Kevin's Watch

Archaeologist recounts 1979 discovery of tomb that held oldest fragments of the Bible

NEW ORLEANS -- As often happens in other fields, the find of Gabriel Barkay's career as a biblical archaeologist rose at the intersection of careful calculation and happy accident -- provided in his case by a bored 12-year-old helper who whacked the stone floor of an Israelite burial vault with a heavy hammer.
His name was Nathan. Too scattered and mischievous to be of much help, he had been dispatched to clean a worked-over corner of Barkay's dig just outside the old city of Jerusalem, a largely overlooked archaeological site that Barkay thought might yield material for his dissertation.
But the stone floor turned out to be the ceiling of a concealed void beneath. And Nathan's hammer blow punched through to a repository containing hundreds of vessels of pottery, personal jewelry and other effects untouched for 2,600 years.
Among them was the find of finds -- two tiny, tightly rolled silver scrolls.
Carefully unpeeled over time, they revealed faint scratchings that took Barkay's breath away:
YHWH. The earliest appearance in Jerusalem of the unspeakable Hebrew word for God.
That find came in 1979 and still ranks on many scholars' lists as one of the most remarkable in modern biblical archaeological history.
Barkay, now 60 and a faculty member at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, retold the story of his find recently at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary's new Center for Archeological Research. One of his former students, Steven Ortiz, is a co-director of the center.

The site, Barkay recalled, was high on the west side of the Hinnom Valley, prime commercial real estate in today's Jerusalem, but once outside the walls of the old city. The prophet Jeremiah referred to it as a place of cult and sacrifice; it appears in the 15th and 18th chapters of the Book of Joshua in the allocation of land among the tribes of Israel.
Starting in 1975, Barkay scraped together some money, hired some helpers and began digging.
The site once controlled the approaches to Jerusalem from the southwest. For centuries, professional soldiers recognized the site's strategic value and set up quarters there, he said.
In various places around the dig, Barkay's team descended through layers of military encampments: from Allenby's British troops in 1916, to Ottoman Turks, to debris left by Rome's 10th Legion, which sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
He found the foundation of a lost Byzantine church.
He found evidence the site had been quarried about the time of Herod the Great, perhaps for stone to build the great Second Temple.
The quarrymen had unroofed a complex of caves used as burial vaults in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, about the time the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and carried its inhabitants off to exile.
The former caves yielded important information about burial customs of the time, but were nothing compared with Nathan's accidental discovery of the treasure trove below, Barkay said.
"This was a gusher of a find. Something totally unexpected and surprising," he said.
The repository contained the personal effects of some of the city's wealthy dead, including their jewelry: 300 intact pottery vessels, 125 pieces of silver, five pieces of gold, arrowheads, beads.
But most important were two little amulets, perhaps worn around a wrist or over the heart.
"By itself, this was a sensation," Barkay said.
Unrolled, each scroll of hammered silver was only about 2 inches long. But they contained 18 and 19 lines of text in tiny letters scratched only a quarter-inch tall, Barkay said.
In time, Barkay and other researchers came to see that both contained variations of the so-called triple blessing from the Book of Numbers, familiar to many today even if they do not recognize its provenance.
In the New International Version of the Bible, the blessing in Numbers 6: 24-26 says: "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace."
To this day, they stand as the oldest fragments of Bible ever found: "older by four centuries than the Dead Sea Scrolls," from the time of Jeremiah the prophet, Barkay said.
The sixth or seventh century find "means that if people were writing it on their jewelry, it means the text was already seen as sacred and already in common use," Ortiz said.
The find yielded another important insight, Barkay said: that the Babylonians may not have decimated Jerusalem as severely as once thought if some elite, wealthy Israelites were left behind, Ortiz said.
"It meant that that part of the city's history would be open to reinterpretation," he said.
Barkay's dig went on intermittently for seven seasons between 1975 and 1994, he said. In time, its archaeological value was thoroughly mined. Today, it lies under a modern building.
The amulets are preserved in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

'A once-in-a-lifetime discovery'

Exciting objects are emerging from beneath the mud in a Croatian river valley. Chris Arnot reports

Tuesday March 9, 2004
The Guardian

Being in the right place at the right time can be fortuitous in academia as in journalism. Had he not been one of the few foreign academics to be working in Croatia throughout the civil wars of the 1990s, Dr Vince Gaffney may never have got to hear about what he calls "the most remarkable site that I have, and will ever have, the privilege of being involved with - a once-in-a-lifetime discovery for any archaeologist".
Ten years ago, he was sitting outside a cafe on the island of Brach with colleagues from Birmingham University's field archaeology unit, watching distant military helicopters lifting injured Croatian soldiers from Split. "The national army had taken back some territory and there was a hell of a party that night," he recalls. "There was a lot of firing into the air. Then somebody pulled a pin out of a grenade and handed it to me."

Fortunately, the grenade was hurled into a field, where it exploded without loss of life or limb. The man who is now director of the Institute for Archaeology and Antiquity at Birmingham had survived to dig another day and, some years later, to follow up those rumours.

"Archaeology wasn't high on the national agenda while the country was falling apart," he says. "But in 2001, I was on a sabbatical, looking at pots in Split, when I was asked by Ante Milosevic from the Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments if I'd like to visit the site we'd heard about at the valley of the River Cetina."

What Gaffney found there exceeded his wildest expectations. Here was evidence of previous Balkan wars spanning many millennia. Some of the metalwork dated back to the neolithic period, 6,000 years BC. "Divers were coming up from the water and holding aloft Bronze-Age swords like the Lady of the Lake brandishing Excalibur," Gaffney recalls. To find one bronze sword is enough to set an archaeologist's pulse racing. To find more than 60 was almost heart-stoppingly exciting. In addition, there were over 30 Graeco-Illyrian helmets, a Roman legionary dagger, plus jewellery, axes and spearheads.

Among his many questions was why this site had not been unearthed before. "I discovered that a Croatian archaeologist had excavated some remains in the 1950s, but his findings had never been published," says Gaffney. "There were two reasons why so much more came to light decades later. One was the building in 1990 of a hydro-electric dam. A Serb attempt to bomb the dam a few years later led to the scouring of the banks. Metalwork that had been buried in the mud began to fall out, and house timbers were exposed. Organic deposits had preserved them."

It began to dawn on Gaffney that an entire historic landscape had survived. "There had been a string of settlements up and down the river," he says. "I emailed a colleague, Dr David Smith, who specialises in environmental archaeology. When he arrived here, he said it was rather like how it must have been standing on the Somerset Levels 100 years ago, before anything had been discovered."

The Cetina valley, however, is anything but level. There could be up to 14 significant sites spread over 80 sq km, set in a mountainous landscape. "The mountains formed a border between the Venetian and Turkish empires, and between the Roman empire and the Slavic kingdoms," says Gaffney, who is going back in the spring. "The British Academy has given us some financial backing for a three-year investigation, but I have to raise serious money to explore this area properly. We have to control the river, for instance, without destroying ancient timbers."

This part of the world has seen too much destruction already, as he knows so well. He still has the pin of that grenade from 10 years ago.

Study: Humans, Neanderthals Did Not Mate
By Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News

Neanderthal vs. Human

March 17, 2004 — The verdict is in: humans and Neanderthals did not date — much.

Genetic evidence from Neanderthal and early human bones indicates that if there was any intermixing of the two species, it was so little that it left no genetic trace. The discovery was published in the current edition of PloS Biology.

"I thought this was an incredibly significant paper," said Stanford University anthropologist Richard Klein. "So much of the time in paleoanthropology and other 'softer' sciences the arguments seem to go on forever."


This work by a team of European scientists led by Svante Paabo finally brings some solid evidence into the matter, he said.

For years anthropologists have been debating whether humans, when they wandered north into Europe from Africa more then 30,000 years ago, might have interbred with Neanderthals who lived there, said Klein. The evidence, until now, was mostly restricted to the shape of fossil bones.

Now, by isolating the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from four Neanderthals and five contemporary European early humans, the team has found no evidence of any noticeable genetic crossover.

Earlier attempts by Paabo's lab to extract intact genetic material from Neanderthal bones and comparing it to modern humans were inconclusive because of the difficulties of avoiding contaminating the samples with the genetic material of the lab workers who did the work, the researchers explain.

That's why this time they compared the mtDNA from Neanderthals to their contemporary humans — all of whom had mtDNA very different from modern humans.

That's not to say no mixing went on, the researcher cautioned. It would take a lot more samples from a larger number of fossils to rule out small amounts of mixing.

"About 50 early modern human remains would need to be studied to exclude a Neanderthal [sic] mtDNA contribution of ten percent," Paabo and his colleagues reported. "To exclude a five percent contribution, one would need to study more early modern human remains than have been discovered to date."

So the final word on how little the Neanderthals contributed to the modern human gene pool is that it's impossible to say.

For Klein's part, he suspects that humans and Neanderthals were just too different to find each other romantically interesting. "It's not that they couldn't, perhaps, but they probably weren't interested."

Early humans would have probably found Neanderthals very odd-looking and strange-acting, said Klein. So odd-looking, he said, that if you dressed a Neanderthal in a suit and put him on a subway, most people would probably move to another car.

The very prominent jaw and cheekbones, the large nose, as well as the swept-back forehead and low I.Q., would probably make a Neanderthal appear repulsive to most humans.

Women-Only Language Reemerges
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News



March 29, 2004 — In late April, Chinese archivists will unveil a rare collection of items featuring Nushu, a mysterious ancient language created by, and exclusively for, women.

The exhibition, to be held at the provincial archive of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China, appears to be part of a growing effort within China to both recognize and preserve Nushu, which many scholars feared was on the verge of extinction.

Nushu, meaning women's script, was held so securely by its speakers and writers that women used to burn manuscripts to keep them away from men, or they would bury items containing Nushu with female friends upon their deaths.

The language's origins are unclear, but most scholars believe Nushu emerged in the third century during a time when the Chinese government prohibited education of women. Practices such as arranged marriages and foot binding also prevented many women from travelling far beyond their homelands.

Orie Endo, professor of sociolinguistics and Japanese teaching methodology at Bunkyo University, has been called the world's foremost expert on Nushu. At an Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, she theorized that Nushu arose out of a custom called Jiebai Zimei, or "sworn sisterhood," in the counties of Daoxian, Jianghua, Jiangyong, and Yongjiang.

For the pact, women would pledge commitment to female friends who were not blood relations, Endo said.

"These 'sworn sisters' would go to festivals at the village shrine together, do Nuhong (textile arts and crafts) together, and generally were much closer to each other than they were to their real sisters," explained Endo.

She said that although village life was, in many ways, idyllic, due to the regions' relatively warm climate and fertile soil, "the hell of married life awaited."

According to Endo, young brides were forced into the homes of men they had never met before, and were bullied by their mother-in-laws to work and produce children, who often died at young ages.

"(The women) would compose songs expressing their sorrow," Endo said. "However, once separated (from other women), they could not, of course, sing together, nor could their voices travel the distances between villages. It can be hypothesized that the origin of (Nushu) can be found in the fervent desire to somehow express their feelings to each other, to find a way in which to communicate."

Nushu somewhat resembles Hanzi, a more common Chinese script, but Nushu has a more fluid, rhombic style, which Endo thinks could have been inspired from embroidery designs. Many of the objects in the upcoming exhibit reflect this idea, as they include aprons, handbags, handkerchiefs and scarves embroidered with Nushu characters.

"We have collected 303 pieces of heritage bearing the rare language during five trips to Yongjiang county, birthplace of the female language, over the past year," Liu Gening, one of the upcoming exhibit's archivists, told the Chinese news service Xinhuanet. "The oldest of them dates back to the late Qing Dynasty in the early 1900s, and the most recent pieces were from the 1960s or 1970s."

Liu added that Nushu still is in use, but only by very few elderly women in remote rural areas.

Endo and several other Asian linguists hope to keep the language alive through books, education, and further efforts at preserving what is believed to be the world's only female-specific language.

Scientists find world's first jewelry
From correspondents in Washington
April 16, 2004

A COLLAR made of shell beads estimated to be 75,000 years old and found in a cave in South Africa is believed to be the oldest known jewelry, appearing 30,000 years before what had previously been considered the first signs of civilization, researchers said.

Archaeologists discovered 41 beads the size of peas with holes bored in them in the Blombos Cave on the Indian Ocean coast, according to an article in the journal Science.

The discovery was made in a layer of sediment dating from the middle of the Stone Age, researchers said.

The beads were made from the shells of a mollusk native to nearby waters, and contained traces of red ochre, indicating they were colored with pigment.

The discovery reinforces the theory that civilization developed earlier than first believed, said Christopher Henshilwood, program director of the Blombos Cave Project and professor at the Centre for Development Studies of the University of Bergen in Norway.

"The Blombos Cave beads present absolute evidence for perhaps the earliest storage of information outside the human brain. Once symbolically mediated behavior was adopted by our ancestors it meant communication strategies rapidly shifted, leading to the transmission of individual and widely shared cultural values - traits that typify our own behavior," Henshilwood said.

"If the dates hold up we now seem to be seeing a trail of representational objects that is increasingly older as we move back into Africa," Randall White of New York University said in another article on the discovery.

Scientist: Oldest American skull found
By Jeordan Legon
CNN
Wednesday, December 4, 2002 Posted: 8:56 AM EST (1356 GMT)



The "Peñon Woman III" skull was found near Mexico City International Airport.

(CNN) -- Researchers said it may be the oldest skull ever found in the Americas: an elongated-faced woman who died about 13,000 years ago.

But perhaps more significant than the age, researchers said, is that the skull and other bones were found while a well was being dug near Mexico City International Airport. Because the remains were discovered outside the United States, scientists will be able to study the DNA and structure of the skeleton without the objection of Native American groups, who can claim and rebury ancestral remains under a 1990 U.S. law.

"Here Mexico is providing the opportunity to see what clues these bones can yield about man's arrival in the American continent," Mexican anthropologist Jose Concepcion Jimenez Lopez said.

The oldest skull in the Americas up to now, believed to be that of "Buhl Woman," was found in 1989 at a gravel quarry in Idaho. Scientists said it dates back 10,500 to 11,000 years. But researchers scarcely studied those bones before the Shoshone-Bannock tribe claimed and reburied them.

The "Peñon Woman III" -- which scientists believe is now the oldest skull from the New World -- has been sitting in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology since 1959.

At the insistence of geologist Silvia Gonzalez, who had a hunch that the bones were older than previously thought, the remains were taken to Oxford University to be carbon-dated. And indeed, tests proved Gonzalez's assertion.

Scientists said they believe that the Peñon Woman died anywhere from 12,700 to 13,000 years ago at the age of 27.

Did humans arrive in the Americas by boat?

Emboldened by her finding, Gonzalez will try to prove her theory that the bones of the Peñon Woman belong not to Native Americans, but to descendants of the Ainu people of Japan.

She said she bases her hypothesis on the elongated, narrow shape of the Peñon Woman's skull. Native Americans, she said, are round-faced with broad cheeks. "Quite different from Peñon Woman," she said.

She said she believes descendants of the Ainu people made their way to the New World by island hopping on boats.

"If this proves right, it's going to be quite contentious," said Gonzalez, who teaches at John Moores University in England and received a grant last week from the British government to conduct her research. "We're going to say to Native Americans, 'Maybe there were some people in the Americas before you, who are not related to you.' "

Gonzalez's theory is controversial but gaining credence in scientific circles, where up to now many believed hardy mammoth hunters were first to arrive in the Americas 14,000 to 16,000 years ago by crossing into Alaska from Siberia.

Gonzalez and other scientists said they believe people may have arrived in America as much as 25,000 years ago. She points to evidence of camps -- man-made tools, a human footprint and huts dating back 25,000 years -- that have been found in Chile as evidence of man's imprint on the Americas long before mammoth hunters.

Searching for answers to coastal migration

Gonzalez will embark on a three-year journey to prove her theory. As part of that journey, she will travel to Baja California to study the Pericue people, who shared the same elongated faces of the Peñon Woman. She said she believes that the Pericue, who for unknown reasons went extinct in the 18th century, may hold the answers to coastal migration of man from Asia to America.

The bones of the Peñon Woman will have DNA extracted to compare it with genetic matter of the Pericue, she said. Scientists also said they hope to study clothes fibers found near the skeleton and try to piece together how the woman died. Gonzalez said the skeleton does not show any wounds or obvious injuries.

"We still have a long way to go," she said. "But we have a good start."

Rocking the Cradle

In Iran, an archaeologist is racing to uncover a literate Bronze Age society he believes predates ancient Mesopotamia. Critics say he may be overreaching, but they concede his dig will likely change our view of the dawn of civilization

Discoveries made during a dig in southeastern Iran have convinced archaeologist Yousef Madjidzadeh that a desolate valley here was once home to a thriving—and literate—community. He calls it nothing less than "the earliest Oriental civilization." It's a dramatic assertion, but if he's right, it would mean the site, near Iran's Halil River, is older than Mesopotamia, a thousand miles to the west in what is today Iraq and long acknowledged as one of the earliest civilizations. Confirmation would overturn our understanding of the critical period when humans first began to live a literate urban life. It would also give sudden prominence to this forgotten corner of Iran.

It took an unlikely combination of events—a flood in this region, combined with a political thaw in distant Tehran, the Iranian capital—to bring Madjidzadeh here in the first place. Starting in 2001, local villagers began plundering ancient graves that had been exposed earlier that year by a flash flood. Iranian police confiscated hundreds of finely worked stone vessels carved with images of animals and architecture and decorated with semiprecious stones. Madjidzadeh strongly believes most were made in this valley more than 4,000 years ago.

But other scholars are cautious about Madjidzadeh's ideas, since no radio-carbon tests have been done and there isn't enough research on the area to conclusively cross-reference the finds with other sites. Even Madjidzadeh's American collaborator, University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Holly Pittman, gently suggests that there is not enough evidence yet to back up Madjidzadeh's claims. "He's a typical archaeologist," she says with a smile and a shrug. "His site is the center of the universe." Still, she adds, it is "a very exciting site. The fact that this was a third millennium civilization adds tremendously to our knowledge of the time."

Unearthing canyon's clues
Mysteries of Anasazi revealed in Chaco's centuries-old corn

By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
May 15, 2004

CHACO CANYON, N.M. - As Rich Friedman twists the handle of the T-shaped auger, the steel blades bite into loamy brown soil in a field where scientists suspect Anasazi farmers grew corn 1,000 years ago.

Friedman is part of a Boulder-led research team that collected 60 soil samples around the Chaco basin this month in an ongoing effort to determine where the Anasazi grew all the corn they would have needed to feed the thousands who periodically gathered in the canyon.


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In a paper published last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists matched the chemical fingerprint of seven ancient corn cobs found in Chaco's Pueblo Bonito to soils far from the canyon.

They concluded that the Anasazi, also known as the Ancestral Puebloans, hauled corn on their backs more than 50 miles to feed canyon dwellers.

That result is overturning the long-held belief that the Chacoans were agriculturally self-sufficient, growing everything they needed within the canyon through the clever use of captured and diverted surface runoff.

The findings also reinforce the view that Chaco was the ceremonial, administrative and economic center of a vast region spanning northwestern New Mexico's San Juan Basin.

"We continually underestimate the ability of these people to organize themselves on huge scales without the aid of modern technology," said University of Colorado archaeologist Linda Cordell, one of the authors of last fall's paper.

"That corn didn't just walk there all by itself," Cordell said. "People brought it there. That means they were organized on a regional scale that hasn't been seen in the San Juan Basin for hundreds and hundreds of years."

It now appears that during its heyday in the mid-1000s, Chaco Canyon was as dependent on outside supplies as an Antarctic base, said John Stein, an archaeologist with the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department.

Chaco was sustained by shipments of timber, pottery, stone and food carried in from the edges of the San Juan Basin. It also took in trade goods from Mexico, including copper bells, macaws and seashells from the Gulf of California.

Stein and the other corn project researchers are now expanding their investigation, which began three years ago. They're collecting new soil samples in and around Chaco Canyon, looking for likely Anasazi farming sites.

They plan to chemically analyze 20 to 40 more corn cobs collected by archaeologists decades ago inside the multistory sandstone "great houses" Chacoans built between A.D. 850 and 1150.

Then they'll try to match the cobs to sites throughout the arid, high-desert basin to determine where the corn was grown.

"A lot of ink has been spilled over the issue of farming in Chaco, but practically no systematic work has been done. We're trying to rectify that," Stein said recently, as the caravaning scientists pulled their pickups alongside Kin Kliz- hin, a great house seven miles southwest of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park visitor center.

The dark brown sandstone blocks of Kin Klizhin's 30-foot tower kiva loomed over the treeless landscape like a Scottish castle as the researchers traversed a flower-strewn field to collect bags of dirt for analysis back in a Boulder lab.

"It's been repeated over and over in textbooks that Chaco was some kind of breadbasket, and it's been held up as an example of making the desert bloom," Stein said.

"But this whole romantic idea that this was just a bunch of happy campers living in a utopia is not the case," he said.

"This place was a sorcerer's nest, an evil place," said Stein, whose views about Chaco reflect Navajo clan beliefs.

"And the soils here just suck pond water. It is patently obvious to me that they were not farming (all their corn) in Chaco Canyon," he said.

The Anasazi built 14 multistory great houses in Chaco Canyon. The structures averaged more than 200 rooms apiece and were up to four stories tall.

The largest and best-known site, Pueblo Bonito, held 700 rooms.

The purpose of the Chaco great houses has been debated for more than a century. One idea is that they were the sites of ritual feasts that pilgrims traveled from afar to attend.

During those events, Chaco Canyon's population may have swelled to 7,000 or more, Cordell said.

How did the Chacoans feed all those hungry mouths?

Paltry precipitation, a short growing season and unreliable flows in the Chaco Wash made canyon corn production precarious.

Even so, until the 1970s most archaeologists believed the Chacoans grew all their crops there, said Cordell, author of the textbook Archaeology of the Southwest, and director of the University of Colorado Museum.

That idea was supported by the findings of R. Gwinn Vivian, an Arizona archaeologist who uncovered an extensive system of dams, canals, ditches and walls used to channel Chaco runoff to farming terraces, garden plots and fields.

But in the 1970s, aerial photography and satellite images began to reveal the extent of the prehistoric road network that links Chaco Canyon to outlying communities across the San Juan Basin and beyond.

More than 400 miles of ancient roadways have been identified. They tie the core area around Pueblo Bonito to more than 150 other great houses in a region the size of West Virginia.

It became clear that the Chaco Canyon great houses were once the hub of the San Juan Basin. The roads were spokes connecting that hub to the outlying communities.

More recent studies have shown that the Anasazi used the roads to haul roof timbers to Chaco - without the help of draft animals or the wheel - from the base of the Chuska Mountains, 50 miles to the west. Clay pots and chert, a fine-grained rock used to make projectile points, also were imported from the area.

Cordell and others wondered if the same was done with corn.

She approached researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in Boulder about three years ago. Geochemist Larry Benson suggested using isotopic ratios of the element strontium to trace ancient corn cobs to the soils where they were grown.

The researchers analyzed the chemical content of seven prehistoric corn cobs collected at Pueblo Bonito by archaeologist George Pepper between 1886 and 1899. The 3- to 5-inch cobs had been in storage at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Centuries ago, when the plants that produced those cobs grew, their roots took up strontium from the soil. The ratio of the various forms, or isotopes, of strontium in the cobs provides a chemical fingerprint that can be used to find their source soils, Benson said.

The researchers collected soil and water samples from likely agricultural sites in and around Chaco Canyon. The strontium ratios in the Pueblo Bonito cobs matched soils from the base of the Chuskas and from the San Juan and Animas river flood plains 56 miles to the north.

"I think it's extremely valuable information," said archaeologist Steve Lekson, curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado.

"Chert and obsidian and finished pots in bulk - hundreds of thousands of pots - were coming into Chaco. And we knew they were bringing in timbers from the Chuskas," said Lekson, who is not involved with the corn research.

"But this is the first time that we can prove it was happening with corn as well," he said. "It puts the nails in the coffin of self-sufficiency, and it opens the door to another idea."

That other idea is the notion that Chaco Canyon served as a "corn bank" that distributed maize throughout the San Juan Basin in the 1000s. Surplus corn was brought to the central hub from fields on the edges of the basin, then redistributed to struggling farmers in other areas, according to the model first proposed by archaeologist James Judge in 1976.

"There were episodes in the past when there were people out there who were calling the shots and organizing things at Chaco - political leaders who lived in nice houses," Lekson said.

"Maybe the great houses were warehouses, residences and administrative offices," said Lekson, author of The Chaco Meridian.

And who were those Chaco leaders, living in luxury and calling the shots?

According to some Navajo clan traditions, they included a ruthless ruler known as the Gambler, who gained control of people by defeating them in various games of chance.

"The Navajo will tell you it was a powerful place ruled by a man who misused his power for black magic," Stein said.

"This place was in the service of the devil," he said. "It was like (the Nazi concentration camp) Auschwitz."

According to some of the Navajo stories, the Gambler enslaved the people he outwitted and forced them to build the Chaco great houses. The Gambler claimed one of the sandstone structures, Pueblo Alto, as his home.

After abusing his office and mistreating the masses, the Gambler was beheaded.

Then the large, circular ceremonial rooms within the great houses, known as great kivas, were razed "so that the power they created couldn't be abused" ever again, Stein said.

Various ceremonial secrets were bestowed on a handful of medicine men, who were then sent away from Chaco "in a deliberate diaspora to break up that power so it couldn't be drawn together again in one place," Stein said.

The building boom in Chaco Canyon ended in the mid-1100s and the region's population center shifted northward.

By 1300, Chaco Canyon and most of the northern Southwest had been abandoned by the Anasazi. Drought may have contributed to the abandonments.

Who were the Chacoan People?

• History: Inhabited Chaco Canyon A.D. 850-1250. Built area into a trading hub 1020-1120. Migrated to new areas 1100-1200.

• What they built: Canyon inhabitants were skilled masons and built multistory stone houses with hundreds of rooms oriented to solar, lunar and the four cardinal directions; also built roads between great houses.

• Culture: Included astronomical markers and water-control devices in great houses. May have used great houses as public ceremonial and trading centers. Made distinctive black-on-white Cibola pottery. Treasured turquoise for jewelry and trade.

• Anasazi or Ancient Puebloan?: Anasazi is a Navajo word for "enemy ancestors," a name Anglo explorers and archaeologists gave to prehistoric peoples of the Four Corners region. Some American Indians find Anasazi offensive and prefer Ancestral Puebloan or Ancient Puebloan.

Visiting the sites: Chaco Culture National Historical Park

• Open: Visitor center is open year-round, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., except on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.

• Where: 425 miles from Denver.

• Cost: $8 per vehicle.

• What to see: A nine-mile paved road provides driving access to five Chacoan sites. Self-guided walking trails are marked.

• Information: 505-786-7014 or www.nps.gov/chcu.

Explorers Still Seek El Dorado in the Mountains of Peru
By JUAN FORERO

Published: May 13, 2004


CUZCO, Peru - It was just a sparkle on the horizon, where the sun hit what appeared to be a flat plain on an otherwise steep, untamed mountain in the Peruvian Andes. But Peter Frost, a British-born explorer and mountain guide, surmised that the perch would have made a perfect ceremonial platform for Inca rulers.


So Mr. Frost and the adventure hikers he was leading slogged through heavy jungle growth and at 13,000 feet uncovered remnants of the Inca civilization that flourished here. They found looted tombs, a circular building foundation and the stonework of an aqueduct.

The discovery in 1999 of Qoriwayrachina (pronounced co-ree-why-rah-CHEE-nah) was instantly hailed as a major find. It evoked the romantic image of the swashbuckling explorer unearthing a Lost City, an image embodied by Hiram Bingham, the American who in 1911 made the greatest Inca discovery of them all, Machu Picchu.

In the 21st century it would seem that the remote, rugged mountains around Cuzco would have given up all of their secrets. But this region of southern Peru is still chock full of ruins, from settlements to cobblestone roads to water channels.

Recent carbon dating at Caral, north of Lima, has shown that an advanced civilization existed in Peru nearly 5,000 years ago, when the Egyptian pyramids were being constructed.

Mummies, well preserved, have been found at 20,000 feet or unearthed at construction sites around Lima. The Lord of Sipían tomb, considered one of the richest pre-Columbian sites ever found, was discovered in 1987, firing the ambitions of those hoping to make similar spectacular finds.

"Peru has one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the history of the planet," Mr. Frost explained. "That amounts to an awful lot of culture buried under the ground, or under vegetation."

It is in the mountains just northwest of here - the Vilcabamba range - that perhaps holds the most tantalizing, spectacular ruins.

Vilcabamba, which includes such sites as Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo and Inca Wasi, was the center of a great empire that 500 years ago stretched from modern-day Colombia to Chile. The Spaniards snuffed it all out, wiping out the last Inca holdouts in 1572 and then promptly abandoning much of the region.

That left it to men like Mr. Bingham, a Yale University historian who in one remarkable year discovered Machu Picchu and several other important settlements. But he did not find them all. He even forgot to take proper map bearings of one, leaving much of Vilcabamba open to modern-day explorers.

"I've run across foundations of buildings, foundations of roads, water channels, probably dozens of them," Mr. Frost said in an interview in his Cuzco home.

The finds are significant because while modern Peru is synonymous with the Inca, attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists who each year traipse across Inca ruins, archaeologists actually know very little about their civilization.

"About 90 percent has not been investigated," said Ives B'ejar, a Peruvian archaeologist. "There are maybe 1,000 books on Machu Picchu, but only five or six are really scientific."

Johan Reinhard, 60, an archaeologist and anthropologist who holds the title of explorer in residence at National Geographic, is a proponent of vigorous exploration combined with serious scientific research.

Known for his discovery of frozen mummies at 22,000 feet in Argentina, Mr. Reinhard says it is important to find and catalog sites in Peru before they are looted or destroyed. "If you don't do it now, some of these things will be gone, and they'll be gone forever," he said.

To many like Mr. Frost and Mr. Reinhard, the powerful hold of discovering ruins swallowed by jungle is as strong today as it was early last century when Mr. Bingham laced his boots and embarked on what he called his "unbelievable dream."

"It's the Indiana Jones fantasy," said Scott Gorsuch, 52, whose sharp eye led to the discovery of Qoriwayrachina, with Mr. Frost. "It's really not more complicated than that - the search for El Dorado, this idea that there are lost cities out there waiting to be found."

Ancient Code Stumps Enigma Code-Breakers

By Alex Thompson, PA News


The meaning of a 250-year-old cryptic inscription etched on a garden monument remains a mystery today despite initial efforts to solve the riddle by Second World War code-breakers from Bletchley Park.

Past and present experts from the Buckinghamshire centre gathered at the Shepherd’s Monument in rural Staffordshire after being invited to visit the site as part of attempts to decipher the letters, rumoured to point the way to the Holy Grail.

The marble slab, depicting a mirror image of a painting by Nicholas Poussin, with the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. etched beneath, was constructed circa 1748.

It is flanked by two columns and set among rhododendrons in a corner of the garden at Shugborough, the ancestral home of the Earls of Lichfield.

Oliver Lawn, 85, and his wife Sheila, 81, codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park during the war pledged their support to the project.

On first inspection, Mr Lawn, who was studying maths at Cambridge when he was asked to help break the German Enigma code, said he thought the task required some lateral thinking and a classical education.

He said he and his wife, who met while at the Buckinghamshire site, would look for clues in Shugborough’s archives.

He said: “The inscription is obviously a classical reference. It’s either Latin or Greek and based on some historical happening.

“The picture’s a funny one. Why it’s a mirror image is very strange.” Christine Large, director at Bletchley Park, said there were a number of possibilities the codebreakers had to consider.

One was that the letters were meaningless and etched on the monument to tease future generations.

The other was that it was not a message itself but the key to another message elsewhere.

Ms Large said it was very unlikely the code would be broken if it was a “one to one” – written from person to another.

She said: “This looks to us as if it’s probably going to need language expertise – maybe skills in Greek and maybe forgotten languages – as well as mathematics and puzzles.”

Ms Large thought language mapping techniques could be used and said the most important thing was to keep an open mind.

She said she hoped visitors to Bletchley Park would be able to assist.

“Through visual displays and code and cipher workshops, we will expose the problem to as wide an age range as possible with all sorts of different backgrounds in the hope one will throw up the clue.

“As to when that is, remains an enigma,” she added.

Shugborough’s general manager, Richard Kemp, said the monument had to be considered in its entirety.

“Bletchley Park are saying it’s not just the words, it’s the juxtaposition of the words, it’s the angle of the shepherd’s staffs, it’s the surroundings, it’s the totality of the site.

“They even say they want to get on to the top to see if there’s any significance up there.”

Mr Kemp said the Anson family, who built the estate, commissioned the monument and had strong associations with the Knights Templars.

He said: “The inscription is rumoured to indicate the location of the Holy Grail, which must rank as one of the world’s great mysteries.”

The Bletchley Park team were accompanied by the famous Enigma decoding machine.

World's 'oldest university' unearthed in Egypt
Wednesday, May 26, 2004 Posted: 4:04 PM EDT (2004 GMT)

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Polish archaeologists have unearthed 13 lecture halls believed to be the first traces ever found of ancient Egypt's University of Alexandria, the head of the project said Wednesday.

"This is the oldest university ever found in the world," Grzegory Majderek, head of the Polish mission, told The Associated Press.

The lecture halls, with a capacity of 5,000 students, are part of the 5th century university, which functioned until the 7th century, according to a statement from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

"This is the first material evidence of the existence of academic life in Alexandria," Majderek said. Knowledge of earlier intellectual pursuits in the Mediterranean coastal city came through historical and literary documents and materials.

Ancient Alexandria was home to a library, which was founded about 295 B.C. and burned to the ground in the 4th century. Ruins were never found, but Alexandria was an intellectual center where scholars are thought to have produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and edited Homer's works.

The auditoriums were found near the portico of the Roman Theater in the eastern part of the ancient city.

All the lecture halls are of identical dimensions. Each contains rows of stepped benches in a form of semicircle and an elevated seat apparently for the lecturer, the Antiquities Department statement said.

Alexandria has tried to recapture some of its intellectual glory, building a $230 million library on the city's renovated seaside promenade with help from around the world.

The new library, which opened in 2002, contains about 240,000 books, a planetarium, conference hall, five research institutes, six galleries and three museums.



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