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March 2001 | |
 Seahenge would be damaged if reburied?
Seahenge is one of the most enigmatic prehistoric monuments recently discovered. It dates from 2050 BC and emerged three years ago on the beach near the village of Holme-next-the-Sea (Norfolk - England). Shifting sands gradually revealed a large, upside-down oak stump ringed by 55 timber posts. It is thought to have been a pagan place of worship, representing the ritual burial of a tree.
Fearing that the exposed timbers would rot away, English Heritage excavated the site in 1999 and removed the remains to the Flag Fen prehistoric centre in Peterborough. English Heritage is now pressing for Seahenge to be returned to the Norfolk sands, probably because no museum has agreed to take long-term care of the timbers and put them on public display.
Mike Corfield, EH chief scientist, said: "We hope that reburying will be the safest method of ensuring its survival." Maisie Taylor at Flag Fen said she regretted that no museum had taken responsibility for the timbers, but that reburial was preferable to allowing the timbers to decay. "Without conservation, they will deteriorate very rapidly, particularly as we move into warmer weather in the summer."
However, Martin Jones (professor of archaeological science at the University of Cambridge) said that returning the timbers to a salty environment could damage them. He said: "It would be like putting them into an oven; it would dry them out." Also, the cheapness and convenience of reburying the monument was obscuring the fact that nobody knew what effect this would have on the wooden remains. It is guesswork," he said.
Bacterial activity in the wood, as well as currents and sediments, could also harm the timbers. His warning came as conservators, pagan religious leaders and local people debated what to do with the prehistoric remains that survived 4,000 years in the sands off Norfolk.
Mr Corfield said he hoped that burying the timbers deeper down would give them a better chance of survival at the original site. He said: "That is the best we can do. It is a terribly evocative thing and it belongs in a landscape. It would look rather lost in a museum."
One option is to find a more stable site for Seahenge. Vanessa Trevelyan, head of Norfolk Museum Service, said that to display the circle in its entirety a new museum would have to be built, for which there were neither funds nor an audience in Norfolk. "The display would require public subsidy for the rest of its life and there is no political will for that." Pagan leader Rollo Maughfling, Archdruid of Britain, said the timbers would lose their significance if moved.
Sources: British Archaeology (February 2001), Electronic Telegraph (23 March 2001)
The oldest Rock Art in the Nile Valley
An international team led by the Belgian Royal Museums of Art and History has been studying the petroglyphs of El-Hosh area of Upper Egypt since 1998. The rock art has been firmly dated - using the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry C-14 method - to at least 8,000 years old, making it the oldest artwork ever recorded in the Nile Valley.
The petroglyphs in the vicinity of the village of El-Hosh, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Thebes, were discovered more than a century ago. German explorer and ethnographer Hans Winkler surveyed the area in the 1930s and published a number of the drawings. These include bizarre-looking curvilinear designs, capped with mushroom-shaped protuberances. Frequently appearing in clusters and occasionally as isolated figures, these curvilinear designs are often associated with abstract and figurative motifs, including circles, ladder-shaped drawings, human figures, footprints, and crocodiles.
The El-Hosh curvilinear designs may be representations of fish traps, as their outlines are similar to a ground plan for a fish-trapping device called a labyrinth fish fence.
The expedition collected several dozen samples of the dark, patinated deposits from within petroglyphs and on the surrounding rock. Minute amounts of organic matter (namely, plant fiber) appeared to have been trapped within the surface patina. One of the samples gave a radiocarbon date of about 5,900 to 5,300 B.C. This date provides a minimum-age estimate for the petroglyphs. It is estimated that the curvilinear designs are between 13,000 and 8,000 years old, well beyond the age of any other graphic activity known in the Nile Valley.
Source: Egypt Revealed ((2 March 2001)
Scottish Iron Age burial chariot discovered
Scottish archaeologists have completed an operation to remove an Iron Age chariot from an Edinburgh building site. The chariot, which is thought to have been used in a burial around 250BC, was described as unique in Scotland and extremely rare in Britain. Unlike similar items unearthed in Yorkshire, this one appears to be intact.
Edinburgh City Council ordered an archaeological excavation to be carried out on the Newbridge site due to its proximity to Huly Hill, a Bronze Age burial cairn surrounded by three standing stones. Stephen Carter, director of Headland Archaeology, who undertook the dig, said the discovery had been "a complete surprise". The chariot, which was still encased in mud, was then taken to the NMS laboratory in Granton, Edinburgh, for conservation work.
Archaeologists who removed the chariot from its shallow grave confirmed that a fragment of tooth enamel, believed to be human, has also been retrieved from the site. The burial chariot was first uncovered in January but archaeologists, who were carrying out an exploratory excavation before work began on a business park, kept quiet about their find until they could assess its importance.
The chariot would have contained a person important enough to merit a formal burial when it was first placed underground 2,250 years ago. It is believed that the area where it was found was a religious centre in prehistoric times.
Fraser Hunter, curator of the Iron Age and Roman collections at the National Museums of Scotland, said: "This is a marvellous discovery - one of those entirely unexpected finds that changes our views on Scotland's past. A chariot like this would be the Ferrari of the Iron Age, and suggests someone important was buried there. This chariot is unique in Scotland and extremely rare in Britain. The best parallels are in France and Belgium, showing the wide-ranging contacts at the time."
The chariot was 1.5 metres tall and 1.4 metres wide. The wooden body has disintegrated in the acidic soil but the iron chassis, axle and wheels have been preserved. The chariot has been taken to the National Museum of Scotland
Sources: Ananova (9 March 2001), BBC News (12 March 2001), The Times (13 March 2001)
The oldest Bronze Age boat
A boat found more than 40 years ago near Hull has been identified as the oldest of its kind in western Europe. New scientific research carried out on the remains shows it is at least 4,000 years old.
The boat, known as Ferriby 3, was one of three discovered by amateur archaeologist Ted Wright on the banks of the Humber at Ferriby near Hull. He first noticed three oak planks sticking out of the mud while walking with his brother in 1937. "We didn't know what we'd found to begin with, other than we'd found a boat." Mr Wright went on to find the remains of another boat in 1940 and most importantly a third in 1963 after years of dedicated shore watching.
New scientific techniques suggest the boat Mr Wright found in 1963 is 500 years older than everyone thought. Improved methods of carbon-dating have cracked the mystery of an oak planked hulk the size of an articulated lorry, which was wrongly dated by archaeologists. Described for 30 years as mid-bronze age - c 1700 BC - the paddle powered craft has now been traced to 2030 BC after the painstaking removal of gallons of 1960s wood preservative which confused earlier tests. That means it date backs to the early Bronze Age.
The boat would have been about 16m long, the sewn-plank method constructing an elegant but sturdy ship in the shape of a melon slice, with thick oak planks sewn together with twisted yew withies. There was room for up to 18 paddles, with nine timbers or thwarts across the boat which could have been used by paddlers or passengers to sit on. What is not clear is whether the boat had a mast and sail.
Keith Miller, a regional inspector of ancient monuments, said all three boats shed new light on the lives of our prehistoric ancestors. "These boats were the kind of crafts that were used for crossing the English Channel or the North Sea. They were large enough to carry not just people but animals as well.
The boat provides important historical evidence, but that may not be the end of the story. More fragments have been found on the shores of the Humber in the last few years and scientists believe there may be more boats waiting to be discovered.
The vessel will be unveiled as part of an exhibition at Hull and East Riding Museum for National Science Week.
Sources: BBC News, Guardian Unlimited, The Times (22 March 2001)
Suspended reconstruction of an Irish megalithic tomb
A Dúchas spokesman confirmed that due to concerns raised, the reconstruction of a megalithic tomb at Carrowmore, Co Sligo (Ireland), had been suspended "pending an archaeological review of the operation".
Carrowmore is a megalithic cemetery of 60 passage tombs and is between Sligo town and Knocknarea mountain, which has Maedbh's Grave at its summit. It is one of the most important archaeological sites in the State and the area has the largest concentration of megalithic tombs in these islands.
Late last year Dúchas started work to reconstruct the main cairn at Carrowmore, although it can never be known how precisely it originally looked.
Dr Stephan Bergh, a Swedish archaeologist who completed his doctoral thesis on Carrowmore, visited the site and said he was horrified at the way the ground had been dug up by the movement of machines. "I, as an archaeologist, would have to apply for about 10 licences to do tracks like that," Dr Bergh said. "If you decide to reconstruct a monument of this scale there should be a definite plan and archaeologists should be present to ensure no damage is done. Neither of these two things have been done in this case," Dr Bergh said.
The rectangular chamber of the cairn is still intact but because of the way Dúchas has done the reconstruction it is now deep in a pit surrounded by gabions of stones similar to those used in embankments. "This chamber looked great from the ground and there was important art-work on the stones, but now people will not be able to see it from that view," the archaeologist said. Dúchas said because of heavy rainfall the machines had caused ruts along the route to the tomb. The sides of the tomb had been supported by stone gabions and this was "in accordance with standard practice".
Source: The Irish Times (15 February 2001)
Stone Circle in Yemen
Archaeologists stumbled upon remarkable remnants of a lost Bronze Age civilization near Yemen's Red Sea coast. A Stonehenge-like enclosure of granite and basalt monoliths, each more than 3 meters (10 feet) tall and weighing seven tons, is all that remains. But it suggests a complex, well-organized culture that thrived roughly 4,000 years ago.
The huge stones are arranged in a pattern strikingly similar to that of the Neolithic site of Stonehenge in England. Archaeologists believe the stone used to make the pillars originated in the Surat Mountains about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the site and was probably floated on rafts across the Red Sea.
Beneath one of the splintered monoliths, the remains of a male skeleton were found among several layers of charred earth,possibly signifying some sort of commemoration. Also recovered were the skeletons of three children, each found beneath a basalt pillar.
"Sometime around 2000 B.C., this early Bronze Age 'Stonehenge' culture disappeared suddenly without a trace," said Edward Keall of the Near Eastern and Asian Studies Department at the Royal Ontario Museum. But understanding the culture that built this monument should shed new light on "other unknown civilizations of the Arabian Peninsula, who set up similar stones and pillars throughout the region."
Source: Discovering Archaeology (8 February 2001)
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