Ancient Amazonian Funeral Urns Found in Brazil

Elaborately decorated in shades of red and black, the nine funeral urns are thought to be at least 500 years old.

A collection of 500-year-old urns is rocking Brazil’s science communities after experts discovered traces left behind from Amazonian Polychrome Tradition, a first in Brazilian archaeological achievements.

Decorated in shades of red and black, nine urns buried 40 centimeters below the surface in the Amazonian community of Tauary were found by archaeologists last month, the Archaeological Laboratory Mamiraua Institute announced Friday.

A researcher with the institute, Eduardo Kazuo Tamanaha, said, "We discovered more than one per day, first came one, we started to clean, there was another next, they were appearing like a domino effect."

Though similar discoveries have been made in both Peru and Ecuador, for scientists to encounter pre-Hispanic Amazonian funeral urns in Brazil is unheard-of, Kazuo explained

“Researchers often receive them from locals, who actually find the artifacts and pull them out of the ground. Now to dig and find a grave with the urns from that culture, the way they were, and to the whole record is unprecedented,” said Kazuo.

Paintings of animals and human faces adorned the collection, which scientists say were found carefully placed with their designs facing away from each other.

“If an urn was buried face up, the urn beside it was ‘looking’ down...it was as if they did not want to look at each other. Clearly they were buried that way and it was intentional,” the researcher said.

The Mamiraua staff also say they believe the vessels were buried at the same time due to the fact that all nine urns were found at equal depths.

“If it were different moments of burial, the urns would be at different heights. It is as if they had excavated a single grave and deposited one urn next to the other," said Kazuo.

Shards of pottery were also found buried among the urns which seem to be from an older group that also once inhabited the same region.

"The Tauary urns are close to the year 1500 AD. But this other pottery found appears to be much older, with a difference of 49 centimeters deep compared to the period of the polls which indicates a greater passage of time," Kazuo said.

The team of scientists hopes the recent discovery can lead to a deeper understanding of the ancient civilization’s traditions, beliefs, and morphology.

Ancient Amazonian Funeral Urns Found in Brazil

Archaeological Excavation Uncovers Ancient Minoan Graves on Crete

Two burials with rich grave goods were found in a pit from the Middle Minoan IA era (2100-2000 BC) in Siteia, NE Crete, during excavations of a palace-related cemetery.

The excavations took place for 14 years under Director Emerita of the Ministry of Culture Metaxia Tsipopoulou, at the cemetery of Petras in the area of Siteia, dated to 2800-1700 BC (Pre- and Proto-Palatial periods).

In the first pit, a primary or original burial of a man included the first weapon found in Petras, a bronze short sword, Tsipopoulou said in a statement. The first burial also included a “secondary burial of a woman with a large number of gold beads of very fine workmanship” and beads of silver, crystal, carnelian, and jasper.

The second burial, also a primary one, was dated to the Proto-Minoan II period (2600-2300 BC) and included “dozens of gold beads with exquisite pressed decoration of spirals, as well as hundreds of other beads of gold or silver, with a diameter of 1mm, which appear to have been sewn onto a garment.”

A third burial was unique to Petras and consisted of a tomb made of perpendicular schist slabs, forming a box-like structure. This contained two secondary burials of children under 10 years old and two gold bracelets from thin sheets of gold.

For its era, the Petras cemetery has proven to be by far the largest on Crete. It belonged to elite family members related to the palace in the area. So far, 26 funerary buildings of 45 to 150 sq.m. have been excavated, along with five burial pits that include irregular stones or low walls.

According to Tsipopoulou, the cemetery contains at least four or five funereal buildings that were noted in 2018 but have not been fully excavated yet. It also includes two extensive areas for rituals, dating to between 1900 and 1700 BC (Middle Minoan IB-IIB) and two periboloi, or low built enclosures, east and west.

In antiquity, Petras had a large port and served as the entry gate to eastern Crete during the Pre- and the Proto-Palatial period for the incoming trade of raw materials, objects and ideas from Syria and Egypt.

Its palace, according to the official excavation site (https://www.petras-excavations.gr/el) was built in the Middle Minoan IIA era (19001800 BC), slightly after the large palatial complexes of central Crete. The preserved section of it covers 2,500 sq.m., but it’s impossible to calculate its original extent because the whole southern section has been destroyed.

In the 14th century BC (during Late Minoan IIIA), following the destruction of its palace, there was building activity in the cemetery that appears to be related to honoring ancestors. This activity lasted until the 12th century BC.

During this year’s season, the excavation staff included 19 graduate and doctoral students from the Universities of Athens, Crete, Thessaloniki, Kalamata, Madrid, Harvard, Rhodes and Toronto. Senior excavators included professors David Rupp, Miriam Clinton and Sevi Triantafyllou, Dr. Maria Relaki, and nine workmen from Siteia.

The study group includes 26 archaeologists from Europe, the United States, and Canada. The excavation, the stabilization of architectural features, the conservation of findings and their study are funded exclusively by INSTAP, the Institute for Aegean Prehistory which was established as a nonprofit in the United States in 1982.

Archaeological Excavation Uncovers Ancient Minoan Graves on Crete

Egypt says village found in Nile Delta predated pharaohs

Egypt says archeologists have unearthed one of the oldest villages ever found in the Nile Delta, with remains dating back to before the pharaohs.

The Antiquities Ministry said Sunday the Neolithic site was discovered in Tell el-Samara, about 140 kilometres (87 miles) north of Cairo. Chief archaeologist Frederic Gio says his team found silos containing animal bones and food, indicating human habitation as early as 5,000 B.C.

That would be some 2,500 years before the Giza pyramids were built.

In recent years, Egypt has touted discoveries in the hopes of reviving tourism after the unrest that followed its 2011 popular uprising.

Egypt says village found in Nile Delta predated pharaohs

Archaeologists uncovered a series of giant stone troughs erected more than 10,000 years ago at Göbekli Tepe,

Archaeologists made an intriguing discovery recently at the neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey. They uncovered a series of giant stone troughs erected more than 10,000 years ago. And at the bottom of these huge vessels, they found traces of a chemical called calcium oxalate, typically produced during the soaking, mashing and fermenting of grain. It’s a by-product of brewing, in other words.

From this evidence, researchers conclude that Göbekli Tepe was a vast festival site where Stone Age men and women came to feast and to drink beer by the trough-load. Humans have known how to party for a very long time, it would seem. In fact, our love of alcohol can be traced even further into the past, according to scientists who now believe that social drinking played a key role in our evolution as we developed into big-brained, social primates.

It is a theory that will form the core of a major conference at the British Academy next week, Alcohol and Humans: A Long and Social Affair. Delegates will argue that our love of alcohol is deep-rooted and that drink – although harmful in excess – still has a role to play in generating happiness and wellbeing, as the broadcaster Adrian Chiles maintained in his TV film, Drinkers Like Me, last week.

“Studies clearly show that there are social and wellbeing benefits to be derived directly from drinking alcohol, especially in relaxed social environments,” said the evolutionary biologist Professor Robin Dunbar of Oxford University. “That is why the practice has persisted for so long.”

Dunbar, a fellow of the British Academy and one of the conference’s organisers, argues that our hunter-gatherer ancestors began to hold feasts at least 400,000 years ago after they learned how to use and control fire. Dinners round firesides helped us to cement relationships as fellow tribesfolk exchanged food, stories and gossip. Alcohol may not have been present at first but could still have become a key factor of feasts fairly quickly, and certainly long before the Neolithic arrived and we began to make brewing troughs.

“Archaic humans may have been very familiar with naturally fermented fruits and may well have consumed them avidly – much as chimpanzees and elephants do in Africa,” said Dunbar.

The crucial point is that all these activities – relating stories, exchanging gossip, telling jokes and singing – trigger the production of endorphins in the brain, he said. “Endorphins in turn generate a positive feeling in a person, similar to that of morphine. So we feel good. And crucially, alcohol also activates the endorphin system, which in itself will enhance social bonds among those who indulge together.”

In other words, alcohol was vital in helping to strengthen social bonding and break down inhibitions – and has done so since the early days of human evolution. Certainly, we had long mastered the art of making the stuff before we made those first stone troughs and pottery vessels 10,000 years ago. It continued to have a considerable influence on our history, however. Take the example of farming. It was once assumed we turned to agriculture and the growing of fields of wheat in order to make bread and so provide reliable sustenance for ourselves. Yet the kind of wheat grown then – known as einkorn – would have made a very poor bread, say researchers. But it would have made excellent beer.

“This leads to the great theory of human history: that we didn’t start farming because we wanted food – there was loads of food around,” says Mark Forsyth, in his book A Short History of Drunkenness. “We started farming because we wanted to booze.”

This idea is backed by others, including Dunbar, who believe beer-making was the initial attraction in turning ourselves from hunter-gatherers into farmers. And, ever since, alcohol has made its mark on our lives, from lubricating parties to complex state rituals.

“By the 17th century, after the [English] civil war, drinking had become a critically important social act,” said the historian Angela McShane, of the Wellcome Trust, who will also speak at the conference. “It was a way of demonstrating your loyalty to the state in terms of the toasts that you were expected to make. If you got them wrong, you could be killed.

“To not drink not only suggested that you were not much fun to be with but that you were dangerous or seditious, because you would not toast your allegiance. That attitude became so embedded in our culture that, even today, there is a feeling among some people that they don’t quite trust someone who does not drink.”

In our own day, excess alcoholic intake has been linked to a host of health problems, from increased risks of contracting liver disease and cancers to suffering serious accidents. As a result of medical campaigns, average intakes have declined from an annual high of 9.5 litres of alcohol per head in 2004 to 7.8 litres in 2015.

But McShane pointed out that there was no set medical opinion about whether or not alcohol was good for you. “Some doctors will say that whatever amount you drink, it will have an adverse impact on your body. But that is true of tea, coffee or even water. What we should also realise is that alcohol is a lubricant that can smooth the running of society.”

Dunbar agrees. He pointed to one analysis of 148 epidemiological studies of heart attack patients, which was then used to isolate what factors best predicted a patient’s survival 12 months after a heart attack. “The most important turned out to be the quality of their relationships with others,” he said. “Giving up smoking, obesity and exercise were less important than the number of good friends you had. In other words, our social networks play a central role in our ability to survive the worst traumas that life can throw at us. And those networks are very clearly enhanced by the use of alcohol.”

Other studies conducted by Dunbar show that those who regularly visit their local pub for moderate drinking tend to be more socially engaged, feel more contented and are more likely to trust other members of their community than those who do not drink at all.

“Most research that is carried out on alcohol and humans has concentrated on its excessive use – its abuse – by men and women,” said Dunbar. “Moderate social drinking has been ignored as subject of study until relatively recently. These latest studies suggest that the impact of moderate alcoholic intake is surprisingly beneficial.”

Archaeologists uncovered a series of giant stone troughs erected more than 10,000 years ago at Göbekli Tepe,

Ancient Egyptian medical knowledge revealed by 3,500-year-old texts

3,500 years ago, a woman might have done much the same thing to find out if she was pregnant as she would today: take a urine sample and wait patiently for a chemical reaction.

A papyrus from ancient Egypt instructs a woman to pee into a bag of barley and a bag of emmer (the variety of wheat cultivated by ancient Egyptians), according to a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, who is studying the document.

"If they grow, she will give birth. If the barley grows, it is a boy. If the emmer grows, it is a girl. If they do not grow, she will not give birth," reads the text, written in a hieratic script -- the ancient Egyptians' cursive form of Hieroglyphic writing -- and dated to the New Kingdom era, sometime between 1500 and 1300 BC.

The birth prognosis, which was first translated by a Danish Egyptologist in 1939, is just one example of a large collection of ancient Egyptian papyri belonging to the University of Copenhagen, acquired by grants from the Carlsberg Foundation. Of the 1,400 papyri, a tiny proportion are medical texts, most of which have remained untranslated.

"We're dealing with the kind of material that is so incredibly rare," says Egyptologist Kim Ryholt, head of the Carlsberg papyrus collection and part of the international research collaboration translating the texts. "There's less than a dozen well-preserved ancient Egyptian medical papyri... Anything new will shed important new light."

Promising new insights

Translation is a long process. "The texts are damaged, they are written in an ancient script that few people can read, and the terminology is immensely complex," says Ryholt. c

The wheat and barley test was already known from a papyrus of a similar date that is now held at the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. However, there have been other revelations since the research collaboration began in September 2017.

Until now, many Egyptologists thought that the civilization was unaware of the existence of the kidneys, but one of the translated medical texts discusses the organ, showing that their knowledge of anatomy was even more advanced than previously thought.

Other papyri include various treatments for eye diseases, such trichiasis, when the eyelashes grow inwards toward the eye. The papyrus prescribes mixing the blood of a lizard, a bull, a female donkey and a female goat, and inserting the concoction into the eye.

Sofie Schiødt, one of the PhD students analyzing the texts, suggests that there may have been a standardized medical corpus containing tests and treatments used across ancient Egypt. But she urges caution, as the small number of papyri and the uncertainty as to where they came from geographically means that it is hard to say exactly how representative the texts are.

Transmission of knowledge

One thing is for sure, the pregnancy testing method had longevity. "We find the same test in Greek and Roman medicine, in the Middle East during the Middle Ages, and European medical traditions," says Schiødt. The test appears as late as the 1699, in a book of German folklore.

In the ancient world, Egyptian medicine was highly respected and their methods were often adopted by other cultures, explains Andreas Winkler, an Egyptologist from the University of Oxford.

"Ancient travelers to Egypt were amazed at the fact that there were doctors specializing in particular areas of medicine and their knowledge was praised," he says. "As the pregnancy test shows, it is clear that certain techniques found their ways beyond the shores of the Nile."

Scientific accuracy

Not only did the method stand the test of time, it may also have some scientific substance. According to an article published in the journal Medical History in 1963, researchers tested the theory and found that in 70% of the cases, the urine of pregnant women did cause the grain to sprout. The test was deemed unreliable for predicting the sex of the children, however.

Modern scholars have attributed the test's accuracy to the high levels of estrogen in a pregnant woman's urine, which helps to stimulate growth in the wheat and barley.

So, did ancient Egyptian doctors know about hormones in urine?

"No," says Schiødt, "any idea of hormonal influences is completely non-existent." Instead, she suggests that the test's accuracy is probably down to trial and error.

Other pregnancy tests attested in Egyptian papyri were less reliable. Winkler tells of the onion test that advises inserting an onion in the vagina of a woman, and if her breath smelled like onions the next day, it meant she was pregnant.

"It's difficult to put our idea of rational, scientific medicine onto what they were doing," says Schiødt.

Ancient Egyptian medicine was grounded in religious or mythological stories and pharmaceutical remedies were aimed to expunge spirits or demons from the body, she says. So, while they recognized diseases similar to those today, the treatments can't be compared.

Ancient Egyptian medical knowledge revealed by 3,500-year-old texts

10,000 year-old spear found on historic Co Down hillside

A tiny spear dropped by a prehistoric "hunter gatherer" 10,000 years ago is the latest dramatic discovery on a famous Co Down hillside.

The needle, still sharp despite its Stone Age roots, has stunned archaeologists at an excavation dig in Downpatrick that is now expected to make its own history because of "significant findings".

The Queen’s University team has confirmed the "microlith" is “the earliest evidence” for people living in the historic area.

The tiny 10,000 year-old spear

This follows the recent sensational discovery of 12 medieval skeletons in the same grounds of Down Cathedral - within meters of St Patrick’s grave.

The tourist site has been a magnet for visitors over the summer as word has travelled about the historic treasure trove.

Dozens of artefacts, including 1,500 year-old glazed pottery, metalwork, oyster shells and a tiny ceramic shoe, have also been uncovered in the buried ruins of an ancient Benedictine monastery.

Excavation director Brian Sloan said they were stunned by their most recent discovery despite the long history associated with the site.

He said: “We know Cathedral Hill has substantial prehistoric remains waiting to be found but we didn't really expect something so early.

“All of this material will revolutionise our understanding of life in Downpatrick from the time of St Patrick onwards.

“The Mesolithic flint tool dates back to about 8000 BC, which represents the earliest evidence for people living here in Downpatrick 10,000 years ago."

Cathedral Dean Rev Henry Hull described the discovery of the flint as "quite remarkable".

In a further nod to the site's history, a replica of an ancient High Cross which would have been the original marking of St Patrick's grave, was erected during a ceremony today (Friday).

Three fragments of the original cross have been put on display in the entrance porch of the cathedral.

A Newry, Mourne and Down Council spokesman confirmed “significant findings” had been made during the excavation project, which is supported by the European Union’s PEACE IV Programme, managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB).

Council chairman Mark Murnin said: “The unexpected discoveries have become a massive tourist attraction for the area with hundreds of visitors everyday from as far as USA, Australia, and Japan. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley MP even made time in her diary to stop by the dig.

“The discoveries from this excavation have inspired the interest and imagination of many.”

Queen’s University Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork will deliver a post-excavation lecture at Down Museum, Downpatrick, on Thursday, November 15.

Match-funding for the project was provided by the Northern Ireland Executive Office and the Department for Rural and Community Development in Ireland.

10,000 year-old spear found on historic Co Down hillside

Medieval artisans built a glass-walled palace in the desert

New analysis of glass from Samarra reveals local manufacturing and long-range trade.

In 836CE, Abbasid caliph al-Mu’tasim ordered the construction of a new capital city on the east bank of the Tigris River, in modern-day Iraq. Since 762, al-Mu’tasim’s predecessors had ruled from Baghdad, but the presence of the caliph’s newly formed Turkish regiments had stirred unrest in the city, so he wanted to pack up his troops and move to a new capital. This also allowed him to build his own grand palace complex with walls of inlaid glass and intricate mosaics.

This is what Samarra looked like in the early 20th century.

Archaeologist Nadine Schibille of the University of Orleans and her colleagues recently analyzed fragments of the glass that once decorated the gleaming walls of Samarra’s palaces and mosques, and their chemical composition offers some hints about the gritty reality of the industry and trade that built the glass palaces.

Fit for a caliph

Glass inlays of clear and purple geometric shapes and multicolored millefiori tiles, along with elaborate mosaics, decorated the walls of the audience chamber at Dar al-Kilafa palace. That glittering opulence may have been an allusion to the story of King Solomon’s glass palace, but the appearance of al-Mu’tasim’s audience chamber also created a physical manifestation of the caliph’s power. The awe and wonder that visitors experienced when they stepped into the glass-walled audience chamber were meant to transfer to the ruler himself.

The Abbasid rulers left Samarra to move back to Baghdad in 892CE; today pieces of the glass that once decorated its palaces and mosques are on display in museums around the world, mostly thanks to archaeological digs in the early 20th century. Schibille took tiny samples from 256 of those items and analyzed their chemical composition using a method called laser inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. (That's a scientific way of saying they mounted tiny fragments of glass in epoxy, then shot them with lasers and measured the chemical makeup of the vaporized material.)

Proportions of different elements in a piece of glass can tell scientists where the material for that glass came from, which impurities or additives it contained, and how it was manufactured. And that, in turn, can reveal a lot about the construction of a 9th century palace. It turns out that the caliph’s construction project supported a fine glassmaking industry near the banks of the Tigris. It also reused relics of the caliphate’s past and the products of ancient trade networks.

Advanced local industry

Nearly all of the glass for the audience chamber’s inlays and the palace windows had been produced locally, out of very high-quality materials, using a process adopted in the region just a few decades earlier. For centuries, glass makers in the Levant and Egypt combined silica with natron, but around the late 8th century or early 9th century, glass makers in the region started substituting plant ash for natron. The proportion of magnesia in inlays and window glass from Samarra’s palaces suggests plant ash, rather than natron, as the source of sodium carbonate in the glassmaking process. That means the inlays and windows were probably made around the time of the city’s founding.

And the chemical signatures in those glass pieces matched silica from the region around Samarra. That lines up well with historical descriptions of glass production in the village of al-Qadisiyya, about 25km (16 miles) away from the city and its glass palaces. A local industry could have expanded to fulfill royal commissions, and it seems that those ancient glass makers knew their work well. They appear to have used the purest silica sources for clear inlays and windowpanes, because impurities would discolor the glass. In Schibille and her colleagues' analysis, the chemical composition of those samples suggested very pure silica, such as clean silica sand or quartz pebbles.

For the colored glass inlays, however, the glass makers didn’t have to worry so much about impurities, since they would be adding colorants to the glass anyway. So, based on the chemical analysis, it seems that they used less expensive silica sources—very high quality but a bit less pure than what went into the clear glass. That suggests that the glass makers wanted to balance cost and quality, and the same pattern is reflected in glass containers and dishes from Samarra.

Scavenged mosaics and Byzantine trade

Despite the thriving local industry, tesserae for the elaborate mosaics of Samarra seemed to have been scavenged and recycled from several older palaces and mosques in Syria and Egypt. The tesserae have different concentrations of the elements aluminum and calcium, as well as a few heavier elements. That suggests that they came from different silica sources and so probably from different geographical areas. Some match glass from 4th century to 8th century CE sites in Israel, others match glass from 6th and 7th century CE sites across Europe and the Mediterranean, and yet another set has a chemical makeup that looks more like Egyptian glass from the 8th century CE. All of them predate the 9th century CE foundation of Samarra.

“They might instead have been scavenged from buildings no longer in use and imported to Samarra from the western regions of the Abbasid Caliphate, from Syria-Palestine and/or Egypt,” suggested Schibille and her colleagues. Some of those buildings might have been the work of rulers from the Umayyad dynasty, which al-Mu’tasim’s ancestors had overthrown in 750CE. Umayyad mosques were known for their wall mosaics, and historical accounts claim that an early 8th century Byzantine emperor sent tiles and skilled workmen to the Umayyad caliph for the mosques of Damascus in Syria and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

The fact that the silica that went into making the Samarra tesserae seems to have come from Byzantine territory and that it matches styles and techniques used during the Umayyad period suggest that some of the tiles for the Umayyad mosques might, in fact, have come from the Byzantine Empire in trade. It also suggests that later Abbasid rulers took them east to Samarra to decorate their own fabulous glass-walled palaces.

But that, too, was destined not to last. Caliph al-Mu’tasim poured money and resources into Samarra, as did several of his successors, and that constant influx of royal gold and royal attention kept the city thriving even in the desert. But when the Abbasids shifted their seat back to Baghdad in 892CE, the once-grand city of Samarra pretty much dried up without imported water and food, and most of the old city was abandoned within a few decades.

Medieval artisans built a glass-walled palace in the desert