Ancient Maya would paint unlucky people blue and throw them down a sacred well as human sacrifices. Now scientists have solved the mystery of how to make the famous blue pigment by analyzing traces on pottery left in the bottom of the well.
Category Archives: Archaeology
Bone Ice Skates Invented by Ancient Finns
The researchers showed that people traveling across the region’s frozen lakes reduced their physical energy cost by 10 percent.
Cloud Warriors Of Peru
The “cloud warriors” of ancient Peru are slowly offering up their secrets — and more questions. Recent digs at this majestic site, once a stronghold of the Chachapoya civilization, have turned up scores of skeletons and thousands of artifacts, shedding new light on these myth-shrouded early Americans and one of the most remarkable, if least understood, of Peru’s pre-Columbian cultures.
Ancient Egyptian Glassmaking Recreated
A team led by a Cardiff University archaeologist has reconstructed a 3,000-year-old glass furnace, showing that Ancient Egyptian glassmaking methods were much more advanced than previously thought.
New Dates For Clovis Sites
New radiocarbon dates kept the controversy over the peopling of the Americas simmering in 2007. An analysis of dates for the best-documented Clovis sites suggests the culture arose later and was shorter-lived than once thought, a finding that some say deals a blow to the “Clovis first” theories that maintain the big-game-hunting people were the first immigrants to the New World.
Year Of The Lapita
There was no doubt about including in our 2007 Top Ten the discovery that chicken bones from ancient Polynesian sites in Tonga and Samoa and El Arenal, a Chilean site occupied between A.D. 700 and 1390, had identical DNA. The chicken was domesticated in Southeast Asia, but how it arrived in the New World before Europeans arrived was a mystery. Now it seems that Polynesian seafarers brought them, adding to the evidence for trans-Pacific contacts. The presence of South American sweet potatoes and bottle gourds on Pacific islands had already hinted at this, along with some (to my mind less convincing) evidence that complex fishhooks and sewn plank canoes used by southern California Indians had Polynesian origins.
Polynesian Chickens In Chile
Scholars have long assumed the Spaniards first introduced chickens to the New World along with horses, pigs, and cattle. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in oceangoing canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe’s “Age of Discovery.”
The Pompeii Of The Aegean
The new results suggest that the sophisticated and powerful Minoan civilization (featured in the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur) and several other pre-Homeric civilizations arose about a century earlier and lasted for longer than previously thought.
Early Austronesian Migration To Luzon
In the northern Philippines, interaction between the foragers of the Peuffffablanca cave sites and the early Austronesian farmers of the Cagayan Valley (northern Luzon) was established by at least 3500 years ago. Farmers exchanged earthenware pottery, clay earrings, spindle whorls and shell beads with foragers, possibly for forest products. This exchange, however, did not, on present evidence, include cereal-based foods such as rice. The botanical evidence from the cave sites shows a heavy reliance on wild and arboreal food sources.
Ancient Shell Necklace
The shells, originally collected from Israel and Algeria, could be as many as 100,000 years old, and each has a hole through its center, suggesting it was worn as jewelry.