Hundreds Of Ancient Sealed Wine Jars Found In Mysterious Tomb Of Meret-Neith In Abydos
Archaeologists excavating in Um Al-Qaab archaeological site in Abydos in Sohag Governorate, Egypt, have discovered hundreds of 5,000-year-old well-preserved wine jars and grave goods in a tomb belonging to an enigmatic woman known as Meret-Neith.
Scientists hope the find can shed new light on the identity of Meret-Neith of Dynasty 1.
Mostafa Waziri, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said ancient inscriptions indicate that Meret-Neith had been in charge of central government offices, like the Treasury, which lends credence to the theory that she played a historically significant role. Still, so little is known about her life and reign.
According to Dietrich Raue, Director of the German Archaeological Institute, “Meret-Neith had been the only woman with her own monumental tomb in Egypt’s first royal cemetery at Abydos and was probably the most powerful woman of her era.
Raue added that recent excavations have provided new information about this “unique woman and her era” and given rise to the speculation that Meret-Neith may have been the first female Queen in Ancient Egypt, thus predating Queen Hatshepsut of the 18th dynasty,” Ahram Online reports.
Her true identity, however, remains a mystery, he concluded.
E. Christiana Köhler, head of the mission, said that Meret-Neith’s monumental tomb complex in the desert of Abydos, which includes her own tomb as well as those of 41 courtiers and servants, was built of unfired mudbricks, mud, and timber.
Köhler added that through meticulous excavation methods and new archaeological technologies, the team demonstrated that the graves had been built in phases over a relatively long period.
“This observation, together with other evidence, radically challenges the oft-proposed but unproven idea of ritual human sacrifice in the 1st Dynasty,” she noted.
Several of the unearthed large wine jars had intact stoppers and contained the well-preserved remains of 5,000-year-old wine.
Dr. Waziry added that “well-preserved jars offer a unique glimpse into the past, providing a window into the culinary and cultural practices of a bygone era,” the Luxor Times reports.
As the excavations continue, archaeologists may eventually learn more about the enigmatic history and identity of Queen Meret-Neith, who may stand alone as the sole woman from the First Dynasty to have a royal tomb discovered in Abydos.
Archeologists discover human bones and Viking-era settlements in Viru-Nigula
During an archeological dig ahead of planned roadworks in Viru-Nigula, Lääne-Viru County, human bones were discovered in the vicinity of the church wall. The archaeological work confirms researchers’ earlier hypothesis that the cemetery and church were built in the medieval period on the site of an earlier settlement.
During the archaeological excavations, a total of 11 human skeletons have been discovered. Four of those found had most likely been buried in a common grave. Preliminary estimates place the burial date of the finds somewhere between the 16th and 18th centuries.
The findings from Viru-Nigula will provide bone researchers with valuable information regarding methods used to treat illnesses and injuries at that time.
“There are a number of interesting pathologies, bone fractures, and injuries that are interesting to observe in my line of work. One [skeleton] has a fracture of the femur, for example. It will be interesting to see how that person deals with it.
Clearly, someone had to care for and treat them. There’s a perception about these types of severe fractures that people at that time didn’t survive them, but in fact, they did manage to cope with them. Of course, they weren’t put in the hospital and fixed up like they are nowadays, but they have healed nicely,” said bioarcheologist and bone specialist Martin Malve.
In addition to the medieval cemetery, the location of a settlement with a history dating back to the Viking Age was also discovered at the site.
“There are a lot of pottery shards and nails, and there are also plenty of animal bones – fish bones, bird bones, for example, so the material is very rich, in addition to the human bones. We can learn what people ate and which utensils they used.
We are also taking soil samples from here, where we are trying to get plant residue, which should provide us with information about their agricultural practices,” Malve said.
The finds from different eras will inevitably lead to imaginations running wild, with plenty of speculation about what kinds of events may have taken place in Viru-Nigula at the end of antiquity, 800 years ago, and during the Crusades.
“People’s romanticism has led to suggestions that the village was burnt down, or that the Germans came and destroyed the village. But what actually happened, we don’t know.
Perhaps part of the village was deserted or demolished or a church was built in the center. If you look at the maps of the settlement and the cultural layer of the area, there is evidence that the church and the cemetery were built right in the middle of the village,” Malve said.
The two-week archaeological dig in Viru-Nigula is scheduled to end on Sunday.
Ancient Greek helmet found buried next to ‘elite warrior’ who died 2,400 years ago
A very rare bronze Greek-Illyrian war helmet, used in Greece during the time of the Greco-Persian Wars, has just been discovered in a rock-cut tomb in Dalmatia, Croatia.
The form of the iconic open-faced helmet, which archaeologists consider an especially rare find, originated in the Peloponnese during the 8th and 7th centuries BC.
The Greek-Illyrian war helmet was found in southern Dalmatia, Croatia in December of 2020.
The spectacular find was made recently during the exploration of the cave tomb in Zakotarac, located on the Pelješac peninsula, in southern Dalmatia, Croatia. The tomb was for a warrior buried approximately three centuries later, however, in the 4th century BC.
The rare find, accompanied by many other valuable objects from the era, was discovered within a previously-unknown rock-cut tomb along a hillside near Gradina.
This particular style of helmet, which became the iconic head covering of Greek warriors over the centuries, was first used by the ancient Greek Etruscans and Scythians. It later became known as the Illyrian helmet.
An alternate form of this helmet was also developed in Italy, according to archaeologists who gleaned this information from depictions on ivory relief sculptures. However, this style of helmet became obsolete in most areas of Greece in the early 5th century BC and its common use in Illyria ended by the 4th century BC.
Part of the warrior’s skull appears to be visible from the openings of the helmet, although earth has over the millennia made its way into where the rest of his head would be.
Archaeologists working at the grave site in Croatia.
Adding to the importance of the find, archaeologists also discovered a treasure trove of ancient weapons, including spears and knives, in the same Croatian grave.
At least two other people had been buried along with the warrior, including a woman, who was found wearing a bronze bracelet.
According to a report in Archaeology News Network, additional treasures at the gravesite included “fifteen bronze and silver fibulae (clasps), twelve needles, several spiral bronze ornaments and tweezers and several hundred glass paste and amber beads belonging to necklaces.”
The spectacular find was made when archaeologists were working on restoring a damaged burial mound. The rectangular space of the mound measured approximately 3 x 2 meters (9.84 x 6.56 feet).
The body of the warrior had been laid to rest in a west-east direction in the tomb, but unfortunately, his bones were found in a “rather poor condition,” according to the archaeologists.
The site of the 4th-century BC grave site in Croatia. In the distance is a hilltop settlement of Gradina that Archaeologists believe may hold further important discoveries.
The tomb dates back to earlier than the nearby colony on Korčula, which is known to have been founded in the late 4th or early 3rd century BC, according to the project coordinator, Dr. Hrvoje Potrebica, from the Department of Archaeology of Zagreb University.
The discovery was made possible after last year’s visit to western Peljesac by a team from Croatia’s Center for Prehistoric Research. In the process of exploring this area, they were able to identify potential archaeological dig sites at the Illyrian Cave Sanctuary at Nakovana, dating back to the 4th to 1st centuries BC.
Priceless objects to accompany the dead in the afterlife
During this reconnaissance, they found grave goods deposited around a stalagmite. Professor Potrebica holds that the fourth century BC Greek-Illyrian helmet “is exceptionally rare” and is one of only about forty such helmets that have ever been found in all of Europe.
Another treasure found in the grave were thirty vases of predominantly Greek origin — although the researchers believe that they had been made by both Attic and Italian workshops.
According to the archeologists, these types of vessels were among the most expensive vases made during that period. Along with these rare discoveries, the researchers were able to pinpoint many other previously unknown sites in Nakovana, Professor Potrebica stated.
The researchers additionally were able to examine another group of prehistoric mounds around the Croatian village of Zakotorac. Following a road that is believed to have been trodden in prehistoric times, they came upon yet another site known as “the Vidohovo spring.”
The archaeologists state that they believe this site will yield yet more treasures, possibly including a shrine, with Dr. Potrebica adding that it holds “enormous potential.”
An ancient Greek vase was found at the Croatian burial site.
In 2021, after all the pandemic-related restrictions will be lifted, the archeological team hopes that they will once again be able to return to this site, which will enable them to lace these finds into their proper historical context.
Dr. Potrebica told interviewers that the discovery of the bronze war helmet, along with the other “exceptional finds” on Korcula, are presenting archaeologists with a new understanding of the “importance of the southern Adriatic in the historical dynamics of this part of Europe.”
A cryptic 2,700-year-old pig skeleton found in Jerusalem’s City of David
An ancient pig skeleton is seen in Jerusalem, having been discovered in a building dating back to the First Temple.
Israeli archaeologists have unearthed the complete skeleton of a piglet in a place and time where you wouldn’t expect to find pork remains: a Jerusalem home dating to the First Temple period.
The 2,700-year-old porcine remains were found crushed by large pottery vessels and collapsed walls during excavations in the so-called City of David, the original nucleus of ancient Jerusalem. The team of archaeologists behind the discovery reported their findings in a study published in the June edition of the journal Near Eastern Archaeology.
The find of swine adds to previous research showing that pork was occasionally on the menu for the ancient Israelites and that biblical taboos on this and other prohibited foods only came to be observed centuries later, in the Second Temple period. It also ties into broader questions about when the Bible was written and when Judaism as we know it was born.
This little piggy wasn’t bacon
The animal’s skull clearly identifies it as a domestic pig, as opposed to a wild swine, and its presence indicates that pigs were raised for food in the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, says Lidar Sapir-Hen, an archaeozoologist at Tel Aviv University and at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History. The fact that the skeleton was found intact suggests that this specific piglet, less than seven months old, was not eaten, but died accidentally when the building was destroyed at some point in the eighth-century B.C.E, Sapir-Hen and colleagues report.
First Temple period structures near the Gihon Spring in Jerusalem’s City of David, where the pig skeleton was found along with the “butchered” remains of many other types of animals.
But there can be little doubt of what the piglet’s ultimate fate would have been having its home not collapsed for as yet unclear reasons. In addition to large storage jars and smaller cooking vessels, the room where the pig was unearthed also hosted dozens of animal bones from sheep, goats, cattle, gazelles, as well as fish and birds, the archaeologists report.
Most of these remains were burnt or showed signs of butchery, meaning the animals had long been dead and eaten when the building was destroyed, Sapir-Hen says.
This suggests that this room was where meals were prepared or eaten,” she says. “So this pig was just waiting for its turn.”
We don’t know the cause of the building’s collapse, as there is no known major destruction event in Jerusalem in the eighth century B.C.E., says Joe Uziel, the Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist who led the dig. It may have been destroyed by an earthquake or a more localized event, he speculates.
In any case, the structure was rebuilt and continued to be in use until around 586 B.C.E., when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the First Temple, Uziel says. The building had at least four rooms and was located in a fairly central area near the Gihon spring, the main source of water for the city at the time. Constructed with rough fieldstones, it was probably a private home, although the fact that bullae, or seal impressions, were unearthed in another room suggests it may have also had an additional, administrative function, Uziel says.
An archaeologist retrieves the skull of a piglet from a First Temple period building in Jerusalem’s City of David at the site where the “articulated” pig skeleton was also found.
The excavation also yielded an elegantly carved bone pendant and a human figurine. Together with the great variety of animals found alongside the pig, all of this indicates the house was occupied by an upper-class family, the archaeologist says.
The importance and central location of the house suggest that pig husbandry and pork consumption may have been a rare treat, but still very much part of “mainstream” food habits, he says. In other words, it doesn’t look like this was something done secretively by, say, a poorer household that may have been desperately in need of a quick meal.
At this point, we have to wonder how to square the idea that pigs were infrequently but openly raised in Jerusalem with the biblical injunction that: “The swine, though he divides the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you.” (Leviticus 11:7-8
It’s the Levantine economy, stupid
While domesticated pig bones are rarely found in Jerusalem and in most of the Levant, they are not entirely absent, Sapir-Hen notes. In excavations from the First Temple period in Jerusalem and in other sites from the Kingdom of Judah, swine bones constitute up to 2 per cent of the animal remains unearthed, she says.
Already back in the 1990s, archaeologists also observed that pig bones were much more frequent in the coastal strip that was inhabited by the Philistines. Scholars thus concluded that a dearth of pig bones identified a site as Israelite and that the biblical ban on partaking in pork was already known and observed in the First Temple period.
But more recent research by Sapir-Hen and others has shown that the picture is much more complex. For one thing, the near absence of pig bones is not unique to Israelite sites of the Iron Age, the period that roughly corresponds to the First Temple era. Swine is equally scarce in most of Canaan during the preceding era, the Late Bronze Age, a time before the writing of the Bible or the formation of ancient Israel.
This dearth then continues in the Iron Age, not only in Judah but in many of its neighbours, including sites linked to the Canaanites, Phoenicians and Arameans, Sapir-Hen notes. Even when it comes to the supposedly pork-loving Philistines, the situation is actually more nuanced.
While the diet of Philistine city-dwellers did include a larger proportion of pigs, which were seemingly imported from Greece, swine bones are almost absent from their rural settlements, in keeping with the dietary habits of the rest of the Levant. Equally puzzling is the fact that in the Kingdom of Israel, Judah’s northern neighbour, a pig is rare in the early Iron Age, but it increases to up to 8 per cent of the animal mix at urban sites in the eighth century B.C.E.
All of this indicates that the tendency to eschew pork in the Iron Age cannot be linked to a specific ethnic identity or to the biblical prohibition, Sapir-Hen concludes. Pigs were only a small part of the Levantine diet most probably because other animals, especially goats, sheep and cattle, were more suited to the local environment and economy.
Pigs can be raised in an urban environment, as they require less space, but they also need a nearby water source: it is perhaps not a coincidence that the Jerusalem piglet was found near the city’s spring. This may explain why, throughout the Levant, swine occurrences only tend to rise at times and in places where populations increase and are concentrated in larger urban settlements, whether in Philistia, in the Kingdom of Israel or, to a lesser extent, in the more built-up sections of Judah’s capital, Jerusalem.
Gods, figurines and shrimp
Figurine and bone pendant found in the building where the piglet’s remains were found
This also gels with a growing body of research on the Israelite religion in the First Temple period. While scholars believe that parts of the Bible were already compiled at the tail end of this era, it is generally agreed that the holy text we know today only reached its final form after the Babylonian exile, in the Second Temple period.
Whenever the Bible was actually written, archaeological finds have shown that, in practice, First Temple-period Judaism was very different from the religion it would later become. While the ancient Israelites believed in Yahweh, the God of the Bible, they also worshipped other deities, including Asherah, who was thought to be God’s wife. They liberally made figurines and other graven images, ostensibly banned by the Second Commandment.
Additionally, a study published just last month in the Tel Aviv journal of archaeology looked at the finding, at archaeological sites throughout Israel, of bones from scaleless and finless fish, which are also prohibited by the Bible’s dietary rules. The research showed that catfish, sharks and other non-kosher fish were commonly consumed in Jerusalem and Judah during the First Temple period, and only for the late Second Temple period is there clear evidence that Jews were eschewing such banned seafood.
In other words, biblical prohibitions that are considered signposts of the Jewish faith today were unknown, unheeded or non-existent back in the First Temple period. And it seems that, from time to time, the ancient Israelites were not averse to literally bringing home the bacon.
Smashed pottery vessels in the room where the pig was found
Archaeologists Find Hidden Rooms in Pyramid of Egyptian Pharaoh Sahure
The pyramid of Sahure at Abusir, Egypt.
The pyramid complex of Sahure was built in the 26th to 25th century BCE for the Egyptian pharaoh Sahure. It introduced a period of pyramid building by Sahure’s successors at Abusir, on a location earlier used by Userkaf, founder of the Fifth Dynasty, for his Sun temple.
The pyramid of Sahure was first investigated by the British Egyptologist John Perring, who was the only one who was able to break off and clean the entrance as well as the descending access passage.
The burial chamber was very badly damaged by the stonecutters, and it is not even clear if it was comprised of one or two rooms.
From left to right: Exterior view of the pyramid. A passage secured with steel beams. One of the discovered storage rooms.
Perring found a single fragment of basalt, thinking that it belonged to the king’s sarcophagus.
Interestingly, in the northeastern part of the eastern wall of the burial chamber, Perring discovered a low passageway.
He suggested that this could lead to a magazine area, however, the corridor was full of rubble or waste and he did not attempt to enter it.
Due to the bad state of preservation in the interior compartment of the pyramid, precise reconstruction of the substructure’s plan was impossible.
“The conservation and restoration project inside Sahure’s pyramid, initiated in 2019 and supported by the Antiquities Endowment Fund (AEF) of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), aimed to safeguard the substructure of Sahure’s pyramid,” said Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg egyptologist Mohamed Ismail Khaled and his colleagues.
“Our efforts focused on cleaning the interior rooms, stabilizing the pyramid from inside, and preventing further collapse.”
“In the process, we succeeded in securing the pyramid’s burial chambers, which had previously been inaccessible.”
One of the newly-discovered storage rooms in the pyramid of Sahure at Abusir, Egypt.
During the restoration work, they identified the original dimensions and were able to uncover the floor plan of the antechamber, which had deteriorated over time. Consequently, the destroyed walls were replaced with new retaining walls.
“The eastern wall of the antechamber was badly damaged, and only the northeast corner and about 30 cm of the eastern wall were still visible,” the archaeologists said.
“Traces of a low passageway that Perring had already noticed during an excavation in 1836 continued to be excavated.”
“Perring had mentioned that this passage had been full of debris and rubbish and had been impassable due to decay.”
“He suspected that it might have led to storage rooms. However, during further exploration of the pyramid by Ludwig Borchardt in 1907, these assumptions were called into question — other experts joined his opinion.”
“All the more surprising was our discovery of the traces of a passage. Thereby proving that the observations made during Perring’s exploration were correct,” they said.
“The work was continued, and the passage was uncovered. Thus, eight storerooms have been discovered so far.”
“Although the northern and southern parts of these magazines, especially the ceiling and the original floor, are badly damaged, remnants of the original walls and parts of the floor can still be seen.”
Meet ‘Dragon Man,’ the latest addition to the human family tree
This illustration shows what Homo longi — dragon man — may have looked like.
A cranium hidden at the bottom of a well in northeastern China for more than 80 years may belong to a new species of early human that researchers have called “dragon man.”
The exciting discovery is the latest addition to a human family tree that is rapidly growing and shifting, thanks to new fossil finds and analysis of ancient DNA preserved in teeth, bones and cave dirt.
The well-preserved skullcap, found in the Chinese city of Harbin, is between 138,000 and 309,000 years old, according to geochemical analysis, and it combines primitive features, such as a broad nose and low brow and braincase, with those that are more similar to Homo sapiens, including flat and delicate cheekbones.
The ancient hominin – which researchers said was “probably” a 50-year-old man – would have had an “extremely wide” face, deep eyes with large eye sockets, big teeth and a brain similar in size to modern humans.
Three papers detailing the find were published in the journal The Innovation on Friday.
“The Harbin skull is the most important fossil I’ve seen in 50 years. It shows how important East Asia and China is in telling the human story,” said Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at The Natural History Museum in London and coauthor of the research.
Researchers named the new hominin Homo longi, which is derived from Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, the province where the cranium was found. The team plans to see if it’s possible to extract ancient proteins or DNA from the cranium, which included one tooth, and will begin a more detailed study of the skull’s interior, looking at sinuses and both ear and brain shape, using CT scans.
Dragon man’s large size could be an adaptation to the harsh environment in which he likely lived, researchers said.
We are family
It’s easy to think of Homo sapiens as unique, but there was a time when we weren’t the only humans on the block. In the millennia since Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, we have shared the planet with Neanderthals, the enigmatic Denisovans, the “hobbit” Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis and Homo naledi, as well as several other ancient hominins. We had sex with some of them and produced babies. Some of these ancestors are well represented in the fossil record, but most of what we know about Denisovans comes from genetic information in our DNA. The story of human evolution is changing all the time in what is a particularly exciting period for paleoanthropology, Stringer said.
The announcement of dragon man’s discovery comes a day after a different group researchers published a paper in the journal Science on fossils found in Israel, which they said also could represent another new type of early human. The jaw bone and skull fragment suggested a group of people lived in the Middle East 120,000 to 420,000 years ago with anatomical features more primitive than early modern humans and Neanderthals.
While the team of researchers stopped short of calling the group a new hominin species based on the fossil fragments they studied, they said the fossils resembled pre-Neanderthal human populations in Europe and challenged the view that Neanderthals originated there.
“This is a complicated story, but what we are learning is that the interactions between different human species in the past were much more convoluted than we had previously appreciated,” Rolf Quam, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University and a coauthor of the study on the Israeli fossils, said in a news release
Stringer, who was not involved in the Science research, said the fossils were less complete than the Harbin skull, but it was definitely plausible that different types of humans co-existed in the Levant, which was a geographical crossroads between Africa, Asia and Europe that today includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan and other countries in the Middle East.
Two fossils found in Israel challenge the idea that Neanderthals originated in Europe.
Concealed treasure
The Harbin cranium was discovered in 1933 by an anonymous Chinese man when a bridge was built over the Songhua River in Harbin, according to one of the studies in The Innovation. At the time, that part of China was under Japanese occupation, and the man who found it took it home and stored it at the bottom of a well for safekeeping.
“Instead of passing the cranium to his Japanese boss, he buried it in an abandoned well, a traditional Chinese method of concealing treasures,” according to the study.
After the war, the man returned to farming during a tumultuous time in Chinese history and never re-excavated his treasure. The skull remained unknown to science for decades, surviving the Japanese invasion, civil war, the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, rampant commercial fossil trading in China, the researchers said.
The third generation of the man’s family only learned about his secret discovery before his death and recovered the fossil from the well in 2018. Qiang Ji, one of the authors of the research, heard about the skull and convinced the family to donate it to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University.
‘Sister lineage’
The so-called dragon man likely belonged to a lineage that may be our closest relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals, the study found. His large size and where the fossil was found, in one of China’s coldest places, could mean the species had adapted to harsh environments.
Dragon man had a large brain, deep set eyes, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth and oversize teeth.
“We are human beings. It is always a fascinating question about where we were from and how we evolved,” said coauthor Xijun Ni, a research professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the vice director of the Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins.
“We found our long-lost sister lineage.”
The study suggested that other puzzling Chinese fossils that paleoanthropologists have found hard to classify – such as those found in Dali in Yunnan in southwestern China and a jawbone from the Tibetan plateau, thought by some to be Denisovan – could belong to the Homo longi species.
Stringer said also it was definitely plausible that dragon man could be a representative of Denisovans, a little-known and enigmatic human population that hasn’t yet been officially classified as a hominin species according to taxonomic rules.
They are named after a Siberian cave where the only definitive Denisovan bone fragments have been found, but genetic evidence from modern human DNA suggests they once lived throughout Asia.
Denisovans is a general name, Stringer said, and they haven’t officially been recognized as a new species – in part because the five Denisovan fossils that exist are so tiny they don’t fulfill the requirements for a “designated type specimen” that would make it a name-bearing representative.
Denisovans and Homo longi both had large, similar molars, the study noted, but, given the small number of fossils available for comparison, it was impossible to say for sure, said Ni, who hoped that DNA experiments might reveal whether they are the same species.
“We’ve only just begun what will be years of studying this fascinating fossil,” Stringer said.
2,000-year-old Flower Bouquet in ‘Very Good Condition’ Found Under Mexican Pyramid
Nearly 2,000 years ago, the ancient people of Teotihuacan wrapped bunches of flowers into beautiful bouquets, laid them beneath a jumble of wood and set the pile ablaze.
Now, archaeologists have found the remains of those surprisingly well-preserved flowers in a tunnel snaking beneath a pyramid of the ancient city, located northeast of what is now Mexico City.
The pyramid itself is immense and would have stood 75 feet (23 meters) tall when it was first built, making it taller than the Sphinx of Giza from ancient Egypt.
The Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan, Mexico
The Teotihuacan pyramid is part of the “Temple of the Feathered Serpent,” which was built in honour of Quetzalcoatl, a serpent god who was worshipped in Mesoamerica.
Archaeologists found the bouquets 59 feet (18 m) below ground in the deepest part of the tunnel, said Sergio Gómez-Chávez, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) who is leading the excavation of the tunnel.
A digital reconstruction of the tunnel running under the pyramid at Teotihuacan.
Numerous pieces of pottery, along with a sculpture depicting Tlaloc, a god associated with rainfall and fertility, were found beside the bouquets, he added.
The bouquets were likely part of rituals, possibly associated with fertility, that Indigenous people performed in the tunnel, Gómez-Chávez told Live Science in a translated email.
The team hopes that by determining the identity of the flowers, they can learn more about the rituals.
One of the 2,000-year-old bouquets is prepped for research.
The team discovered the bouquets just a few weeks ago. The number of flowers in each bouquet varies, Gómez-Chávez said, noting that one bouquet has 40 flowers tied together while another has 60 flowers.
Archaeologists found evidence of a large bonfire with numerous pieces of burnt wood where the bouquets were laid down, Gómez-Chávez said.
It seems that people placed the bouquets on the ground first and then covered them with a vast amount of wood. The sheer amount of wood seems to have protected the bouquets from the bonfire’s flames.
The tunnel that Gómez-Chávez’s team is excavating was found in 2003 and has yielded thousands of artefacts including pottery, sculptures, cocoa beans, obsidian, animal remains and even a miniature landscape with pools of liquid mercury.
Archaeologists are still trying to understand why ancient people created the tunnel and how they used it.
Teotihuacan contains several pyramids and flourished between roughly 100 B.C. and A.D. 600. It had an urban core that covered 8 square miles (20 square kilometres) and may have had a population of 100,000 people.
Family Looking For Lost Gold Ring Finds Viking Age Artifacts In Their Garden On The Island Of Jomfruland
While searching for a missing gold ring with a metal detector, a family in Norway found, to their big surprise, something entirely different in their garden on the island of Jomfruland.
Jan Erik Aasvik has a metal detector he almost never uses, but he thought he would try it to search for his mother’s missing gold ring.
The artifacts were found by the Aasvik family. Suit buckles were not uncommon in the Viking Age. They functioned as decoration and helped keep clothes in place, says archaeologist Vibeke Lia.
After finding a couple of different objects, the detector began beeping distinctly louder than on previous finds. Aasvik suspected this was a sign that something bigger was hidden beneath the soil, but what could it be?
“I took the spade and started digging. I think I was probably no further down than about 20-30 centimeters. I didn’t understand what it was, but it looked old.
I am a member of a group of people who use metal detectors, so I posted a picture there. I am a beginner, but in that group, there are many who have more experience than me”, Aasvik told Kragerø Vestmar.
The Aasvik family was as surprised as happy.
The Aasvik family had discovered a bowl-shaped buckle and a round buckle. Both objects have been there since the 8th century and were used together with clothing in the Viking Age.
Archaeologist Vibeke Lia in Vestfold and Telemark County Municipality, who has seen the buckles, says it is an incredible find, and 1,200-year-old artifacts are in good condition.
“As far as I know, it is the first secure find we have from the Viking Age on Jomfruland,” Lia told the NRK Vestfoldogtelemark, adding this is an exciting archaeological find.
The buckle proves people lived on the island of Jomfruland during the Viking Age.
It is possible there may be a Viking Age grave belonging to a woman at the site, the Cultural Heritage Department in Vestfold and Telemark County said in a press statement.
The find is significant to the history of the region. It was previously assumed people lived on the island in Kragerø during the Viking Age, but scientists have been unable to confirm it until now.
Lia believes there may be more objects in the ground at the site but says digging for more is inappropriate.
“If it is a grave, it is protected. We will rather try to find out more in other ways,” she said.
