Robes and Shovels: Medieval Monks Cultivated Wetlands

Topic: cultivating wetlands

A medieval monastery in Belgium went to major effort to drain wetlands on its land, building structures on artificially raised soil, a new study finds.

Archaeologists excavated the Boudelo Abbey, once part of the medieval county of Flanders, in the 1970s. Until now, however, they had no idea that an extensive drained wetland surrounded the site.

“They placed these abbeys in all sorts of marginal areas to cultivate,” said study researcher Philippe De Smedt, a soil scientist at Ghent University in Belgium. In the High Middle Ages between the 12th and 14th centuries, Europe’s population was growing, De Smedt told LiveScience. Monk labor provided a solution to the crowding by making the land livable.

“The former rulers of Flanders then handed out those territories to the abbeys to make the areas more habitable and more profitable,” De Smedt said. [See Images of the Medieval Wetlands Site]

Surprise wetlands

De Smedt and his colleagues weren’t looking for medieval work projects when they stumbled across the wetlands find. They were searching for buried geological features, such as lost riverbeds, using a technique called electromagnetic induction (EMI).

With this technique, researchers transmit an electromagnetic field to generate currents in the soil. The currents create their own, secondary electromagnetic field, which is detected by an aboveground sensor. Comparing the two fields allows researchers to determine the electrical conductivity of the soil and the magnetic susceptibility (how easily it can become magnetized).

Knowing the electrical conductivity in turn provides information about the soil texture, organic matter content and water content, De Smedt said. Magnetic susceptibility tells researchers about soil minerals, organic matter and other features. In particular, magnetic susceptibility can reveal if soil has ever been heated — and a handy way to reveal buried bricks, which are made of baked clay.

Early investigations of the area turned up unnatural-looking variations in elevation. A full survey revealed an extensive ditch system and signs of brick structures.

“We were in for quite a surprise, because previously we had no idea if there was going to be something there,” De Smedt said.

Studying Stonehenge

A three-dimensional reconstruction revealed that the ditches (detectable because they’d been refilled with lots of organic matter and clay soil) linked up to modern-day drainage ditches, suggesting they were used to turn the marshland into something more suitable for cultivation and building. Two small excavations at spots where bricks were detected turned up foundations dating back to the 13th and early 14th centuries. The purpose of one of the buildings is unknown, the researchers write today (March 21) in the journal Scientific Reports. The other appears to have been a monastery barn.

The project would have been a major undertaking, given the saturated soil, De Smedt said. The research team had to drain the area themselves for several days before excavating.

“Imagine what it must have been like for those people to do with just a shovel,” he said.

The barn was built on a naturally high spot, but the medieval builders also created a higher elevation area with sand to build the second building. The abbey itself sits on a nearby sand ridge, out of the swamp, but military struggles and repeated floodswould eventually drive the monks out in 1578.

The EMI technique is a useful tool for archaeologists, because it can provide lots of information about what’s underground without anyone lifting a shovel, De Smedt said. It also allows for investigation without destruction of a site by excavation. And it helps put human structures in their environmental context.

Along with scientists from other institutions, the researchers are using the same technology in Austria, in the Roman town of Carnuntum, which boasted its own gladiator school, and in Stonehenge in England.

“There, we try to see if there is landscape variability related to the prehistoric monuments, if there is a connections between the archaeology and the landscape,” De Smedt said.

Original article:
livescience

By Stephanie Pappas march 21, 2013

RIC Archaeologist Lobban and Team Discover Lost Temple

Richard Lobban, professor emeritus of anthroplogy, unearths Sudanese skeleton
For additional photos see https://picasaweb.google.com/RICNPR/LobbanArchaeologyPhotos

Topic Sudanese temple- cooking pots

In the austere landscape of the eastern Butana desert in Sudan where there is no running water, no electricity nor paved roads, and where the few passersby are the occasional camel, goat or sheep, archaeologist Richard Lobban has discovered a lost temple of the Meroitic Empire.

He works steadily with trowel and brush, while 10 Sudanese workers haul away the dirt. He has only two months out of the year – November and December – to excavate, before the desert sun becomes too scorching to continue. Here, temperatures can climb to 120 degrees.

It’s noon on this day in late 2012. Lobban calls off work. The heat is too much. The crew drink from water bottles brought in from the nearby village of Kabushiya. Even without a road, their taxi driver manages to find his way through the desert to whisk them back to their lodgings.

Each year, for the past four years, Lobban and two other archaeologists, Eleonora Kormysheva, from the Oriental Institute in Moscow, and Eugenio Fantusati, from the University of Rome, have taken this journey to Abu Erteila to unearth a Sudanese (Nubian) temple.

Lobban is professor emeritus of anthropology at Rhode Island College. He’s been a scholar of the Sudan for 43 years and is one of only half a dozen experts in the world on Sudan history, ethnography, linguistics and archaeology.

In 2008 he retired from his full-time teaching position at RIC but describes himself as “a retiree failure.”

That year, when he heard there might be promising “koms” (Arabic for “mounds”) of archaeological interest in Abu Erteila in the eastern Butana desert, he left for Sudan.

The koms, he said, were about six feet high. Broken pottery that dated back to the Meroitic Period (fourth century BC) and to the early Christian era (fourth century AD) was found scattered about the koms.

The team hired two Russian experts to use ground-penetrating radar to determine if there were formations beneath the surface. Immediately, the radar detected underground features that proved to be walls. They did an analysis of the orientation of the walls that were angled toward the sun, and realized beneath the surface was a solar temple.

“Temples were built for royalty,” Lobban said. “Based on this temple’s size, it appears that the temple belonged to a local prince. Larger temples were built for the ruling king and queen. This temple was smaller.”

He said the local prince and his people would have used the temple, as one would a local church. Their religious system was polytheistic – a belief in many gods.

In January 2009, licensed by the Sudanese National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums, the international team began their dig. Lobban would do much of the actual excavation, while archaeology students from Italy, Russia and America would also come to help, including RIC students Robert Borges ’06 and Andrea Dill ’07.

“Based on the radar reading, we knew we would not find the temple intact,” said Lobban. “We knew most of the original walls had been dismantled for reasons we don’t know.”

However, they did unearth portions of the walls that enclosed eight rooms. In each room he found diverse painted pottery. He also found six cooking pots sitting on a pile of charcoal.

“We determined that the northeast side of the temple had been used for the mass production of food. When the local people came to the temple on a daily or weekly basis to worship they were also given food.”

Grinders and the bones of butchered animals, such as sheep, goats, camels and cattle, were found where they had been left next to the kitchen. As the excavation continued, Lobban found adult skeletons identified as Sudanese. The koms had been used as a burial site.

“You see, most of the walls of the temple had been broken down and the temple buried six feet high. The people may have remembered that this was once a sacred place – a Howsh al-Kufar (the abode of nonbelievers) – and decided to bury their dead there on the kom.”

Based on carbon dating, the team discovered that the bodies dated back to early Christian times – the ninth or 10th century – when the Meroitic Empire had ended and the Christian era had begun, brought to the Sudan from Ethiopia and Egypt.

“We know the bodies were Christian by the orientation of the burial. Their heads were facing west, so that when they were resurrected, they would sit up and face east. In subsequent years we found more of these buried Christian Sudanese, 10 in all,” he said.

In 2011 the team opened a new 15 x 15 foot square on a kom, and there they had their most dramatic find to date. They unearthed columns from the temple inscribed with hieroglyphic writing and carved with images of deities, such as the image of the Nile god Hapy.

“Hapy is a bisexual god of the river who could create life by himself,” said Lobban. “He represents unity of the Nile valley.”

Other columns, he said, were carved with “the protective combination of ‘nekhbet’ (vulture) and ‘wedjat’ (cobra),” which Lobban said is unique to Nile valley royalty.

Among legible inscriptions, he found reference to “neb-tawi,” meaning “Lord of Two Lands,” a title reserved exclusively for royalty and nobility. “This title meant that they still considered themselves not only kings of Meroe, but of all Egypt,” he said.

The team also found a lintel used to decorate the top of a window or an entryway. It was made of sandstone and carved with a solar disc and a wing. The lintel was virtually identical to those found in other Meroitic solar temples dedicated to the sun god Amun.

Based on all of these findings, his team was able to confirm, at last, that they were at the site of an ancient Meroitic temple that had not been otherwise known or recorded.

Lobban’s reaction? He gave a wry smile. “Here I am reading hieroglyphics on a column that is 2,000 years old and that no one has seen before. That’s a pretty good deal,” he said.

In future seasons, he hopes to excavate further and deeper and find still more of the missing pieces of this temple. He said, “There’s a lot of African history just sitting there. Meroe was a classical civilization. They have a writing system that’s never been translated. There’s a lot of research work to be done.”

Back at Rhode Island College, anthropology students Adam and Laura Gerard – husband and wife – work with Lobban to translate the Meroitic language. Laura described Lobban as a fascinating man. She said, “I heard the Lobban legend in the anthropology department, long before I met him.”

“Legend is he was a journalist in war-torn countries and that he helped liberate people in the jungles of West Africa,” she said.

Lobban modestly confirmed that these past exploits were true.

“He’s also known as the modern-day Indiana Jones,” she said.

Lobban is founder, first president and executive director of the Sudan Studies Association. He works at the Office of Naval Research in Newport, R.I., where he does research on the Sudan conflict. And he teaches at the Naval War College “African Security and Transnational Threats,” “African Religion and Politics,” “The Governance and Economics of Africa” and “African Culture and History.”

He has also taught at the University of Khartoum and the American University in Cairo and published scores of articles, reviews, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and books on the Middle East.

Adam Gerard likened his mentor to the “greats of ages past” – great in knowledge and great in building bridges of cross-cultural understanding.

Donations to the archaelogical team’s expedition may be made to the Sudan Studies Association at http://www.sudanstudies.com.
Original article:

ric.edu

UC Research Examines Ancient Puebloans and the Myth of Maize

Ancient Corn

Topic: Maze and the Anasazi

A University of Cincinnati graduate student archaeologist theorizes that ancient Puebloans used a variety of food sources beyond maize. Her research will be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Research from the University of Cincinnati shows that perhaps the ancient Puebloans weren’t as into the maize craze as once thought.

Nikki Berkebile, a graduate student in anthropology in UC’s McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, has been studying the subsistence habits of Puebloans, or Anasazi, who lived on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon in the late 11th century. Traditional ethnographic literature indicates these ancient American Indians were heavily dependent on maize as a food source, but Berkebile isn’t so sure about that.

“I’m trying to assess sustainable subsistence strategies within the time period of the site,” Berkebile says. “I’m not trying to bash anyone who says maize is not on the table, because I have maize in my samples. I’m just saying maize is not as important as once thought.”

Berkebile will present her research, “Investigating Subsistence Diversity in the Upper Basin: New Archaeobotanical Analysis at MU 125,” at the 78th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), held April 3-7 in Honolulu. More than 3,000 scientists from around the world attend the event to learn about research covering a broad range of topics and time periods.

The MU 125 archaeological site in northern Arizona features a multi-room masonry structure occupied by the ancient Puebloans from 1070-1090. Berkebile looks for ancient plant remains inside soil samples excavated from the site. She uses a “flotation” technique to reveal the secrets hidden within the ancient earth. By dropping the soil into water-filled buckets and swirling them just right, the lightweight bits of plants will rise to the water’s surface, allowing them to be skimmed off. Berkebile analyzes and catalogs those often tiny plant fragments with help from a small team of fellow graduate and undergraduate students.

What she’s found so far suggests the Puebloans of MU 125 dined on much more than just maize. Berkebile has uncovered many examples of other plant life the Puebloans might have used as a food source such as purslane, pinyon nut, juniper berries, globemallow and even cactus. The diverse amount of wild resources combined with the area’s scarcity of water and seasonal climate – prone to periods of drought and frost – makes Berkebile think the Puebloans had to rely on more than maize to survive.

“If you think about the climate of the Upper Basin, there’s only 145 frost-free days in which you could grow maize,” Berkebile says. “What are you going to do for those months when you don’t have anything?”

Berkebile thinks it’s likely the Puebloans lived at the MU 125 site year-round and to do so they would have needed to develop sustainable agricultural methods that complemented their maize crops. She uses the plant samples she’s found at the site to assess the Puebloans’ agricultural strategy. Her research splits the strategy into three categories:

- Cultivated wild resources: These are hardy and easy-to-cultivate plants that existed in the Southwest a thousand years before maize. Examples at MU 125 include purslane, globemallow and chenopodium.

- Gathered wild resources: These are also Southwestern plants that predated maize, but they weren’t necessarily actively cultivated. Puebloans would gather what they needed from these plants and bring them home to process. Examples at MU 125 include pinyon nut, juniper berries and cactus.

- Domesticated resources: These are plants brought to the Southwest by humans and made to adapt to the environment. Examples at MU 125 include maize and possibly a type of bean.

Berkebile hopes her research can be a game-changer in how archaeologists perceive ancient cultures’ reliance on maize, and also a mind-changer in the way modern society views its environmental resources. She thinks there are aspects of the Puebloans’ intercropping strategies and implementation of wild resources that could be adapted to a modern context. More importantly, she thinks how Puebloans thought about food is an important lesson for today.

“We think that we can just go to the grocery store any time and get whatever we want,” Berkebile says. “To the ancient Puebloans, it was all about seasonal availability. And if we have a mind-set that we can have certain foods when they are in season, the process becomes a lot more sustainable.”

Additional contributors to Berkebile’s research paper were assistant professor Susan Allen and professor Alan Sullivan. Berkebile received funding for her research and SAA presentation from the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society and UC’s Charles Phelps Taft Research Center and the Anthropology Department in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences.

Original article:
uc.edu
By Tom Robinette, April 2, 2013

UC Research on Maya Village Uncovers ‘Invisible’ Crops, Unexpected Agriculture

Ridged and furrowed land, believed to be a maize field.

Topic: Mayan agriculture

The research on the well-preserved plant remains found in a Maya village that was destroyed by a volcano’s fury will be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The University of Cincinnati’s mastery of ancient Maya mysteries continues with new research from professor of biological sciences David Lentz.

UC faculty have been involved in multiple research projects concerning ancient Maya culture for more than a decade. This latest Maya study from Lentz focuses on Cerén, a farming village that was smothered under several meters of volcanic ash in the late sixth century.

Lentz will present his research, “The Lost World of the Zapotitan Valley: Cerén and its Paleoecological Context,” at the 78th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, held April 3-7 in Honolulu. More than 3,000 scientists from around the world attend the event to learn about research covering a broad range of topics and time periods.

THE SCIENTIFIC GIFTS OF VOLCANIC CATACLYSM

Cerén, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site known as Joya de Cerén, was discovered in El Salvador in the late 1970s when a governmental construction project unearthed what turned out to be ancient ceramic pottery and other clay structures. The initial archaeological excavation was directed by Payson Sheets, a faculty member at the University of Colorado and a friend of Lentz.

Cerén is sometimes called “the Pompeii of Central America,” and much like that doomed ancient Roman city, the wreckage of Cerén was remarkably well preserved by its volcanic burial shroud. So that bad news for the Cerén villagers became good news for archaeologists centuries later.

“What this meant for me, is this site had all these plant remains lying on the ground,” Lentz says. “Not only do we find these plant remains well preserved, but we find them where the people left them more than a thousand years ago, and that is really extraordinary.”

Lentz specializes in paleoethnobotany and oftentimes in his work – including at other Maya sites – he’s left to interpret complex meaning from splinters of charred wood and hard nut fragments. The Mayas’ tropical environment, which isn’t conducive to preserving plant remains, doesn’t make things any easier.

But the situation was different at Cerén. The village’s sudden and complete ruin sealed it under layers of preservative ash. So Lentz’s research there is still challenging but in an unfamiliar way.

“It was tricky because we kept encountering things we’d never encountered before at a Maya site,” Lentz says. “They were just invisible because of the lack of preservation.”

GARDENS, CROPS AND OTHER SURPRISES

- They found tremendous quantities of a root crop (malanga, a relative of taro) that previously had not been associated with Maya agriculture. They found another “invisible” crop of manioc alongside the more anticipated fields of maize, and they found grasses no longer in existence on the modern-day El Salvador landscape.

- They made what is thought to be the first discovery of a Maya kitchen, complete with intensively planted household garden. “We could tell what was planted around the houses,” Lentz says. “This is fabulous because people have long debated how the Maya did all this. Now we have a real example.”

- They found a household with more than 70 ceramic pots, many used to store beans, peppers and other plant matter. Having that many vessels in one home was an unusual discovery for what is thought to be a small, farming village. Lentz likened it to having four or five sets of China in a typical American home.

- They found large plots of neatly rowed land, evidence of ridge and furrow agriculture. Lentz also posits that the people of Cerén surrounded their homes with orchard trees. These discoveries seemingly debunk the common theory that the Maya employed a slash-and-burn agriculture method.

- They found a raised, paved pathway called a “sacbe,” which was used by the Maya for ceremonial and commercial purposes. Lentz plans additional research on the sacbe to see what other significant discoveries could be made by following the path.

LEARNING FROM ANCIENT LANDSCAPES

From these new discoveries come many lessons, a lot of them ecological. Lentz has studied how the Mayas effectively implemented systems of agriculture and arboriculture. He is intrigued by what made these methods successful, considering the Maya population was much denser than what exists on the modern landscape.

His findings at Cerén give him new pieces to plug into the Maya puzzle. Furthermore, they help us understand how humankind affects the natural world.

“Cerén is regarded internationally as one of the treasures of the world,” Lentz says. “What’s been found there gives you a real idea of what things were like in the past and how humans have modified things. I think what we’re learning there is revolutionizing our concept of the ancient past in Mesoamerica.”

Additional contributors to Lentz’s research paper were students Christine Hoffer (The Ohio State University) and Angela Hood (University of Cincinnati). Funding for the research was provided by multiple National Science Foundation grants.
See more UC research to be presented at the 2013 Society for American Archaeology conference.

Original article:
uc.edu
By Tom Robinette, April 2, 2013

Byzantine winepress, unique lantern unearthed in dig

Topic More on Byzantine wine-press

Archaeologists digging near a spa in southern Israel have uncovered Byzantine-era remains that include a large wine-press and a unique clay lantern decorated with crosses.

The stone remnants of what must have been a significant wine-making apparatus include compartments for storing grapes, a treading floor, and pits for collecting liquid, all spread over an area of more than 100 yards. It would have been in use about 1,500 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement Thursday.

The lantern, which was found nearby, includes cross-shaped openings on the sides, and the archaeologists in charge of the dig believe it is shaped like a miniature church building. “When the lantern was lit, crosses were projected on the walls and ceiling,” according to the IAA.

The existence of the lantern suggests that the owner of the press might have been Christian, according to the archaeologists.

The newly uncovered wine-press, and three others that have been found nearby, are near the ancient route from the interior to the Ashkelon port, suggesting the wine might have been exported to Europe and North Africa.

The findings were unearthed at the spa of Hamei Yoav, between Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat, during a salvage dig carried out to allow the construction of a garden for outdoor events.

The wine-press will be preserved as part of the new garden, the archaeologists said.

Original article:
times of israel
By Matti-Friedman April 4, 2013

FISH BASED DIETS CAUSE ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATING PROBLEMS

Above: Burning fish stew and pic 2 the residue

Topic: Pottery shards obtain ancient food

Some years ago in northern Germany, archaeologist Sönke Hartz carried out excavations at a prehistoric camp-site belonging to the Ertebølle culture, close by the river Trave.

During these excavations he discovered an ancient pottery sherd which held remnants of burnt food. Hartz, an expert in the Stone Age of northern Europe, sent the pot sherd away for carbon-14 dating and was amazed when the laboratory came back with a date of 5200 BC.

“It was an archaeological sensation! This pottery was many hundreds of years older than all the pottery that was previously found in Northern Germany. It was older than everyone expected. But, then I was in doubt. I had found the pot by the river, so the food crust could possibly consist of fish. I remembered that there were dating problems with freshwater fish, which could give misleading ages,“ explained Hartz.

Reservoir effect

In order to obtain a radiocarbon date, the amount of remaining Carbon-14 atoms in a sample are measured. The less Carbon-14 that is left, the older the sample.

Hard water contains less Carbon-14 than the atmosphere, because dissolved carbonates are Carbon-14 free. A fish caught in hard water has thus a higher Carbon-14 age than contemporaneous terrestrial samples. If such a fish is then cooked in a ceramic pot, the radiocarbon age of the food crust will be higher than if a terrestrial animal was cooked in the pot.

This is known as the “reservoir effect” because the fish’s carbon actually comes from another “reservoir” than the carbon in terrestrial animals from the surrounding area. “Reservoir age” is the difference between the true age and the Carbon-14 date.

The effect, highlighted by the erroneous date from the carbonised residue on Sönkes’ ceramic sherd, persuaded The AMS 14C Dating Centre at Aarhus University in Denmark that they needed to carry out further investigations.

Variety and size of error surprising

On examining freshly caught fish from the River Trave the results revealed not only a large reservoir effect, but also a dramatic variance from between 500 to 2100 years. In effect, this means that some of the fish swimming in the Trave today seem to be over 2000 years old, when radiocarbon dated.

Felix Riede, an archaeologist at Aarhus University who regularly uses Carbon-14 dating in his work, is well aware that fish diets can give anomalous results, but this new research on the variety and size of the error surprised him.

“I had not anticipated an error of up to 2000 years,” he said.

“The implications of this discovery are fairly frightening, because it is crucial for archaeology to have a reliable dating procedure.”

“An error of a few hundred years is acceptable when you date Palaeolithic finds, but an error of 2000 years is of great importance, even for the oldest periods.”

Riede highlighted the need to look at more reliable dates (for example Carbon-14 dates of short-lived terrestrial plants or twigs) and compare them to the now highly unreliable dates from cooking pots.

It is worth noting that even charcoal from a camp fire could be another error source – the “old wood effect”: where the charcoal dated might be from the innermost ring of a 500-year-old tree which was felled 100 years before it finally ended up in the camp fire. Knowing what might cause an error is vital when it comes to dating.

An added surprise

Now armed with the knowledge produced by The Aarhus AMS 14C Dating Centre, a group of researchers actually cooked some fish stew in ceramic pots.

The group, after making their own pots, boiled up the various ingredients – including a freshly caught fish with a Carbon-14 age of 700 years. They then succeeded in burning the meal onto the pot fabric, which was then taken for dating.

Even though the food crust was made only weeks before, Carbon-14 dating returned a 14th century date and thus provided evidence that food crusts on pottery take on the same age as the ingredients.

These results reveal that freshwater reservoir effects have to be seriously considered and understood whenever residues on prehistoric pottery is radiocarbon dated. The same also applies to the bones of humans who had eaten significant amounts of freshwater fish.

This is real food for thought.

Original article:

pasthorizons

By: Bente Philippsen and Rasmus Rørbæk
March 25, 2013

Above: Burning fish stew on purpose!

The Annual Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

Reblogged from Ancientfoods:

• 

Topic: Pasta

On April 1, 1957 the British news show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed both to an unusually mild winter and to the "virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil." The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets.

Read more… 425 more words

Happy April fools day everyone. I'm rebloging one of my favorite April fools day posts for you!