Kevin's Watch

'If you like, this is where Greek history starts'

DNA analysis of Bronze Age bones will answer an ancient question, reports David Adam

Thursday May 27, 2004
The Guardian

'I have seen the face of Agamemnon." No, not the reaction of filmgoers after seeing Brian Cox's depiction of the Greek king in Troy, but that of the celebrated 19th century archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann after digging up a striking Bronze Age gold mask from ancient Greece.
Schliemann was not known for understatement - on excavating the ruins of Troy he said he had "opened a new world" for archaeology - but on this occasion he was wrong. The shaft graves at Mycenae where he found the mask have now been dated to 1500BC, and it would stretch even the historical flexibility of a Hollywood scriptwriter to place Agamemnon there several centuries before he led the Greeks in the Trojan war. The glittering death mask, treasure and the rest of the haul recovered from the graves were not his, but whose were they? The question has long puzzled archaeologists.

"These burials are unique in the Bronze Age," says Keri Brown of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. "These people seem to have cornered the market in gold, so how did they do this, who were they and how did they have this power?"

Working with the forensic science service, Brown and her team are turning to DNA fingerprints to solve the conundrum. Using genetic material painstakingly scraped from 3,500-year-old bones and teeth recovered from the graves, the scientists hope to establish whether the dozens of privileged individuals buried at Mycenae are part of the same family, or an unrelated collection of mercenary fighters. The answer will shine light on the social structure of one of the most influential periods in human history.

"If you like, this is where Greek history starts," says John Prag, an expert in Greek archaeology at the Manchester museum.

His group has already used facial reconstruction techniques to put flesh on the ancient bones and look for family resemblances, with some success. "We got a couple of pairs that were very clearly related but there comes a point where everybody's got two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth and we all look alike," Prag says.

Clues from the bones have also suggested the sex of those buried at Mycenae, as well as how old they were when they died. "But you can't tell from bones who is related to who," says Brown. "Only DNA can do that."

Scientists have worked out how to analyse strands of genetic material from animals and people who lived thousands of years ago. The key is being able to extract DNA from the hard structures like teeth and bones left behind after the rest of the corpse rots away. It's a tricky process, and the results are not always reliable, but researchers have used it to recover DNA from mammoths, sequence the genes of Neanderthals and confirm the identities of the Romanov family murdered during the Russian revolution.

The DNA strands are often broken or degraded (seemingly scuppering our chances of cloning a mammoth), so to analyse the Mycenae skeletons the Manchester team and the forensic scientists are searching for new types of genetic markers that are shorter than those used in conventional DNA fingerprinting. To complicate matters, Schliemann painted them with a sticky preservative that plays havoc with the sensitive chemistry used to isolate and copy the DNA molecules.

"We're spending a lot of time perfecting the experiments on other material before we tackle the Mycenae bones themselves," Brown says. "We want to get the extraction and analysis methods spot-on." The remains are carefully guarded by the National Museum in Athens; it took two years of form-filling and delicate negotiation to get the bone splinters and few odd teeth on the plane to Manchester.

Of the 19 individuals buried in the grave Brown's team are interested in, she has bone or teeth samples from 10 of them. Preliminary work suggests a 40% success rate with the DNA technique, which mean the family secrets of just four ancient Greeks will be revealed. It's not much, but it's a start.

"I'd like to go on to look at DNA from other bodies found in other parts of Greece from the same period," says Prag. "The modern Greeks would love to know they're descended from the ancient Greeks. But since 1500BC Greece has been invaded and occupied so many times I'm not sure we're going to get the answer they want."

Ancient Egyptians Were Jokesters
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

Humor Alleviates the Hum-Drum

June 2, 2004 —A recent series of lectures on ancient Egyptian humor given by a leading historian reveals that people thousands of years ago enjoyed bawdy jokes, political satire, parodies and cartoon-like art.

Related evidence found in texts, sketches, paintings, and even in temples and tombs, suggests that humor provided a social outlet and comic relief for the ancient Egyptians, particularly commoners who labored in the working classes.

The evidence was presented by Carol Andrews, a lecturer in Egyptology at Birbeck College, University of London, and former assistant keeper and senior research assistant in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum.

Andrews was unavailable for comment. Scott Noegel, who helped to arrange one of the lectures and is president of the American Research Center in Egypt's (ARCE) Northwest Chapter and is an associate professor in the Department of New Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington, told Discovery News that ancient Egyptian humor consisted of at least five basic categories.

They included political satire, scatological and vomiting humor, jokes concerning sex, slapstick, and animal-based parodies.

For satire, Noegel explained that commoners would make fun of leaders by showing pharaohs in an unflattering manner. For example, some leaders were depicted unshaven or "especially effeminate."

Drawings of defecating hyenas and drunken, vomiting party guests are among the existing examples of scatological humor, while the sex-based jokes consisted of "innuendoes and outright erotica," he said.

Slapstick comedy included drawings that showed people suffering unfortunate accidents, such as hammers falling on heads, or passengers tipping out of boats.

The ancient Egyptians had a special fondness for animal humor, given the many examples of sketches on papyrus, paintings, and other drawings, according to Noegel.

He said, "(The images show) ducks pecking at someone's buttocks, baboons and cats out of control, animals riding on top of other unlikely animals, baboons playing instruments, and animals drinking and dining."

One papyrus shows a mouse pharaoh, gallantly posed in his chariot pulled by two dogs, speeding towards a group of feline warriors. Yet another papyrus depicts a lion and an antelope playing a board game. The lion lifts a game piece as though in victory, while the antelope falls back in his chair.

"From everything that I've seen and heard, I believe that their sense of humor was very similar to our own," said Vincent Jones, who organized one of Andrews' lectures this week, and is president of the ARCE Georgia Chapter.

Jones told Discovery News that he attended another recent lecture by Guillemette Andreu, curator of the Louvre's Egyptian collection. He said Andreu presented a list of Egyptian excuses as to why people did not come into work. The top three were illness, getting married, and sorry, but I am building a house now.

"It was funny to learn that people have been creative at getting out of work for thousands of years," Jones said.

Humor was not limited to the mundane. A drawing on the wall of the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri shows an obese "queen of Punt" in front of a tiny donkey. The inscription for the sketch reads, "The donkey that had to carry the queen." The drawing gained popularity and was copied, cartoon-style, many times from the original.

The land of Punt, which historians believe might have been the area that is now Libya or Ethiopia, held near-mythical status for Egyptians in the ancient world. Animal skins and other exotic goods came from Punt via trade routes. Historians also think that Bes, the ancient Egyptian god of humor, infants, home life, song, and dance, originated in Punt.

While the Egyptians built no temples to honor Bes, shrines for the chubby, bearded dwarf with uncombed hair were placed in many homes. The ancient Egyptians believed that anytime a baby smiled or laughed for no reason, Bes was in the room making faces.

Water woes, not wars, ended Angkor's empire
Tuesday, June 8, 2004 Posted: 11:24 AM EDT (1524 GMT)


SIEM REAP, Cambodia (AP) -- After resisting Siamese invaders for years, Cambodia's greatest city and civilization -- temple-studded Angkor -- was dealt a death blow with its final sacking in 1431.

Or, so say the history books.

But an international research team now thinks its demise was set much earlier, by something that is the bane of many modern urban societies -- ecological failure and infrastructure breakdown.

"They created ecological problems for themselves and they either didn't see it until it was too late or they couldn't solve it even when they could see it," said Roland Fletcher, an archaeologist working on the Greater Angkor Project.

Angkor city, the capital of several Hindu kings who ruled over large swaths of Southeast Asia, flourished from the 9th to the 14th centuries, leaving a legacy of architectural splendor in its myriad of temples, including the country's cultural icon, Angkor Wat.

Project members are working on the theory that Angkorians created an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals -- for irrigation, trade and travel -- that began to silt up as the population grew, and perhaps saw failures that caused flooding and water shortages.

Experts say Angkor's demise is important to study because it can provide lessons for dealing with modern urban problems.

Damian Evans, an archaeologist working on the project, said Angkor's canals were the equivalent of today's freeways and our telephone lines are a form of communication that can be equated with the old elephant paths.

"It's the same kinds of problems manifesting themselves in different ways," he said.

Seeking evidence for its theories, the Greater Angkor Project team is excavating waterways and digging up pottery and pollen grains. Members pore over radar ground-images collected by NASA and photographs taken from an ultralight plane to map the remnants of the ancient civilization, such as rice paddies, houses, shrines and canals.

About 40 people are working on the current phase of the project, a joint effort of Australia's University of Sydney, the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient and the Cambodian government's Apsara Authority, which manages Angkor.

In the past, archaeologists primarily focused on studying the intricately carved stone walls of Angkor's temples, which tell stories from Hindu mythology.

The Greater Angkor Project is "essentially a shift from dominantly looking at the churches and cathedrals (temples) of a city to looking at housing, drainage, roads -- the daily life stuff," said Fletcher.

Fletcher, a professor at the University of Sydney, theorizes that population pressures and water woes made it harder to trade and communicate. People began migrating south toward the area around what is now Phnom Penh, where subsequent capitals were set up.

The Greater Angkor Project's first goal was to determine how far out Angkor city spread before trying to determine what led to its fall.

They learned the metropolitan area extended far beyond Angkor Thom, the 700-year-old walled city that houses Angkor Wat. Angkor was home to about 750,000 people and covered some 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) -- much larger than any other preindustrial development and similar to the shape and size of modern cities, Fletcher said.

"It's like a Los Angeles. It's not like Hong Kong," he said. "Lots and lots of open space, big gaps around the houses, huge freeways, which are the canals in this case."

The city's economy was based on rice, and rice paddies spread along dozens of canals, at least one up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) long. A network of reservoirs, canals and bridges was created to move people and goods and to ensure there was enough water to grow rice.

Angkor engineers even changed the direction that some rivers flowed in what essentially was "a human-built landscape for growing rice," Fletcher said.

The system had three zones: catching water in the north, storage in the center, and dispersal in the south. The engineers also created a manmade river to join two natural ones.

As Angkor's population grew, so did the strains on its intricate water system, the scientists say.

"The more modifications they made, the more problems they ran into, and the harder and harder it became to implement solutions to the problems," said Evans, who uses aerial photos, NASA images and on-the-ground investigations to generate a computer map of the water system.

The growing population also forced people to venture into the nearby Kulen hills to cut down trees for fuel and to clear land for growing rice. That would have resulted in rain runoff carrying sediment down into the canal network, Evans said.

"Anything that happened to that water management system would have had a great deal of consequence for all of the people," he said.

There are signs of apparent breaches and fixes to the water system, although it's hard to tell if they happened during the Angkor era.

"If you think of the freeway and the railway system failing in a modern city -- it's like that," Fletcher said. "It's an infrastructure problem. Everything else might be working fine, but if the infrastructure goes, this thing can't function."

Stonehenge creators' remains found Jun 21 2004



Remains found near Stonehenge are almost certainly of an ancient people who built the monument, excited archaeologists have revealed.

Researchers investigating the origins of the seven 4,500 year-old skeletons found buried on Salisbury Plain last year have run chemical tests to trace their origins and age.

They have concluded they are of people from south-west Wales - the same region from where bluestones forming the world-famous iconic monument originate.

Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, of Wessex Archaeology, said: "In medieval times, people believed that the stones could only have been brought to Stonehenge by Merlin the Wizard.

"For the first time we have found the mortal remains of one of the families who were almost certainly involved in this monumental task."

The seven skeletons were found by workmen digging trenches for a housing development at Boscombe, Wiltshire, and have been dubbed the Boscombe Bowmen because of the flint arrowheads found in the graves.

Scientists say the bones of the three children, a teenager and three men are so similar they must be related.

They have tested the enamel on their teeth which as it forms in developing years, provides a unique fingerprint of where they grew up.

Tests by scientists of the British Geological Survey on the strontium isotopes in the Bowmen's teeth show that they grew up in a place where the rocks are very radioactive. This was either in the Lake District or Wales.

The finds will be on display in Salisbury Museum in the exhibition Changing Places from Saturday July 3.

Genghis Khan: Father to Millions?
By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News


June 22, 2004 —Genghis Khan left a legacy shared by 16 million people alive today, according to a book by a Oxford geneticist who identified the Mongol emperor as the most successful alpha male in human history.

Regarded by the Mongolians as the father of their nation, Genghis Khan was born around 1162. A military and political genius, he united the tribes of Mongolia and conquered half of the known world with a cavalry riding on grass-fed ponies.



By the time Genghis died in 1227, his empire stretched from the Pacific coast of China to the Caspian Sea.

Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University and author of "Adam's Curse," a study of the Y chromosome, believes Genghis's "super Y" chromosome survived and proliferated as far as the British Isles. He has just begun to check it at Oxford Ancestors, a leading provider of DNA-based services for use in personal ancestry research.

"We will offer British men genetic tests to see if they are Genghis's descendants. It is possible that the Mongol emperor's Y chromosome spread as far as the U.K. through gradual immigration from further East over the centuries," Sykes told Discovery News.

The genetic testing follows another Oxford study, which involved a survey of the Y chromosome — which is passed unchanged from father to son — from all over Central Asia.

The researchers found one Y chromosome fingerprint that was identical in eight percent of the male population.

"This was highly unusual and suggested that they may all have descended from one man living in the fairly recent past. By seeing what small changes had occurred, it was possible to estimate the time at which this common ancestor lived, and it was consistent with an origin in the 12th or 13th century," Sykes said.

Matching that evidence with the overlap between where the chromosome was abundant and the geographical extent of the Mongol empire established by Genghis Khan in the 12th century, the researchers concluded it was Genghis' chromosome.

The Mongol emperor's habit of killing the men and inseminating the women when his army conquered a new territory, coupled with handing the Empire and other wealth to his sons, and their sons, would explain how the chromosome came to such prevalence today, said Sykes.

The final piece of evidence came from the Hazara, a hill tribe in Pakistan who had a strong oral history of being descended from Genghis Khan.

"The Y chromosome was present in the Hazara, but not in the surrounding tribes, who did not have this oral history. Though the evidence is circumstantial, it is, I believe, very strong," Sykes said.

Finding Genghis Khan's tomb, one of the great secrets of all time, could provide the definitive evidence, leading to a direct comparison of Genghis' Y chromosome with those of modern men.

Sykes' hypothesis seems to be consistent with history, according to David Morgan, a Mongol history specialist at the University of Wisconsin.

"There's no reason to doubt that Genghis Khan fathered a good crop of children, if one is to believe the testimony of contemporaries," Morgan told Discovery News.

Farming origins gain 10,000 years

Humans made their first tentative steps towards farming 23,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.
Stone Age people in Israel collected the seeds of wild grasses some 10,000 years earlier than previously recognised, experts say.

These grasses included wild emmer wheat and barley, which were forerunners of the varieties grown today.

A US-Israeli team report their findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The evidence comes from a collection of 90,000 prehistoric plant remains dug up at Ohalo in the north of the country.

The Ohalo site was submerged in prehistoric times and left undisturbed until recent excavations by Ehud Weiss of Harvard University and his colleagues.

This low-oxygen environment beautifully preserved the charred plant remains deposited there in Stone Age times.

Archaeologists have also found huts, camp fires, a human grave and stone tools at the site.

Most of the evidence points to the Near East as the cradle of farming. Indeed, the principal plant foods eaten by the people at Ohalo appear to have been grasses, including the wild cereals emmer wheat and barley.

Grass remains also included a huge amount of small-grained wild grasses at Ohalo such as brome, foxtail and alkali grass. However, these small-grained wild grasses were to disappear from the human diet by about 13,000 ago.

Anthropologists think farming may have started when hunter-gatherer groups in South-West Asia were put under pressure by expanding human populations and a reduction in hunting territories.

This forced them to rely less heavily on hunting large hoofed animals like gazelle, fallow deer and wild cattle and broaden their diets to include small mammals, birds, fish and small grass seeds; the latter regarded as an essential first step towards agriculture.

These low-ranking foods are so-called because of the greater amount of work involved in obtaining them than the return from the foods themselves.

Investigations at Ohalo also show that the human diet was much broader during these Stone Age times than previously thought.

"We can say that such dietary breadth was never seen again in the Levant," the researchers write in their Proceedings paper.

Baalbek identified as ancient city of Tunip
City was known to the ancient Egyptians

By Linda Dahdah
Daily Star staff
Friday, June 25, 2004


BEIRUT: After years of controversy, one Lebanese archaeologist believes he has finally located the ancient city of Tunip, a town mentioned in various Egyptian texts, as the "sun city," Baalbek.

Presenting the results of his latest discovery at the Lebanese Heritage Center at the Lebanese American University on Wednesday, Ibrahim Kawkabani explained exactly how he determined that Tunip was in fact Baalbek, located in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

Kawkabani began excavations in the city in June 1986 in the great hall in front of the Temple of Jupiter.

"I had two ideas in mind, that the Romans erected their temples on an archeological hill and second, that they leveled part of the hill's conical top to widen the building space," he said.

Among the different small discoveries that he made, Kawkabani found flints, axes and a scarab dating back to the early 18th and 16th centuries BC.

He also found broken pieces of pottery dating from 1200 to 1600 BC, the most significant find being a piece of pottery only a few centimeters in length dating back to 1200 BC. It showed a ritual scene and was sealed with cuneiform writing which reads: "Kissib Abi-Malek, Ibn (... ), Baal Tunip" (Baal is the Canaanite word for "Lord").

"The importance of this piece is twofold: it refers to Tunip, the mystery city ... and the signature was discovered in the great hall excavations of Baalbek," said Kawkabani.

The discovery pushed Kawkabani to go over all the documents from Egypt to Mesopotamia that mention Tunip, to better understand its presumed location.

Confirmation came from a 15th century BC message sent by Amen-em Opet to the pharaoh's military chief, referring to a city called Eastern Heliopolis.

Heliopolis is the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian city the Egyptians called Re-pi (Re is the God of the sun and pi means "house").

"It appears that Greeks used the same name for Baalbek that the pharaohs used to refer to Aton-pi. As Semitic languages didn't write vowels they dropped the 'A' of Aton-pi, which became Ton-pi or Tunip, meaning City of Aton - the Sun God."

"Egyptians used to consider Re as a national god whose power was limited to the Egyptian land, while Aton was considered universal with overwhelming power over all countries, including the city-state of Baalbek.

"Thus, from Tuthmosis III (15th century BC) until Ramses II (13th century BC), Egyptians used to call Baalbek Tunip, city of the sun, and the Greeks hellenized the name after conquering the East, when Tunip became Heliopolis. It remained so until the Arab conquest when Baalbek recovered its original Canaanite name of Baal al-Beqaa or lord of the plain."

Study Finds Craftsmen Might Be Neanderthal
Archaeologists Reexamine Bones From Ancient Cave
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 8, 2004; Page A03


For decades, evidence from ancient caves suggested that the world's first works of art were created by modern humans when they arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago, but new research has revived the possibility that the early craftsmen may have been Neanderthals.



Archaeologists using modern dating techniques showed that the supposedly ancient remains of modern humans found buried in a cave in Vogelherd, in southwest Germany, were only between 3,900 and 5,000 years old, far younger than the lovely figurines that someone carved inside the cave more than 30,000 years ago.

Vogelherd, world famous since its discovery in 1931, was the last significant site that had directly linked modern humans with "Aurignacian" artwork and tools from the period between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago when humankind first made objects with aesthetic as well as utilitarian purposes.

"Vogelherd has dated young, like several other sites," said paleoanthropologist Nicholas J. Conard of Germany's University of Tubingen. "Now we're in the uncomfortable position of having a question and no answers."

The Aurignacian culture encompasses several millenniums when modern humans coexisted in Europe with Neanderthals, the Ice Age predecessors who had lived there for at least 100,000 years.

Neanderthals became extinct about 30,000 years ago. How this happened -- whether through disease, intermarriage or obliteration by their cleverer successors -- is one of anthropology's persistent mysteries.

"For years, the thinking was that in the Aurignacian -- with its evidence of art, musical instruments and ornaments -- we were dealing with people like you and me," Conard said in a telephone interview from his Tubingen office. "If Neanderthals were doing it, that would be a shock."

But possible. "This is a good thing, because it shows that maybe you should be careful what you take for granted," said University of California paleoanthropologist Clark Howell, in a telephone interview from Berkeley. "I would argue that there are still a few bits and pieces [of human remains] that have passed all the tests. They are not Neanderthal, but they're not conclusive, either."

Conard, reporting in this week's issue of the journal Nature with co-authors Pieter M. Grootes of the University of Kiel and Fred H. Smith of Loyola University of Chicago, reexamined the work of Gustav Riek, the pre-World War II German archaeologist who excavated Vogelherd before modern radiocarbon and spectrographic dating methods were invented.

Previously dated animal bones from the cave were more than 30,000 years old -- contemporary with a dozen figurines found in the cave. "There's no question they're Aurignacian," Conard said. "The figurines are mammoth, wooly rhinos, horses, reindeer -- Ice Age animals."

The human remains, however -- a skull, a jawbone, a thigh, an upper arm and two vertebrae -- proved to be much younger, "intrusive" objects buried beneath the older artifacts. "Riek was very famous, but it seems clear that while he was digging, he messed it up," Conard said. "I have no reason to believe he falsified his results."

Conard described the Vogelherd cave as the "last linchpin" tying modern humans to Aurignacian artifacts. Without Vogelherd, experts are left in an odd situation in which there are no significant human remains -- modern or Neanderthal -- that can be linked to any Aurignacian artifacts.

"It's amazing how few human remains there are," said University of Arizona archaeologist Steven Kuhn, reached by telephone in Ankara, Turkey, where he is working on an excavation. "It could be a change in burial custom. Or it could be that we just haven't found the sites."

He said his own excavation would not resolve the dispute: "It's a 40,000-year-old site with lots of ornaments," he said. "But there are no human fossils associated with it. We wish we knew who lived there."

Kuhn was skeptical about the possibility that Neanderthals created the early artwork, noting that for tens of thousands of years in Europe "they're not doing this, then suddenly they are? It points to something extraordinary happening, either the arrival of modern humans or something else" as yet unknown.

New York University's Randall White, working this summer in France, also noted the growing evidence that while Neanderthals sometimes buried their dead in their homes, they never buried them with artifacts. He added that there is virtually no evidence that Neanderthals made artwork in any context.

"There is no association of Neanderthal remains with Aurignacian artifacts," White said in a telephone interview from Bordeaux. But, he added, "that said, it would not surprise me to find some."

He acknowledged that the Vogelherd findings had somewhat undercut the argument in favor of modern humans as the ancient artisans.

"We don't understand what [modern humans] did with their dead," White said. "Maybe you don't bury them, but you transform them into ornaments instead. Or maybe you take them out to the woods and bury them there. We'd never find them."

1. Edgar Cayce...I'm sorry, but I really can't accept testimony from psychics as actual evidence; I recognize, however, that his testimony really isn't crucial to your argument.

2. "The only evidence that the Egyptians built them is the fact they are in Egypt and Herodotus claimed he witnessed them being built. What a Liar!" Well, as we all know, just because we haven't found concrete evidence to support an idea doesn't mean that the idea is false...you can't simply discount one source because it supports an idea contrary to what you're trying to prove.

3. Regarding the huge blocks: "No amount of hands could be placed upon it to push nor were there ropes strong enough." Now, I don't know too much about the area, but could nearby animals have been used to help pull? With enough of them (and lots of ropes) with the help of slaves, could they then have moved the blocks with a steeper incline than the one you describe?

4. "I'll post a little bibliography at some point too." Now, I'm not really going to contest your facts, as they pretty much fit with the little I know of anthropology and archaeology, but I would like to see some kind of bibliography for the heaps of info you unload onto us!

Archaeologist believes find is proof of lost Indian culture

By The Associated Press




BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- A government archaelogist believes ancient fire pits and pottery recently unearthed in south-central Montana are the works of an Indian culture that disappeared hundreds of years ago from its home range in modern-day Colorado and Utah.

Glade Hadden, a Bureau of Reclamation archaeologist, said evidence found at the site near Bridger strongly suggests the area was inhabited by Fremont people, an Indian culture known for its masonry work and fine pottery.

"There is no doubt in my mind," Hadden said.

His could be a controversial conclusion, but it could also provide a clue to determining what happened to the Fremont people, who are believed to have disappeared from their home range in the 14th century.

The Fremont people lived in what is now Utah and Colorado, mostly from about 300 A.D. to 1200 A.D.

"Then they disappeared," Hadden said. "I mean they flat disappeared. No one knows what happened to them."

Last month, while on an excavation south of Bridger, Hadden said he saw a piece of ancient earthenware that he immediately recognized.

"I knew right away that it was Fremont pottery," he said. "I grew up with Fremont pottery. I know what it looks like."

Working with students from Montana State University-Billings, Hadden also unearthed an intricate fire pit that further convinced him of the significance of the find.

The pit, about 20 inches deep and 2 feet wide, was expertly lined with a thin layer of sandstone slabs. The joints were plastered with mud and worked to a smooth surface, all identical to the work of Fremont people, said Hadden, whose wife was also involved in the excavation.

"We've dug a lot of fire pits over the years, but I've never seen anything like the amount of work that was put into this one," said Johanna Hadden, an assistant professor of education at MSU-Billings.

Hadden has yet to submit samples of the items found for tests that could determine their age. But he said the site appears to have been in use sometime between 1400 and 1600.

If his theory is correct that the site was inhabited by Fremont people, the question becomes: How and why did they end up moving so far north from their historic range?

Questions remain about whether the Fremont people were assimilated, annihilated or forced north by intruding people, Hadden said.

Hadden suspects a combination of environmental factors and aggressive newcomers may have resulted in a move north.

"We want to find out what kind of people were here and what were they doing," he said.

In Utah this spring, researchers announced they had found a well-preserved Fremont site on a former ranch. The Range Creek site, protected from intruders for 50 years by the rancher who owned it, reportedly contains large numbers of rock art sites, remote granaries in the rock wall and pit houses.

Md. Field Dig May Reach Back 16,000 Years


By Associated Press

August 16, 2004, 3:08 PM EDT


RAWLINGS, Md. -- Robert D. Wall is too careful a scientist to say he's on the verge of a sensational discovery.

But the soybean field where the Towson University anthropologist has been digging for more than a decade is yielding hints that someone camped there, on the banks of the Potomac River, as early as 14,000 B.C.

If further digging and carbon dating confirm it, the field in Allegany County could be among the oldest and most important archaeological sites in the Americas.

"You're talking about the time period of the first settlement of the New World by human beings," said Mark Michel, president of the Archaeological Conservancy. "It would be extremely significant if it pans out."

The discovery of a human presence in Maryland anywhere near 14,000 B.C. would feed the debate about when the continent was first peopled, and by whom.

For now, the age of Wall's find is still in doubt. Three radiocarbon dates taken from buried organic matter found there all suggest the site dates to roughly 14,000 B.C. But another, derived from charcoal found beside an ancient hearth at the same depth, was pegged to 7,000 B.C.

"Not as old as we thought," Wall said. The challenge now, he said, is to find another charcoal sample for more carbon dating along with a tool or other artifact whose design clearly shows its age.

Archaeologist Dennis Curry of the Maryland Historical Trust said scientists were taught for decades that the first humans came to North America after the last Ice Age ended about 13,500 years ago. According to the theory, they crossed a "land bridge" from Asia into what is now Alaska and spread quickly across the continent.

The theory is supported by the stone tools they left behind -- all less than 13,500 years old. Their tool technology was named "Clovis" for the New Mexico town where it was first described.

But in the past decade, a handful of excavations in the eastern United States have turned up traces of different tools and encampments buried beneath the "paleo-Indian" sites of the Clovis people. Those materials are presumed to be older, or pre-paleo.

For example, burned wood found with tools at a Virginia site called Cactus Hill, south of Richmond, was dated to 16,000 B.C. Spear points and bone found in a rock shelter at Meadowcroft, Pa., near Pittsburgh, tested up to 19,000 years old.

But such finds have been controversial. Skeptics argue that the sandy soil at Cactus Hill might have allowed ground water to mix older organic matter with much younger artifacts, which would fool carbon-dating technology.

And the layering of deposits in rock shelters is notoriously complex. Meadowcroft's excavators might have simply confused older layers with younger ones.

A pre-paleo find at the western Maryland site would be harder to dispute, Curry said. On the floodplain where Wall is working, silt is deposited by the river, and the soil builds up over time. Ancient artifacts are buried in simple, stable, horizontal layers, with the oldest buried the deepest.

Uncovering the secrets of the Great Pyramid

August 29 2004 at 01:18PM

By Annick Benoist

Paris - Two French amateur archaelogists this week published a book in which they claim to have located the secret burial chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops near Cairo, the largest pyramid ever built.

According to the study of the Great Pyramid, a fourth, undiscovered room lies underneath its so-called Queen's chamber, and is likely to have been the burial chamber for Cheops, an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled from 2560 to 2532 BC.

Cheops' final resting place has never been found despite decades of investigation at the site, but the French researchers are being denied access to the pyramid to put their theory to the test.

Gilles Dormion, an architect by training, and Jean-Yves Verd'hurt, set out to probe the mysteries of the Great Pyramid with a first trip in 1986, returning to the site in 1998.

Using a technique called microgravimetry, which measures the density of materials, they discovered what appeared to be a cavity underneath the Queen's chamber, where they also found evidence that the stone tiling had been been moved at some point.

Japanese scientists later confirmed the existence of a cavity a few metres wide, using radar technology.

The French team suggests this is a corridor leading to a further chamber, hidden deep in the belly of the pyramid, which could be the elusive sepulchral room - but have been unable to put their theory to the test.

"It is still a hypothesis, but everything adds up and points to the same conclusion. We need the authorisation to carry out a search," Dormion was quoted as saying by the French newspaper Liberation.

Egyptian authorities are currently denying them access to the pyramid on the grounds that neither is a specialist - although their project has the backing of a top French academic.

Many pharaohs built their own pyramid for their mummified body to be preserved away from human view and sacrilege.

According to the French pair, none of the pyramid's three existing rooms would have been strong enough to qualify as a royal burial chamber Nwhich needs to withstand the test of centuries.

In the so-called King's room, at the top of a steep shaft reaching up inside the pyramid, they point to deep cracks in the massive granite blocks that form the chamber's ceiling as evidence of this.

The Queen's chamber, meanwhile, cannot be sealed off, meaning it could not have been used as a burial chamber, while work on the third known room was abandoned before it was completed.

The Pyramid of Cheops, greatest of the three pyramids at Gizeh, stands 147 metres tall and 230,34 metres across. It is 2,34 million cubic metres in size, and weighs more than 4,7 million tons. - Sapa-AFP