SWISS DOLMEN REVEALS RITUALS OF THE NEOLITHIC

Source: www.pasthorizonspr.com

A sensational archaeological discovery has been made in the region of  Bern, Switzerland, consisting of a communal dolmen grave dating back to over 5,000 years, containing 30 bodies and Neolithic artefacts. It represents the first intact burial chamber to be found north of the Alps.

Unexpected discovery

In October 2011, specialists from the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern began investigation of the large granite slab weighing in at 7 tonnes. The glacial erratic measured 3 metres long, 2 metres wide and was nearly 1 metre thick – what they did not realise at first was that it still covered a grave belonging to a Neolithic community.

The site was originally found when a farmer decided to try and remove the glacial boulder that he had to mow around when cutting grass in his field.

The boulder is from the last glacial maximum – some 20,000 years ago – and used by the early farmers during the 4th millennium BCE for burial purposes.

According to a report in the Berner Zeitung, Roman and medieval artefacts were found directly overlying the Neolithic layers and show the dolmen was a visible feature in the landscape until at least the 13th century CE. Most of the sediments that cover the site are flood deposits from the nearby river.

Like winning the lottery

The site director of the Oberbipp dolmen excavation, Marco Amstutz comments, “What we found here is like winning the lottery. “

An intact Neolithic communal burial is slowly coming to light, after fears the grave may have been ransacked in the past. The uprights are slightly tilted due to constant flooding from the nearby river, but despite this, the site is reasonably intact.

The excavation of the burial chamber has revealed over 30 individuals as well as what must represent grave goods from the period, including flint arrowheads pendants made of animal teeth and one bead, probably of limestone.

DNA testing of the occupants as well as sophisticated analysis of their teeth will be taking place over the next two years.

Italian Archaeologists discovered the temple of Jupiter Stator in Rome

The Temple of Jupiter Stator was first vowed, according to ancient tradition, by Romulus after a battle with the Sabines. The city of Rome was hardly more than a settlement on the Palatine Hill, and the battle was taking place in the valley, in the Forum Romanum. The Romans were forced to retreat up hill by the Via Sacra, but at the Porta Mugonia they managed to regroup and hold their ground against the Sabines, who were eventually defeated.

Romulus consecrated a templum to Jupiter Stator, "The Stayer", at the spot, just outside the Porta Mugonia. The sanctuary was not an aedes, more likely it was an altar enclosed by a low wall or fence.

In 294 BCE Marcus Atilius Reguilus made a similar vow in a similar situation, when the Romans were losing a battle against the Samnites, but then miraculously turned around, regrouped and held their ground against the enemy. Afterwards he had an aedes, a temple building, constructed on the site of the archaic altar.

On November 8, 63 BCE consul M. Tullius Cicero convened the senate to a meeting in the Temple of Jupiter Stator, where he held his famous first oration against Catiline, denouncing an attack on the state, which he then ruthlessly suppressed.

The location of the Temple of Jupiter Stator is not known with absolute certainty. The written sources give some hints, such as near or just outside the Porta Mugonia (but it is not known where that was), on the higher end of the Via Sacra or just on the Palatine.

There is a fair amount of consensus on a location just besides the Arch of Titus on the N. slope of the Palatine Hill. When a medieval tower was demolished in 1827, the ruins of an ancient building appeared, and these remains are frequently identified as the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Stator.

The Italian archaeologist Filippo Coarelli places the Temple of Jupiter Stator closer to the forum, between the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina and the Basilica of Maxentius, where the so-called Temple of Romulus  stand. His line of reasoning is based on the course of the Via Sacra before the construction of the Basilica of Maxentius, the known borders of the ancient administrative regions of the city and literary sources listing the monuments in each region. The location near the Arch of Titus does not fit, since it is in the wrong administrative region and not in the right position relative to the other buildings listed by ancient writers, but the Temple of Romulus on the Via Sacra is a perfect match.

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Archaeologist says bones found in Turkey are probably those of Cleopatra’s half-sister.

By John Bordsen.

Long-buried bones and a missing monarch. Add some historical notoriety and modern technology and you have a heck of a captivating, science-driven story.

Just this month, it was announced that bones found under a parking lot in Leicester, England, belonged to King Richard III. DNA evidence, according to the lead archaeologist at the excavation, proved this “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

For Hilke Thur, a Vienna-based archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a similar quest awaits empirical closure. The locale is more exotic – western Turkey – and the evidence is much more difficult to analyze: The bones in question are a bit more than 2,000 years old.

Thur will cover this and other aspects of her work in a March 1 lecture at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh.

The title: “Who Murdered Cleopatra’s Sister? And Other Tales from Ephesus.”

In a recent interview, Thur discussed…

What took her to Ephesus

“I’m an architect as well as an archaeologist, and Ephesus – a large and important city on the coast of Asia Minor centuries before it became part of the Roman Empire – has long been one of the biggest archaeological sites. It is the main excavation of the Austrian Archaeological Institute.

“I was a student when I started working there in 1975, and have based a great deal of my career around the site. From 1997 to 2005 I was assistant director of the Ephesus excavations.

“An English engineer directed the first archaeological digs there in 1869. But since 1895 only Austrian-led projects have permission to do that, though Turks sometimes have excavations. I’d like to add that it’s quite an international team there, with researchers from all over the world.

“My specialty is interpreting buildings and monuments. The excavations of one monument, The Octagon, began in 1904. In 1926, a grave chamber was found inside The Octagon. The skeleton inside it has been interpreted to be that of a young woman about age 20.”

What thickened the plot

“When I was working with the architecture of The Octagon and the building next to it, it wasn’t known whose skeleton was inside. Then I found some ancient writers telling us that in the year 41 B.C., Arsinoe IV – the half-sister of Cleopatra – was murdered in Ephesus by Cleopatra and her Roman lover, Marc Antony. Because the building is dated by its type and decoration to the second half of the first century B.C., this fits quite well.

“I put the pieces of the puzzle together.”

The eight-sided clues

“In antiquity, ordinary people were not buried within the city. That privilege was only for special people – those with an aristocratic background, or people who did special things for their city. So the body must have belonged to a special person. Also, the skeleton was of a woman.

“Then there is the shape of the building. While The Octagon exists only as ruins today, its pieces have been photographed. The images were digitized and ‘virtually rebuilt’ on a computer. The shape of the building, an imperial grave monument, resembles the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The lighthouse, destroyed centuries ago, was built at Alexandria, on the Egyptian coast, by the Ptolemy dynasty from which Cleopatra and Arsinoe IV were descended.

“The center portion of the lighthouse tower was octagonal, which was quite unusual at the time.”

Forensic evidence

“The site of The Octagon has a grave chamber. It was opened in 1926, but the opening was very small, and no one entered it until later on.

“The skull had been removed for tests; it disappeared in Germany during World War II. But there are photos of the skull, and notes written down by those who examined it.

“In 1985 the back side of the chamber became accessible and I re-found the skeleton – the bones were in two niches. The body was removed and examined. The bones were found to be those of a woman younger than 20 – 15 or 16, perhaps.

“The revised age was used for arguments against my theory of the body belonging to Arsinoe IV, but those arguments didn’t find anything to disprove my theory.

“This academic questioning is normal. It happens. It’s a kind of jealousy.”

What would prove her theory

“They tried to make a DNA test, but testing didn’t work well because the skeleton had been moved and the bones had been held by a lot of people. It didn’t bring the results we hoped to find.

“I don’t know if there are possibilities to do more of this testing. Forensic material is not my field.

“One of my colleagues on the project told me two years ago there currently is no other method to really determine more. But he thinks there may be new methods developing. There is hope.”

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Archaeologists discover mammoth burial site.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS in Serbia say they have discovered a rare mammoth field containing the remains of at least five of the giant beasts that lived here tens of thousands of years ago.

The discovery last week at the Kostolac coal mine, east of the Serbian capital of Belgrade, is the first of its kind in the region. It could offer important insight into the ice age in the Balkans, said Miomir Korac from Serbia's Archaeology Institute.

"There are millions of mammoth fragments in the world, but they are rarely so accessible for exploration," he told The Associated Press.

"A mammoth field can offer incredible information and shed light on what life looked like in these areas during the ice age."

The remains were found during coal excavation about 20 metres below ground. Mr Korac said the mammoth field stretches over some eight hectares of sandy terrain.

In 2009, a well-preserved skeleton of a much older mammoth was found at the same site. Vika - as the female skeleton was dubbed - is up to one million years old and belonged to the furless, so-called southern mammoth.

The bones discovered last month probably belong to the so-called woolly mammoth, which disappeared some 10,000 years ago, said Sanja Alaburic, a mammoth expert from Serbia's Museum of Natural History.

Ms Alaburic explained that "this discovery is interesting because, unusually, there are many bones in one place," probably brought there by torrential waters.

Mr Korac said Serbian archaeologists already have contacted colleagues in France and Germany for consultation. He said at least six months of work will be needed before all the bones are unearthed.

Another mammoth skeleton was discovered in northern Serbia in 1996. It belonged to a female mammoth that lived about 500,000 years ago and is now on display in the town of Kikinda, near the Hungarian border.

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Peru archaeologists find ancient temple.

PERUVIAN archaeologists have discovered a temple believed to be about 5,000-years-old at the ancient El Paraiso archaeological site in a valley just north of Lima, the Culture Ministry says.

If the date is confirmed, it would be among the oldest sites in the world, comparable to the ancient city of Caral, a coastal city some 200km to the north.

The discovery, dubbed the Temple of Fire, was found in one of the wings of El Paraiso's main pyramid. It includes a hearth that experts believe was used to burn ceremonial offerings.

"The smoke allowed the priests to connect with the gods," said Marco Guillen, who led the team of researchers who made the find.

Archaeologists found the hearth in mid-January as they were carrying out conservation work at a set of 4,000-year-old ruins known as El Paraiso, located some 40km northeast of Lima in the Chillon River Valley.

The discovery shows "that the Lima region was a focus of civilisations in the Andean territory", Deputy Culture Minister Rafael Varon told reporters.

Archaeologists believe the ancient coastal civilisations raised crops including cotton, which they traded with coastal fishermen for food.

El Paraiso, spread across 50 hectares, has 10 buildings and is one of the largest ancient sites in central Peru.

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Archaeologists Discover 150 Skulls from Largest Mass Human Sacrifice in Meso-America.

An excavation in Mexico has led to the discovery of troves of human skulls. Archaeologists believe that the skulls come from the largest mass human sacrifice unearthed yet in ancient Meso-America.

The study, published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, describes the surprising finding. The skulls were found miles from the nearest study in what used to be a body of water called Lake Xaltocan but now simply contains an empty field. The location was so unassuming that researchers had not even immediately thought to look there; they discovered the site when they stumbled upon evidence of looting when viewing satellite images of ancient canals, irrigation channels and lakes that would have surrounded the ancient Teotihuacan kingdom, according to LiveScience.

Upon investigation, the archaeologists discovered over 150 human skulls that were attached to one or two vertebra. The location also held a shrine, which contained incense burners, deity figurines and pottery that indicated a ritual linked with local agriculture. Through carbon dating, researchers have found that the skulls were a minimum of 1,100 years old and, of the dozens of skulls that have been tested so far, the majority belonged to men.

Because most of the skulls belonged to men, researchers believe that they were carefully chosen, rather than the result of indiscriminate slaughter of a village. However, that 

determination shakes up previously held assumptions about human sacrifice in the region. While several cultures in Meso-America, including the Teotihuacan kingdom, participated in human sacrifice, they mostly occurred at large urban pyramids and were connected to state power - a far cry from this mass human sacrifice that would have taken place in a rural area.

Researchers believe that a drought caused the end of the Teotihuacan kingdom, which led to a period of bloody war and political infighting among several regional groups.

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Hermes statue uncovered in Antalya!

A bronze Hermes statue from the Roman era, which has been unearthed during excavations in the ancient city of Patara in the southern province of Antalya’s Kaş district and restored at the Antalya Museum, was yesterday introduced to Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay.

The head of the excavations, Professor Havva İşkan Işık, said the four-meter long head statue was unique in Turkey and the world, saying, “we have never found such a stature before.”

Işık said the statue was estimated to date back to the period of Emperor Constantine. “This is a work from the late period, which makes it more special,” he said.

Following the uncovering of the statue, it was observed that the statue looked like the modern day people of the region.

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