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The deities worshipped at Stonehenge would have been the prehistoric equivalent of the Greek and Roman god of healing, Apollo, and his twin sister Artemis, says Darvill.

"Although (Apollo's) main sanctuary was at Delphi in Greece, it is widely believed that he left in the winter months to reside in the land of the Hyborians, usually taken to be Britain," Darvill said.

Raimund Karl, a senior lecturer in archaeology and heritage at the University of Wales, Bangor, found Darvill's view of Stonehenge as a major international prehistoric healing center "an interesting idea, which cannot be ruled out as a possibility."
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"However, I'm not convinced that healing properties were already ascribed to the stones at any time in prehistory and that there was a predominance of sick people buried there," said Karl. "Generally speaking, the health of people in prehistory was not particularly good."

Maya Teased Ears Through Architecture
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
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Nov. 27, 2006 — Some ancient civilizations may have had an ear — not just an eye — for architecture. Two recent studies suggest early builders intentionally added unusual, and often psychedelic, sound effects to their structures.

Some of the most striking examples are at the 1,100-year-old Maya Great Ball Court at Chichen Itza, Mexico, according to David Lubman, who will present findings at the upcoming Fourth Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan in Hawaii.

Lubman studied the court's acoustic elements, including two "whispering galleries" that allow visitors to hear whispers from 460 feet away.
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The feature could have once allowed a king or priest to address crowds of up to 3,000 outside without a microphone, Lubman explained.

The sound effects may have also held spiritual significance to players taking part in a bizarre game on the court.

In the Maya competition, players were fully padded and threw around a hard, rubber ball. They deflected the ball with their hips and a device at their chest known as a ball deflector.

The unusual acoustics on the court likely added an eerie ambiance to the play. The effect was perhaps appropriate, considering the competition's losers were sometimes sacrificed after a defeat, according to Lubman.

"Players on the ball court would hear voices but see no one," he explained. "This would seem supernatural to pre-scientific listeners... . According to the K'iche' Maya myth called the 'Popol Vuh,' the noises of the ball court play evoked the Lords of the Underworld."

A single ball striking the court would have echoed four times per second, Lubman found.

"I suspect that the flutter echoes sounded like the rattles of a menacing rattlesnake," he said. "(They) must have added an exciting aural element to the deadly drama of the ballgame."

The echoes were made possible by massive, smooth stone walls carefully positioned to reflect sound, similar to today's band shells. The walls at the court are 270 feet long and 28 feet tall

The whispering galleries work by pushing sound waves along the playing field. The effect is similar to that produced by speaking through a long tube, which conserves sound energy and reduces losses.

Historical Maya writings paint a fuller picture of the games once played on the court, telling of hallucinogenic drugs that may have further heightened the auditory illusions. Fragrant incense has also been unearthed at the site.

Chris Scarre, a professor of archaeology at Durham University in England, recently conducted a survey of acoustical features in ancient structures. He told Discovery News that Lubman's research is "convincing and exciting."
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In addition to Mesoamerican structures, Scarre said sound effects can be heard in Paleolithic caves and various European structures, including St. Paul's Cathedral in London, which has a whispering gallery.

"We do not know in detail how (the more ancient) sites were used, and the challenge is to discover a methodology that enables us to construct a convincing argument," Scarre said, adding that he hopes the research "brings sound, music and hearing back into archaeological discussion."

Peruvian Tombs Offer Wealth of Artifacts
Martin Mejia, Associated Press
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Nov. 22, 2006 —Archaeologists said Tuesday they have unearthed 22 graves in northern Peru containing a trove of pre-Inca artifacts, including the first "tumi" ceremonial knives ever discovered by archaeologists rather than looted by thieves.

The find, which prominent archaeologist Walter Alva called "overwhelmingly important," means that scientists can study the tumi — Peru's national symbol — in its original setting to learn about the context in which it was used.

"This discovery comes as an important contribution to know the burial rites of the elite of this culture," said Alva, who was not involved in the dig. He confirmed that no tumi had before been unearthed by archaeologists.
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The tombs, more than 900 years old, were found next to a pyramid in the Pomac Forest Historical Sanctuary, 420 miles northwest of the capital, Lima. They are from the Sican culture, which flourished on Peru's northern desert coast from A.D. 750 to 1375.

The occupants "are clearly from the social elite and therefore some of them have gold objects, some of them have copper-gilded objects, but they are quite complex, well-endowed tombs," said Izumi Shimada.

Shimada, an anthropology professor at Southern Illinois University, began excavations at the site in July with Carlos Elera Arevalo, director of Peru's Sican National Museum. He said 10 tumi knives were found, including a 14-inch copper alloy tumi bearing the image of the Sican deity.

"The tumi has for many years been the symbol of Peru, and yet no decorated tumi has ever been found or documented scientifically," he told The Associated Press.



All known tumi knives were looted by grave robbers, Shimada said. Sican artifacts, he has argued in his research, were often misidentified as coming from the later Inca Empire because they were always seen out of context.

"It is the first time that such a tumi has been found in context, in a scientific manner, and therefore we will be able to speak a lot about the cultural significance of this object," he said.

Alva agreed that the discovery could help explain the history of these ceremonial weapons, with their figurine handles and arched-shaped blades.
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"Finally, archaeologists have the opportunity to show a scientifically excavated tomb where the context can be known for these objects," said Alva, who led one of Peru's most famous archaeological digs, which uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs in the late 1980s.

The archaeologist gave President Alan Garcia a tour Tuesday of the Pomac Forest excavation site, where Shimada said his team has found 22 tombs at up to 33 feet below ground level.

"This is an extraordinary find," Garcia said.

One grave contains the remains of a woman about 25 years old buried with 120 miniature clay "crisoles" or crucibles, Shimada said, which he believes were made by each member of the funeral ceremony "as a sort of last offering to be placed in the burial chamber."

Peruvian Tombs Offer Wealth of Artifacts
Martin Mejia, Associated Press
small text
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Nov. 22, 2006 —Archaeologists said Tuesday they have unearthed 22 graves in northern Peru containing a trove of pre-Inca artifacts, including the first "tumi" ceremonial knives ever discovered by archaeologists rather than looted by thieves.

The find, which prominent archaeologist Walter Alva called "overwhelmingly important," means that scientists can study the tumi — Peru's national symbol — in its original setting to learn about the context in which it was used.

"This discovery comes as an important contribution to know the burial rites of the elite of this culture," said Alva, who was not involved in the dig. He confirmed that no tumi had before been unearthed by archaeologists.
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Shop Discovery Channel Store
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The tombs, more than 900 years old, were found next to a pyramid in the Pomac Forest Historical Sanctuary, 420 miles northwest of the capital, Lima. They are from the Sican culture, which flourished on Peru's northern desert coast from A.D. 750 to 1375.

The occupants "are clearly from the social elite and therefore some of them have gold objects, some of them have copper-gilded objects, but they are quite complex, well-endowed tombs," said Izumi Shimada.

Shimada, an anthropology professor at Southern Illinois University, began excavations at the site in July with Carlos Elera Arevalo, director of Peru's Sican National Museum. He said 10 tumi knives were found, including a 14-inch copper alloy tumi bearing the image of the Sican deity.

"The tumi has for many years been the symbol of Peru, and yet no decorated tumi has ever been found or documented scientifically," he told The Associated Press.

All known tumi knives were looted by grave robbers, Shimada said. Sican artifacts, he has argued in his research, were often misidentified as coming from the later Inca Empire because they were always seen out of context.

"It is the first time that such a tumi has been found in context, in a scientific manner, and therefore we will be able to speak a lot about the cultural significance of this object," he said.

Alva agreed that the discovery could help explain the history of these ceremonial weapons, with their figurine handles and arched-shaped blades.
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Shop Discovery Channel Store
line

"Finally, archaeologists have the opportunity to show a scientifically excavated tomb where the context can be known for these objects," said Alva, who led one of Peru's most famous archaeological digs, which uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs in the late 1980s.

The archaeologist gave President Alan Garcia a tour Tuesday of the Pomac Forest excavation site, where Shimada said his team has found 22 tombs at up to 33 feet below ground level.

"This is an extraordinary find," Garcia said.

One grave contains the remains of a woman about 25 years old buried with 120 miniature clay "crisoles" or crucibles, Shimada said, which he believes were made by each member of the funeral ceremony "as a sort of last offering to be placed in the burial chamber."

Rome's She-Wolf Younger Than Its City
Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News
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Nov. 22, 2006 — The icon of Rome's foundation, the Capitoline she-wolf, was crafted in the Middle Ages, not the Antiquities, according to a research into the statue's bronze-casting technique.

The discovery quashes the long-prevailing belief that the she-wolf was adopted as an icon by the earliest Romans as a symbol for their city.

Recalling the story of a she-wolf which fed Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, and his twin brother, Remus, after they had been thrown in a basket into the Tiber River, the statue has been always linked to the ancient world.
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It was thought to be either the product of an Etruscan workshop in the 5th century B.C. or the masterpiece of the 6th century B.C. Etruscan sculptor Vulca of Veii.

It was believed that the Romans later adopted the wolf since her defiant stance and raised eyebrows seemed to reflect Rome's liberation from the Etruscan rule.

On the contrary, scholars have long established that the bronze figures of Romulus and Remus were added in the Renaissance, in accordance to the legend of Rome's foundation.

"Now incontestable proofs tell us that also the she-wolf is not a product of the Antiquities," Adriano La Regina, former Rome's archaeological superintendent and professor of Etruscology at Rome's La Sapienza University, wrote in Italy's daily "La Repubblica."

According to La Regina, analysis carried out by restorer Anna Maria Carruba during the 1997 restoration of the bronze statue showed that the she-wolf was cast as a single unit. This technique was typically used in the Middle Ages.

"Ancient bronzes differentiate from those made in the Middle Ages because they were cast in separate parts, and then brazed together," La Regina said

First used by the Greeks and then adopted by Etruscan and Roman artists, the technique basically consisted of brazing the separate joints using bronze as welding material.

The new dating of the Capitoline she-wolf was not revealed at the presentation of the restored statue in 2000. The Capitoline Museum, where the bronze is displayed, claims the artwork traces back to 480-470 B.C.
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"Analysis and findings from the restoration were ignored," wrote La Regina.

Indeed, it might have not been easy for the Romans to accept that the archetypal symbol of Rome was cast in the relatively recent Middle Ages.

The she-wolf was one of the favored images of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, who considered himself the founder of the New Rome. He sent various copies of the bronze to American cities.

The Capitoline she-wolf was also used in the poster of the 1960 Rome Olympics and is one of the most popular items among souvenir sellers in Rome.

Gregory Warden, a professor of art history at Southern Methodist University who specializes in Etruscan bronzes, found the suggestion that the she-wolf may be medieval "intriguing." But, he does not consider the matter closed.

"While the statue is singular, and thus difficult to compare to other Etruscan statuary, I do not think that the technical argument is fully persuasive, since we have so little comparative evidence for large-scale bronze casting in the Etruscan world," he said. "We certainly cannot assume that Etruscan bronze-casting techniques would always have been identical to those of the Greeks."

Jamestown Skeleton Still a Mystery
Sonja Barisic, Associated Press
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Nov. 21, 2006 —Bones discovered four years ago at the site of America's first permanent English settlement could be those of Jamestown's unsung founder, a knight or a captain.

A tooth analysis did not rule out that the skeleton is, as Jamestown researchers had theorized, that of Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold, principal organizer of the expedition from England that established Jamestown in 1607. Next year marks the settlement's 400th anniversary.

But test results released Monday also suggest two other possible candidates: Sir Ferdinando Wenman, the master of ordnance at Jamestown, and Capt. Gabriel Archer, a lawyer who was the first recorder of Jamestown.
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Gosnold is still the leading candidate, based on historical, archaeological and forensic evidence, said William Kelso, director of archaeology at the Jamestown site.

"I still think the evidence lines up, until proven otherwise, that we have Gosnold," Kelso said in a telephone interview.

The Church of England, however, says the Jamestown skeleton is likely that of someone other than Gosnold. A tooth analysis of a skeleton buried in a church grave in Shelley, England, suggests it is that of Gosnold's sister, Elizbeth Gosnold Tilney. However, DNA tests on the two skeletons don't match, showing they're not related.

"While it would appear that the body discovered in Jamestown is not Gosnold, the coffin with the staff makes it clear that it is the grave of an important early settler," said James Halsall, spokesman for the Diocese of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich.



The skeleton was buried in a coffin — usually reserved at the time for people of higher status — with a captain's staff placed on the lid, in a spot outside Jamestown's triangular fort.

Kelso said that makes Wenman the least likely candidate because a knight would more likely be buried with his sword.

Archer was a captain, but he died during the "Starving Time" winter of 1609-1610. Kelso said it is doubtful Archer would have been ceremoniously buried in a coffin outside the fort during that period, when Jamestown was under siege by Indians.
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In the tooth test, the National Environment Research Council Isotope Geosciences Laboratory of the British Geological Survey studied strontium and oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel. The isotope ratios, compared with ratio of isotopes in drinking water, can determine where a person lived during childhood, when the teeth are formed.

Gosnold was born and grew up in the Otley area of southeast Suffolk in England. The tests show the Jamestown skeleton was that of someone who probably came from southern England, but the results are inconsistent with the chalk-dominated terrain of Otley.

However, geological conditions a few miles south of Otley would satisfy the chemical signature found in the tooth of the Jamestown skeleton, researchers said, so Gosnold can't be ruled out because he could have been eating food and drinking water from nearby areas.

Neanderthal Genome Being Mapped
Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press
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Nov. 15, 2006 —A bone fragment that scientists had initially ignored has begun to yield secrets of the Neanderthal genome, launching a new way to learn about the stocky and muscular relative of modern humans, scientists say.

Genetic material from the bone has let researchers identify more than a million building blocks of Neanderthal DNA so far, and it should be enough to derive most of the creature's 3.3 billion blocks within the next two years, said researcher Svante Paabo.

"We're at the dawn of Neanderthal genomics," said gene expert Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
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Such research will "serve as a DNA time machine that will tell us about the biology and aspects of Neanderthals that we could never get" otherwise, Rubin said.

And the Neanderthal data will shed light on what DNA changes helped produce modern humanity by revealing which changes appeared relatively late in human evolution, after the ancestors of Neanderthals and of humans split apart, scientists said.

Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues present an initial analysis of Neanderthal DNA in this week's issue of the journal Nature. Rubin and his collaborators present their own analysis in this week's issue of Science.

Both are based on DNA extracted from a bone fragment that lay in a Croatian cave for 38,000 years. "It's rather small and uninteresting and was thrown into a big box of uninformative bones" at a museum in Zagreb, Croatia, Paabo said.

So it wasn't handled very much, which meant that its DNA was not extensively contaminated by that of modern-day people, a major plus for the new DNA work, he said. Only about one-seventh of an ounce or less of the bone will be enough to get a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome, he said.

DNA analysis indicated that the bone fragment came from a male.


Todd Disotell of the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University, who did not participate in the research, said he found it "really amazing (that) 38,000-year-old fossils are yielding enough DNA to eventually get a whole genome.... Just the fact that they can do this is amazing."

He also called the two new papers impressive "tours de force."

The two teams basically agree, within their margins of error, that the evolutionary lineages of Neanderthals and modern humans split somewhere around 500,000 years ago, he said. That number had been suggested by far more limited DNA analysis before, so it's comforting to see it backed up with more extensive analyses, he said.
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Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, until Neanderthals died out some 28,000 years ago. Scientists have been debating whether the two groups interbred and whether modern humans carry some genetic remnants of Neanderthals.

Rubin said his analysis, like some previous work, found no evidence of such intermixing, though it'll take more DNA to rule it out.

Paabo's analysis didn't directly address whether modern humans have DNA from Neanderthals, but it did raise speculation that DNA from anatomically modern humans might have found its way into Neanderthals. Scientists will have to examine more Neanderthal DNA to study that, he said.

Rubin also said analysis so far suggests human and Neanderthal DNA are some 99.5 percent to nearly 99.9 percent identical.

Roman Shipwreck Bears Culinary Treasure
Daniel Woolls, Associated Press
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Nov. 14, 2006 —A shipwrecked first-century vessel carrying delicacies to the richest palates of the Roman Empire has proved a dazzling find, with nearly 2,000-year-old fish bones still nestling inside clay jars, archaeologists said Monday.

Boaters found its cargo of hundreds of amphoras in 2000 when their anchor got tangled with one of the two-handled jars.

After years of arranging financing and crews, exploration of the site a mile off the coast of Alicante in southeast Spain began in July, said Carles de Juan, a co-director of the project, who works for the Valencia regional government.
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The ship, estimated to be 100 feet long with a capacity for around 400 tons of cargo, is twice the size of most other Roman shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean, de Juan said.

Its cargo of an estimated 1,500 well-preserved clay amphoras was used in this case to hold fish sauce — a prized condiment for wealthy Romans, he said.

For nearly 2,000 years, the 3-foot-tall amphoras lay undisturbed except for the occasional octopus that would pry one open, breaking the ceramic-and-mortar seal in search of food or shelter.

Besides the size of the ship and good condition of its cargo, the site is also important because it is so easily accessible — in just 80 feet of water about a mile from the coast. Other wrecks are so deep they cannot be examined by scuba divers.

"I am not going to say it was on the beach, but almost," said de Juan, who was among the first divers to examine the shipwreck in 2000.

"We knew it was an important find but had no real idea until now," he said. "It is an exceptional find."

The last time a ship of this size and quality emerged was in 1985 off Corsica, he said.

Javier Nieto, director of the Center for Underwater Archaeology of Catalonia and not related to this project, also called it immensely important because of the good condition of the cargo. No other Roman shipwreck is currently under study in the Mediterranean, he added.

"For archaeologists, a sunken ship is a historic document that tells us about ancient history and how its economy worked," Nieto said from Barcelona. "This ship will contribute a lot."



This ship probably sank in a storm while sailing back to Rome from Cadiz in the south of what is now Spain. The storm must have been ferocious because it is odd for such a vessel to have been so close to shore.

"The crew did not care about the cargo or money or anything. They headed for land to save their lives," de Juan said.

De Juan and the other co-director of the project, Franca Cibercchini of the University of Pisa in Italy, presented their first report on the site at a marine archaeology conference last week in the town of Gandia, near Valencia.
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When word of the find first spread in 2000, pirate scuba divers raided the site and stole some of the amphoras. This forced the Valencia government to build a thick metal grating to cover the remains and protect the jars.

What remains of the wooden structure of the ship itself — about 60 percent — is buried under mud in the seabed, de Juan said.

The cargo probably also includes lead, which the Romans used for plumbing, and copper, which they mixed with tin to make bronze for everything from plates to jewelry.

The fish sauce is no longer in the amphoras because the seals were not hermetic and could not withstand 20 centuries under water. But traces of fish bone remain inside and these will help researchers determine how the sauces were made, de Juan said.