Solved: Riddle of ancient Nile kingdom’s longevity

Topic:Water

(Phys.org) —Researchers have solved the riddle of how one of Africa’s greatest civilisations survived a catastrophic drought which wiped out other famous dynasties. Geomorphologists and dating specialists from The Universities of Aberystwyth, Manchester, and Adelaide say that it was the River Nile which made life viable for the renowned Kerma kingdom, in what is now northern Sudan.

Kerma was the first Bronze Age kingdom in Africa outside Egypt.

Their analysis of three ancient river channels where the Nile once flowed shows, for the first time, that its floods weren’t too low or too high to sustain life between 2,500 BC and 1,500 BC, when Kerma flourished and was a major rival to its more famous neighbour downstream.

They also show that the thousand year civilisation came to end when the Nile’s flood levels were not high enough and a major channel system dried out – though an invasion by resurgent Egyptians was the final cause of Kerma’s demise.

Downstream in Egypt, a catastrophic 30 year drought 4,200 years ago, which produced low Nile floods, created chaos in the old kingdom for at least a century.

Other civilisations in the near east and Mesopotamia were also severely hit by this drought.

The team’s findings, funded by the Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARS) and the Australian Research Council, are published in the journal Geology.

Professor Mark Macklin from The University of Aberystwyth said: “This work is the most comprehensive and robustly dated archaeological and palaeoenvironmental dataset yet compiled for the desert Nile.

“The relationship between climate change and the development of Old World riverine civilizations is poorly understood because inadequate dating control has hindered effective integration of archaeological, fluvial, and climate records.”

Professor Jamie Woodward from The University of Manchester said: “In Nubia four thousand years ago the Kerma people farmed what we might call the Goldilocks Nile: its floods were just large enough to support floodwater farming, but not so big as to cause damage to the riverside settlements.

“It’s quite remarkable that the Kerma civilization was able to flourish, produce amazing craftsmanship and wealth, at a time when their Egyptian rivals to the North were struggling with environmental, social, and political strife.

“Until now we didn’t understand why that was – but thanks to our field work in Sudan, this riddle has now been solved.”

The team used cutting edge geological dating methods to analyse the dried up channels, now 20 km from the today’s river course. It is the first time individual flood events on the desert Nile have been dated.

Using hundreds of deep irrigation pits dug by modern Sudanese farmers, Macklin and Woodward were able to observe the geological history of the old channels. In places, these old channel belts are well preserved at the modern land surface. They are between 1 and 3 km wide with Kerma sites on their margins.

According to Derek Welsby from the British Museum who led the archaeological survey, Kerma’s wealth and power may have been underpinned by its agriculturally-rich hinterland utilising the banks of the ancient channels.

Archaeological surveys of the floodplain in the Dongola Reach to the south of Kerma have discovered more than 450 sites spanning the Neolithic (pre–3500 B.C.) to the Medieval Christian period (A.D. 500–1500). Many sites are associated with the Nile’s ancient channels.

He said: “Kerma’s success was also down to their reliance on animal husbandry practices that are less susceptible to changes in flood level, more mobile, and better able to cope with environmental stress.

“They were a truly remarkable civilisation, producing some of the most exquisite pottery in the Nile Valley.”

The paper is titled “Reach-scale river dynamics moderate the impact of rapid Holocene climate change on floodwater farming in the desert Nile.”

Original article:
Phys.org

Giza Secret Revealed: How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed

Topic: Feeding ancient workers

The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers’ town near the pyramids.

The workers’ town is located about 1,300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx, and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure, the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau. The site is also known by its Arabic name, Heit el-Ghurab, and is sometimes called “the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.”

So far, researchers have discovered a nearby cemetery with bodies of pyramid builders; a corral with possible slaughter areas on the southern edge of workers’ town; and piles of animal bones.

Based on animal bone findings, nutritional data, and other discoveries at this workers’ town site, the archaeologists estimate that more than 4,000 pounds of meat — from cattle, sheep and goats — were slaughtered every day, on average, to feed the pyramid builders. [See Photos of the Unearthed Giza Pyramid Site]

This meat-rich diet, along with the availability of medical care (the skeletons of some workers show healed bones), would have been an additional lure for ancient Egyptians to work on the pyramids.

“People were taken care of, and they were well fed when they were down there working, so there would have been an attractiveness to that,” said Richard Redding, chief research officer at Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), a group that has been excavating and studying the workers’ town site for about 25 years.

“They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village,” Redding told LiveScience.

Feeding the Giza work force

At the workers’ town, which was likely occupied for 35 years, researchers have discovered a plethora of animal bones. Although the researchers are still unsure of the exact number of bones, Redding estimates he has identified about 25,000 sheep and goats, 8,000 cattle and 1,000 pig bones, he wrote in a paper published in the book “Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the ICAZ Working Group ‘Archaeozoology of southwest Asia and adjacent Areas’” (Peeters Publishing, 2013).

About 10,000 workers helped build the Menkaure pyramid, with a smaller work force present year-round to cut stones and complete preparation and survey work, the AERA team estimates. This smaller work force would have ramped up for a few months starting around July of each year. “What they would do is, for about four or five months a year, they would bring in a big work force to move blocks, and they would do nothing but move blocks,” explained Redding, who is also a research scientist at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan. [In Photos: The Beautiful Pyramids of Sudan]

Needless to say, pyramid building is hard work. The workers would need at least 45 to 50 grams of protein a day, Redding said. Half of this protein would likely come from fish, beans, lentils and other non-meat sources, while the other half would come from sheep, goat and cattle, he estimated. Milk and cheese were probably not consumed due to transportation problems and the cattle’s low milk yield during that time, Redding said.

Combining these requirements and other protein sources with the ratio of the bones (and the amount of meat and protein one can get from an animal), Redding determined about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were consumed each day.

This would be in addition to supplying workers with grain, beer and other products.

Vast herds … and herders

In order to maintain this level of slaughter, the ancient Egyptians would have needed a herd of 21,900 cattle and 54,750 sheep and goats just to keep up regular delivery to the Giza workers, Redding estimates.

The animals alone would need about 155 square miles (401 square kilometers) of territory to graze. Add in fallow land, waste land, settlements and agricultural land for the herders, and this number triples to about 465 square miles (1,205 square km) of land — an area about the size of modern-day Los Angeles. Even so, this area would take up just about 5 percent of the present-day Nile Delta.

These animals also needed herders — likely one herder for every six cattle and one herder for every 50 sheep or goats, based on ethnographic observations. This brings the total number of herders to 3,650 overall and, once their families are included, 18,980, just under 2 percent of Egypt’s estimated population at the time.

These herds would have been spread out in villages across the Nile Delta, then brought to the workers’ town at Giza to be slaughtered and cooked. At the end of their lives, the animals were likely kept in the southern part of the town, in a recently unearthed structure that researchers have dubbed the “OK corral.” (“OK” stands for “Old Kingdom,” the time period in which the Giza pyramids were built.) The structure, which includes two small enclosures where animals may have been slaughtered and a rounded pen, is partly hidden under a modern-day soccer field. [Image Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries]

The boss eats the beef

The research revealed interesting details about life in the workers’ town. For instance, the overseers — who lived in a structure the archaeologists call the “north street gatehouse” — got to eat the most cattle, and those living in an area called the “galleries,” where the everyday workers lived, ate mainly sheep and goats.

Redding said it wasn’t surprising that the overseers preferred to dine on beef, considering it was the most valued meat in ancient Egypt. “Cattle is, of course, the highest-status meat,” he said, noting that it appears far more frequently then sheep or goat in tomb scenes, and that pigs never appear in tomb scenes.

The settlement located adjacent to the workers’ town, dubbed “eastern town,” wasn’t as rigidly planned as workers’ town, and its residents were eating a considerable number of pigs, the researchers found. Evidence also suggested the people in eastern town were trading with people in workers’ town for hippo-tusk fragments.

These finds suggest that the residents of the eastern town were not as directly involved in pyramid building and had a special relationship with the pyramid workers.

“They were not provisioned; they were not given their meat and food every day,” like those in the workers’ town were, Redding said. “It’s more of a typical urban farming settlement, and there was a symbiotic relationship between the two —probably,” he said.

Future discoveries at Giza

Research at workers’ town suggests that not all the workers lived there and some may have actually camped out near the Giza pyramids.

“What we think now is — and this is something we’re going to be coming out with in the next little while — is that, more likely, it was a large portion of the work force, the more skilled laborers [living at workers' town], and that there were temporary camps up by the pyramids where the temporary workers who came in would be housed,” he said.

“They probably (didn’t) need much in the way of housing; they would need more shade than anything else. They wouldn’t need any kind of warmth because it wouldn’t be winter.”

Future studies will look for the remains of the workers’ towns of Khufu and Khafre, the two other pharaohs who built pyramids at Giza. A dump area, investigated in the 1950s, may hold them; seal impressions found at the dump have the rulers’ names on them.

“What we think was going on was that Menkaure came along, he establishes his reign, he leveled that whole area and he took all the levelling debris, took it to the top of the hill and threw it over the back in a big dump,” Redding said.

“That dump on the back side of the ridge may represent a remnant of Khufu and Khafre’s construction’s town,” Redding said, adding that he hopes new excavations will begin on the dump in the next year or two.

Original article:
yahoo news
By Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor | LiveScience.com – Wed, Apr 24, 2013

New excavations indicate use of fertilizers 5,000 years ago

New excavations indicate use of fertilizers 5,000 years ago.

cheery Monday everyone!

Excavation set to shed new light on London’s Victorian past

Excavation set to shed new light on London’s Victorian past.

 

i forgot to post this last feb, so here goes.

 

 

 

Norfolk Broads: Bronze Age evidence ‘everywhere’

Slightly off topic but interesting, and well it’s more on England.

Proof of Bronze Age activity can be found throughout the whole of the Norfolk Broads, archaeologists claim.

The Middle Bronze Age field system at Ormesby St Michael in 2010 is not unique to the area, Nick Gilmour said.

Mr Gilmour, who will feature in The Flying Archaeologist on BBC One, said aerial photos suggest clear signs of life well before the Broads were dug.

“The more you look the more you start seeing Bronze Age everywhere,” he will say on the programme, at 19:30 BST.

Mr Gilmour was involved with the discovery of the complex field systems, which date back to about 1,500 BC.

It was previously thought the systems had not existed further east than the Cambridgeshire Fens.

‘Lost underwater’
The presenter of the Flying Archaeologist, Ben Robinson, said the area had proven a “real challenge” for archaeologists due to the landscape being flooded to create the broads in the 9th or 10th Century.

“Traces of settlement are lost underwater or flattened by the plough,” Mr Robinson said.

“But they don’t disappear completely because history leaves a footprint.”

The programme explores how these footprints, crop marks which were spotted by archaeologists ahead of the Ormesby dig, were best viewed by air.

“An ancient ditch or pit that has been filled in long ago will show up as different colours across the fields – crop marks,” he said.

Mr Gilmour said the Ormesby dig had revealed evidence of settlers’ activities, such as weaving, and objects including a whetstone.

‘Crop marks’
“If you’ve got a whetstone you need something to sharpen on, which means in this case bronze.

“In order to get bronze you need copper and tin so that must have come from somewhere as well.

“So you start putting in these links to other settlements much further afield across potentially the whole of Britain.

“It’s really the beginnings of the mass altering of the landscape.”

Mr Robinson said hundreds of archaeological sites in the Norfolk Broads could now be re-evaluated.

“We’ve got other crop mark sites that look similar,” he said.

“Maybe there’s an extensive pattern – a Bronze Age world out there that we are only just beginning to understand.”

bbc.co.uk
April 19, 2013

Stonehenge occupied 5,000 years earlier than thought

Topic: Stonehenge settlement

Where there is a settlement there is hunting, gathering and the possibility of early farming. Besides I could never resist anything where Stonehenge was involved!

New archaeological evidence from Amesbury in Wiltshire reveals traces of human settlement 3,000 years before Stonehenge was even built

An excavation funded with redundancy money shows Stonehenge was a settlement 3,000 years before it was built.

The archaeological dig, a mile from the stones, has revealed that people have occupied the area since 7,500BC.

The findings, uncovered by volunteers on a shoestring budget, are 5,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Dr Josh Pollard, from Southampton University, said the team had “found the community who put the first monument up at Stonehenge”.

‘Archaeological blind spot’

The small-scale project has been led by Open University archaeologist David Jacques, who had to plough his redundancy money into it to make it happen.

The first aerial photograph of Stonehenge was taken in 1906
He first spotted the Amesbury site in aerial photographs as a student.

The photographs, in an archive at Cambridge University, showed a site known as Vespasian’s Camp just a mile from Stonehenge.

Assumed to have been completely landscaped in the 18th Century, Mr Jacques realised the area had not been and decided to investigate.

“The whole landscape is full of prehistoric monuments and it is extraordinary in a way that this has been such a blind spot for so long archaeologically,” he said.

“But in 1999 a group of student friends and myself started to survey this area of Amesbury.”

The site, which contains a natural spring, is the nearest source of fresh water to Stonehenge.

And Mr Jacques, with the theory it may have been a water supply for early man, believed there could be pristine and ancient archaeology waiting to be discovered.

“I suppose what my team did, which is a slightly fresher version, was look at natural places. Places in the landscape where you would imagine animals might have gone to, to have a drink,” he said.

“My thinking was where you find wild animals, you tend to find people, certainly hunter gatherer groups coming afterwards.”

And he was right.

Over the past seven years, the site has yielded the earliest semi-permanent settlement in the Stonehenge area from 7,500 to 4,700BC.

And carbon dating of material found at the site show people were there during every millennium in between.

“Here we are in this little nook at the bottom of a hill with a river running round it and it probably had more people coming to it in the Mesolithic period than it’s had people coming ever since,” he said.

‘Tip of iceberg’

For a project that has had limited funding it is already generating excitement amongst other leading archaeologists.

Professor Peter Rowley-Conwy, from Durham University, said: “The site has the potential to become one of the most important Mesolithic sites in north-western Europe.”

And Dr Pollard, from the Stonehenge Riverside Project, said “being able to demonstrate that there were repeated visits to this area from the 9th to the 5th millennia BC” was significant.

“I suspect he’s just hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of Mesolithic activity focussed on the Avon
around present day Amesbury,” he said.

The Flying Archaeologist – Stonehenge is broadcast on Friday, 19 April at 19:30 BST on BBC One West and South. The series is broadcast nationwide from Monday, 29 April at 20:30 BST on BBC Four.

bbc.co.uk
April 19, 2012

HISTORY Oldest European Medieval Cookbook Found

Topic: Early cookbook

A 12th-century manuscript contains the oldest known European Medieval food recipes, according to new research.

The recipes, which include both food and medical ointment concoctions, were compiled and written in Latin. Someone jotted them down at Durham Cathedral’s monastery in the year 1140.

It was essentially a health book, so the meals were meant to improve a person’s health or to cure certain afflictions. The other earliest known such recipes dated to 1290.

NEWS: Early Human Ancestors Ate Grass

Many of the dishes sound like they would work on a modern restaurant menu. Faith Wallis, an expert in medical history and science based at McGill University, translated a few for Discovery News:

“For “hen in winter’: heat garlic, pepper and sage with water.”

“For ‘tiny little fish’: juice of coriander and garlic, mixed with pepper and garlic.”

For preserved ginger, it should kept in “pure water” and then “sliced lengthwise into very thin slices, and mixed thoroughly with prepared honey that has been cooked down to a sticky thickness and skimmed. It should be rubbed well in the honey with the hands, and left a whole day and night.”

Re – the “hen in winter” dish, Giles Gasper from Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies said, “We believe this recipe is simply a seasonal variation, using ingredients available in the colder months and specifying ‘hen’ rather than ‘chicken,’ meaning it was an older bird as it would be by that time of year.”

Gasper added, “The sauces typically feature parsley, sage, pepper, garlic, mustard and coriander, which I suspect may give them a Mediterranean feel when we recreate them. According to the text, one of the recipes comes from the Poitou region of what is now modern central western France. This shows the extent to which international travel and exchange of ideas took place within the medieval period. And what more evocative example of cultural exchange could there be than food?”

NEWS: Iron Age Feast Found in England

Gaspar and colleagues are recreating some of the dishes for a workshop to be held on April 25 at Blackfriars Restaurant in Newcastle, U.K. A lunch the following Saturday will feature the same dishes. The researchers are also putting together a translation of the cookbook under the title “Zinziber” (Latin for ginger).

While much of the food is still tasty to modern palates, not all of the medical cures would work today.

Gaspar explained, “Some of the medical recipes in this book seem to have stood the test of time, some emphatically haven’t! But we’re looking forward to finding out whether these newly-discovered food recipes have done so and whether they also possess what you might call a certain Je Ne Sais Quoi — or Quidditas, to use the Latin.”

(Image: Samuel Woods, Jacqueline Pankhurst, Samantha Ellis, Lydia Harris, Andy Hook, Daniel Duggan and Giles Gasper preparing one of the Medieval dishes; Credit: Durham University)

discovery news
APR 17, 2013 12:05 PM ET // BY JENNIFER VIEGAS