Archaeology

Archaeologists Have Discovered an Ancient Fort—Complete With Wooden Spikes—Built by the Romans to Protect Their Silver Mines


For the first time, archaeologists have discovered wooden defenses surrounding an ancient Roman military base. The fence topped with sharpened wooden stakes, akin to today’s barbed wire, is the kind of fortification known to have existed from ancient writings—including by Caesar—but no surviving examples had previously been found.

The intimidating defense measures are located in what is now the town of Bad Ems in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Excavations on the site began after a local hunter, Jürgen Eigenbrod, noticed faint markings on the ground in a field in 2016. The differences in color in sections of the grain, it turned out, were caused by the remnants of ditches dug by the Romans.

Using geomagnetic prospecting, archaeologists have since discovered evidence of no fewer than 40 towers at the site, as well as a smaller camp, on opposite sides of the valley. The area appears to have only served as a camp for a couple of years before burning down, reports Frankfurt’s Goethe University.

It appears that the ancient Romans were tunneling into the earth, searching for deposits of silver. At first, archaeologists believed that fire remains and melted slag were evidence that the Romans had set up a smelting works to process silver ore.

Hunter Jürgen Eigenbrod spotted these markings in a field in Germany, which turned out to be traces of an ancient Roman ditch. Photo by Hans-Joachim du Roi.

Hunter Jürgen Eigenbrod spotted these markings in a field in Germany, which turned out to be traces of an ancient Roman ditch. Photo by Hans-Joachim du Roi.

But the writings of the ancient historian Tacitus reveal that the Roman governor Curtius Rufus’s efforts to mine silver in the area failed in the year 47 A.D. Expecting untold riches, the Romans had set up a heavily fortified base manned by military troops—which explains the barbed wire-like defenses, meant to deter sudden raids.

Unfortunately for them, a rich vein of the precious metal would not be unearthed in the area until millennia later, during archaeological excavations in 1897. There was enough silver there that Romans could have continued mining operations for two centuries—if they had only kept digging.

The remains of the ancient fire, it would seem, came from a watch tower, not a profitable smelting works.

The ancient Romans erected a fence topped with these wooden spikes in a effort to defend a silver mining operation that ultimately ran dry. Photo by Frederic Auth.

The ancient Romans erected a fence topped with these wooden spikes in a effort to defend a silver mining operation that ultimately ran dry. Photo by Frederic Auth.

These futile ancient efforts make for a fascinating story—Frederic Auth, the leader of the excavations since 2019, won first prize for his account of the history of the site at the 2022 Wiesbaden Science Slam.

Research and excavations are slated to continue, ledby Markus Scholz, a professor of archaeology and ancient Roman history of Roman at Goethe University; archaeologist Daniel Burger-Völlmecke, and Peter Henrich of the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Rhineland-Palatinate. Meanwhile, the ancient wooden spikes are now at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz.

 

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Archaeologists Digging in Iraq Have Located the Remains of a 5,000-Year-Old Tavern—As Well as a ‘Beer Recipe’


A team of U.S. and Italian archaeologists digging in southern Iraq have unearthed the remains of an ancient tavern, dating back to 2,700 B.C.

Excavated as part of a joint project by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pisa over the fall of 2022, the site is a small rectangular room that opens directly onto a courtyard. Across its plaster floor were strewn about 36,965 shards of ceramic bowls and beakers—some of the pottery even containing residue of food and drink, including fish bones. A number of shelves and benches along a wall further pointed to what might have been a “public eatery” with open-air seating.

Pottery fragments found at the site. Photo: Asaad Niazi / AFP via Getty Images.

The same room also housed two large jars, one placed inside the other, representing what appears to be a primitive cooling device for beverages. According to Reed Goodman, one of the University of Pennsylvania archaeologists, the brick remains of a “large oven” were also located, containing ashy deposits of “various burning episodes.”

“We’ve got the refrigerator, we’ve got the hundreds of vessels ready to be served, benches where people would sit… and behind the refrigerator is an oven that would have been used for cooking food,” Holly Pittman of the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania told AFP. 

The array of artifacts, she added, has led the team to believe the place to be “where people—regular people—could come to eat and that is not domestic.”

An aerial picture of the excavated site. Photo: Asaad Niazi / AFP via Getty Images.

The find was made in Lagash, an ancient city east of Al-Shatrah, Iraq. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the area was a major center of the early dynastic Sumerian civilization, known for their advanced agricultural and writing systems, and architectural projects such as the Girsu temple complex.

That the archaeologists deemed the site to be that of a “tavern” is down to the Sumerians’ preference for the beverage, “even more than water,” said Pittman. She further pointed to the discovery of “a beer recipe,” inscribed on a cuneiform tablet, at an excavated temple close by.

The team emphasized that while previous digs in the area have focused on uncovering religious or royal architecture, its current excavations are intended to provide a better understanding of the lives of the everyday, non-elite citizens. The aim, it stated, was to learn about the “urban social fabric of Lagash.”

“We hope to be able to characterize the neighborhoods and the kinds of occupation… of the people that lived in this big city who were not the elite,” said Pittman.

“The fact that you have a public gathering place where people can sit down and have a pint and have their fish stew, they’re not laboring under the tyranny of kings,” Goodman added. “Right there, there is already something that is giving us a much more colorful history of the city.”

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French Archaeologists Make ‘Unprecedented Discovery’ of What May Be the Remains of a Roman-Era Mausoleum


In what archaeologists are hailing “an unprecedented discovery” for the region, the remains of a set of Gallo-Roman buildings—including what might be a funerary monument—have been excavated in a residential district in Néris-les-Bains, a town in Auvergne, France.

Undertaken by a team from the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), the dig located the remnants of a group of structures delimited by a road. They include two buildings with a partially legible plan, two others represented by walls with tiles bound in lime mortar, and a pipe network. The northwestern segment of the plot houses a large pit. 

It was close to this pit that archaeologists uncovered a number of relics that have helped date the site to the Gallo-Roman period from the 1st to 5th century.

The archaeologists clearing relics at the Néris-les-Bains site. Photo: © Marie-Laure Thierry, INRAP.

They include a fragment of a modillion, an elaborate cornice that would have decorated the top structure of buildings, and a pilaster, a rectangular column carved with interlocking leaves and topped by a figurine. A conical architectural element measuring some 55 inches in diameter was also found, its surface carved with scales and its back holding an anathyrosis frame, indicating it was meant to be joined to a similar piece as part of a circular spire. 

More notable is the discovery of 21 sandstone blocks—“a big surprise,” Marie-Laure Thierry, head of the operation at INRAP, told La Montagne. Once cleaned with water and a sponge, archaeologists found they were adorned with bas-reliefs that “have an unprecedented character for Néris-les-Bains, even for Auvergne,” added Thierry.

The most “representative” relief, according to the team, is a frieze fragment, measuring about 27 by seven inches, which portrays Triton, Greek god of the sea, with his arms spread, hair long, and tentacles ending in palm leaves. He is flanked on his right by a horse (or more probably, a seahorse), with only its two front legs visible. 

The sandstone blocks showing bas-reliefs of a possible mausoleum at the archaeological center of Clermont-Ferrand. Photo: © Marie-Laure Thierry, INRAP.

The combination of the frieze, the conical spire (with scales recalling the sea god), and the ornate cornice have led researchers to associate the finds with mausoleums that were constructed in the 1st and 2nd centuries. The motif depicting a figure from Greek and Roman mythology, in particular, symbolizes the journey of blessed individuals into the afterlife. “It was certainly not the tomb of ordinary mortals,” said Thierry of the monument. 

Other comparable funerary structures have been identified in Auvergne, from Aulnat to Mont-Dore, where similar artifacts representing Triton were found.

The INRAP team plans to carry out detailed studies of the architectural blocks to support its early hypothesis and further illuminate the history of Néris-les-Bains. The town, best known for its thermal baths (its name derives from Nérios, Gallic god of the spring), was colonized by Rome in the early centuries—a period borne out by the number of Roman and Gallic ruins and relics, including an amphitheater, that have been excavated in the area since the 19th century. 

According to INRAP, the recent discovery of the settlement and its artifacts could well open “a new window on the occupation of this peripheral and little-known sector of the ancient agglomeration of Néris-les-Bains.”

 

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English Quarry Workers Have Struck Elizabethan-History-Lover’s Gold With the Discovery of a Rare 16th-Century Ship


Last April, workers dredging for gravel in a quarry just outside Dungeness in Kent, England inadvertently turned up the remains of a shipwreck. Perplexed by the discovery, they called upon the services of Wessex Archaeology, which swiftly recognized the historical significance of the find, determining it to be a 16th-century vessel, one of the very few from the era to have survived.

Wessex Archaeology would excavate more than 100 timbers that made up the ship’s hull, with support and funding from Historic England. These components—from the massive planks to the round pegs pinning these boards together—were crafted out of English oak, which, through dendrochronological analysis, has been dated to between 1558 and 1580. 

“To find a late 16th-century ship preserved in the sediment of a quarry was an unexpected but very welcome find indeed,” Andrea Hamel, the marine archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology who was first on the scene, said in a statement. “The ship has the potential to tell us so much about a period where we have little surviving evidence of shipbuilding, but yet was such a great period of change in ship construction and seafaring.”

Remains of a rare 16th-century ship found at a quarry in Kent. Photo: © Wessex Archaeology.

The late 16th century marked a transitional period in ship construction as much as a remarkable time of growth in England’s maritime trade.

In Northern Europe, shipbuilding was evolving from traditional clinker builds, where planks are overlapped rather than joined (most commonly seen on Viking longships), to frame-first construction, where the internal hull is built before planking is added. This latter technique is best evidenced by the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s most notable warship that was deployed from 1510 to 1545. 

The reign of Queen Elizabeth I further saw the expansion of England’s naval commerce, spurred on by the formalizing of trade with Russia, Turkey, and Venice. Tellingly, the majority of known shipwrecks from the late Tudor period have been designated the remains of merchant vessels, including the Gresham Ship, which was located in the Thames Estuary in 2004.

Archaeologist laser-scans the remains of a rare 16th-century ship found at a quarry in Kent. Photo: © Wessex Archaeology.

The wreck in Kent was found some 984 feet from the sea, in a quarry that experts deem could once have been on the coastline. Having been locked deep in waterlogged shingle, the remains have been exceptionally preserved.

“Some of the samples we have still feel so fresh that you can smell the tar,” said Hamel on the January 1 episode of BBC’s Digging for Britain series, which documented the team’s efforts in excavating and studying the vessel’s hull.

Every piece unearthed by Wessex Archaeology has been digitally photographed and laser-scanned, allowing scientists to build a complete 3D model of a vessel now estimated to measure more than 82 feet-long and weigh about 150 tons. The ship, though, remains unidentified. 

Once their study is complete, archaeologists will rebury the ship close to where it was found, as the timbers are in danger of shrinking and losing all detail the more they dry out. By returning the remains to the environment, the team hopes to preserve them in situ.

“Hopefully, as techniques change,” Hamel added, “future archaeologists could go back and recover the ship and do more work on it.”

 

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Ancient Stone Tools Once Thought to be Made by Humans Were Actually Crafted by Monkeys, Say Archaeologists


Experts are reevaluating prehistoric Pleistocene-era sites in Brazil previously believed to have been home to ancient humans. It turns out, the 50,000-year-old stone tools discovered in excavations are probably the work of capuchin monkeys, not early humans.

“We are confident that the early archeological sites from Brazil may not be human-derived but may belong to capuchin monkeys,” wrote archaeologist Agustín M. Agnolín and paleontologist Federico L. Agnolín in an article published in the new issue of the journal the Holocene.

Excavations at Pedra Furada, a group of 800 archaeological sites in the state of Piauí, Brazil, have turned up stone shards believed to be examples of simple stone tools. Made from quartzite and quartz cobbles, the oldest ones appear to be up to 50,000 years old, which would put them among the earliest evidence of human habitation in the Western Hemisphere.

However, the tools also bear a striking resemblance to the stone tools currently made by the capuchin monkeys at Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park.

The monkeys have their own rock quarries, where they select substantially sized rocks to use as hammers to crack nuts against a larger, flattened anvil rock. Rocks also come in handy for eating seeds and fruits—and the monkeys even lick the dust created from driving two rocks together, possibly as a way of adding minerals to their diets.

Stone tools assist capuchins with other tasks as well, such as digging. And the females throw rocks at potential mates as a way of demonstrating sexual interest.

All of these processes can lead to the stones breaking into smaller flaked pieces—which, the new study found, are indistinguishable from some ancient stone tools carved by early humans.

Pebble tools from Pre-Clovis sites in Brazil: A, Vale da Pedra Furada artifacts; B, Toca da Tira Peia artifacts. Photos courtesy of <em> Elsevier</em>.

Pebble tools from Pre-Clovis sites in Brazil: A, Vale da Pedra Furada artifacts; B, Toca da Tira Peia artifacts. Photos courtesy of Elsevier.

“Our study shows that the tools from Pedra Furada and other nearby sites in Brazil were nothing more than the product of capuchin monkeys breaking nuts and rocks some 50,000 years before the present,” Federico Agnolín, a researcher at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, told Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET).

The possibility that monkeys were responsible for the human-looking lithic deposits at Pedra Furada was first raised in 2017 by archaeologist Stuart J. Fiedel in the journal PaleoAmerica, noting that capuchins may have been using tools for 100,000 years. Similar concerns were discussed in the journal Quaternaire in 2018.

Stone pounding implements used by capuchin monkeys in Brazil. Photo by Tiago Falótico.

Stone pounding implements used by capuchin monkeys in Brazil. Photo by Tiago Falótico.

A 2019 study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution was the first to examine stone tool-making practices of the capuchin population at the Serra da Capivara.

Coupled with the lack of other evidence of human habitation from 50,000 years ago, such as concrete traces of dietary remains or hearths—charcoal at the site could have originated from naturally occurring fires—the tools’ resemblance to rock fragments created by monkeys calls into question the likelihood that humans were responsible for their creation.

The new findings could have a major impact on our understanding of when the first humans arrived in the Americas. Pleistocene archeological sites from Brazil are among the most compelling evidence that people lived on the continents prior to the end of the last Ice Age.

Capuchin monkey fracturing nuts using a rock as a hammer and a larger one as an anvil in Northeast Brazil. Photo by Tiago Falótico, courtesy of CONICET.

Capuchin monkey fracturing nuts using a rock as a hammer and a larger one as an anvil in Northeast Brazil. Photo by Tiago Falótico, courtesy of CONICET.

The once-predominant “Clovis first” theory long held that glaciers prevented significant settling of the Western Hemisphere until around 14,000 years ago. In recent decades, archaeological sites like the Buttermilk Creek complex in Texas, which has evidence of human inhabitants dating back 15,000 years, and Monte Verde in Chile, dated as early as 18,500 years ago, have challenged that hypothesis. There is growing acceptance of the theory that during the Ice Age, people began settling along a coastal entry route.

But support for a Pre-Clovis human presence received a setback last month, when new testing called into question the dating of fossilized footprints at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park to 22,800 to 21,130 years ago—making them the oldest evidence of human occupation of North America. It now appears the seeds used to date the markings may have ingested ancient carbon from the waters of Lake Otero, leading to inaccurate, artificially ancient dating.

Now, Brazil’s capuchin monkeys may have landed another blow against the Pre-Clovis faction.

“Our work reinforces the idea that the human settlement of this part of the American continent is more recent and is in line with the studies that determine its arrival some 13,000 or 14,000 years before the present,” Agustín Agnolín, of Argentina’s National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought, added. “This questions the hypotheses that proposed an excessively old settlement of South America.”

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