A wall painting shows Helen of Troy meeting Paris, with a handmaiden and a dog between them. (Credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii)
Archaeologists in Pompeii have unveiled an ancient Roman banquet hall featuring a cleverly conceived set of frescoes inspired by tales of the Trojan War.
The 50-by-20-foot (15-by-6-meter) room was recently unearthed as part of a project aimed at shoring up the front of a perimeter between the excavated and not-yet-excavated areas of the Pompeii site near Naples, Italy. Pompeii’s archaeological park preserves sites that were buried in ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.
During Pompeii’s heyday, the “Black Room” opened onto an open courtyard with a long staircase leading up to the home’s first floor.
The banquet room’s frescoes — portraying heroes and deities associated with the Trojan War — were apparently meant to entertain banquet guests and serve as conversation starters. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said the frescoes took advantage of painterly tricks to serve that purpose.
As the world’s best-known fictional archaeologist goes after what may be his last ancient mystery in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” new generations of real-life archaeologists are ready to dig in with 21st-century technologies and sensibilities.
Harrison Ford, the 80-year-old actor who’s played Indiana Jones for 42 years, has said “Dial of Destiny” will be his last sequel in the series. And this one is a doozy: The dial-like gizmo that gives the movie its name is the Antikythera Mechanism, a real-life device that ancient Greeks used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. The Lance of Longinus, the Tomb of Archimedes and the Ear of Dionysius figure in the plot as well.
Indy and his mysteries will be missed. Sara Gonzalez, a curator of archaeology at Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, says her favorite movie about her own field is “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the 1981 film in which Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) made his debut. But that’s not because it’s true to life.
Gonzalez said researchers from the University of Washington’s Department of Anthropology, where she’s an associate professor, recently took a field trip to a local cinema where “Raiders” was playing.
“They have something called HeckleVision, where you can text onto the screen and see it,” she said. “There was this great, fun discussion, happening virtually live, with a whole bunch of anthropologists sitting and watching a movie that we love to deride. But we still kind of love the story and the angle, and we also love educating people about what’s real and what’s fictional about archaeology.”
That’s the subject of the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, focusing on the intersection of science and fiction.
Endoscopic imagery shows a hidden passage within the Great Pyramid of Giza. (ScanPyramids / Egyptian Min. of Tourism and Antiquities)
Archaeologists have discovered a long-lost passageway within Egypt’s 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, thanks to 21st-century technologies including muon tomography and endoscopy.
It’s the latest find made possible with the help of ScanPyramids, an international effort that started documenting Egypt’s best-known archaeological sites with high-tech tools in 2015.
Over the past eight years, ScanPyramids’ team has identified several voids within the Great Pyramid. The passageway described today lies just beneath the pyramid’s north face, about 23 feet (7 meters) above the main entrance. It’s 30 feet (9 meters) long, about 7 feet (2.1 meters) wide, and high enough for a person to stand in.
An ancient city once known as "The Rise of Aten" has been unearthed in Luxor. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)
Egyptian archaeologists unearth a 3,000-year-old lost city, magnetic readings from muons could lead to new physics, and Elon Musk’s Neuralink venture has monkeys playing video games with neural impulses. Get the details on the Web:
The city was at one time called “The Rise of Aten,” reflecting the religious shift brought about by Akhenaten. Today it’s being called the “Lost Golden City.” During the past seven months of excavation, several neighborhoods have been uncovered, but the administrative and residential district hasn’t yet been brought forth from the sands. “The discovery of this lost city is the second most important archaeological discovery since the tomb of Tutankhamun,” said Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University.
Anomalous results from a Fermilab experiment have added to the suspicion that scientists have finally found a flaw in one of their most successful theories, the Standard Model of particle physics. The anomalies have to do with the strength of the magnetic field for a weightier cousin of the electron, known as the muon. Data from Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment supported previous findings from Brookhaven National Laboratory that the muon’s magnetism is ever-so-slightly stronger than predicted by the Standard Model — just 2.5 parts per billion stronger.
If the results hold up, physicists might have to consider far-out explanations — for example, the existence of scads of particles that haven’t yet been detected, or a totally new take on the foundations of physics. But the findings will require further confirmation. Grand discoveries, like 2012’s detection of the Higgs boson, typically have to be confirmed to a confidence level of 5-sigma. Now the muon findings have hit 4.2-sigma — which doubters would say is still substandard.
In a Twitter exchange, Musk said human trials of the mind-reading system would begin, “hopefully, later this year.” He said Neuralink’s first brain-implant product would enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs. “Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again,” Musk tweeted.
Archaeologists say this chariot was used for ceremonial processions in Pompeii. (Archaeological Park of Pompeii Photo)
Italy’s Pompeii archaeological site has yielded up yet another treasure revealing how the good life was lived in ancient Rome: a four-wheeled chariot that was designed for use during sexy ceremonies.
The intact artifact was unearthed over the past month from a field of ash laid down in the year 79 during the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Nearby, excavators previously found the ash-preserved remains of three horses — including one horse that died in its harness.
Massimo Osanna, outgoing director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, suggested that the chariot served a function analogous to modern-day limousines. It’s styled as a type of ceremonial chariot known as a pilentum, and was decorated with bronze and tin medallions depicting men, women and winged Cupids in erotic scenes.
“The scenes on the medallions which embellish the rear of the chariot refer to Eros … while the numerous studs feature Erotes,” Osanna said in a news release. “Considering that the ancient sources allude to the use of the pilentum by priestesses and ladies, one cannot exclude the possibility that this could have been a chariot used for rituals relating to marriage, for leading the bride to her new household.”
The conch of Marsoulas is shown in its hypothetical Magdalenian context. (Photoillustration by G. Tosello)
A sliding musical scale from a conch shell horn that hasn’t been played for 17,000 years, signs that Stonehenge was built with recycled rocks, and the world’s oldest known industrial-scale beer brewery: Here’s your daily dose of science on the Web…
Paleolithic horn blares again: What’s thought to be the world’s oldest known conch shell horn can play three notes: C, C-sharp and D.
The 17,000-year-old conch shell was discovered 90 years ago in the cave of Marsoulas, nestled in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. For decades, archaeologists assumed that it was used as a ceremonial drinking cup. But a team led by Carole Fritz, the head of research at France’s Prehistoric Art Research Center, took a closer look and saw signs that the shell had been modified to install a mouthpiece and was shaped to optimize its ability to play musical notes.
In the open-access journal Science Advances, the researchers recount how they recruited a musicologist and a horn player to re-fit the shell with a suitable mouthpiece and produce three different notes.
Sorbonne University archaeologist Philippe Walter told The Guardian that the notes would have reverberated impressively during Paleolithic rituals in the decorated cave. “The power of the sounds produced by the shell is incredible,” he said. “It is more than 100 decibels.”
Researchers have known for a while that Stonehenge’s slabs of bluestone were quarried in Wales more than 5,000 years ago, but there was an unresolved mystery: Radiocarbon dating suggested that 300 to 400 years passed between the time the stones were quarried and the time they were placed at Stonehenge. What could explain the gap?
Excavation of a Welsh site known as Waun Maun turned up a plausible explanation: Stonehenge’s slabs were a perfect fit for the socket-shaped pits that were left behind at Waun Maun, suggesting that the region’s ancient inhabitants pulled out the stones and carried them to Salisbury Plain during a mass migration.
Four stones that were left behind at Waun Maun helped archaeologists reconstruct the 360-foot-wide circle traced by Waun Maun’s empty sockets — a circle that matched the dimensions of a circular trench that was part of Stonehenge’s original layout.
“There was great excitement, but I think also blessed relief,” University College London archaeologist Michael Parker Pearson told ITV News, “because this had been a real labor of love, trying to untangle this extraordinary mystery.”
5,000-year-old brewery unearthed in Egypt: Archaeologists have found the remains of a sprawling brewery that may have produced the beer for royal burial rituals in Egypt thousands of years ago.
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says the brewery, unearthed in the ancient city of Abydos, was split into eight large sections for beer production, each containing 40 clay pots that were used to warm mixtures of grain and water.
The brewery could have produced as much as 5,900 gallons of beer at a time, New York University archaeologist Matthew Adams said.
Evidence for small-scale beer production goes back as far as 13,000 years, based on an analysis of residues found in a cave in Israel, but the discovery at Abydos suggests that the Egyptians were mass-producing beer during the era of King Narmer, 5,000 years ago.
Annalee Newitz checks out a centuries-old frieze at Angkor's Bayon Temple. (Photo Courtesy of Annalee Newitz)
Time-honored tales of lost cities emphasize the quest for glittering treasures, priceless relics or mysterious civilizations — but more recent expeditions are going after a different sort of prize: a greater understanding of how and why cultures create large-group living spaces, and what factors eventually cause them to move on.
The findings — gleaned from archaeological digs including Cambodia’s ancient stone city of Angkor and a faded metropolis of mounds on the Mississippi River known as Cahokia — can help future architects and planners build the cities of tomorrow more sustainably.
At least that’s what Annalee Newitz hopes.
“My hope is that we’re going to be building more like the people at Cahokia and Angkor in a more sustainable way, and that our houses will be … made of things that are biodegradable, or that are even living materials,” said Newitz (who uses they/them pronouns).
Newitz recounts a personal quest to learn about Cahokia and Angkor, as well as the ancient cities of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and Pompeii in Italy, in a new book titled “Four Lost Cities” — and in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, which focuses on the intersection of science and fiction.
There’s something deeply attractive about the idea of places that were ahead of their time, but were somehow lost to history. Such tales are as old as the biblical city of Sodom and as fresh as Wakanda of “Black Panther” comic-book fame. It’s even better if the lost city ends up being submerged, like Plato’s Atlantis or Egypt’s Alexandria.
But Newitz says the “lost city” concept usually doesn’t hold water.
“I don’t like to use the term ‘fallen’ or ‘collapsed’ for these cities, because their cultures didn’t collapse,” they said. “The cities themselves were abandoned by people who basically, in a lot of cases, just got sick of how the cities were being run, with the exception of Pompeii.”
Pompeii was buried under more than a dozen feet of volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius in the year 79, but even there, most of the eruption’s survivors carried their culture to other Roman cities nearby. Something similar happened to Çatalhöyük, which was abandoned more than 7,500 years ago but spawned other settlements in Neolithic Turkey.
Cahokia and Angkor, which had their heyday from roughly 800 to 1400, traced more complex evolutionary arcs: They’re both thought to have been hit by a combination of political and climate-related crises — but went through periods of revival before fading away.
Newitz noted that natural disasters typically aren’t enough by themselves to bring a city down. “You really can’t take a city out with the natural disaster unless the government is also unstable,” they said. “It was the one-two punch of not having good political leadership … and having some kind of environmental problem, whether that was within the city because of the infrastructure or because of some kind of weather problem or climate problem.”
For that reason, Newitz is of the view that the coronavirus pandemic alone won’t be enough to spark the abandonment of cities — even though some downtown cores may look like ghost towns today.
Newitz is less confident about the long-term outlook, especially for urban areas threatened by wildfires or rising sea levels.
“This is a tough time for us to be thinking about this, because I think many places in the world, including the U.S., are having big questions about our government and our governance,” they said. “And we’re also having climate disasters and a pandemic. So this is a good time to be thinking about how we want to re-imagine our governments, to help us be resilient against these kinds of disasters, because they’re going to keep happening.”
After working on “Four Lost Cities” for years, Newitz wonders how tomorrow’s archaeologists will look at the peculiarities of today’s urban culture — ranging from the quirks of San Francisco’s architecture, to the stratigraphic layer of plastic left behind by the Anthropocene Age, to the revelations contained in Newitz’s own garbage.
Newitz is also working what’s been learned from the lost-cities research into their next science-fiction novel — following up on “Autonomous” and “The Future of Another Timeline.” Intelligent animals will provide an extra twist of genetic engineering to the plot.
“You’ve got to have uplifted animals if you’re going to have a really good city,” Newitz said. “It’s kind of an imaginary way of depicting getting consent from the environment to build something.”
Could cities ever go totally extinct? Newitz doubts that could ever happen. There’s something innately human about living in groups — something that goes beyond economic or environmental factors. Adapting urban culture to become truly sustainable may be one of the biggest challenges for the next century, or the next millennium.
“How do you bring nature into the city, but also how do you continue to have the cool stuff that cities have, like high-speed internet and parties and concerts and restaurants? That’s what we love about cities. People come to cities to party and to meet other people,” Newitz said.
The prime directive to party is pretty much a scientific fact.
“Every time I would talk to an archaeologist about their city, I would be like, ‘Well, why did people come here?'” Newitz said. “In my head, I kept thinking, ‘Oh, they came here for economic reasons.'”
The archaeologists were quick to set Newitz straight. “Every single archaeologist would be like, ‘Well, they came because of pageantry,'” Newitz said. “Like they don’t want to say ‘party,’ right? Because that’ll sound too low-brow. ‘There were some incredible pageants.’ And I was like, ‘So, yeah, people came to have fun.’ … We’re never going to lose that desire to have good food and crazy entertainment.”
Cosmic Log Used Book Club
So what’s Newitz doing for fun during this shut-in pandemic? Podcasts are a prime pursuit: Newitz’s list includes “Short Wave”, a daily science podcast from NPR, and a quirky show called “Who? Weekly.”
“If you’re not able to soak up all the celebrity news that you want, it’s two hosts who will deconstruct silly celebrity news,” they said.
Newitz’s science-fiction reading list includes lots of tales of the city.
“N.K. Jemisin’s latest trilogy, which starts with the novel ‘The City We Became,’ really captures for me a lot of the feelings I have about cities,” they said. Other recommendations include “Perdido Street Station,” the classic book from China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series; and “Throne of the Crescent Moon” by Saladin Ahmed.
“When I was a teenager, one of the books that got me into science fiction was ‘Lord Valentine’s Castle’ by Robert Silverberg, which is basically just city porn,” Newitz joked. “Half the book is like, we reach this place that’s a giant mountain that has 12 giant cities on it, and then we spend half the book going up the mountain and going through the cities. I don’t remember the plot, but I remember the cities.”
The sheer quirkiness of Newitz’s recommendation, and the fact that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, should be enough to qualify “Lord Valentine’s Castle” as this month’s selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club. Since 2002, the CLUB Club has featured books with cosmic themes that have been around long enough to be available at your local library or used-book store. For more recommendations, check out the CLUB Club reading list — and go have some fun.
Archaeologists say they found more than 50 wooden coffins at Egypt's Saqqara site. (Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities Photo)
The historical hits keep coming from Egypt’s Saqqara dig: Today archaeologists announced the discovery of more than 50 wooden coffins, found inside 52 burial shafts that go almost 40 feet deep.
An excavation team headed by Zahi Hawass, one of Egypt’s best-known archaeologists, also explored the funerary temple of Queen Nearit — parts of which were found in previous years. Nearit was one of the wives of King Teti, who ruled Egypt more than 4,000 years ago and built a pyramid next to the newly excavated site in Saqqara.
The finds promise to shed light on more than a millennium’s worth of ancient Egyptian history.
“These discoveries will rewrite the history of this region, especially during the 18th and 19th dynasties of the New Kingdom, during which King Teti was worshiped and the citizens at that time were buried around his pyramid,” the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement published to Facebook.
This painting of a Sulawesi warty pig has been dated to a minimum age of 45,500 years. (Griffith University Photo / Maxime Aubert)
Archaeologists say they’ve found the oldest known artistic depiction of a natural creature — a painting of a warty pig that’s at least 45,500 years old, found inside a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
“The Sulawesi warty pig painting we found in the limestone cave of Leang Tedongnge is now the earliest known representational work of art in the world, as far as are aware,” study co-author Adam Brumm of Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution said today in a news release.
Brumm and his colleagues discovered the painting during an expedition in 2017. It’s part of a scene that appears to show three or four animals facing off against each other on the cave wall.
The painting’s age — reported in Science Advances, an open-access journal — was estimated by using a uranium-series dating technique on mineral deposits that formed over the painting. The researchers behind the find say the artwork could be thousands of years older.
In any case, the reported minimum age beats out the previous record for representational art, which was held by a 44,000-year-old hunting scene found by the same research team in a different Sulawesi cave. The better-known paintings in France’s Chauvet Cave are thought to be a mere 32,000 years old.
Frescos painted on the side of a Pompeii fast-food stand show mallard ducks and a rooster. (Archaeological Park of Pompeii)
A just-unveiled excavation at Italy’s Pompeii archaeological site shows that ancient Roman restaurants had a lot in common with modern-day fast-food eateries — including rude graffiti.
But at Pompeii’s snack bar, naughty comments weren’t just scratched on restroom walls. They were right out in the open, inscribed onto the counter where hot food and drinks were served.
The nearly 2,000-year-old fast-food joint, which was known back then as a thermopolium, got rave reviews this weekend when the Archaeological Park of Pompeii opened it up for pictures. The site was first excavated in 2019, but this year, archaeologists dug down all the way to the floor, unearthing marvelous frescoes in the process.
They also found traces of the tasty wares that were once stored inside the restaurant’s vessels and doled out to customers — as well as the remains of someone who died suddenly when Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in the year 79 covered Pompeii with hot ash and debris.
