A STONE AGE burial chamber in Orkney has yielded a gruesome haul of more than 1,000 human bones, it was revealed June 13, 2011.

Drawing the north cell lintel of Tomb of the Otters. Photo: © ORCA

The 5,000-year-old human bones – numbering at least 1,000, but possibly as many as 2,000 – were found in just one of the five chambers of the Banks Tomb on South Ronaldsay.

The burial chamber, also known as the Tomb of the Otters because large numbers of otter remains were also found there, was discovered last year by a local farmer working the land. In December, archaeologists recovered the remains of eight people from the tomb.

New research, in which two separate cells in the tomb were investigated, has almost doubled this number to at least 14, though it is very likely this number will end up much higher.

The narrow passage of Wideford Hill, one of the many portal “tombs” across the Orkneys, the most famous of which is the spectacular Maes Howe. The bones were preserved in several layers on the bottom of the stone-lined cell, or cist, which were divided by layers of silt, which might indicate that the tomb had been used over different periods of time and fell out of use in the intervening years. Archaeologists now hope that these finds will help them determine how long the tomb was in use. They also hope, through DNA research, to be able to discover more about the people who were buried there. Team leader Dan Lee, projects officer with the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology (Orca), said: “To find 1,000 human bones, and possibly as many as 2,000 – there are still layers and parts of the cell to fully uncover – in just one cell, is absolutely amazing. “We have discovered an incredible assemblage of disarticulated human bones. All parts of the human skeleton were represented, including tiny bones such as finger bones, sternums and kneecaps.

One of the skulls recovered from the west cell of the Banks Tomb. (Picture: ORCA)

“They covered all age ranges, from very young children, perhaps even babies, to adults.

“We have managed to identify 14 individuals, but it is very likely that this number will turn out to be much higher.

“This gives us a really good indication of what to expect in the tomb’s other cells and an opportunity to study the people who lived and died in Orkney so many years ago.

“The next stage will be to fully excavate the passageway and the entrance, and we hope to get back to continue working on this fascinating piece of Stone Age archaeology.

“Unfortunately, because the conditions are changing inside as we’ve taken out the mud, silt and water, there is now a real danger that we’re going to lose key information.”

The archaeologists also hope to be able to get more information about the significance of the otter remains found in the tomb – if they have any.

Mr Lee added: “We’ve found otter droppings and bones, which proves that these animals have been using the tomb, and certainly the cell we’ve excavated, throughout the entire life and use of the tomb.

“It doesn’t seem to have been a problem that the otters were living in this tomb at the same time as the Neolithic people that built it, or to those who later used it and buried their dead here.

“The otters used it as part of their territory – they basically used it as their toilet.”

The Tomb of the Otters is just a few yards away from the larger Tomb of the Eagles, where remains of dozens of people were found.

Recent studies concluded that some of the people buried there may have suffered violent deaths.

Some of the human bones found in the Tomb of the Eagles

The Tomb of the Eagles

There is no evidence that this was also the case for the people who found their last resting place in the Banks Tomb.

Mr Lee said: “We really can’t say anything about the use of the Banks Tomb yet.

“There is no evidence that they died of violence, but we only excavated a small part of the tomb, and it is really hard to tell what we will find in the future.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT AXIS OF LOGIC

WHAT look like just a few fields close to Presteigne, in fact cover up an ‘exceptional’ and significant historical site which maps around 5,000 years of Welsh history.

The Walton Basin has been an area of interest to Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT), who have been carrying out significant excavation work over the last few years to try and uncover the wonders of Welsh history.

One of their earliest findings is from the Neolithic period, where archaeologists believe they have found something that could be as significant as the word famous Stonehenge, on the Salisbury plains.

Chris Martin, regional architect at CPAT, explained that what has been found in the Walton Basin is thought to be a rare Neolithic ’causewayed’ enclosure.

Having used some 1,400 mature oak trees in its construction, which has been dated to around 2700 BC, to date this is the largest Neolithic enclosure in Britain, making its finding quite significant.

“It’s really quite an impressive structure when you consider that it was 5,000 years ago or so,” said Chris.

“We don’t actually know what it is for. It seems to be some kind of ceremonial enclosure that was significant to the local population, a religious structure, a meeting place for the community.”

Will Adams, curator at the Radnorshire Museum in Llandrindod Wells speculated that one of the enclosures could be as bit as four Millennium Stadiums.

“This could be as important as Stonehenge,” he said.

The enclosures may be significant if they are the only ones, however archaeologists are unsure as to whether or not these enclosures exist elsewhere in the country.

Despite this, the site’s significance is not in question because of all the other era that can be found there from the Bronze Age, to the Romans.

Mr Martin said: “There is a riot of stuff in a relatively small space, you’ve got almost an entire Welsh history in this small area.

“It’s a mind blowing area and has something for everyone, and there is almost too much to say about the basin. It really is exceptional.”

There is currently an exhibition at the Radnorshire Museum on the Walton Basin, and people can watch an interactive video which explains the significance of the site, or it can be viewed at www.cpat.org.uk/vr/llandod/index.htm

 

A new technique lets archaeologists reconstruct the past in greater detail

THAT economic expansion leads to building booms seems to have been as true 6,000 years ago as it is now. When agriculture came to Britain, it led to a surge of construction as impressive—and rapid—as the one that followed the industrial revolution.

Which is all a bit of a surprise to archaeologists, who had previously seen the arrival of the Neolithic as a rather gentle thing. But that may be because of the tools they use. Radiocarbon dating provides a range, often spanning 200 years or more, rather than an exact date for a site. Stratigraphy, which looks at the soil layers in which artefacts are found, tells you only which ones are older and which younger. None of these data is precise. They do, however, limit the possible range of dates. And by using a statistical technique called Bayesian analysis it is possible to combine such disparate pieces of information to produce a consolidated estimate that is more accurate than any of its components. That results in a range that spans decades, not centuries.

A team led by Alex Bayliss, from English Heritage, a British government agency, has just used this technique to examine digs from hundreds of sites around Britain. The results have caused them to reinterpret the Neolithic past quite radically.

Agriculture seems to have arrived fully formed in what is now Kent, in the south-east, around 4050BC. The new culture spread slowly at first, taking 200 years to reach modern-day Cheltenham, in the west, but over the following five decades it penetrated as far north as Aberdeen. Soon afterwards, causewayed enclosures (circular arrangements of banks and ditches hundreds of metres across—see picture) began springing up all over the country.

Until now, archaeologists had assumed that these were built over the course of centuries. Dr Bayliss’s work suggests they were the product of two booms, each just a few decades long—for the Neolithic seems to have seen its share of busts, too.

The team’s work offers such a sharp picture of the past that it is possible to trace the histories even of individual communities, such as one in Essex whose inhabitants built, used and then abandoned an enclosure within the span of a single generation.

English Heritage now plans to apply the technique to another murky era of British history, the early Anglo-Saxon period between 400AD and 700AD. In principle, the method can be applied to any archaeological site, and several groups of researchers around the world are working on similar projects. But, fittingly for a discipline that deals in centuries and millennia, the revolution will be a slow one. Unlike traditional radiocarbon dating, which can be bought off the shelf, Dr Bayliss reckons it takes between three and four years to train a graduate researcher to use the new technique properly.

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE ECONOMIST

For generations, it has been scrambled up with pride by students at Marlborough College. But the mysterious, pudding-shaped mound in the grounds of the Wiltshire public school now looks set to gain far wider acclaim as scientists have revealed it is a prehistoric monument of international importance.

After thorough excavations, the Marlborough mound is now thought to be around 4,400 years old, making it roughly contemporary with the nearby, and far more renowned, Silbury Hill.

The new evidence was described by one archeologist, an expert on ancient ritual sites in the area, as “an astonishing discovery”. Both neolithic structures are likely to have been constructed over many generations.

The Marlborough mound had been thought to date back to Norman times. It was believed to be the base of a castle built 50 years after the Norman invasion and later landscaped as a 17th-century garden feature. But it has now been dated to around 2400BC from four samples of charcoal taken from the core of the 19 metre-high hill.

The samples prove it was built at a time when British tribes were combining labour on ritual monuments in the chalk downlands of Wiltshire, including Stonehenge and the huge ditches and stone circle of Avebury.

History students at the college will now have the chance to study an extraordinary example just a stone’s throw from their classroom windows. Malborough’s Master Nicholas Sampson said: “We are thrilled at this discovery, which confirms the long and dramatic history of this beautiful site and offers opportunity for tremendous educational enrichment.”

Article continues at THE GUARDIAN …

Be that as it may, we are very glad that further – and more concrete evidence – for the human transportation (as opposed to the glacial) of the bluestones has been provided by new research. Read on: (ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT ARCHNEWS)

It has been around for the best part of 5,000 years and still holds many mysteries but new research into Stonehenge has overturned established ideas about where some of the rocks came from.

Dr Rob Ixer from the University of Leicester Department of Geology has been studying the famous monument in collaboration with Dr Nick Pearce from Aberystwyth University and Dr Richard Bevins from the National Museum of Wales. Their particular interest was in the ‘bluestones’ which are not the iconic massive uprights and cross-pieces but smaller stones, weighing a mere(!) four tonnes or so each.

Stonehenge is not just a ‘stone circle’ but is structurally quite complex. There is an outer circle of massive ‘sarsen’ stones: uprights and cross-pieces, weighing anything up to 50 tonnes, collected from the Marlborough Downs about 25 miles away. Within this is a ring of bluestones – which predates the outer ring – then a horseshoe of sarsens, then a horseshoe of bluestones, then the central stone commonly referred to as the ‘altar stone’.

Even that’s not all because there are circular earthworks around the stone circle and all manner of stone detritus scattered within and around. Furthermore any investigation into Stonehenge is, of course, complicated by the number of stones which have fallen over or been moved – and complicated even more by the number which have been stood up again! As recently as the 1960s work was carried out to lift some of the fallen stones and set them in concrete bases which was not, strictly speaking, how they were held up five millennia ago…

Bluestone technology

Most of the bluestones are a type of rock called spotted dolerite, an igneous rock similar to basalt but coarser grained. It was in 1923 that the source of this rock was comprehensively identified as the Mynydd Preseli district, a range of hills to the east of Fishguard, meaning that each of these stones was transported about 240 miles.

However, while the spotted dolerite is distinctive, the origin of the non-dolerite bluestones, which include sandstone, silica-rich rhyolites and volcanic ejecta called basaltic tuffs, are harder to pin down. They have generally been assumed to come from the same location as the dolerites because, well, there are rocks like these in the Preseli Hills.

Rob Ixer and his colleagues analysed samples from the Stonehenge bluestones and found that they matched rocks in the Pont Saeson area just outside Newport. Having established a likely origin, they looked in detail at zircons within the stones. These are tiny crystals of zirconium silicate (about 150?m across) which have distinctive signatures of trace elements within them, such as hafnium, yttrium and scandium.

Long story short, the Stonehenge bluestones matched the Pont Saeson samples extremely closely whilst being markedly different from control samples of similar rocks collected elsewhere.

Rock and rollers

As so often in research, solving one outstanding mystery just raises more questions, in this case regarding transport.

The accepted view of how the bluestones got to Salisbury Plain is that they were transported overland due south to Milford Haven (probably using logs as rollers underneath the stones), then by raft up the Bristol Channel, then more log rolling to take them across to Stonehenge. Which is fine if all the stones started life at the top of the Preseli Hills because it’s all downhill from there.

But if some of the stones came from Pont Saeson, that’s low ground to the North of Mynydd Preseli. In other words, to get those stones to Milford Haven, our Neolithic building gang would have had to transport them over the Preseli Hills. Which seems, frankly, unlikely.

This research builds on work published by the team in 2006 which showed that the ‘altar stone’, previously believed to have originated at Milford Haven, came from somewhere else much, much further away.

This new, detailed chemical analysis of the stones actually has enormous (pre-)historical implications, overturning established theories about how this extraordinary creation was constructed. The mystery of Stonehenge continues…

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT ARCHNEWS

Bone flute found in China at 9,000-year-old Neolithic site

Upton, NY – Researchers in China have uncovered what might be the oldest playable musical instrument. Their work is described in a paper published in the September 23 issue of the scientific journal Nature.

Recent excavations at the early Neolithic site of Jiahu, located in Henan province, China, have yielded six complete bone flutes between 7,000 and 9,000 years old. Fragments of approximately 30 other flutes were also discovered. The flutes may be the earliest complete, playable, tightly-dated, multinote musical instruments.

Garman Harbottle, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and member of the Jiahu research team, helped analyze data from carbon-14 dating done in China on materials taken from the site. “Jiahu has the potential to be one of the most significant and exciting early Neolithic sites ever investigated,” said Harbottle. “The carbon dating was of crucial importance to my Chinese colleagues in establishing the age of the site and the relics found within it.”

The exquisitely-crafted flutes are all made from the ulnae, or wing bones, of the red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis Millen) and have five, six, seven or eight holes. The best-preserved flute has been played and tonally analyzed in tests at the Music School of the Art Institute of China.

The discovery of these flutes presents a remarkable and rare opportunity for anthropologists, musicians and the general public to hear musical sounds as they were produced nine millennia ago. Two audio recordings of the flutes being played are available here: WAV file 1 (4.2 Mb), WAV file 2 (1.7 Mb).

The excavations and carbon-14 dating were carried out by researchers from the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Henan Province, Zhengzhou, China; the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Science and Technology of China; and the Paleobotany Laboratory, Academia Sinica, Beijing, China.

Tonal analysis

of the flutes revealed that the seven holes correspond to a tone scale remarkably similar to the Western eight-note scale that begins “do, re, mi.” This carefully-selected tone scale suggested to the researchers that the Neolithic musician of the seventh millennium BC could play not just single notes, but perhaps even music.

Jiahu lies in the Central Yellow River Valley in mid-Henan Province and was inhabited from 7000 BC to 5700 BC. The site was discovered by Zhu Zhi, late director of the Wuyang County Museum, in 1962, but only in the past 15 years has significant excavation activity begun. In addition to the musical instruments, the site has yielded important information on the early foundations of Chinese society. Music in China is traditionally associated with ritual observances and government affairs.

To date, only about five percent of Jiahu has been excavated, uncovering 45 house foundations, 370 cellars, nine pottery kilns and thousands of artifacts of bone, pottery, stone and other materials. Additional excavation activities are planned for the near future.

The authors of the paper describing the Jiahu findings are Juzhong Zhang, from the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Henan Province, Zhengzhou, China, and the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Science and Technology of China; Changsui Wang, also from the Archaeometry Laboratory; Zhaochen Kong, from the Paleobotany Laboratory, Academia Sinica, Beijing, China; and Garman Harbottle from Brookhaven

The Anglesey Rock Art Project recently extended their programme to include excavation and recording of megalithic rock art on a stone at Llwydiarth Esgob Farm. The stone, made from a distinctive localised hornblende picrite, stands within the garden of the farmhouse and was moved there by the noted antiquary Thomas Pritchard at the beginning of the 20th century.

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Excavations at the site of the former MOD Headquarters at Durrington have revealed deposits dating to the Late Upper Palaeolithic (Late Glacial) c. 12,000BC and evidence of human activity from the late Neolithic (2550-2200 BC) through to the modern period, with the main focus of activity dating from the Late Iron Age c.100BC to Romano-British period (AD43-410). The site is located within an archaeologically rich landscape just 1km north of the Neolithic Durrington Walls henge and between the Romano-British settlements at Figheldean and at the Packway enclosure to the north and south respectively.

Two monumental Neolithic posthole alignments, which appeared to follow the contours of high ground, contained Grooved Ware pottery. Potentially contemporary with these alignments was a natural swallow hole or sink hole 25m across which had been consolidated with a flint pebble surface which created a metalled platform covered with flint knapping debris and a broken late Neolithic flint axehead or chisel. In the Iron Age, the site comprised a number of paddocks and small fields, formed by shallow gullies and ditches.

READ FULL ARTICLE AT WESSEX ARCHAEOLOGY

A human skull dated to about 2,684 years ago with an “exceptionally preserved” human brain still inside of it was recently discovered in a waterlogged U.K. pit, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science study.

The brain is the oldest known intact human brain from Europe and Asia, according to the authors, who also believe it’s one of the best-preserved ancient brains in the world.

“The early Iron Age skull belonged to a man, probably in his thirties,” lead author Sonia O’Connor told Discovery News. “Cause of death is rarely possible to determine in archaeological remains, but in this case, damage to the neck vertebrae is consistent with a hanging.”

“The head was then carefully severed from the neck using a small blade, such as a knife,” added O’Connor, a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Bradford. “This was used to cut through the throat and between the vertebrae and has left a cluster of fine cut marks on the bone.”

The brain-containing skull was found at Heslington, Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. O’Connor and her team suspect the site served a ceremonial function that persisted from the Bronze Age through the early Roman period. Many pits at the site were marked with single stakes. The remains of the man were without a body, but the scientists also found the headless body of a red deer that had been deposited into a channel.

Laser imaging, chemical analysis and other examinations revealed that the brain naturally preserved over the millennia. The scientists found no evidence for bacterial or fungal activity, and described the tissue as being “odorless…with a resilient, tofu-like texture.”

The condition of the brain is remarkable for its age.

Read full article at Discovery.com

EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties – the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.

The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE AT NEW SCIENTIST