Carvings on the walls of the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna depict a world of plenty. Oxen are fattened in a cattle yard. Storehouses bulge with grain and fish. Musicians serenade the pharaoh as he feasts on meat at a banquet.
But new research hints that life in Amarna was a combination of grinding toil and want—at least for the ordinary people who would have hauled the city’s water, unloaded the boats on the Nile, and built Amarna’s grand stone temples and tombs, which were erected in a rush on the orders of a ruler named Akhenaten, sometimes called the “Heretic Pharaoh.”
Researchers examining skeletons in the commoners’ cemetery in Amarna have discovered that many of the city’s children were malnourished and stunted. Adults show signs of backbreaking work, including high levels of injuries associated with accidents. Read more.
MEXICO CITY.- Researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH-Conaculta) keep acquiring knowledge of funerary practices in the ancient groups that inhabited the north of Sonora, such as the incineration and burial (in pots) of their departed, a custom that has been known to archaeologists since the finding of a pre Hispanic cemetery of approximately 700 years old in the Archaeological Zone of Cerro de Trincheras.
Archaeologist Elisa Villalpando Canchola, who directs the investigation in this pre Hispanic site, said the location of this funerary context is so enriching (found in the north hillside of Cerro de Trincheras) it has been named “Loma de las cremaciones” [Hill lock of cremations]
Because the site shows a lot of potential (archaeologically), they took the decision to leave “Loma de las cremaciones” as an archaeological reserve. As such, Villalpando Canchola added that the discovery of the pre Hispanic cemetery can be known until today because they wanted to study the archaeological context. Read more.
MUSCAT — A team of archaeologists at the Ministry of Heritage and Culture managed to unearth an archaeological site at the Aswad border Check Point area in the Wilayat of Shinas in North Al Batinah Governorate. The site includes a settlement and an archaeological symmetry that dates back to 2000 BC (Wadi Souq era) as per the archaeological surveys conducted by the ministry.
The team unearthed the settlement and the archaeological cemetery while conducting the routine surveys before starting any public or private project. Rescue digging works are currently under way for some of the archaeological tombs due to the importance of this site. Read more.
High on a hill overlooking Pakistan’s scenic Swat Valley sits a recently excavated cemetery. Italian archaeologist Luca Maria Olivieri walks across the site and lays a sun-beaten hand on a clay slab jutting out from a high, dun-colored wall. It’s an ancient grave.
Olivieri says the remains still have to be carbon-tested, but archaeologists believe the graves contain members of a Dardic community, which dominated this part of Pakistan 3,000 years ago.
It’s believed Alexander the Great fought one of his battles here, in the village of Udegram.
The grave site was discovered when a landowner started to develop the area. Olivieri is one of several archaeologists working with the local Archaeology Community Tourism Project. He says his group made a deal with the landlord to stop building for one year so they could excavate the cemetery. Read more.
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — With 34 gravesites identified, some possibly dating back more than 200 years, and several large piles of displaced soil surrounding them, the excavation of what is believed to be a Colonial-era cemetery in Brunswick’s Wright Square is nearing an end.
City Manager Bill Weeks, who was previously a research associate with the South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology, says much of the digging is complete at the site on the old Glynn Middle School, at the northeast corner of George and Egmont streets in Brunswick.
After the school, which was built in 1953, was demolished this summer and the city regained ownership of the land from the Glynn County Board of Education, Weeks and a crew from the city public works department began searching for graves and the boundaries of the cemetery. Read more.
Bristol Water has been laying a seven-kilometre, £3.6million main between Banwell and Hutton, and archaeologists employed to investigate remains along the work route discovered a horde of Roman artefacts in the village.
Bristol Water’s Jeremy Williams said of the discovery: “We are told that the finds rewrite the known interpretation of Roman Banwell and are of regional significance.”
Among the discoveries was what appears to be a Roman cemetery containing several human burials, 9,000 pieces of pottery, several copper brooches and a coin from the reign of Roman emperor Constantine the Great.
As well as the cemetery, which seems to show a shift in Roman practice from cremating the dead to burying them, there is also evidence of earlier, possibly Iron Age agricultural activity around the site. Read more.
MEXICO CITY.- A set of 12 burials, inside basalt boxes, were discovered by archaeologists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH – Conaculta) in the southeast part of Nayarit. Given the great quantities of human bones that were contained in each burial, archaeologists consider this finding as a type of pre Hispanic cemetery about 1000 years old.
According to Lourdes Garcia Barajas and Jose Beltran Medina, archaeologists of the INAH Center in Nayarit, this funerary finding is unique since it’s the first one of its kind and because this is a mortuary tradition that had been unknown in the region, with the only related findings being shaft tombs or osseous remains cramped inside clay pots. Until this finding, never had they found osseous remains inside basalt boxes. Read more.
BRUNSWICK - Archaeologist Fred Cook had repeatedly said there were graves where Glynn Middle School had stood.
Brunswick City Manager Bill Weeks found them Thursday in the city’s historic district, and Cook called the graves — five so far — the city’s most significant historical find.
The graves, said to be from the Colonial era, lay on the southwestern corner of the grounds of the recently razed old school at George and Egmont streets. Weeks said he tried skimming the surface, but then employed a city front-end loader with its heavy-duty scoop.
Upon finding the graves, Weeks called in Cook, who dated the graves to the late 1700s.
“This was a Colonial cemetery from before Brunswick was laid out in 1771,” Cook said. “They came out here and picked out this place to bury people.” Read more.
