PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—Leaks at the President’s House commemorative site on Independence Mall threaten the archaeological remains of the home occupied by George Washington and John Adams during their presidencies, from 1790 to 1800. Nine of Washington’s enslaved servants also lived at the site. Despite repairs, glass panels, paving tiles, and a hatch into the site continue to leak. Underground water may be causing problems as well. Independent consultants for the city of Philadelphia, which has managed the building of the memorial, found that an underground drainage system called for in the original design had never been installed. A surface drain was found to be faulty and a gap along a wall may also be letting in water. “We’ve talked internally about a drastic step of filling it with sand and covering it over. It’s an option. It’s not a pleasant option. But in the name of preservation, it’s something we have to consider,” Cynthia MacLeod, superintendent of Independence National Historical Park, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
NAPLES, FLORIDA—A canal that was probably used as a shortcut for transporting goods by the Calusa has been dated to between 800 and 1100 A.D. Robert Carr, executive director of the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, said that the canal is part of a complex web of canals in southern Florida. This section of the canal was found with ground-penetrating radar in the center of modern Naples. “These canals are the only transportation canals in North America outside of Mexico. So, in that sense they are a major engineering marvel that indigenous people have constructed,” he told WGCU.
PIURA, PERU—Necklaces, pottery, and other artifacts have been unearthed at a site thought to have been an administrative center for the Tallan culture, which lived in northwestern Peru from 700 to 1400 A.D. “This would have been a large storage for corn, cotton and other products from the area. It would have also been a place where the Tallan lived,” archaeologist María Elena Nuñera told El Comercio. Many of the pre-Incan sites in the region have been destroyed by looters.
VIEQUES, PUERTO RICO—An analysis of bacteria and fungi found in coprolites, or fossilized human feces, supports archaeological evidence of the ancestries of two cultures that lived in the Caribbean more than 1,500 years ago. “One culture excelled in the art of pottery; in fact, their signature use of red and white paint helped identify them as descendants from the Saladoids, originating in Saladero, Venezuela. In contrast, the second culture had exquisite art for crafting semiprecious stones into ornaments, some of which represented the Andean condor. This helped archaeologists identify the Bolivian Andes as possible origins of this Huecoid culture,” Jessica Rivera-Perez of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, told Phys Org. Differences in the DNA from the coprolites from the two cultures, as well as their bacterial and fungal populations, indicated that they may indeed have had different origins. Fungal and corn DNA were also found in the Huecoid coprolite, suggesting that an Andean fermented corn beverage had been consumed.
EAST SUSSEX, ENGLAND—A skeleton bearing six fatal sword injuries to the back of the skull has been radiocarbon dated to 28 years on either side of 1063, suggesting that the man may have been involved in fighting at the time of the Norman invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The bones had been found in Lewes on the grounds of a medieval hospital, and so it had been thought that the man died at the Battle of Lewes, which occurred in 1264. “There is no record of any skirmishes happening in Lewes or any other towns in Sussex at the Norman Conquest, but this suggests that the Normans didn’t just turn up and say, ‘We’re in charge’ and everyone said, ‘OK, that’s fine.’ It begins to paint a picture of what might have happened in the aftermath,” Edwina Livesey of Sussex Archaeological Society told BBC News. The new dates make the bones the only human remains ever recorded that are related to the Norman invasion.
ORONO, MAINE—The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire in the sixteenth century had an unexpected impact on Peru’s northern coastline, according to a new study by Daniel Belknap and Dan Sandweiss of the University of Maine. They examined the massive sand dunes along the ridges of the coastline and found that millions of discarded mollusk shells had held sediments deposited by the combined effects of earthquakes and El Niño events in place for some 5,000 years. After the conquest, the local population was decimated by disease and those who survived were moved inland. New sediments deposited on the ridges were not protected from harsh winds. “You don’t think that pre-Columbian people can have such a significant effect on the landscape, but clearly they can,” Sandweiss told Science Now.
CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS—The presence of a ceremonial road running through the center of Cahokia has been confirmed by Sarah Baires of the University of Illinois. She uncovered distinct layers of fill dirt that resembles other monuments at the site. Known as the Rattlesnake Causeway, the elevated earthen road stretches from the Grand Plaza through the center of the city, and ends in Rattlesnake Mound. Cahokia’s buildings and the causeway may all have been constructed to align with the lunar standstill, when the moon rises at its southernmost point in the sky, every 18.6 years. “Why would Cahokians have built this one kilometer-long earthen feature after they constructed everything else? To me, it makes much more sense that this was one of the foundational pieces of the Cahokian landscape,” she told Western Digs. Traces of the road were first uncovered in 1927, but some thought it may have been a natural feature or an early railroad bed.
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—Catherine Dejoie of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology led an international team of scientists in the analysis of the chemical composition of Jian bowls, made some 1,000 years ago in China’s Fujian Province. The bowls, which are known for retaining heat and for their patterned glaze, were made from local iron-rich clay and coated with a mixture of clay, limestone, and wooden ash. When the bowls were fired, the clay hardened, the coating melted, and oxygen within the glaze pushed iron ions to the surface. As the glaze cooled, molten iron flux flowed down the sides of the bowls and crystallized into iron oxides, forming the bowls’ characteristic patterns. X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, and other techniques revealed that rare epsilon-phase iron oxide was formed on the bowls in two of the three patterns. This type of iron oxide is highly valued for its persistent magnetization, high resistance to corrosion, and lack of toxicity, but it is difficult to create with modern equipment. “The next step will be to understand how it is possible to reproduce the quality of epsilon-phase iron oxide with modern technology,’ Dejoie announced at the Berkeley Lab.
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—A tourist has discovered Neolithic artwork in a shallow cave in the Egyptian Western Desert that supports the suggestion that ancient Egyptian culture drew on cultural influences from Africa as well as the Near East. Giulio Lucarini of Cambridge University and co-director of the Archaeological Mission in the Farafra Oasis examined the etchings last month. He thinks the images, including a giraffe, a cow-like mammal, two boats, and a human hand, could date to between 6000 and 5,500 B.C. The drawings resemble those from another site in the region known as Wadi el Obeiyid Cave, discovered in 1995. “Our work shows that people living in the Eastern Sahara had a significant and developed culture which fed into the development of the Pharaonic civilization and beyond,” Lucarini announced at the University of Cambridge.
AL-GHAZALI, SUDAN—Polish archaeologists are excavating a large Byzantine-era church made of sandstone blocks in Sudan that was located on a busy trade route. “Along the east wall of the monastery we dug out a row of 15 toilets. However it may sound and look, it is an important discovery. Nowhere else in Nubia has such a large sanitary complex been discovered,” Artur Obluski of the University of Chicago told Science & Scholarship in Poland. The team also conserved the plaster walls of the church, which date to the first half of the seventh century and were decorated with Christian images and the names of the four archangels. “By removing a thick layer of mud, we restored part of the original appearance of the church, which is now glowing white from a distance,” added Cristobal Calaforra-Rzepka, head of the conservation team.
LIMASSOL, CYPRUS—Three burial chambers were discovered when the roof of a cave collapsed during landscaping work in southern Cyprus. The tomb, which dates to the second or first centuries B.C., contained seven sets of skeletal remains, amphorae, and small artifacts. “Archaeologically, it is a very interesting area,” archaeologist Yiannis Violaris of the Antiquities Department told the Cyprus Mail.
DEARBORN, MICHIGAN—Excavations in the British Virgin Islands have uncovered evidence of ritual practices of English plantation residents in the eighteenth century. At the first site, John Chenoweth of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and his team unearthed a cache of grape shot—small iron balls meant to be shot from a cannon—that had been buried in two postholes under a two-room sugar plantation house. Chenoweth thinks the iron grape shot may have served a magical purpose, since it was in short supply and valuable to the English who needed to protect themselves from the Spanish and were concerned about slave uprisings. On another island, the team recovered a whelk shell that had been modified to hold fish bones, pins, and the bones of a Puerto Rican racer snake. It had been placed in the foundation of another two-room plantation house, and resembles a witch’s bottle, found in England and America. Chenoweth told Live Science that witch’s bottles are “seen as an effort to protect the house against bad magic basically, spirits and spells that might seek to harm some of the occupants of the house.”
ÇORUM, TURKEY—A 1,900-year-old sarcophagus that was illegally unearthed from a tumulus in northern Anatolia has been moved to the Çorum Museum. “The two long sides of the tomb cover were broken by smugglers who wanted to enter it. One of the acroteria was also broken. Some pieces of this acroterion were found by experts and attached to their place by the conservator of the museum. Eros, the god of love in Greek mythology, is embroidered on the surface of the tomb. The head of Eros received damage because of smugglers,” museum director Önder İpek told Hurriyet Daily News. Bones thought to have belonged to a woman will be tested. A silver coin, a gold earring, and a ring were also recovered.
ESSEX, ENGLAND—The Guardian reports that climate change has brought ship-boring organisms to live in the warmer waters of the Thames, and they are damaging the London, a seventeenth-century vessel that had been well protected in the river’s thick silt. “It’s rare for wooden shipwrecks of this age and older to survive to this extent,” said Mark Dunkley, a marine archaeologist at English Heritage. The wooden ship was part of a convoy that transported Charles II to England from the Netherlands after the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. A gunpowder explosion sank the London in 1665, an event that killed 300 people. Rescue divers carrying out emergency excavations at the site have recovered leather shoes, a bronze signet ring, clay pipes, navigational dividers, buckets, pots and cooking utensils, door latches, an anchor cable, and cannonballs, despite the poor visibility and strong currents.
HACHELBICH, GERMANY—A Roman military camp that held up to 5,000 troops has been discovered in central Germany. “People have been searching for evidence of the Romans in this part of Germany for 200 years. It took a long time before we realized what we had, and we wanted to be sure,” Mario Kuessner, and archaeologist for the state of Thuringia, told Science Now. The camp, shaped as a rough rectangle with round corners, was surrounded by a trench and had a gate on its northern edge. A low wall of dirt would have been placed behind the trench and topped with tall stakes. “It’s typically Roman—no Germans did that sort of thing,” Kuessner explained. Bread ovens, four nails from Roman boots, a piece of horse tack, and part of a scabbard have also been found. The camp may have been a stopover on the way to invade territory further east. “The best would be if we could find coins or something with the legion number written on it. That would help us pin down the date,” he said.
BOTHELL, WASHINGTON—Analysis of mitochondrial DNA taken from a tooth of a teenaged girl discovered seven years ago in Mexico’s flooded caverns of Hoyo Negro suggests that modern Native Americans are the descendants of the earliest Palaeoamericans, who migrated across the Bering land bridge from Siberia, despite the differences in their skull shapes. The girl, dubbed Naia after the water nymphs of Greek mythology, resembles the fossils of other Paleoamericans in that she had a small, projecting, angular face and pronounced forehead. Carbon dating of her tooth enamel and the ratio of uranium and thorium in the mineral deposits taken from her bones indicate that she died between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago. Naia’s skeleton is the first complete Palaeoamerican skeleton to have been found, but her remains were measured underwater and left in situ because it is impossible to recover them safely from the cave. “Naia, and the other animals, would have slipped through a hidden sink hole and fallen 30 meters into a shallow pool. There would have been no way out,” palaeontologist James Chatters of Applied Paleoscience told Nature News.
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL—Haaretz reports that additional nineteenth-century wall paintings depicting images related to the Crusades were revealed during the repair of a broken water line at the Saint Louis French Hospital, located near the New Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City wall. The images were painted by Count Marie Paul Amedee De-Piellat, who established the French area of Jerusalem and saw himself as a “last Crusader” combating the influence of other colonial powers in the city. Experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority assisted with the restoration of the artworks, many of which had been covered in paint over the years. The building is currently used as a hospice care facility.
SØBY, DENMARK—A thirteenth-century Christian statue of the Virgin Mary was discovered under the floor of a small church in eastern Jutland by archaeologist Hans Mikkelsen of Denmark’s National Museum, where the statue was cleaned and restored. The Limoges figurine, complete with halo, probably sat atop a crucifix that was used in a church processional. “I could see the colors—the red in the halo and the beautiful blue-green nuances in the clothing. It is absolutely fantastic,” conservator Signe Nygaard told The Copenhagen Post.
ITHACA, NEW YORK—Tree ring samples taken from an ancient Egyptian coffin in 1938 have been tested with “dendro radiocarbon wiggle matching” by Sturt Manning of Cornell University and an international team of scientists, who also examined wood from funeral boats that had been buried near the pyramid of Sesostris III. The technique calibrates radiocarbon isotopes in the tree rings with patterns known from other places in the world with identified chronologies and produces very precise results. The scientists were able to confirm that the “higher” Egyptian chronology for the time period is correct, and they also learned that a dry period occurred following the year 2200 B.C. “This radiocarbon anomaly would be explained by a change in growing season, i.e. climate, dating to exactly this arid period of time,” Manning told the Cornell Chronicle.
WIGTOWNSHIRE, SCOTLAND—Road construction in southwest Scotland has uncovered evidence of human settlement in the area dating back 9,000 years. Among the discoveries are two necklaces made of jet beads that date to 2000 B.C., a brooch dating to the Roman period, a Bronze Age cemetery complex, and an Iron Age village. The necklaces had been made in North Yorkshire and are the first of their kind to have been found in southwest Scotland. “In addition, numerous smaller sites have been discovered which seem to relate to the use and exploitation of the land both through hunting and farming,” Rod McCullagh of Historic Scotland told The Scotsman.