Archaeology Excavation

Sun Temple, Konarak (1984), Orissa

The roof of the jagamohana, made of horizontal tiers grouped in three stages with life-size female sculptures of matchless charm and delicacy adorning each stage, the whole surmounted by two stupendous crowning members, produces a picturesque contrast of light and shade and is unparalleled for its grandeur and structural propriety. Majestic in conception, this temple is indeed one of the sublimest monuments of India, notable as much for its imposing dimensions and faultless proportions as for the harmonious integration of architectural grandeur with plastic elegance.

By evaluating the bacteria and fungi found in fossilized feces, microbiologists are providing evidence to help support archeologists’ hypotheses regarding cultures living in the Caribbean over 1,500 years ago. They report their findings today at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

“Although fossilized feces (coprolites) have frequently been studied, they had never been used as tools to determine ethnicity and distinguish between two extinct cultures. By examining the DNA preserved in coprolites from two ancient indigenous cultures, our group was able to determine the bacterial and fungal populations present in each culture as well as their possible diets,” says Jessica Rivera-Perez of the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, who presented the study.

Various indigenous cultures inhabited the Greater Antilles thousands of years ago. The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico have thousands of pre-Columbian indigenous settlements belonging to extinct cultures that migrated to the Caribbean at some point in history.

Archaeological excavations in Vieques, Puerto Rico unearthed hand-made tools and crafts as well as fossilized feces dating from 200 to 400 A.D. The presence of two distinct styles of craftsmanship, as well as other clues obtained from the dig sites, suggested these artifacts belonged to two distinct cultures.

“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,” says Rivera-Perez.

To help confirm these archeological hypotheses, Rivera-Perez and her colleagues examined the DNA preserved in coprolites from both Saladoid and Huecoid settlements and compared the bacterial and fungal populations found in each. Major differences were detected between the fecal communities of these cultures, providing additional support that they may have had different origins. Additionally, they found fungal and corn DNA in the Huecoid coprolite that suggests the consumption of an Andean fermented corn beverage, further confirming the theory that the Huecoids originated in the Bolivian Andes.

“The study of the paleomicrobiome of coprolites supports the hypothesis of multiple ancestries and can provide important evidence regarding migration by ancestral cultures and populations of the Caribbean,” says Rivera-Perez.

Header Image : Example of a coprolite: Lloyds Bank coprolite : fossilised human faeces dug up from York, England by archaeologists.

Between 850,000 and 950,000 years ago a small party set out across the upper reaches of an estuary. The group was made up of at least five individuals, including adults and children, while the tidal mudflats they were navigating lay at the mouth of what is now the Thames. Flowing almost 100 miles north of its current course, the river debouched into the North Sea through modern Norfolk.

There is nothing to suggest that the group’s journey was in any way extraordinary. Its members ambled slowly in a southerly direction, following the course of the river and frequently making detours towards its channel. These people did not return the way they came, but they left a jumbled mass of footprints in their wake.

Those fragile impressions in the soft esturine clay proved remarkably durable. At high tide they were submerged and swiftly filled with the sediments that would preserve them for almost a million years. By the time the footprints reappeared, in May 2013, they were the earliest traces of a human journey in Britain.

Stepping-off point
The waters that exposed the ancient footprints at Happisburgh are no longer laying down sediments. Instead,
that stretch of Norfolk coastline is retreating at an alarming pace. As we saw in Current Archaeology 288, the same waves collapsing cliff faces and demolishing houses are exposing the remains of long-extinct animals – and the earliest traces of human activity ever discovered in Britain. It was this archaeological silver-lining that brought Dr Martin Bates of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Lampeter) to Happisburgh last year.

‘I was doing geophysical survey with my brother Richard, to try and map the course of the ancient estuary channels under the modern cliffs,’ Martin explains. ‘As part of that work we lay out 400m of cable and put 80 electrodes into the ground. Our computer spends about an hour taking a series of measurements, and during that time we’ve got nothing to do. So we went and had a look at the deposits on the beach. And there in front of us was this strangely patterned surface.’

The footprints were exposed a short distance to the south of a site the team call Happisburgh 3. Eighty flint tools discovered there are believed to date back between 850,000 – 950,000 years, making them the earliest relics of human activity in Britain. If the footprints belonged to the same period, they would be one of the earliest sets in the world. Only the 3.5m-year-old footprints made by a human ancestor at Laetoli in Tanzania and the 1.5m-year-old examples from Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya are more ancient.

Previously the oldest human footprints in Europe were from Roccamonfina in Italy, which date back 350,000 years. So how could the team date the Happisburgh footprints?

‘It is really down to the sediments in which the footprints were made,’ explains Dr Nick Ashton, Co-Director of the Happisburgh Project and British Museum Curator. ‘Elsewhere along the coast, old estuary silts at a similar depth are associated with a range of animal and plant remains. Among them is a very early form of mammoth, for example, which we know became extinct about 800,000 years ago.’

‘The sediments themselves also provide a clue. At the moment, compasses point north, but in the past there have been periods when the Earth’s magnetic field reversed and a compass would have pointed south. Because these sediments were laid down very slowly, the iron minerals within them orientated themselves on the magnetic pole at the time. By measuring that, we can say they formed during a period of reversal. Putting all of this together narrows down the date to between 850,000 and 950,000 years ago.’

‘It was pretty lucky we had as long as we did,’ says Martin. ‘The sand on that beach is very abrasive, and the footprints were simply scoured away over a number of tidal cycles. I don’t know how long they’d been exposed when I saw them, but we are probably looking at a window of about a month in which they could be spotted and recorded before they were lost forever. There were about two weeks between the time when I said “This is what I think they are” and their destruction.’

‘The trail was about 3m wide and 10m long,’ Nick remembers. ‘Its recording took place over several days and used a technique called multiple image photogrammetry, undertaken by Sarah Duffy from York University. This takes a series of images from different angles and uses software to stitch them together into a 3D model. Using colouring to show different depths within the prints we could begin to see the various parts of the feet. In one we could even make out four of the five toes.’

Mud larking
Once the footprints had been recorded, they were studied by Dr Isabelle De Groote at Liverpool John
Moores University. ‘These are clearly human footprints,’ she observes. ‘In the best-preserved prints you can see the heel, the arch of the foot and then the ball of the foot and the toes. Humans are the only ones who leave footprints like these. Other primates have a divergent big toe – that is, one coming out at the side. And humans do a very distinctive heel strike when they walk, rolling off onto the ball of the foot.

‘Both small prints and large prints were present. What I was able to do was measure the length and the width of the footprint in order to estimate how many individuals were there. Over the whole surface there were a huge number of hollows, and I ended up identifying a total of 49 that were clearly footprints. They were made by at least five different people, and there were at least two or three children in the group, the smallest of which can be estimated to have been about 3ft tall.

‘The largest prints, of which there are three, come from a single individual with the equivalent of a modern UK size 8 foot and a height of about 5ft 8in. We believe that this is likely to be a male. A slightly smaller individual could be an adult female, or perhaps a young adult male. There’s no reason why we should not think of them as a family, but because we’re only seeing the prints of a few individuals we cannot be certain whether it was a single family unit or a larger group.’

It was a couple of days after I visited the mummy store that my nightmares began. Bandaged bodies on shelves. A loose wrapping, perhaps about to uncoil further as the corpse within awoke from its 3,000-year sleep. Most of all, the painted face of a young man gazing untiringly into darkness as the curator turned out the lights behind us and firmly locked the door.
Hidden in the heart of the British Museum, deep within a labyrinth of research departments the public never sees, is a secret world of the dead. This museum, whose collections blossomed in the age of empire when Egypt was under British control, owns more than 100 mummies. Many are on permanent display. Eight were taken to hospital to undergo CT scans for the museum’s revelatory new exhibition Ancient Lives. Others lie here, on wooden pallets, layered one over the other, in London’s most enigmatic morgue.
The room doesn’t need to be especially cold – the mummies were embalmed millennia ago, their brains and organs removed to prevent internal decay – but it does have a carefully regulated temperature that suits the fragile dead. Their casings, too, are organic and need care: linen wrappings, wooden coffins. One of the coffins dates from about 3,000BC – older than the pyramids – and is just a timber crate. Later ones are painted in styles from Old Kingdom to Roman, laden with hieroglyphic spells.
Why are mummies spooky? Why are horror stories told about them and why do Scooby Doo scenarios come to mind when you see them in a museum? I’d love to pretend that I was too interested in proper archaeology to waste time on such stuff, but I really did have nightmares after visiting the mummy store. And they got me thinking about what mummies really are: vehicles of immortality.
It’s amazing that any Egyptian mummies have survived to be preserved in the British Museum. Over the centuries, thousands have been destroyed through superstition and morbid curiosity. In the 18th century, "mummy", the powdered flesh and bone of the ancient Egyptian dead, was swallowed as medicine. Even when a growing fascination with Egypt made this seem wasteful, things got little better, for public unwrappings of mummies became all the rage. Invaluable archaeological evidence was destroyed for cheap thrills.
Then the horror stories began. The 19th-century writers Theophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker all wrote eerie tales about mummies, but it was Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who hit on the perfect formula of the revived mummy in his story Lot 249. Soon the 1932 Boris Karloff classic The Mummy launched the pharaonic dead on their fantastic film career.
Is all this a depressing insight into our vulgar souls and inability to be interested in the remote past unless it is turned into cheap fiction? No. The gothic imagination feasts on mummies for a good reason. They are genuinely uncanny: the closest that humanity has come to conquering death.
Ancient Egyptians wanted to live for ever. Almost all the Egyptian art and artefacts in museums are part of an effort to achieve this. False doors from tombs – the British Museum has a majestic one painted red that resembles a massive stone Mark Rothko painting – are portals through which the ka, or spirit double, of the deceased person could come to receive food offerings. The models of people brewing beer that were put in tombs were intended to provide actual beer for the living dead.
Everything important in a tomb, from small sculpted servants to the mummy itself, was touched with an adze by a priest in a ritual called "the opening of the mouth". This rite gave magical potency to everything the ka would need in the next life – and its needs included the mummified corpse. The reason for perfectly preserving the corpse was so that its ka could recognise it, and so connect with it to enjoy the food and drink the mummy digested on its behalf.
Spirit and body were mysteriously connected. It’s not that Egyptians believed that the mummy could get up and chase people round museums – but they did believe that the dead person’s spiritual ka form, which needed the mummy to exist, could leave the tomb and walk around. There are statues of it doing just that.
So what? People believe all kinds of things. But the ancient Egyptians believed in their conquest of death for at least 3,000 years and repeated their spells and rituals over and over again. Their art is incredibly powerful because it is full of the confidence and faith of those rituals. It is truly magical art. Looking at the painted caskets in the mummy store I am moved by the conviction they communicate that death is not the end, but only the beginning of a strange adventure.
The door closes. The eternal night of the tomb returns. The young man’s painted face looks calmly into the eyes of his ka.

The wreck of the ‘Santa Maria’, as envisaged in 1492 Shipwreck found off coast of Haiti thought to be one of the most significant underwater discoveries in history

More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti. It’s likely to be one of the world’s most important underwater archaeological discoveries.

The spectacular ‘lost city of the Incas’ high among the Andes mountains in Peru attracts so many visitors today and their presence causes so much damage that a limit has had to be put on their numbers. Hiram Bingham, the man who first revealed it to the world, was a buccaneering American explorer, born in Hawaii in 1875. His parents were missionaries and hoped he would follow in their footsteps, but his youthful efforts to do so made him feel physically sick and he preferred playing American football. Educated privately in New England, he went to Yale University in 1894 to embark on an academic career. He was strongly interested in Latin American history and studied for his PhD in it at Harvard. Fortunately for him and the
world at large in 1900 he married – to her parents’ dismay – a girl called Alfreda Mitchell. She was an heiress to the Tiffany jewellery fortune and Bingham used her money to travel in South America. He was appointed a lecturer at Yale but found exploring far more interesting than teaching. His enthusiasm for exploring extended to women as well and he took full advantage of his travels away from home.

In 1906 Bingham traced Simon Bolivar’s routes through Venezuela and Columbia in the 1820s. In 1909 he explored historic South American trade routes and took the old one from Buenos Aires to Lima in Peru, going on to Cuzco. In 1911 he led a small expedition to Peru in search of the ‘lost city’ of  Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Inca Manco Capac II, who fought against the Spanish conquerors in the 1530s. This took Bingham and his party of seven to Cuzco and from there by mule and on foot to a small settlement called Mandor Pampa, near Aguas Calientes, where they encountered a local farmer named Melchor Arteaga. Through Bingham’s policeman-interpreter, Arteaga told him that there were extensive ruins high in the mountains nearby at what Arteaga in his native Quechua called Machu Picchu, meaning "old mountain".

They climbed up to the ruins next morning through a persistent drizzle of rain. No one else in Bingham’s party showed any interest, but Bingham, Arteaga and the interpreter spent two exhausting hours clambering up the mountain to a small hut occupied by peasants who were growing crops there. They greeted the American hospitably and deputed a small boy to show him the astonishing things close by. They soon came to what Bingham called ‘an unexpected sight, a great flight of beautifully constructed stone terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and 10 feet high.’ They continued along one of the terraces: ‘Suddenly I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stonework.’ The ruins were overgrown by trees, bamboo thickets and tangles of vines and covered with moss, but the white granite walls were ‘carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together’ and the scene ‘fairly took my breath away.’

Bingham was sure he had discovered Vilcabamba. He believed that to the end of his life, mistakenly as it turned out, and he was fascinated by the mystery and magic of the place, with the great snowy peaks looming above it. Returning in succeeding years he took thousands of photographs. He also took thousands of objects to the United States for study and safekeeping, which was to cause wrangling between the Peruvian government and Yale University for years afterwards.

After the First World War Bingham went into politics in Connecticut and was US senator for the state at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. He and Alfreda had seven children but by 1937 she could stand his persistent infidelity no longer and divorced him. In the 1950s he had a controversial role as head of President Truman’s new Loyalty Review Board, which made it easier to dismiss civil servants for Communist sympathies. He died in Washington DC at the age of 80 in 1956.

The Spanish conquistadors never saw Machu Picchu and consequently never wrote about it. A few other outsiders had seen it in the years before Bingham, but he was the one who revealed it to the world at large and it made him famous. He has a moon crater named after him and the character of Indiana Jones is thought to owe something to him but he is not highly regarded by scholars. He was not trained in archaeology, his theories were wrong and the real Vilcabamba was discovered by another American explorer, Gene Savoy, in 1964. Machu Picchu is now believed to have been the mountain retreat of the great Inca emperor Pachacutec (‘He who Shakes the Earth’), abandoned at some point after his death in 1472.