Archeology

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Lidar mapping reveals mountainous medieval cities along the Silk Road

ancient cities, Archeology, LiDAR, Science, Silk Road / /

The city of Tugunbulak, which stretched beyond the forest inspector’s house, had powerful walls enclosing the area of 120 hectares, nearly five times larger than the Tashbulak site. With those walls, there was a dense architecture with hundreds of buildings, streets, palaces, plazas—even industrial facilities the Frachetti’s team suspects were used to produce iron or steel.

To put that in perspective, the medieval walls of Siena, one of the foremost cities in Italy during that time, surrounded an area of 105 hectares at the peak of its power. Genoa, another crown jewel among Italian medieval cities, between the 6th and 11th centuries, had walls protecting just 20 hectares, an area bumped up to around 50 hectares by the time of Frederic Barbarossa’s invasion between 1155 and 1158 CE.

Tugunbulak was a monster of a city. But what did it look like?

A city of iron?

“If you looked at Tugunbulak from the outside you would have seen these kind of rocky walls. They appear to have been made in a technology called rammed earth. The builders would take mud and press it into something almost like cement—a very high labor, very dense, very defensive and fortified material,” Frachetti says. Rammed earth was a dominant building technique used in the early stages of Tugunbulak’s development. “The later phase in the site, we see some stone architecture foundations with mud brick on the top. They used local resources and building techniques that were popular in the region,” Frachetti explains.

According to the team, the main contribution of the city to the Silk Road trade was iron, as the surrounding mountains are particularly rich in iron ore. One of the still unanswered questions was about the way Tugunbulak’s people lived and worked. Were they skillful blacksmiths forging iron and perhaps even steel in their mountainous city? Did at least some of its inhabitants live the lives of nomads, visiting the city only periodically to trade on market days or did they live there permanently?  “We’d like to know how extensive was the industry there—what level of production were they actually doing?” Franchetti says. He suggested that a shifting, seasonal population that most likely lived in yurts spread outside of the walls was more likely in the smaller Tashbulak, considering it lacked residential suburbs. “Tugunbulak must have been a far more organized political entity. Their power and their influence must have been significant in the broader economy of the Silk Road,” Frachetti claims.

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520-million-year-old larva fossil reveals the origins of arthropods

Archeology, arthropods, Biology, evolution, Science / /

Loads of lobopods —

Early arthropod development illuminated by a microscopic fossil.

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Image of a small grey object, curved around its abdomen, with a series of small appendages on the bottom.

Enlarge / The fossil in question, oriented with its head to the left.

Yang Jie / Zhang Xiguang

Around half a billion years ago, in what is now the Yunnan Province of China, a tiny larva was trapped in mud. Hundreds of millions of years later, after the mud had long since become the black shales of the Yuan’shan formation, the larva surfaced again, a meticulously preserved time capsule that would unearth more about the evolution of arthropods.

Youti yuanshi is barely visible to the naked eye. Roughly the size of a poppy seed, it is preserved so well that its exoskeleton is almost completely intact, and even the outlines of what were once its internal organs can be seen through the lens of a microscope. Durham University researchers who examined it were able to see features of both ancient and modern arthropods. Some of these features told them how the simpler, more wormlike ancestors of living arthropods evolved into more complex organisms.

The research team also found that Y. yuanshi, which existed during the Cambrian Explosion (when most of the main animal groups started to appear on the fossil record), has certain features in common with extant arthropods, such as crabs, velvet worms, and tardigrades. “The deep evolutionary position of Youti yuanshi… illuminat[es] the internal anatomical changes that propelled the rise and diversification of [arthropods],” they said in a study recently published in Nature.

Inside out and outside in

While many fossils preserved in muddy environments like the Yuan’shan formation are flattened by compression, Y. yuanshi remained three-dimensional, making it easier to examine. So what exactly did this larva look like on the outside and inside?

The research team could immediately tell that Y. yuanshi was a lobopodian. Lobopodians are a group of extinct arthropods with long bodies and stubby legs, or lobopods. There is a pair of lobopods in the middle of each of its twenty segments, and these segments also get progressively shorter from the front to back of the body. Though soft tissue was not preserved, spherical outlines suggest an eye on each side of the head, though whether these were compound eyes is unknown. This creature had a stomodeum—the precursor to a mouth—but no anus. It would have had to both take in food and dispose of waste through its mouth.

Youti yuanshi has a cavity, known as the perivisceral cavity, that surrounds the outline of a tube that is thought to have once been the gut. The creature’s gut ends without an opening, which explains its lack of an anus. Inside each segment, there is a pair of voids toward the middle. The researchers think these are evidence of digestive glands, especially after comparing them to digestive glands in the fossils of other arthropods from the same era.

A ring around the mouth of the larva was once a circumoral nerve ring, which connected with nerves that extend to eyes and appendages in the first segment. Inside its head is a void that contained the brain. The shape of this empty chamber gives some insight into how the brain was structured. From what the researchers could see, the brain of Y. yuanshi had wedge-shaped frontal portion, and the rest of the brain was divided into two sections, as evidenced by the outline of a membrane in between them.

Way, way, way back then and now

Given its physical characteristics, the researchers think that Y. yuanshi displays features of both extinct and extant arthropods. Some are ancestral characteristics present in all arthropods, living and extinct. Others are ancestral characteristics that may have been present in extinct arthropods but are only present in some living arthropods.

Among the features present in all arthropods today is the protocerebrum; its evolutionary precursor was the circumoral nerve ring present in Y. yuanshi. The protocerebrum is the first segment of the arthropod brain, which controls the eyes and appendages, such as antennae in velvet worms and the mouthparts in tardigrades. Another feature of Y. yuanshi present in extant and extinct arthropods is its circulatory system, which is similar to that of modern arthropods, especially crustaceans.

Lobopods are a morphological feature of Y. yuanshi that are now found only in some arthropods—tardigrades and velvet worms. Many more species of lobopodians existed during the Cambrian. The lobopodians also had a distinctively structured circulatory system in their legs and other appendages, which is closest to that of velvet worms.

“The architecture of the nervous system informs the early configuration of the [arthropod] brain and its associated appendages and sensory organs, clarifying homologies across [arthropods],” the researchers said in the same study.

Yuti yuanshi is still holding on to some mysteries. They mostly have to do with the fact that it is a larva—what it looked like as an adult can only be guessed at, and it’s possible that this species developed compound eyes or flaps for swimming by the time it reached adulthood. Whether it is the larva of an already-known species of extinct lobopod is an open question. Maybe the answers are buried somewhere in the Yuan’shan shale.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07756-8

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“Archeology” on the ISS helps identify what astronauts really need

Archeology, Science, Space, space archeology, Space exploration, space station / /

Archeology without the dig —

Regular photography shows a tool shed and more isolated toilet would be appreciated.

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I woman holds a handheld device in front of a rack of equipment.

Enlarge / Jessica Watkins gets to work on the ISS

“Archeology really is a perspective on material culture we use as evidence to understand how humans adapt to their environment, to the situations they are in, and to each other. There is no place, no time that is out of bounds,” says Justin Walsh, an archeologist at Chapman University who led the first off-world archeological study on board the ISS.

Walsh’s and his team wanted to understand, document, and preserve the heritage of the astronaut culture at one of the first permanent space habitats. “There is this notion about astronauts that they are high achievers, highly intelligent, and highly trained, that they are not like you and me. What we learned is that they are just people, and they want the comforts of home,” Walsh says.

Disposable cameras and garbage

“In 2008, my student in an archeology class raised her hand and said, ‘What about stuff in space, is that heritage?’ I said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never thought of this before, but yes,’” Walsh says. “Think of Tranquility base—it’s an archeological site. You could go back there, and you could reconstruct not only the specific activities of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but you could understand the engineering culture, the political culture, etc. of the society that created that equipment, sent it to the Moon, and left it there.”

So he conceived the idea of an archeological study on the ISS, wrote a proposal, sent it to NASA, and got rejected. NASA said human sciences were not their priority and not part of their mission. But in 2021, NASA changed its mind.

“They said they had an experiment that could not be done at the scheduled time, so they had to delay it. Also, they changed the crew size from six to seven people,” says Walsh. These opened up some idle time in the astronauts’ schedules, allowing NASA to find space in the schedule for less urgent projects on the station. The agency gave Walsh’s team the go-ahead under the condition that their study could be done with the equipment already present on the ISS.

The outline of Walsh’s research was inspired by and loosely based on the Tucson Garbage Project and the Undocumented Migration Project, two contemporary archeology studies. The first drew conclusions about people’s lives by studying the garbage they threw away. The second documented the experiences of migrants on their way to the US from Mexico.

“Jason De León, who is the principal investigator of this project, gave people in Mexico disposable cameras, and he retrieved those cameras from them when they got to the US. He could observe things they experienced without being there himself. For me, that was a lightbulb moment,” says Walsh.

There were cameras on board the ISS and there was a crew to take pictures with them. To pull off an equivalent of digging a test pit in space, Walsh’s team chose six locations on the station, asked the crew to mark them with squares one meter across, and asked the astronauts to take a picture of each of those squares once a day for 60 days, from January to March 2022.

Building a space shed

In the first paper discussing the study’s results, Walsh’s team covered two out of six chosen locations, dubbed squares 03 and 05. The 03 square was in a maintenance area near the four crew berths where the US crew sleeps. It’s near docking ports for spacecraft coming to the ISS. The square was drawn around a blue board with Velcro patches meant to hold tools and equipment in place.

“All historic photographs of this location published by NASA show somebody working in there—fixing a piece of equipment, doing a science experiment,” says Walsh. But when his team analyzed day-by-day photos of the same spot, the items velcroed to the wall hardly changed in those 60 days. “It was the same set of items over and over again. If there was an activity, it was a scientific experiment. It was supposed to be the maintenance area. So where was the maintenance? And even if it was a science area, where’s the science? It was only happening on 10 percent of days,” Walsh says.

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Egalitarian oddity found in the Neolithic

Archeology, diet, isotopes, neolithic, Science / /

Eat up! —

Men, women, and immigrants all seemed to have similar dietary inputs.

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Greyscale image of an adult skeleton in a fetal position, framed by vertical rocks.

Enlarge / A skeleton found during 1950’s excavations at the Barman site.

Did ancient people practice equality? While stereotypes may suggest otherwise, the remains of one Neolithic society reveal evidence that both men and women, as well as locals and foreigners, were all equal in at least a critical aspect of life: what they ate.

The Neolithic saw the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry some 6,000 years ago. In what is now Valais, Switzerland, the type and amount of food people ate was the same regardless of sex or where they had come from. Researchers led by Déborah Rosselet-Christ of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) learned this by analyzing isotopes in the bones and teeth of adults buried in what is now called the Barmaz necropolis. Based on the 49 individuals studied, people at the Barmaz site enjoyed dietary equality.

“Unlike other similar studies of Neolithic burials, the Barmaz population appears to have drawn its protein resources from a similar environment, with the same access to resources for adults, whether male or female,” the researchers said in a study recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Down to the bone

To determine whether food was equal among the people buried at Barmaz, Rosselet-Christ and her team needed to examine certain isotopes in the bones and others in the teeth. Certain types of bone either do or do not renew, allowing the content of those bones to be associated with either someone’s place of birth or what they ate in their last years.

Being able to tell whether an individual was local or foreign was done by analyzing several strontium isotopes in the enamel of their teeth. Tooth enamel is formed at a young age and does not self-renew, so isotopes found in enamel, which enter it through the food someone eats, are indicative of the environment that their food was from. This can be used to distinguish whether an individual was born somewhere or moved after the early years of their lives. If you know what the strontium ratios are at a given site, you can compare those to the ratios in tooth enamel and determine if the owner of the tooth came from that area.

While strontium in tooth enamel can give away whether someone was born in or moved to a certain location at a young age, various isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur that also come from food told the research team what and how much people ate during the last years of their lives. Bones such as the humerus (which was the best-preserved bone in most individuals) are constantly renewed with new material. This means that the most recently deposited bone tissue was put in place rather close to death.

Something for everyone

Near the valley of the Rhone River in the Swiss Alps, the Barmaz necropolis is located in an area that was once covered in deciduous forests that villages and farmland replaced. Most of the Barmaz people are thought to be locals. The strontium isotopes found in their teeth showed that only a few had not lived in the area during the first few years of their lives, when the enamel formed, though whether other individuals moved there later in life was more difficult to determine.

Analysis of the Barmaz diet showed that it was heavy on animal protein, supplemented with some plant products such as peas and barley. The isotopes analyzed were mostly from young goats and pigs. Based on higher levels of particular carbon and nitrogen isotopes found in their bones, the researchers think these juvenile animals might not have even been weaned yet, which means that the people of this agrarian society were willing to accept less meat yield for higher quality meat.

Rosselet-Christ’s most significant find was that the same median fractions of certain carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotopes were found in the bones of both men and women. Whether these people were local or foreign also did not matter—the values of these isotopes in those with different strontium isotope content in their tooth enamel was also the same. It seems that all adults ate equal amounts of the same foods, which was not always the case in Neolithic societies.

“The individuals buried at Barmaz—whether male or female—appear to have lived with equal opportunities, painting a picture of a society with egalitarian reflections,” the research team said in the same study.

Other things in this society were also equal. The dead were buried the same way, with mostly the same materials, regardless of sex or if they were locals or foreigners. While a society this egalitarian is not often associated with Neolithic people, it shows that some of our ancestors believed that nobody should be left out. Maybe they were much more like us than we think.

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2004. DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104585

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High-altitude cave used by Tibetan Buddhists yields a Denisovan fossil

ancient proteins, Archeology, Denisovans, human evolution, Science / /

Eating in —

Cave deposits yield bones of sheep, yaks, carnivores, and birds that were butchered.

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Image of a sheer cliff face with a narrow path leading to a cave opening.

Enlarge / The Baishiya Karst Cave, where the recently analyzed samples were obtained.

Dongju Zhang’s group (Lanzhou University)

For well over a century, we had the opportunity to study Neanderthals—their bones, the items they left behind, their distribution across Eurasia. So, when we finally obtained the sequence of their genome and discovered that we share a genetic legacy with them, it was easy to place the discoveries into context. In contrast, we had no idea Denisovans existed when sequencing DNA from a small finger bone revealed that yet another relative of modern humans had roamed Asia in the recent past.

Since then, we’ve learned little more. The frequency of their DNA in modern human populations suggest that they were likely concentrated in East Asia. But we’ve only discovered fragments of bone and a few teeth since then, so we can’t even make very informed guesses as to what they might have looked like. On Wednesday, an international group of researchers described finds from a cave on the Tibetan Plateau that had been occupied by Denisovans, which tell us a bit more about these relatives: what they ate. And that appears to be anything they could get their hands on.

The Baishiya Karst Cave

The finds come from a site called the Baishiya Karst Cave, which is perched on a cliff on the northeast of the Tibetan Plateau. It’s located at a high altitude (over 3,000 meters or nearly 11,000 feet) but borders a high open plain, as you can see in the picture below.

Oddly, it came to the attention of the paleontology community because the cave was a pilgrimage site for Tibetan monks, one of whom discovered a portion of a lower jaw that eventually was given to a university. There, people struggled to understand exactly how it fit with human populations until eventually analysis of proteins preserved within it indicated it belonged to a Denisovan. Now called the Xiahe mandible, it remains the most substantial Denisovan fossil we’ve discovered to date.

The Ganjia Basin borders the cliffs that contain the Baishiya Karst Cave.

Enlarge / The Ganjia Basin borders the cliffs that contain the Baishiya Karst Cave.

Dongju Zhang’s group (Lanzhou University)

Since then, excavations at the site had turned up a large collection of animal bones, but none that had been identified as Denisovan. Sequencing of environmental DNA preserved in the cave, however, revealed that the Denisovans had occupied the cave regularly for at least 100,000 years, meaning they were surviving at altitude during both of the last two glacial cycles.

The new work focuses in on the bones, many of which are too fragmentary to be definitively assigned to a species. To do so, the researchers purified fragments of proteins from the bones, which contain large amounts of collagen. These fragments were then separated according to their mass, a technique called mass spectrometry, which works well even with the incredibly small volumes of proteins that survive over hundreds of thousands of years.

Mass spectrometry relies on the fact that there are only a limited number of combinations of amino acids—often only one—that will produce a protein fragment of a given mass. So, if the mass spectrometry finds a signal at that mass, you can compare the possible amino acid combinations that produce it to known collagen sequences to find matches. Some of these matches will end up being in places where collagens from different species have distinct sequences of amino acids, allowing you to determine what species the bone came from.

When used this way, the technique is termed zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, or ZooMS. And, in the case of the work described in the new paper, it identified nearly 80 percent of the bone fragments that were tested.

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Mayans burned and buried dead political regimes

Archeology, mayans, Politics, ruling dynasties, Science / /

Winning isn’t everything! —

After burning, the remains were dumped in construction fill.

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A long, rectangular stone building.

Enlarge / Mayans built impressive structures and occasionally put interesting items in the construction fill.

As civilizations evolve, so do the political regimes that govern them. But the transition from one era to another is not always quiet. Some ancient Mayan rulers made a very fiery public statement about who was in charge.

When archaeologists dug up the burned fragments of royal bodies and artifacts at the Mayan archaeological site of Ucanal in Guatemala, they realized they were looking at the last remnants of a fallen regime. There was no scorching on the walls of the structure they were found beneath. This could have only meant that the remains (which had already been in their tombs a hundred years) were consumed by flames in one place and buried in another. But why?

The team of archaeologists, led by Christina T. Halperin of the University of Montreal, think this was the doing of a new leader who wanted to annihilate all traces of the old regime. He couldn’t just burn them. He also had to bury them where they would be forgotten.

Into the fire

While there is other evidence of Mayans burning bodies and objects from old regimes, a ritual known as och-i k’ak’ t-u-muk-il (“the fire entered his/her tomb”), this is the first time burnt royal remains have been discovered somewhere other than their original tomb. They were found underneath construction fill at the base of a temple where the upper parts are thought to have been made from materials that had not lasted long.

Radiocarbon dating revealed these remains were burned around the same time as the ascent of the ruler Papmalil, who assumed the title of ochk’in kaloomte’ or “western overlord,” suggesting he may have been foreign. Inscriptions of his name were seen at the same site where the burnt fragments were unearthed. Papmalil’s rise meant the fall of the K’anwitznal dynasty—the one that the bones and ornaments most likely belonged to. It also marked the start of a period of great prosperity.

“Papmalil’s rule was not only seminal because of his possible foreign origins—perhaps breaking the succession of ruling dynasts at the site—but also because his rule shifted political dynamics in the southern Maya Lowlands,” the archeologists said in a study recently published in the journal Antiquity.

The overthrowing of the K’anwitznal dynasty is evidenced on the wall of a temple at Caracol, a site not far from Ucanal. An engraving on a Caracol altar shows a captive K’anwitzanl ruler in bondage. Other engravings made only two decades later depict Papmalil as the ruling figure, and the way he is pictured giving gifts to other kings is a testament to his regime’s increased strength in foreign relations.

Ashes to ashes

The archaeological team sees Papmalil’s accession as a pivotal point after which the city of Ucanal would go on to thrive. As other rulers had done before him, he apparently wanted to dismantle the old regime and make the fall of the K’anwitznal rulers known to everyone. Though the location of the K’anwitznal tombs is unknown, the team used a map of the site they had already made to determine that the temple where the burnt remains were found stood in what was once a public plaza.

Halperin thinks that the bones of these royals and the lavish ornaments the royals were buried with were believed to have had some sort of life force or spirit that needed to be conquered before the new regime would be secure. It was evident, because of shrinkage, warping, and discoloration, that the human bones, which belonged to four individuals (three of which were determined to be male), had been burned, suggesting temperatures of at least 800° C (1,472° F). Fractures and fissures on the jade and greenstone ornaments were also signs of burning at high temperatures.

“Because the fire-burning event itself had the potential to be highly ceremonial, public, and charged with emotion, it could dramatically mark the dismantling of an ancient regime,” the team said in the same study.

To the archaeologists, there is almost no doubt that the burning of the bones and artifacts found at the Ucanal site was an act of desecration, even though the location where they had been thrown into the fire is still a mystery. They’re convinced by the way that the remains were treated no differently than construction debris, deposited at the base of a temple during construction.

Other findings from cremations have shown a level of reverence for the bones of deposed rulers and dynasties. At another site that Halperin also investigated, the cremated bones of a queen were arranged carefully along with her jewelry. That was apparently not enough for Papmalil. Even today, some leaders just feel the need to be heard more loudly than others.

Antiquity, 2024.  DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.38

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