkey). Both stories made our list of the most important discoveries of 2008.
Here you will find the other discoveries that really excited us, along with our first annual list of endangered archaeological sites—ranging from the great Indus city of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan to the rock art of Utah's Nine Mile Canyon.
Sadly, reports of site destruction seem to be just as frequent as announcements of important finds. That's why we were heartened to learn that the world's earliest oil paintings had been identified in caves in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, where the Taliban dynamited two colossal Buddha statues in 2001. Even with the world's heritage disappearing at an alarming rate, there are still amazing discoveries to be made.
Sacred Maya Blue | Chichén Itzá, Mexico
by Samir S. Patel
Maya blue, the brilliant and long-lasting paint that graces scores of Maya sites, is one of just a handful of man-made pigments known to the ancient world. It had special significance, and was associated with sacrifice and Maya deities, including the rain god Chaak. While scientists have long known that it is produced by chemically binding indigo to a clay mineral (palygorskite) with heat, it's not clear exactly how the Maya made it. Dean Arnold, an anthropologist at Wheaton College in Illinois, now believes that making Maya blue was an integral part of the ceremonies in which it was used.
Arnold examined a bowl at the Field Museum in Chicago that had been retrieved from Chichén Itzá's Sacred Cenote, a flooded sinkhole that was a site of countless ritual offerings and more than 100 human sacrifices (many of which had been painted with the distinctive blue). He and his team found that the bowl contained traces of indigo, palygorskite, and copal incense, a tree sap burned as an offering to the gods and used for medicinal purposes. "It doesn't seem to me to be much of a jump to say that one of the ways that Maya blue was created was in the act of ritual itself," says Arnold, through the heat of burning copal. The resultant offering to Chaak would have held both the copal's healing properties and the pigment's mystical power.
Not everyone is sold on the theory. Scientists who study ancient pigments believe that the presence of copal and Maya blue together doesn't indicate that one was burned to create the other, or that producing the pigment had any ritual significance. "They're not anthropologists and they don't understand perhaps how ritual works," says Arnold in response to his critics. "I'm just surprised there was so much interest in this. It just bowls me over." Well, anything that relates to human sacrifice will certainly turn a few heads.
This bowl may have been used in sacrificial rituals to make Maya blue--a pigment that has not lost its brilliance on the murals at Bonampak.
(Courtesy of The Field Museum)
Wari Masked Mummy | Lima, Peru
by Roger Atwood
Not all big discoveries come from out-of-the-way places. In August, Peruvian archaeologists announced they had found an intact mummy from the Wari culture in a burial mound beneath a busy Lima neighborhood. Wrapped in six layers of cotton and llama-wool textiles, the 1,700-year-old mummy was probably a working mother. A team led by archaeologist Isabel Flores also found knitting needles, balls of yarn, and other items associated with weaving buried with the mummy. "She must have been the chief of the weavers, or head of a knitting circle or a guild that made textiles," says Flores.
The mummy, one of three found in the mound, along with the body of a possibly sacrificed infant, wore a wooden mask with a feminine face and large blue eyes made of seashells--a captivating detail that has earned her the nickname la Dama de la Máscara (the Mask Lady). The team removed the mummy for laboratory analysis after excavating gourds, kitchen vessels, textiles, and other objects that accompanied the Mask Lady and the other mummies. Surrounded today by apartment towers and trendy restaurants and shops, the adobe mound in the city's Miraflores district is considered one of the most important surviving structures built by the so-called Lima culture, which flourished for about 500 years from A.D. 100. With the discovery of the graves, archaeologists now have further evidence of the Wari sweeping into the area from the southern Peruvian highlands and occupying the Lima culture's major ceremonial sites.
(AP Photo/Karel Navarro)
Kuttamuwa's Soul | Zincirli, Turkey
by Eti Bonn-Muller
Archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute got a crash course in linguistics this summer. Digging at ancient Sam'al, capital of an Iron Age kingdom in southeastern Turkey, they were thrilled when they excavated an extremely well-preserved eighth-century B.C. funerary stele depicting a high official named Kuttamuwa. But a 13-line inscription on the basalt monument revealed that they had, in fact, unearthed something more. In it, Kuttamuwa refers to food offerings made where his stele was displayed, including "a ram for my soul that is in this stele."
(Courtesy Eudora Struble)
"It's the first inscription to make really clear what these people understood about the afterlife in terms of the soul," says archaeologist David Schloen, who directs the Neubauer Expedition at Sam'al. The Sam'alians probably cremated their dead, a practice rejected by the kingdom's neighbors in the West Semitic world, who for centuries believed it taboo to burn one's bones, the soul's final resting place. "Here, the soul was thought to inhabit this stele," he says, "which may have been a way to preserve the individual's memory without the body or the bones."
The 800-pound stele, the only inscribed example ever found in its original context, was discovered in an annex to Kuttamuwa's house, surrounded by remnants of food offerings and fragments of stone bowls similar to those depicted in it, indicating that the room was a private shrine. The students who excavated it had just taken a class on the dialect in the inscription, notes Schloen. "Boy, did they luck out!"
University of Chicago doctoral students Virginia Rimmer and Benjamin Thomas read an eighth-century B.C. stele inscription that is helping illuminate Iron Age concepts of the soul.
(Courtesy Eudora Struble)
American Genes | North America
by Zach Zorich
The remarkable discovery of 14,300-year-old feces in eastern Oregon's Paisley Cave provided the earliest direct evidence of human colonization of the Americas. Known in the laboratory as coprolites, the feces were proof positive that humans lived in North America well before the Clovis people, long thought to have been the first arrivals, around 12,000 years ago. Thanks to a new technique for isolating genetic samples from materials such as ice, soil, and now fecal matter, researchers were able to extract human DNA from the coprolites. The improbable "artifacts" opened a new chapter in the debate over the identity of the first Americans.
But Paisley Cave wasn't the only source of genetic evidence reshaping ideas about how and when the Americas were settled. A multinational team of geneticists completed the most comprehensive study yet of Native American mitochondrial DNA (the genetic material contained within the organelles that provide human cells with energy). By looking at variations in the DNA between different modern-day Native Americans, the researchers determined that the first people probably arrived about 18,500 years ago. "It looks like there was a migration out of Asia into Beringia and there was a stopover for a few dozen generations," says geneticist Scott Woodward of the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation. "Then these people spread quite rapidly into the Americas." But not so rapidly that they couldn't take a pit stop in a cave in eastern Oregon.
University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins holds a human coprolite found at Paisley Caves.
(Andrew Curry)
Oldest Oil Paintings | Bamiyan, Afghanistan
by Eti Bonn-Muller
An international team of conservators and archaeologists found the world's oldest-known oil paintings in a maze of caves in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, where the Taliban blew up two gigantic stone Buddha statues in 2001. The team started work in the area five years ago, investigating ways to preserve Buddhist art in some 1,000 caves that had been ravaged over the years by the harsh natural environment, rampant looting, and the infamous explosions. They found that about 50 of the caves were once adorned with glistening murals depicting images of Buddha, bodhisattvas, and female devotees. One unique scene shows the Persian solar deity Mithra, riding a chariot driven by four winged horses.
In 2008, their research revealed that paint samples from 12 of the caves contained "drying oils," most likely walnut and poppy-seed oils, which are key ingredients in oil-based paints. In the ancient Mediterranean world, drying oils were used in medicines, cosmetics, and perfumes. Scholars long believed they were first added to paints much later in medieval Europe. "There was no clear material evidence of drying oils being used in paintings before the 12th century A.D. anywhere in the world, until now," says Yoko Taniguchi, a Japanese conservation scientist on the team. The murals at Bamiyan, which lay on the Silk Road where goods and ideas flowed between East and West, date to the mid-seventh century A.D. "This is one of the most important art-historical and archaeological discoveries ever made," she says. "It indicates more complicated material and technical interconnections in this area than previously thought."
(National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo)
First European | Atapuerca, Spain
by Zach Zorich
Ancient hominin bones found in northern Spain's Atapuerca Mountains have pushed back the arrival of humans in Europe to roughly 1.2 million years ago, some 500,000 years earlier than once believed. While digging at Sima del Elefante (Elephant Cave), paleoanthropologists unearthed a chunk of lower-jaw bone containing an incisor and parts of four other teeth that belonged to Homo erectus, the first human species to migrate out of Africa. The discovery is challenging the idea that Europe was settled by small, scattered groups of humans. "The arrival of people in Europe was much earlier than first thought and probably more continuous," says Jose M. Bermudez de Castro, codirector of the Atapuerca excavations. "We have populations that are living in Europe over a longer period, so maybe [occupation] isn't so sporadic."
Within the cave's 10-foot-square excavation area, the team has also found flints that were used as simple stone tools and pieces of bison bone with cut marks, as well as a large number of bird bones. Whether the animals were hunted or scavenged is an open question, but despite the apparent availability of meat, the person found at Sima del Elefante was probably not in good health. Preliminary analyses show he or she may have suffered from tooth infections and abscesses.
The ancient jaw may just be the beginning of the surprises from Sima del Elefante. Only about one-tenth of the site's total area has been excavated and the sediment extends 6 to 10 feet below where the jaw was found, which means there may be many more important discoveries in store.
Courtesy José M. Bermudez de Castro
Earliest Shoes | Tianyuan Cave, China
by Malin Grunberg Banyasz
The toes of East Asia's oldest modern human show that our ancestors first began wearing shoes around 40,000 years ago, about the same time they developed more sophisticated toolkits and began creating elaborate art. Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, came to that conclusion after studying toe bones of the 42,000-year-old skeleton dubbed Tianyuan 1. Of indeterminate sex, the skeleton was discovered in a cave on the grounds of the Tianyuan Tree Farm, four miles southwest of the site of Zhoukoudian, where the so-called Peking Man fossils were discovered in the 1920s.
Trinkaus found that Tianyuan 1 had robust leg bones but that the toes were considerably more gracile, or slimmer, than those of earlier humans--who went without shoes for millions of years and had thick toes. When one walks barefoot, the middle toes curl into the ground to give traction during push off. But when wearing a shoe, a person pushes off with the big toe, placing less stress on the middle toes, resulting in less-developed toe bones. Trinkaus notes that the gracility of the toes is an individual pattern that develops during childhood. Tianyuan 1, it seems, had worn baby shoes.
Courtesy Erik Trinkhaus / Hong Shang
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