Smashed Skulls Indicate Stone Age Fears

Several of the smashed skulls, all of young men.

Evidence that some Stone Age cultures may have considered dead young men to be threatening to living people could be the reason groups of newly discovered skulls were buried with smashed-in faces.

The 10,000-year-old skulls were found in Syria. They appear to have been dug up several years after being buried with their bodies, separated, then reburied. No one knows why Neolithic societies buried clusters of skulls - often near or underneath settlements.

Like those found in other caches, they have been cleanly separated from their spines, suggesting they were collected from dead bodies that had already begun to decompose. Patterns on the bone indicate that some had been decomposing for longer than others, making it likely that they were all gathered together for a specific purpose.

Most of the skulls belonged to adult males between 18 and 30 years old.

Click here for the article.

Lone Male Buried Amidst Moche Priestesses

Gilded mask found beside the tomb of the elite male.

Archaeologists were surprised recently to unearth the remains of a male buried among a bevy of powerful priestesses in a Peruvian pre-Inca Moche tomb. The Moche people were a fragmented society of farmers who occupied the arid coasts of Peru from about 100 to 1000 AD.

According to National Geographic:

Surrounded by early "smoke machines" as well as human and llama bones, the body was among several buried inside a unique double-chambered tomb that dates back to A.D. 850, said archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, of the Catholic University of Peru in Lima.

The tomb contained a wooden coffin decorated with a copper lattice and a gilded mask, sitting on a raised platform. Inside the coffin "is where we find the main object of the burial, and that fellow is a male," Castillo said.

"After 18 years of excavation in San José de Moro, we were expecting another female," he added. "But this tends to happen [in archaeology]—expect the unexpected."

The site has so far yielded seven royal priestess burials, an indication of the powerful role of women in Moche society, Castillo said.

Click here for the National Geographic article and more photos.

Human Remains Deepen Macedonian Mysery

The burial vessels found in Aigai, one of which contained human remains.

Archaeologists have unearthed a lavish burial site at the seat of the ancient Macedonian kings, pointing to a 2,300-year-old mystery of murder and political intrigue. The find in the ruins of Aigai in northern Greece is only yards from last year's discovery of what could be the bones of Alexander the Great's murdered teenage son.

According to the Associated Press:

Archaeologists are puzzled because both sets of remains were buried under very unusual circumstances: Although cemeteries existed near the site, the bones were taken from an unknown first resting place and re-interred, against all ancient convention, in the heart of the city.

Excavator Chrysoula Saatsoglou-Paliadeli said in an interview that the bones found this week were inside one of two large silver vessels unearthed in the ancient city's marketplace, close to the theater where Alexander's father, King Philip II, was murdered in 336 B.C. She said they arguably belonged to a Macedonian royal and were buried at the end of the 4th century B.C.

But it is too early to speculate on the dead person's identity, pending tests to determine the bones' sex and age, said Saatsoglou-Paliadeli, a professor of classical archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Saatsoglou-Paliadeli believes the teenager's bones found in 2008 may have belonged to Heracles, Alexander's illegitimate son who was murdered during the wars of succession around 309 B.C. and buried in secret. The remains had been placed in a gold jar, with an elaborate golden wreath.

Click here for the complete AP article.

Beheaded Vikings Buried in English Pit

The burial pit with the remains of 51 warriors, presumably Vikings.

Archaeologists are pondering the discovery of 51 beheaded warriors in a burial pit in southern England, dating back at least 1,000 years. The slain men’s heads were found stacked neatly on one side of the pit.

The dead are thought to have been war captives, possibly Vikings, whose heads were hacked off with swords or axes, according to excavation leader David Score of Oxford Archaeology, an archaeological-services company.

Many of the skeletons have deep cut marks to the skull and jaw as well as the neck. "The majority seem to have taken multiple blows," Score said.

Unusually, no trace of clothing has been found, indicating the men were buried naked. Even if their weapons and valuables had been taken "we should have found bone buttons and things like that, but to date we've got absolutely nothing," Score said.

"They look like a healthy, robust, very strong, very masculine group of young males," he added. "It's your classic sort of warrior."

Click here for the complete National Geographic article.

Zapotec Used Thighbones as Status Symbols

Carving of a Zapotec ruler holding a human femur.

Centuries-old stone carvings in southern Mexico indicate that Zapotec men brandished human thighbones as status symbols.

"The thought was that the femurs are those of the ancestors of the rulers, serving like staffs of office or symbols of legitimacy," archaeologist Gary Feinman of the Field Museum in Chicago recently told National Geographic.

Flourishing from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 1000 in the Valley of Oaxaca, the Zapotec were contemporaries of the ancient Maya and Aztec. Prior excavations had revealed a Zapotec tomb where nine femurs were missing. But the skeletons were a bit of a jumble, so it wasn't clear whether the bones had been taken or had simply gone missing.

"I believe removal of the femur from a male was one way the ancient Zapotec asserted dynastic continuity," said archaeologist Joyce Marcus at the University of Michigan, who did not participate in this study.

Click here for the complete National Geographic article.

Pre-Incan Graves Found Beneath Shantytown

A pre-Incan mummy and eight other skeletons have been unearthed in the middle of Lima, Peru, archeologists said yesterday.

Urban squatters had lived in a shantytown above the Huaca Huantille ruins for years, unaware they contained an ancient burial site, Reuters reported.

Archeologist Roberto Quispe working on the excavation said the bones were from the Ychsma civilization dating from between 1000 and 1400 AD.

The burial site was found after city officials kicked out 50 homeless families that had built a shantytown on the ruins, and later started excavations. Hundreds of archeological sites are scattered across Lima, and in some cases Catholic churches or mansions were built on top of Inca ruins after Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru.

Superb Artifacts Found in Saqqara Tomb

Ancient Egyptian treasures have recently been unearthed by a team of Japanese archaeologists from Waseda University who’ve been digging in the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo. Two weeks ago they made significant discoveries in the 3,300-year-old tomb. Top photo shows one of four wooden sarcophaguses, richly engraved with symbols and hieroglyphics. The lower photo shows three canopic jars recovered among the tomb’s numerous grave goods.

Early "Vampire" Exorcised to Stop Plague

A woman’s skeleton with a small brick in her mouth ~ exhumed in Venice, Italy ~ is being considered the first known example of a so-called “vampire.” The brick is believed to be part of an exorcism designed to stop the spread of the black plague.

The skeleton was removed from a mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576. At the time the woman died, many believed the plague was spread by "vampires" chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, according to Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence.

The belief in vampires probably arose because blood is sometimes expelled from the mouths of the dead, causing the shroud to sink inwards and tear. Borrini, who presented his findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver last week, claims this might be the first such vampire to have been forensically examined.

Click here for the New Scientist article.

Nazca Beheaded Own Brethren for Trophies

The South American people who carved the Nazca Lines across the Peruvian desert some 2,000 years ago also were great collectors of human heads, according to Discovery News.

The Nazca civilization ~ flourishing in Peru between the first century BC and the fifth century AD and sliding into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes ~ is mostly known for carving in the desert hundreds of geometric lines and images of animals and birds that can only be viewed from the air.

They also boasted the largest collection of human heads in the Andes region of South America. Carefully prepared, the lips sewed with long cactus spines, all heads featured a hole in the center of the forehead so that a carrying rope could be inserted. Hanged and suspended from these woven cords, the heads were long believed to be war trophies.

Heads Came from Own People

But recent analysis of the diet-related substances found in the teeth of some heads unearthed in 1925, reveals that the Nazca built their collection not from foreign enemies slain in battles, but from their own people.

"Nazca pottery gives us very interesting information about the role of trophy heads, both in the hands of warriors and also in ritual activities, such as burials and ritual caches. We can use sophisticated laboratory techniques to answer very interesting questions about the past, even when the excavations took place almost 100 years ago," archaeologist Kelly Knudson of Arizona State University in Tempe, told Discovery News.

Teeth Show Same Substances

Published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, the study examined 16 trophy heads of the Kroeber collection at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and 13 mummified bodies buried in the Nazca region. Knudson and colleagues compared tooth enamel from the trophy heads with the mummified bodies.

Teeth from the trophy heads and from the mummified bodies showed no substantial differences in the ratios of several chemical substances, showing that the trophy heads came from the Nazca themselves rather than from outsiders.

"Our data do not support the hypothesis that Nazca trophy heads were taken from enemy warriors from foreign locales. We argue that transforming local Nazca individuals into trophy heads highlights their ritual role," the researchers concluded.

Top photo shows Nazca terracotta representation of a trophy skull, while lower photo shows actual skulls with the forehead hole.

Click here for the Discovery News article.

Mayans Distorted Bodies to Create 'Beauty'

Some might think our culture goes to unacceptable lengths in enforcing society’s standards for beauty, but we’ve got nothing over on the ancient Mayans, who reshaped their children’s skulls and inlayed their own teeth with jade.

“The Maya went to extreme lengths to transform their bodies,” Professor Mary Miller reports in the new issue of Archaeology magazine. “They invested vast wealth and endured unspeakable pain to make themselves beautiful.”

As an example, Miller cites K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who ruled the western Maya city of Palenque from 615 to 683, and after his death at the age of 80. His skeleton shows that soon after his birth, his head was strapped between two cradle-boards to compress it from back to front. This left an indentation above his brow, which was emphasized by an artificial nasal bridge, probably of clay or plaster, built up on to his forehead.

Pakal’s front teeth were filed into an inverted T-shape, marking him as also being the Sun God, something shown on his jade burial mask as well. For many Maya, notably those of the elite, dental decoration was seen as highly desirable. Teeth, especially the upper incisors and canines were filed and notched in a variety of designs, giving in some cases a distinctly crooked smile.

Most striking, however, were the dental inlays: a shallow hole was drilled into the front face of the tooth enamel (using a reed or bone hollow drill and an abrasive such as sand or jade dust), sometimes reaching the dentine within. Small discs of jade, obsidian or haematite were then cemented into the holes: the plant adhesive was so powerful that many burials found by archaeologists today still have the inlays firmly in place. Up to three discs were inserted into a single tooth, and jade and the other materials were combined to give a flash of apple-green, dull red and shiny black across the mouth; inlays and filing were also combined.

The Maya also painted their bodies, in life and in death. Narrative scenes on polychrome vases show pigments applied to face, chest and buttocks. In death, Pakal’s corpse was treated with alternating layers of red and black pigments, Miller reports. Red to the Maya was the color of the sunrise, black of the sunset, alternating with each other in the diurnal cycle, according to the Times article.

Click here for the Times of London article.

Rare Cremation Pit Found on Georgia Island

Georgia Department of Natural Resources archaeologist Jenn Bedell, left, and Council on American Indian Concerns archaeologist Tom Gresham examine artifacts from the cremation excavation on Ossabaw Island.


Archaeologists have discovered an unusual American Indian cremation pit on an island six miles off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, containing bones of fingers or toes, mixed with charcoal, bits of burned logs and pottery shards 1,000 to 3,000 years old.

According to the Associated Press, the find has led researchers to suspect that American Indians used the ancient pit to burn bodies of the dead, making it a rare example of cremation among the early native inhabitants of the southeastern U.S.

"It's a special sort of burial," said Tom Gresham, an archaeologist who worked on the excavation and serves on Georgia's Council on American Indian Concerns. "The way Indian tribes over time buried their dead varied tremendously. But cremations are fairly rare."

Hoping for Carbon Dating

The site of the pit is on Ossabaw Island, one of Georgia's wildest barrier islands. Researchers have found evidence that humans came to Ossabaw more than 4,000 years ago. It's believed Indians at first may have used the island as a winter camp to feed on shellfish before moving inland to hunt deer in the spring.

Burial mounds on Ossabaw typically hold intact human remains. Archaeologists believe the cremation pit dates to the Woodland Period between 1000 B.C. and 900 A.D. They hope to narrow that time period by carbon dating the charcoal from the pit.

Click here for the complete Associated Press article.

Iron Age Slab Indicates Soul Separate from Body

The stone slab with the inscription saying the cremated man's soul continued to live in the stone itself.

Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body.

Part of an expedition sponsored by the University of Chicago, the archaeologists found the 800-pound basalt stele ~ 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide ~ at Zincirli, site of the ancient city of Sam’al. Once the capital of a prosperous kingdom, it is now one of the most important Iron Age sites under excavation.

The stele is the first of its kind to be found intact in its original location, enabling scholars to learn about funerary customs and life in the eighth century BC. At the time, vast empires emerged in the ancient Middle East, and cultures such as the Israelites and Phoenicians became part of a vibrant mix.

Cremation Was Common

The man featured on the stele was probably cremated, a practice that Jewish and other cultures shun because of a belief in the unity of body and soul. According to the inscription, the soul of the deceased resided in the stele. It was discovered last summer in a small room that had been converted into a mortuary shrine for the royal official Kuttamuwa, self-described in the inscription as a “servant” of King Panamuwa of the eighth century BC. The inscription reads in part:

“I, Kuttamuwa, servant of Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber(?) and established a feast at this chamber(?): a bull for [the storm-god] Hadad, ... a ram for [the sun-god] Shamash, ... and a ram for my soul that is in this stele. …”

It was written in a script derived from the Phoenician alphabet and in a local West Semitic dialect similar to Aramaic and Hebrew.

The finding sheds a striking new light on Iron Age beliefs about the afterlife. In this case, it was the belief that the enduring identity or “soul” of the deceased inhabited the monument on which his image was carved and on which his final words were recorded.

Click here for the complete University of Chicago new release.

Stash of Phoenician Jugs Found in Lebanon

An archeologist extracting a Phoenician earthenware jug.

Documenting locations of some of the 100 jugs unearthed so far.

Archaeologists in southern Lebanon have unearthed more than 100 Phoenician pottery jars dating back 2,900 years. The jars were used to hold human remains following cremation. "The big jars are like individual tombs. The smaller jars are left empty, but symbolically represent that a soul is stored in them," Ali Badawi, the archaeologist in charge in Tire, told Reuters.

Lebanese and Spanish archaeologists discovered the jars at a Phoenician site in the southern coastal city of Tire. Phoenicians are known to have thrived from 1500 B.C. to 300 B.C and were also headquartered in the coastal area of present-day Syria. The Phoenicians' earliest cities included Byblos, Tire and Sidon on Lebanon's coast. From Tire, Phoenicians are thought to have expanded into other colonies on the Mediterranean coast.

"These discoveries help researchers who work on past Phoenician colonies in Spain, Italy and Tunisia, to pin down a large number of their habits and traditions," said Maria Eugenia Aubet, who leads the Spanish archaeological team.

"Especially since there are few studies of the Phoenicians in their motherland of Lebanon," Aubet said, adding that the remains proved that the Phoenicians had a vision for life after death.

Viking Burial Rituals Were Highly Theatrical

Viking grave in longboat shape in Sweden.

A study of thousands of excavated Viking graves suggests that rituals were performed at the graveside in which stories about life and death were presented as theatre, with live performances designed to help the passage of the deceased from this world into the next.

Neil Price, head of archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, believes these rituals may have been the early beginnings of the Norse sagas, telling stories about men and gods in the pagan world. He says a close study of the graves and the artifacts they contained ~ as well as contemporary accounts of Viking funerals ~ presents a far more complex picture of their lives than the simple myth of the Viking raider.

Price said that the burial rituals suggested the Vikings had no defined religion, but instead made up a set of spiritual beliefs, which were then acted out at the graveside. “There seem to have been something like stage directions dictating how these rituals were to be enacted,” he said. “Eyewitness accounts suggest that there were as many as ten days of ritual, with enormous time and effort put into the performances.”

Many Artifacts

Detailed analysis of the burials revealed a remarkable variety of objects found alongside the bodies, from everyday items to great longships, wagons and sledges, together with animals of many different species and even human sacrifices.

“No two graves were the same,” Price says. Some bore evidence of a military career, with whole ships containing the corpse left open. Other graves were found to have had animal remains ~ one had no fewer than 20 decapitated horses ~ and occasionally there were human remains as well. Some Vikings were buried with their wives and families, others were laid to rest in more simple single graves.

Sophisticated Pagans

“What emerges from these studies is that these were an immensely sophisticated people, with a complex set of beliefs, and a strong interest in poetry. It was an utterly different world from ours,” Price says. “They were aggressively pagan, and strongly anti-Christian, perhaps as a reaction to the Christian missionaries. But there is great richness in this non-Christian world.”

Most of the existing records on Norse mythology date from the 11th to 18th centuries, having gone through more than two centuries of oral tradition that is thought to carry the seeds of Germanic legends such as the Valkyrie, the Niebelungen and Siegfried.

Click here for the London Times article.

Shaman's Grave Is One of World's Oldest

Sketch shows locations of the female shaman's body as well as the assortment of animal parts and another human foot apparently left as offerings in the female healer's grave.

A 12,000-year-old burial site in Israel has revealed what appears to be one of the earliest known graves of a female shaman. The remains were discovered in a small cave that functioned as a burial site for at least 28 individuals. Her grave was separated from the others by a circular wall of stones.

The shaman's grave contained offerings including 50 tortoise shells, a human foot, tail vertebrae from an extinct type of cattle, skulls from two members of the weasel family, bony wing parts from a golden eagle, the forearm of a wild boar and a nearly complete pelvis from a leopard. Such healers mediate between the human and spirit worlds, often summoning the help of animal spirits along their quests, according to the researchers who unearthed the burial site.

"What was unusual was there were so many different parts of different animals, clearly put there on purpose," Natalie Munro, a zoo archaeologist at the University of Connecticut, told LiveScience.

Great pains were likely taken long ago to collect the animal remains for the grave, not to mention the long trek that must have been made from the closest domestic site at the time, about six miles away, the researchers noted. This care ~ along with the animal parts ~ points to the grave belonging to both an important member of the society and possibly a shaman, according to research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The woman was about 45 years old when she died and stood just under five feet. Wearing of her teeth and other aging signs on the bones suggested the woman was relatively old for her time.

The human foot lying alongside the body came from an adult individual who was much larger than the women. "What's interesting is it's only the foot," Munro told LiveScience. "She hasn't been disturbed, but a part of another human body was definitely put into the grave. It could be related to the fact they were moving body parts around sometimes, but we don't know why."

The woman was part of the Natufian culture, a group of hunter-gatherers who lived from 15,000 to about 11,500 years ago in the area that now includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Click here for the LiveScience article.

The shaman's grave was separated from the other graves by a circular wall of stones.