Field Notes

014

Owning (up to) the Past

U.S. Museums to Return Pharaoh’s Mummy and Roman Sculpture

After determining that objects in their archaeological collections had entered this country under suspicious circumstances, two U.S. university museums separately announced plans last summer to repatriate the artifacts to their countries of origin.

The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Atlanta’s Emory University will return to Egypt a mummy that scientists believe is the remains of Pharaoh Ramesses I (1295–1294 B.C.). According to Peter Lacovara, the Carlos’s curator of ancient Egyptian art, the mummy will resume “its rightful place, as a good will gesture from the citizens of Atlanta.”

The mummy’s crossed arms—a burial pose reserved exclusively for royal mummies—and its physical resemblance to the remains of Seti I, Ramesses’s son, prompted researchers to examine the mummy using non-invasive computerized tomography (CT) scans (a computer-generated image of Ramesses’s head is shown above). Tests confirmed that the mummy’s brain had been removed and his skull filled with molten resin—a mummification technique used for Egyptian royalty during Ramesses I’s reign.

The Emory University museum had purchased the then-unidentified remains, along with an extensive collection of ancient Egyptian art and artifacts, from Canada’s Niagara Falls Museum in 1999. The mummy had originally been acquired from a broker in Luxor, Egypt, in the 1860s, when a cache of mummies—discovered in what was later identified as a royal cemetery—was partially sold off.

Traditional research, rather than high technology, led curator Michael Padgett of the Princeton University Art Museum to suspect the provenance of a fragmentary, second-century A.D. Roman relief on display in the museum since 1986. Padgett discovered a reference to a 1981 discovery of an ancient funerary monument in Colle Tasso, Italy; that artifact, he recognized, was the Princeton sculpture, which is adorned with a Latin inscription and a high-relief bust of a bearded man named Aphthonetus (below).

Because a 1939 Italian law stipulates that antiquities discovered in Italian soil are state property, and because the Princeton museum determined that the relief in its collection left Italy without a legal export permit, incoming museum director Susan M. Taylor announced that Princeton would be returning the object to the Italians—thus “righting the wrongs perpetrated prior to its acquisition by this museum 17 years ago.”

015

Surveying the Walls of Uruk

Can Technology Discover the Ancient City of Gilgamesh?

German archaeologists working at the ancient site of Uruk (modern Warka, just east of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq) have begun mapping the canals, walls and building foundations of the sprawling, buried city—without even lifting a spade.

Over the past two winters, a team headed by Margarete van Ess of Berlin’s German Archaeology Institute has laid out a grid system over the site and begun to map the buried ruins with a magnetometer—an instrument that measures differences in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field under the soil. (In the photo above, Jörg Fassbinder of Munich’s Bavarian State Conservation Office maps a small portion of the site grid.)

“With this method, we get a complete picture of all the lower areas of the city. We will be able to define city quarters, neighborhoods, technical installations and the directions of streets and canals. Of course, we can’t see small things like pottery, cuneiform tablets or figurines to define the function of a structure or to reconstruct the living circumstances. So the magnetic survey doesn’t replace an excavation, but it shows very well where we should dig in the future,” van Ess told Archaeology Odyssey.

The initial results reveal the kinds of structures mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, portions of which were first written down in the early second millennium B.C. Gilgamesh, the legendary mid-third millennium B.C. king of Uruk, ruled an impressive city: “[A square mile the] city, [a square mile the] date grove, [a square mile] the clay-pit, [half a square mile] the temple of Ishtar: [three and a half square miles] is Uruk’s expanse.”

Piecing together a map of ancient Uruk has turned out to be a painstaking process. “The magnetic survey delivers us pictures of only four- fifths of an acre a day,” van Ess said. Given the size of ancient Uruk—about 6 miles in circumference—the measurements will probably take at least another three years to complete.

Uruk was settled from about the fifth millennium B.C. to the third century A.D. A series of German excavations beginning in the late 19th century revealed temple complexes adorned with colorful mosaics, monumental ziggurats (the ziggurat of Ishtar/Inanna, the goddess of love and war, is shown below), houses, a cemetery filled with sarcophagi and portions of the city’s wall. German archaeologists also found clay tablets inscribed in an early form of cuneiform (a wedge-shaped script used to write Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages) dating to the latter part of the fourth millennium B.C.—the world’s earliest recorded writing.

Political turmoil in Iraq may well scuttle this latest round of German investigations. In the future, van Ess and her team hope to learn how the ancient city’s teeming masses lived and worked. “We would like to get more information about the construction of Uruk’s canals and the connections between the canals and the city’s living quarters,” she said.

016

Roman-British Villas Found

Magnificent Mosaic with Dancing Dolphins from Western England

For years, teachers and students at St. Laurence School in the small English town of Bradford-on-Avon, about 85 miles west of London, wondered what lay buried beneath the school’s soccer field.

“In one goal, there were stones sticking up,” says Sophie Hawke, who works in the school’s administrative offices. During dry summers, yellow lines of parched grass would appear on the field in a grid pattern, hinting at structures buried below.

Just how large and opulent those structures once were became clear this summer, when archaeologist Mark Corney of the University of Bristol probed the earth beneath the field with a magnetometer (an instrument that measures anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field) and detected two large buildings. During a three-week preliminary excavation, Corney’s team began uncovering two 40-room Roman villas dating to the late third or fourth century A.D. So far only a small section of the villas has been excavated, but archaeologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Cardiff in Wales are drawing up plans for a major five-year dig at the site.

The palatial villas, which cover an area of about 45,000 square feet, probably housed a large extended family and their household slaves. “It was like an 18th-century country house,” Corney told Archaeology Odyssey. The family would have been extremely wealthy, perhaps earning their fortune in the local wool trade. A fine glass beaker imported from the Rhineland and chunks of decorated wall plaster recovered at the villas suggest that more luxury items may surface in future excavations.

Already, in one of the villas, the archaeologists have discovered what may have been the artistic centerpiece of the complex: an ornate 30-by-16-foot mosaic (below) that depicts two dolphins flanking a vase amid geometric and floral motifs. The villa’s walls and roof collapsed around the fifth century A.D., shielding the mosaic floor from further damage. Experts believe it was made at a workshop in the Roman town of Corinium (modern Cirencester), about 35 miles to the north.

Corney told Archaeology Odyssey that the owners of the villa would have belonged to the local Romano-British—not Roman—gentry. “The plans of the villas are very much in a regional style, native to Britain and northern France,” he said.

Archaeologists found further evidence of native non-Roman practices when they exhumed the body of a teenage boy buried near the villas. The boy’s body had been placed face-down in the grave; his head had been cut off after death and placed between his feet, along with several hobnails. “This rite is reasonably well known from the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. in northern France and Britain,” Corney said. “We may be looking at people who were considered social outcasts, possibly because of mental or physical disability, or were thought to have special powers.” Or, Corney suggests, the rite may have served to protect against malicious forces from beyond the grave: “By detaching the head from the body, you can stop the soul from coming back to plague the living.” Such burials are often found on the margins of ancient cemeteries; scholars believe their peripheral placement was, like the detaching of the head, a precaution against evil.

The next step for Corney’s archaeological 017team will be to establish the boundaries of the estate associated with the villas. Corney thinks the estate may have been very large and could have survived in some form into the Anglo-Saxon period. Pre-Roman material discovered at the site indicates that it was settled long before the Romans arrived in Britain. “There’s a growing sense that many of the great villas developed on top of Iron Age settlements,” Corney added. “Probably a lot of the late Iron Age aristocracy became Romano-British landowners.”

This spectacular find caps off an unusually fruitful year for archaeologists of Roman Britain, especially those digging in southwestern England. In November 2001, construction workers paving a driveway near Ilminster, in the county of Somerset, uncovered a 540-square-foot mosaic portraying wine vessels and a dolphin. Six months later and only a mile away, a small team of archaeologists, accompanied by a TV crew for the BBC series Time Team, unearthed the remains of a another villa in a farmer’s field. “Over the last 100 years, there’s been a steady ‘background noise’ of Roman finds in the area,” Corney noted. It’s unlikely these latest discoveries will remain in the background for very long.

017

Iceman Report #379

What Oetzi Ate

Using DNA analysis, Italian scientists examining the intestinal contents of the 5,000-year-old frozen mummy known as Oetzi have determined that the Neolithic iceman consumed deer and ibex meat, cereal grains and some kind of greenery not long before he died.

This flies directly in the face of information provided in earlier reports (see “Slumber Disturbed: Was the Ancient Iceman a New Age Health Freak?” in Field Notes, AO 02:02), when Oetzi was described by scientists as “probably a vegetarian.”

Pollen found on Oetzi’s body—which was discovered by hikers in the Italian Alps in 1991—indicates that he passed through an evergreen forest en route to the mountainous area where he met his death.

While most of the iceman’s contemporaries ate their animal protein in the form of rabbit, squirrel and even pack rat, Oetzi’s big game diet suggests that he “occupied an elevated social position,” according to researcher Franco Rollo of the University of Camerino. So does his gear: The iceman wore a deerskin coat and grass cape, and he carried a bow and arrows and a copper ax. He probably died as a result of a severely disabling arrow wound found in his shoulder.

018

Revitalizing Stonehenge

To protect the brooding 5,000-year-old monument on England’s Salisbury Plain, car traffic will soon be routed away from Stonehenge.

English Heritage, the British governmental agency charged with conserving England’s historical environment, announced a five-year plan to close a major road bordering the site and channel traffic to a nearby highway that passes through a new, mile-and-a-quarter-long tunnel. The $88-million project will also involve the construction of a new visitors center to accommodate the 830,000 tourists who visit the site each year.

Most visitors won’t come within touching distance of Stonehenge’s 18-foot-tall, 5-ton megaliths, however. The destructive potential of so many feet and hands will make it necessary to more strictly limit public access to the stone circle.

018

Curator’s Choice

Bronze Statuette

7th century B.C.
5 inches high
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Emory University

One of my favorite objects is a small bronze statue of Taharka (690–664 B.C.), the 25th Dynasty pharaoh who inherited the thrones of Nubia and Egypt at the age of 32. Taharka, whose native Nubia is called “Cush” in the Bible, helped liberate both Israel and Egypt from Assyrian control and created the largest empire in the ancient world prior to the coming of Alexander the Great.

Our small statuette was almost certainly disfigured in antiquity. The king’s forearms, which likely supported gold offering vessels, were broken off, and two symbols of Nubian kingship were effaced from the statue’s surface—the double cobra emblem that once adorned the king’s brow and the carved ram’s head pendant that rested on his chest. The figurine was probably mutilated by a native Egyptian king of the 26th Dynasty (664–525 B.C.) to eradicate the memory of the century-long reign of Nubian pharaohs.

017

OddiFacts

Colosseum? Arboretum?

As the Roman Empire declined and the Colosseum in Rome was abandoned, the structure’s travertine blocks became covered with exotic plants. Seeds had been carried into the building on the fur and in the guts of animals sacrificed in gladiatorial games, and dried nuts and fruits were showered over the crowds assembled in the arena. Spectators discarded peach and olive pits, which eventually sprouted into trees. For more than 1,000 years—until 1870, when the Colosseum was stripped of its vegetation and restored—the ruin supported over 420 species of plant life.

Owning (up to) the Past
U.S. Museums to Return Pharaoh’s Mummy and Roman Sculpture
After determining that objects in their archaeological collections had entered this country under suspicious circumstances, two U.S. university museums separately announced plans last summer to repatriate the artifacts to their countries of origin.