http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11346-france-notre-dame-coffin Fri, 07 Apr 2023 12:30:24 -0700 Joomla! - RSS Template - Archaeology Magazine en-gb http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11353-utah-basketmaker-beetle-ornament http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11353-utah-basketmaker-beetle-ornament <![CDATA[Different people value different things. The same goes for cultures at large. The things people value and how they choose to display their wealth depends on a great number of factors: geography, history, personal preference, religious beliefs, and mythology, to name just a few. And while the term “wealth” may evoke images of shining gold and silver, glittering gems, and piles of currency, something that may not have any value to people of one culture may be precious to another. It is often at times of momentous change that notions of value can provide the greatest insight into a culture’s belief system. Recently, archaeologist Michael Terlep, who works in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest, and colleagues from Northern Arizona University (NAU) have explored how members of the Basketmaker II culture in the American Southwest displayed their wealth and power as they were undergoing the dramatic shift from hunting and gathering to farming. They fashioned an unusual form of jewelry: necklaces made from insect exoskeletons.   The Basketmaker II people lived across the Colorado Plateau, which covers parts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500. These seminomadic people farmed maize and gourds during the summer and hunted wild game during the winter. They are perhaps best known for their skill in producing ornate woven items such as mats, aprons, sandals, bags—and the painted baskets that give them their name. These objects do not appear to have been owned only by particularly powerful individuals or families, but rather were evenly spread throughout the community. While such a pattern of distributing wealth is typical of hunter-gatherers, it is unusual in a society that has adopted farming.   Across the world, as predominantly egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups began to adopt faming and embrace more sedentary lifestyles, archaeologists often see evidence of increased social hierarchy—which is to say that society was gradually divided into people at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom, with the people at the top having more power and wealth than everyone else. At sites such as Cahokia in Illinois, for example, the Mississippian culture (ca. A.D. 900–1700) had a ranked society in which chiefs and an elite class oversaw workers and lower-class families.   Scholars hotly debate the exact processes by which people in different cultures developed status and power, but a widely accepted theory sees the accumulation of surplus goods as a possible driver. As certain individuals acquired more goods than others and became powerful in a community, they were able to distinguish themselves further by accumulating even more personal property such as opulent homes, art, and jewelry. While archaeologists have occasionally found artifacts such as stone pendants and beads in Basketmaker II houses, pointing to the production of some prestige items, they are exceptionally rare. This has led some to suggest that Basketmaker II people adopted agriculture without experiencing the expected increase in social hierarchy. “Archaeologists wondered for a long time if these people somehow managed to work around issues of wealth and status as they transitioned into agriculture,” says Terlep. As it turns out, the evidence that this was not the case was there all along, just not in the form researchers were expecting. There were no precious stones such as turquoise, commonly used later in the culture’s history, to signify status distinctions among the Basketmaker II people. Instead, they occasionally displayed their higher positions by fashioning necklaces from the iridescent legs of the green June beetle.   Terlep has focused his research on two examples of beetle adornments he found in a storage repository at Edge of the Cedars State Park in Utah. One, a fragment of fiber with 16 insect legs, was discovered by NAU archaeologists at a level in Boomerang Shelter in southern Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument that dates to the Basketmaker II period. Although only a portion of the artifact was recovered during excavation, its shape and materials indicate that it was likely part of a necklace or bracelet. The second is a complete necklace fashioned of more than 200 beetle legs that likely came from Atlatl Cave, just 20 miles from Boomerang Shelter, which Terlep radiocarbon dated to the Basketmaker II period.   Each of these beetle necklaces would have required more than 100 insects and taken considerable time and effort to produce. An artisan would have had to painstakingly remove insect femurs just a fifth of an inch long and puncture holes in them so they could be strung onto an extremely fine cord, likely made of yucca, measuring just a twenty-fifth of an inch thick. Because green June beetles have not historically been found in the region surrounding Atlatl Cave and Boomerang Shelter, it’s possible that the Basketmaker II people would have needed to travel or trade to acquire them. “These adornments were very costly to produce and likely signaled that the wearer was a person of status,” says Terlep. “Because insects in southwestern Native American cultures hold significance within creation mythology and storytelling, it’s probable that these necklaces had symbolic meaning, too.”   Terlep hopes that his research will encourage archaeologists to look for unconventional or unexpected evidence of social organization when investigating new Basketmaker II sites. As he continues his studies, Terlep plans to work alongside Native American collaborators in the area to build a stronger base of information that will draw upon traditional knowledge to help recognize and understand objects such as the beetle adornments. “Our ideas about wealth may have led us to overlook some items like insects in Basketmaker sites,” Terlep says. “Coordinating with local tribes will help reveal information and stories that were clouded by a Western bias.”]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:29:47 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11352-norway-earliest-runestone http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11352-norway-earliest-runestone <![CDATA[Lying in the path of a road construction project near Svingerud farm in southeastern Norway was a cremation pit that contained what at first seemed to be an utterly ordinary mud-smeared chunk of sandstone. When archaeologists cleaned the stone and it had dried, a series of shallow runic inscriptions became visible. The grave has been radiocarbon dated to between A.D. 25 and 250, making the artifact the oldest known runestone. Some of the inscriptions are in the 24-character Elder Futhark writing system, which was used until around A.D. 700, when it was replaced by the 16-character Younger Futhark system that was used during the Viking Age (A.D. 800–1050). Many of the inscriptions are a mixture of scribbles, says Kristel Zilmer of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. One may be a woman’s name, Idiberug. However, Zilmer says that many of the inscriptions don’t make sense and some may just be decorative.]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:28:56 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11351-germany-bronze-age-well http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11351-germany-bronze-age-well <![CDATA[People living in southern Germany around 3,500 years ago appear to have grown so concerned about dwindling water supplies that they deposited valuables in a well in an attempt to end the drought. Archaeologists working in advance of construction in the town of Germering found dozens of items at the bottom of the well, including 26 robe pins, needles, a bangle bracelet, two metal spirals, four amber beads, and a wooden ladle. There were also more than 70 finely crafted and decorated clay vessels of a type usually only found in Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1800–1200 B.C.) graves, a single button that was likely already hundreds of years old when it was put in the well, and an animal tooth wrapped in bronze wire, possibly as a ritual practice. “We think this was a sacrificial deposit, maybe to the gods,” says Jochen Haberstroh, an archaeologist with the Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection.   Archaeologists have discovered around 70 wells dating from the Bronze Age through the Early Middle Ages in an excavation area covering 17 acres, though none of the other wells were found to contain a similar concentration of valuable objects. This well is also 16.5 feet deep, several feet deeper than others in the area, suggesting that it was dug at a time when groundwater had dropped significantly due to drought.]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:28:10 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11350-iraq-paleolithic-cuisine http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11350-iraq-paleolithic-cuisine <![CDATA[Burned vegetable remains from Franchthi Cave in Greece and Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq are revealing that Middle and Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers cooked plants many thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. A team including archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu of the University of Liverpool found that people in the two caves used food preparation techniques that were remarkably similar, despite the 60,000 years separating them; Shanidar Cave was occupied by Neanderthals between 75,000 and 70,000 years ago, while Franchthi Cave was used from 11,700 to 11,400 years ago. The researchers employed reflected light and scanning electron microscopes to identify the species of carbonized plants. They found that the remains in both caves included oat and barley seeds as well as peas, pistachios, almonds, and wild mustard. Several of these plants would have had to be soaked in water and crushed to remove toxins before they could be eaten. In some cases, different plants were combined into a single dish. Many of the plants would have had a bitter taste, and wild mustard has a particularly sharp flavor. According to Kabukcu, these people weren’t just gathering foods with the most calories. “They go out and seek specific flavors and eat the things that they like,” she says.]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:27:29 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11349-teotihuacan-maya-monkey-burial http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11349-teotihuacan-maya-monkey-burial <![CDATA[Around A.D. 275, an unlikely emissary arrived in the central Mexican city of Teotihuacan. A group of Maya brought a spider monkey as an exotic gift to help establish a formal relationship with the city’s rulers. The sacrificed monkey’s remains were part of an offering cache uncovered by archaeologist Nawa Sugiyama of the University of California, Riverside, in the Plaza of the Columns, an elite neighborhood of Teotihuacan. The cache also included the remains of a golden eagle, as well as greenstone figurines and obsidian blades. Examination of the monkey’s bones showed that it was five to eight years old when it died. Isotope analysis of the bones indicated that it lived in captivity for the last two years of its life, based on the type of foods it ate. Sugiyama believes that the monkey symbolized the type of relationship the Maya hoped to have with the rulers of Teotihuacan. Monkeys were important figures in Maya cosmology, she says, noting that they were associated with traits such as artisanship, intellectual knowledge, and writing, as distinct from brute force or power.]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:26:40 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11348-south-africa-horn-medicine http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11348-south-africa-horn-medicine <![CDATA[The chance discovery of a cow horn container in a rock shelter in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province has provided scholars with the recipe for a pharmaceutical compound formulated around 500 years ago. The cow horn, which has been radiocarbon dated to between 1461 and 1630, was found covered with a leather lid and wrapped in leaves and grass. A team led by University of Johannesburg archaeologist Justin Bradfield analyzed residues from the container. They concluded that the residues contained high concentrations of the chemical compounds mono-methyl inositol and lupeol, both of which are used to control blood sugar and cholesterol levels, lower fevers and soothe inflammation, and treat infection. The team determined that three local plants could have been the source of the chemicals. Bradfield says the container is the earliest evidence from southern Africa of people combining two or more plants for the purposes of medicinal treatment. “We know that for tens of thousands of years people have understood the medicinal and toxicological properties of plants,” he says. “But until now we haven’t had tangible evidence that they were combining extracts from several plants to create a medicinal recipe.”]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:26:01 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11347-israel-silk-road-depot http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11347-israel-silk-road-depot <![CDATA[At a site on the edge of southern Israel’s Arava Desert, archaeologists have unearthed a trash heap packed with an unprecedented quantity of discarded merchandise of the sort that was once traded along the medieval Silk Road. The site, called Nahal Omer, was a way station a day’s walk west of the city of Petra, in present-day Jordan. In two dig seasons there, University of Haifa archaeologist Guy Bar-Oz and his team have excavated cotton and silk fabric and other organic remains such as papyrus fragments and cotton ear swabs that came from India and China. To the team’s surprise, the textiles were radiocarbon dated to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D.—at least 300 years after the Roman-era route had largely fallen into disuse. This was a time of growing globalization and renewed trade spurred by the rise of Islam. Bar-Oz believes this midden sat along a previously unknown segment of the Silk Road that might have given Greek-speaking Christians and newly arrived Arabic-speaking Muslim peoples access to sumptuous goods.]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:23:32 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11346-france-notre-dame-coffin http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11346-france-notre-dame-coffin <![CDATA[While digging beneath the transept of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, archaeologists from the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) recovered two lead sarcophagi. The first was sealed within a masonry tomb in a privileged position at the threshold of the cathedral’s choir. An epitaph identifies the deceased as Antoine de la Porte, a cleric who paid for renovations to the choir and died in 1710 at the age of 83. Three bronze medals depicting de la Porte were found atop the coffin. De la Porte’s polished teeth and slender bones indicate a life of leisure befitting someone of his position. Furthermore, explains biological paleoanthropologist Eric Crubézy of the University of Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier, he has lesions on a big toe that appear to be characteristic of gout. “Because gout is associated with rich food and excessive alcohol consumption,” Crubézy says, “it has been considered a disease of elites.”   The other coffin, which dates to the sixteenth or seventeenth century, was found west of the transept. “The coffin’s contours sharply follow the shape of the head, shoulders, and hips, which seems to suggest that it was adapted to the deceased’s body,” says INRAP archaeologist Christophe Besnier. The unidentified man died around the age of 30 of chronic tuberculous meningitis. His hip socket shows he rode horses starting in early childhood, and the treatment of his remains further signals his elevated status. “He was embalmed, his thorax opened, and the top of his skull sawed off,” Crubézy says. “Opening the skull and thorax is found only in subjects of the high nobility.”   To read more about excavations in Notre Dame, go to "Exploring Notre Dame's Hidden Past."  ]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:22:41 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11345-germany-neolithic-mass-grave http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11345-germany-neolithic-mass-grave <![CDATA[A team of archaeologists from Kiel University and the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences unearthed an unusual mass grave at the Neolithic site of Vráble in Slovakia. Vráble was inhabited from about 5250 to 4950 B.C. by people belonging to what scholars call the Linear Pottery culture. At its peak, the site consisted of three neighboring settlements of around 80 houses in all, making it especially large for the time. The team discovered 37 skeletons missing their skulls in a ditch surrounding one of the villages. Mass graves have been found in ditches at other Linear Pottery sites, but none excavated thus far have contained decapitated bodies. Evidence of large-scale massacres at other mass graves suggests the Linear Pottery people entered a period of crisis around 5100 B.C. The headless burials at Vráble may have been part of a response to this upheaval. “The ritual depositions could be some kind of social coping mechanism of a magical or religious nature that people performed to get back control in a time when things seemed to be falling apart,” says archaeologist Martin Furholt. Excavation and dating of other settlements in the area show that they were being abandoned around the time the headless bodies were buried. Meanwhile, the population at Vráble was growing, perhaps a result of newcomers seeking security in an increasingly unstable world.]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:19:33 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11344-greece-odeon-discovered http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11344-greece-odeon-discovered <![CDATA[An excavation team led by archaeologist Katerina Janakakis of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania has uncovered ruins of an odeon, or roofed theatrical building, in the ancient city of Lissos on the southwest coast of Crete. Thus far, the team has unearthed 14 rows of seats, two vaulted side chambers, and part of the stage, all constructed from local limestone. The odeon was built in the first century A.D., when Lissos was a prosperous Roman city. The settlement was heavily damaged, likely during a devastating earthquake in A.D. 365 that leveled other cities in the eastern Mediterranean. Although odeons typically hosted musical performances and poetry competitions, Janakakis believes this particular building might also have served as a gathering place for government authorities. “Lissos was a small, provincial city,” she says, “so it’s a rather logical assumption that the odeon might have had a double use, judging by its form and location in the center of the city.”]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:18:39 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11343-greece-poseidon-sanctuary http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11343-greece-poseidon-sanctuary <![CDATA[In his encyclopedic Geography, the first-century A.D. Greek historian Strabo mentions an important sanctuary dedicated to the sea god Poseidon that was situated in the hilly region of Triphylia along the west coast of Greece’s Peloponnese. Its exact location has long eluded scholars, but now a team of researchers led by Birgitta Eder of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, in cooperation with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Elis, believe they have finally discovered possible traces of the sanctuary. At the site of Kleidi-Samikon, the team unearthed stone foundations of a temple measuring at least 90 feet long, as well as a fragment of a large marble water basin of a kind found in sanctuaries throughout Greece. Eder explains that the structure’s layout and the terracotta roof tiles used to fill in the space between its walls suggest that it was built in the sixth century B.C. “This was a major monumental building with two interior rooms and probably a front and back hall,” she says. “It would have been a prominent site and a central meeting point for the regional cities of Triphylia.”]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:17:50 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11342-sweden-tycho-brahe http://www.archaeology.org/feed/509-issue/2305/digs/11342-sweden-tycho-brahe <![CDATA[The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was the most accomplished scientist in sixteenth-century Europe. Using only astronomical equipment that relied on the naked eye—the telescope hadn’t been invented yet—he established that the stars were not part of an unchanging firmament, but belonged to a constantly evolving universe. In 1576, the Danish king Frederick II granted Tycho title to the windswept island of Ven, where the scholar constructed Uraniborg, or Castle of the Heavens, a state-of-the-art, three-story brick observatory and scientific institute. There, not content with observing a single heavenly body once and then moving on to the next, Tycho and his assistants made thousands of observations of individual stars with instruments such as quadrants, sextants, and a device of Tycho’s own invention known as an equatorial armillary. “He observed the heavens with a skeptical mind,” says Luther College historian John Christianson. “He didn’t assume that a single observation was accurate. He made measurement after measurement to assess their accuracy and essentially invented the modern concept of data.” Tycho soon realized that the island’s heavy winds were disturbing his precise measurements. He constructed a second, underground observatory, dubbed Stjerneborg, or Star Castle, where he could take more accurate readings. Both observatories were destroyed soon after Tycho left the island in 1597, dismayed by the antipathy of Frederick II’s heir, Christian IV, and calls from the scientific establishment to subordinate his institute to the University of Copenhagen. In the 1950s, Swedish archaeologists excavated the site of Stjerneborg, uncovering its original foundations. More recently, teams from Lund University have excavated the remnants of Uraniborg itself. They have also reconstructed sections of its ramparts and the magnificent Renaissance garden that Tycho commissioned.   THE SITE The former location of Uraniborg lies within the grounds of the Tycho Brahe Museum. Open from late April to September, the museum displays replicas of Tycho’s astronomical instruments as well as artifacts such as a cherub statue and water faucet from Uraniborg discovered during excavations. The nearby Stjerneborg observatory has been reconstructed based on archaeological evidence. Still visible are its original walls and its foundations, which were unearthed by archaeologists and once supported immense instruments. The gardens surrounding Uraniborg, which were re-created based on excavated botanical remains, are open to visitors.   WHILE YOU’RE THERE Ven is a 90-minute ferry ride from Copenhagen. In the city, visitors can prepare for a trip to the island by going to the University of Copenhagen, where the Round Tower observatory, built by Tycho’s disciples according to his scientific principles, still stands. After touring the Tycho Brahe Museum on Ven, Christianson recommends stopping at St. Ibb’s church. Tycho ordered an artist employed at Uraniborg to paint the church’s altar, and visitors can see his personal pew, which is adorned with the Brahe family crest.]]> Digs & Discoveries Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:16:57 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/issues/458-2203/features/10331-notre-dame-restoration http://www.archaeology.org/issues/458-2203/features/10331-notre-dame-restoration <![CDATA[The first major fire at Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral burned through an August night more than 800 years ago. At the time, cathedral fires were not uncommon—the structures were tinderboxes of dry wood, textiles, hanging lamps, and burning candles. The twelfth-century chronicler Guillaume le Breton records that the inferno started when a thief broke into the cathedral’s attic and, using ropes and hooks in an attempt to steal the candlesticks, set the silk hangings alight. Over the following centuries, there were almost certainly many more fires, but none as catastrophic as the one that began in the attic and engulfed the building on April 15, 2019. The cause of that conflagration remains uncertain; an electrical short circuit or damaged electrical cable in use during restoration efforts taking place at the time are the possible culprits.   For 15 hours, flames reaching nearly 1,200°F ate away at a large part of the cathedral’s medieval wooden roof, which crashed onto the stone vaulting that forms its ceiling. The nineteenth-century spire that topped the building broke apart when the lead coating meant to protect it melted. The weight of the debris caused a ceiling vault to collapse, sending huge piles of burned wood and broken stone down to the marble floor of the nave. When the fire was finally extinguished, the scene was one of complete devastation and the atmosphere one of extreme concern. Parisians, along with those watching from around the world, wondered if the building was structurally sound, if the cathedral’s spectacular stained-glass windows had survived, and if Notre Dame, which has been called the soul of the city—and of France—could ever be rebuilt.   The fire pared Notre Dame to its core, but the destruction is providing an unprecedented chance for scholars to investigate its history and reimagine its future. For archaeologists, the bent iron, burned roof timbers, and shattered stonework provide an opportunity to study a building that, despite its religious, architectural, and historic significance, is, in fact, poorly understood. Over time, the cathedral was modified to accommodate the requirements of a growing staff of clergy and an expanding congregation, as well as the increasing number of visitors to a building not designed for mass tourism, obscuring its medieval origins. Since the nineteenth-century renovation by architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, there has been little opportunity to study the cathedral’s archaeological record.   Archaeologists and other specialists removed, sorted, and inventoried the collapsed remains from late April 2019 to spring 2021, after which the artifacts were transferred to rented warehouses in the northeast of Paris where they are available for study. What researchers have collected is considerable—about 10,000 pieces of wood, 650 pallets of stone, and 350 pallets of metal. “It’s impressive to have Notre Dame right there in front of us,” says archaeologist Dorothée Chaoui-Derieux of the French Ministry of Culture. “There is a certain emotion to have at hand blocks of stone that were previously more than 100 feet up and about which little was known, or all this wood, some of which dates to the thirteenth century and still smells like burning from the fire.” Sidebar: Layers of History {page}  Chaoui-Derieux is chief curator of heritage at the Regional Archaeology Service based in the Île-de-France, the region including and surrounding Paris. She is part of a huge team that includes at least 100 researchers from the Ministry of Culture, the French National Center for Scientific Research, and the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), all dedicated to studying and restoring Notre Dame. In addition to medieval archaeologists, experts in glass, metal, wood, and stone are investigating the materials Notre Dame’s builders used and discovering how their skill would safeguard the cathedral some eight centuries after it was constructed. This work will take many years, long past the planned reopening of the restored cathedral in 2024, and thus far, has raised more questions than it has answered. But the fire has led to an archaeological project like no other.   The history of the site that would eventually be home to the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on the Île de la Cité, or City Island, is long and varied. Paris had its origins in the Gallo-Roman town of Lutetia, on the left bank of the Seine. It took its current name from the Parisii, a Gallic tribe that had permanently settled on the island by a.d. 25, although they may have inhabited it for centuries before as it was a convenient point at which to cross the river. The site was fortified in a.d. 308 by the province’s Roman governor, and in the early sixth century A.D., the first king of the Franks, Clovis I (r. ca. A.D. 509–511), chose Paris as his capital and built a palace on the island. Later in the sixth century, Paris’ first cathedral, the cathedral of Saint Étienne, or Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was built close to the south portal of the present-day cathedral. Many other buildings and monuments were constructed over the next few centuries, most of which were torn down during eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development of the site, which included razing buildings deemed unsanitary during an 1865 cholera epidemic.   In 1163, the bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, began work on a new cathedral built of Lutetian limestone at the island’s eastern end on the ruins of two earlier churches, including that of Saint Étienne, and, farther down, ruins of a temple dedicated to Jupiter dating to the city’s Roman period. The current Notre Dame Cathedral measures 427 by 157 feet, soars 115 feet high, and can hold more than 6,000 people. It was mostly built by 1245, but not completed for another century.   Its role as a useful river crossing played a part in its selection for the new place of worship. At the time, many of the thousands of pilgrims who traveled each year from France to the holy site of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, as well as Crusaders who set out for Jerusalem, crossed the Seine. Many stopped on the Île de la Cité, making it an even more important religious site. It became the seat of the archbishop of Paris, which it remains today. It also became a lively commercial and residential area, home to clerics, servants, and merchants. In the thirteenth century, Notre Dame’s importance was burnished when relics from the Passion of Christ, including the crown of thorns, were brought to Paris from Jerusalem and placed in the cathedral. The building also housed a thirteenth-century tunic of Saint Louis. The crown, tunic, precious sets of candlesticks, and other relics were among the first objects saved from the 2019 fire. A copper rooster that had crowned the spire and contained relics of Saint Geneviève, the city’s patron saint, was found by a restorer sorting debris on the street. Sidebar: Layers of History {page}  Notre Dame is built in the Gothic style, which was widely adopted between the mid-twelfth and sixteenth centuries across Europe. The size of Romanesque-style buildings constructed prior to and in the mid-eleventh century was limited by engineering challenges that had yet to be solved. By the time Notre Dame was built, architects had begun to find solutions to these problems, and the soaring, cavernous cathedrals of medieval Europe could be constructed.   The primary innovations that allowed gigantic Gothic cathedrals to stand, even though their walls are pierced with numerous huge stained-glass windows, are rib vaults and flying buttresses. Rib vaults are much lighter than the groin or barrel vaults that hold up Romanesque cathedrals. Because they are composed of diagonal, crossing arched ribs, the building’s thrust—the outward pressure of a vault or arch—can be distributed out to the corners of the vault and down to the ground on thin columns and piers. Masonry buttresses on the cathedral’s exterior—called flying because they are high on the wall—carry the tremendous thrust of the vaults and roof, making the high ceilings of Gothic churches possible. The massive cruciform interiors of these cathedrals could then be divided into the main aisle, called the nave; the arms that cross the nave, or transept; the space between the nave and the altar, called the choir; and additional aisles and chapels.   As Notre Dame burned through the night and the sounds of raging flames, cracking stone, and falling roof beams filled the air, many lining the Seine held their breath for the sound of shattering glass that would signal the destruction of the cathedral’s stained-glass windows. They were especially concerned about the immense circular windows—called rose windows because they resemble multi-petaled flowers—that are a defining feature of Gothic architecture. Throughout the medieval period, the designs for these windows were adapted to play with light and color, creating patterns as complex as carpets.   Notre Dame’s rose windows sit over the north, south, and west portals and were completed in the early to mid-thirteenth century. They are the only windows in the cathedral to retain their original medieval glass. As daylight came up on smoldering embers, reports started to arrive from people who had trained their binoculars on the windows for hours: They were intact, thanks not least to the skills of the Parisian firefighters who had averted further disaster by aiming their hoses away from the glass as water pressure could have caused the windows to explode.   Though the rose windows were unharmed, colorful stained-glass panels by later artists that were part of Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration did sustain some damage. After the fire, a panel depicting King David was brought to the Historical Monuments Research Laboratory, 15 miles from Paris, where glass specialist Claudine Loisel examined it for evidence of cracks due to intense heat. “There is some damage, but nothing catastrophic,” she says. “Overall, the stained-glass windows are all in a good state of conservation with only a few occasional thermal breaks.”   Glass is only one of the materials used in Notre Dame that specialists are now studying. The immense amount of lead used for the cathedral’s medieval construction and nineteenth-century spire is both a curse and a blessing for modern scholars. During the fire, the heated lead emitted toxic fumes that lingered for months. But lead can also provide evidence of the provenance of materials and of the methods builders employed. Medieval archaeologist Maxime L’Héritier leads the group working on the metal from Notre Dame. Because of the poisonous emissions from the lead, he had to wait six months to access the cathedral’s interior. He was finally allowed in, wearing a protective suit and using a respirator. “I remember the shock the first time,” L’Héritier says. “We are researchers, but humans, too.” Sidebar: Layers of History {page}  At the time the cathedral was built, lead was commonly used for roofing in major monuments, providing sealing for stones and the staples or metal pins inside columns, and as decoration. “Lead was a prestige material and lead workers were very important in medieval times,” says L’Héritier. “Nails, staples, and iron pins can all be sealed with mortar or by pouring in molten lead which solidifies. In Notre Dame, most examples we saw, though not all, are sealed with lead.” Hundreds of lead samples have been taken for isotope analysis and other chemical experiments. Researchers will also be able to track how lead materials were reused during past renovations and which ones might be reused as part of the current reconstruction.   The cathedral’s nails, many of which were recovered from the burned remnants of its upper sections, are a significant part of the archaeological evidence. By studying the nails, researchers may be able to date some of the changes and repairs undertaken since the thirteenth century.   One major discovery after the fire is that staples were used throughout the entire construction process of Notre Dame. These staples are currently being dated and analyzed to better understand where they came from, how they were made, and how they were used in the building. This will give scholars more information about the city’s trading system during the medieval period. “Unlike other medieval buildings studied so far, many different iron sources seem to have been called for at Notre Dame,” says L’Héritier. “These artifacts are keys to better understanding the Parisian iron market in medieval times.”   One of the largest groups of researchers is now working on the wood recovered from Notre Dame. These archaeologists and dendrochronologists also had to wait to examine and sample the burned timbers, which were polluted with lead and had to be removed to a dedicated warehouse far north of Paris. The collection of burned medieval timbers is now known as “the forest,” and includes wood from more than 1,000 trees.   Before the fire it was difficult to obtain permission to take wood samples from Notre Dame, and dendrochronologists had dated just 70 samples. But the fire created an opportunity for more samples to be taken, possibly enabling researchers to answer questions about the chronology of the cathedral’s interior. “We know that the frameworks of the choir and nave are medieval, and that the transept’s framework dates from the nineteenth century,” says Chaoui-Derieux. “It’s now interesting to see whether they underwent several construction phases, and whether wood was replaced in certain sections.”   One of the most daunting challenges of the current work is surveying and documenting the cathedral’s stones, many for the first time. This task falls to a 30-person team led by architectural historian Yves Gallet of Bordeaux Montaigne University. “What made an impression when I first went back to the cathedral after the fire was the direct access to the upper levels and vaults,” says Gallet. “There is a real opportunity for research, as well as to do something to help in the restoration of the monument.”   The team’s first objective was to assess what was original and what had been redone later in the north arm of the transept. The south arm was completely remade by Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century, and initial indications from studying the stonework are that the frame of the north rose window was as well. Previously it was believed that the north window is just as it was originally constructed in the thirteenth century. “It was a shock, in a way,” says Gallet, “to realize that here, too, Viollet-le-Duc had to replace all the blocks around the rose.” Sidebar: Layers of History {page}  Gallet’s group has made additional significant discoveries since the fire. Part of their work is to identify notations left by the stonecutters, either to mark the stones they had cut themselves so they could be paid for their work or to indicate the direction in which a stone was to be laid. Analysis of the voussoirs—wedge-shaped stones used to form arches—recovered from the floor of the nave after the double arch above collapsed has shown that stonemasons carved crosses on one side. This detail has allowed researchers to redate the construction of the vaults. “These crosses were not used in the Île-de-France until after the 1220s,” says Gallet. “This led to a rethinking of the chronology of the site.”   There are also more modern marks. Close examination of the keystone, or central voussoir, in the south arm of the transept revealed the engraved date 1728. The inscription is not visible from below, and no one had ever documented it. “Until now, the scientific literature made no mention of these marks. It’s therefore a novelty, and one which places Notre Dame in a very different perspective,” says Gallet. “This is an unexpected date because art historians have always believed that this keystone dated either from the Gothic period or from the nineteenth-century restorations. We’re still thinking about the best interpretation.”   Perhaps the most extraordinary thing that Gallet’s team has learned thus far is what role medieval craftspeople played in saving Notre Dame during the fire. “What protected the cathedral were its vaults,” Gallet says. “Most of them resisted the fire, which was remarkable, especially as examination of the vaults since then confirms that the ribs are very thin, only around six inches thick, and had to support a 42-foot-wide vault that was 100 feet aboveground.” The only major vault that collapsed did so because it was unable to withstand the sudden weight of the crumbling upper section of the spire. “The vaults played the role of firewall,” says Gallet. “If there had been no stone vaults, the flaming beams of the roof would have fallen to the ground and shattered the stones of the supporting piers. And then the whole cathedral would have collapsed.”   A builders’ crane now hovers over Notre Dame, a stark reminder on the skyline of where the cathedral’s spire once stood. The metal scaffolding erected during the restoration work that was taking place when the fire started melted into and became part of the building. It has now been removed. Apart from continuing work on the thousands of artifacts recovered from the site, there may be other opportunities to learn more about Notre Dame, especially when the work of rebuilding gets fully underway. For example, if the renovation requires excavations to anchor temporary support structures, researchers might be able to study Notre Dame’s original foundations, or perhaps even earlier remnants. (See “Layers of History.") “It’s known that there were iterations of the building before the construction of the Gothic cathedral,” Chaoui-Derieux says. “But few remains of these buildings have been unearthed.”   In the autumn of 2020, INRAP archaeologists carried out a geophysical survey in the cathedral’s basement. A few feet under the paving they detected features they identified as part of the cathedral’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century heating networks. Chaoui-Derieux describes certain other masonry finds as “archaeological anomalies,” and says it’s possible that they could belong to a previous version of the cathedral, or could even be vestiges of Roman structures. Once again, the unique circumstances of the fire enabled this investigation. “It was indeed the first time this was done at Notre Dame, and probably one of the last,” Chaoui-Derieux says. Nevertheless, the possibilities continue. “What intrigued me at Notre Dame when I was a student was those parts of its history that we do not see—the earlier cathedral, the buildings of the early Middle Ages—in short, everything which disappeared with the construction of the Gothic cathedral,” says Gallet. “This is one more step in our treasure hunt.”   Christine Finn is a writer living in Paris. Sidebar: Layers of History]]> Features Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:15:08 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/issues/463-2203/sidebars/11341-notre-dame-quay http://www.archaeology.org/issues/463-2203/sidebars/11341-notre-dame-quay <![CDATA[Scaffolding that had been erected for a restoration project at Notre Dame melted into the building during the April 2019 fire. Before workers removed this scaffolding, archaeologists had a unique opportunity to dig at the site. During this project, archaeologists from the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research, overseen by Xavier Peixoto, dug three test pits. Two revealed little of interest, but the third brought to light a 10-foot-high medieval limestone quay wall that predates the Gothic church begun in 1163 and provides new evidence of the earlier history of the site.   The wall had first been discovered in 1918, at which time the lower part was dated to the pre-Roman Gallic period and the upper part to the Roman era. But according to Peixoto, the entire wall is medieval and dates to the end of the eleventh or first half of the twelfth century. “It’s an important find because it’s earlier than the cathedral and the episcopal palace of its builder, Maurice de Sully,” Peixoto says. “Its position seems to indicate that the location of the episcopal palace of the 1160s was further north than previously thought, and not under the new episcopal house built by de Sully.”   On top of the wall the team found a layer of fill corresponding to the period of the Gothic cathedral’s construction that Peixoto interprets as landfill needed to build up the ground to construct the new episcopal palace. Atop the fill layer, the team uncovered construction debris relating to work to extend the palace in the sixteenth century and a buttress dating to the 1300s that was found in a layer corresponding to eighteenth-century renovations of the cathedral. These discoveries provide evidence of the long and complicated history of Notre Dame that has until now rarely been seen.]]> Sidebar Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:13:18 -0700 http://www.archaeology.org/feed/508-issue/2305/features/11340-peru-chimu-chan-chan http://www.archaeology.org/feed/508-issue/2305/features/11340-peru-chimu-chan-chan <![CDATA[The Moche River Valley in northern Peru was an unlikely place to build a city. Though barely 1,000 feet from the Pacific Ocean, the valley received less than a tenth of an inch of rain per year. Nevertheless, in about A.D. 1000, a people known as the Chimú selected a location in the valley some four miles north of the river and set about making it habitable. Called Chimor in colonial accounts, and now commonly known as Chan Chan, it became the largest urban center in the Americas.   What enabled the Chimú to build a city in this unpopulated coastal desert was their tremendous engineering skill, which they used to create an extensive network of irrigation canals that channeled snowmelt from the Andes Mountains into the Moche River. What drove the Chimú was the desire for a place to call their own. The valley had no one to conquer and evict, no existing structures to raze, and no troubled history to erase. “Chan Chan is an invented city in an artificially irrigated valley,” says archaeologist Gabriel Prieto of the University of Florida. “The Chimú transformed the landscape, created an entirely new society, and became the most powerful rulers in coastal Peru. Chan Chan was an experiment that worked for almost five hundred years.”   The Chimú built their new capital, which spread over more than seven square miles, in a way that distinguished them from other Andean cultures and was intended to reflect their particular social system. “There were enormous social differences and a clear recognition of social distinctions in Chimú society,” says archaeologist Jerry Moore of California State University, Dominguez Hills. “What is so important about Chan Chan is that it shows a very different kind of architectural style from other Andean societies.” Even their myths reveal how, for the Chimú, division between classes was at the center of their worldview. One myth says that royal and noble males were spawned from a gold egg, noblewomen from a silver egg, and everyone else from a copper egg. “I like the egg myth because it suggests that the Chimú understood that social and political inequality is ‘baked in’ to humanity from the beginning,” says anthropologist Robyn Cutright of Centre College. Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice {page} The first large-scale explorations of Chan Chan were conducted between 1968 and 1974 by members of the Chan Chan–Moche Valley Project, a massive mapping effort that investigated both the city’s monumental architecture and houses believed to have belonged to the urban working class. In the city plan that emerged, the researchers determined that Chimú kings lived in self-contained adobe royal palace complexes in a dense urban core of about two and half square miles. Each of the nine palaces had a single entrance that strictly controlled access to a zone of twisted, winding corridors leading to a royal residence with kitchens and wells, storerooms overflowing with the king’s treasure, and open plazas to hold feasts, ceremonies, and royal funerals. Many of the walls were covered with depictions of pelicans, fish, marine motifs, and Chimú deities. Seven palaces contained burial platforms intended for the deceased ruler.   The palaces were surrounded by walls up to 30 feet high. When a king died, his successor would build a new palace. “Each king or ruler constructed his own palace,” says Cutright. “There must have been some idea that succession required something new, not just inheriting the old.” Other members of the royal elite lived in smaller adobe compounds that included many of the same structures as the palaces, but on a much smaller scale. Chan Chan’s commoners, it was thought, lived and worked in small wattle-and-daub structures in four neighborhoods spread across the city. “The sharp social stratification of Chimú society is very clear in the architecture,” says Joanne Pillsbury, curator of ancient American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “There are extreme differences in the scale and quality of building materials and ornament.”   For much of the last five decades, there has been little investigation of Chan Chan. “Chan Chan is greatly understudied considering its importance,” says Tulane University biological anthropologist John Verano. An exception has been ongoing excavations conducted by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture that began in 2006 and have focused on the palaces and especially the funerary platforms, or huacas. For the past several years, archaeologists have excavated the imposing Huaca Toledo on the east side of the city, which, sixteenth-century sources report, once contained an enormous treasure of gold and silver belonging to the Chimú king. During the recent excavations, the team discovered fine tapestries and decorated ceramics, evidence of important burials once placed in the platform.   In 2022, Prieto returned to Chan Chan to excavate the neighborhood on the southwest side of the city and reexamine how average residents had lived. “We thought we knew that these types of neighborhoods were inhabited by artisans and craft specialists—silversmiths, weavers, wood-carvers—from a low social class who worked full-time for the needs and desires of the Chimú kings and queens,” he says. “But archaeology changes all the time and there are new techniques and new things to learn.” Thus far, the discoveries Prieto and his team have made have begun to upend the traditional view of the neighborhoods and redefine who lived in Chan Chan. They have found that these areas were much more ethnically diverse than previously believed and, in some cases, the people much better off. The work has also suggested that some families in the neighborhoods may have filled a special role in Chimú society. Prieto believes that some of the children who were sacrificed during one of multiple mass sacrifice events that are known to have occurred in Chimú history were either born in or moved to Chan Chan before these ceremonies, which were crucial to how the Chimú envisioned the world and their place in it. Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice {page} The Chimú were successors to the people of the Moche culture, whose rulers controlled much of northern Peru from about A.D. 200 to 900. According to the 1604 Anonymous History of Trujillo, written by a Spanish chronicler who recorded Chimú oral histories, the first Chimú king was Taycanamo, who came to the Moche Valley from the sea, having sailed there on a raft made of balsa logs, a design typical of the north. But the idea that the Chimú founder came from elsewhere may be more myth than reality. “The Chimú are the same people who have lived on the coast of Peru for as long as there have been people living there,” says Cutright. “There’s no evidence of any major population replacement, and instead we should think about shifts in political organization and cultural identity.” Once new generations started to call themselves Chimú, Prieto says, they tried to detach from the past and wipe the slate clean. “Chan Chan doesn’t emerge out of nowhere, but is distinctly and consciously different from Moche or anything else before,” says archaeologist Alicia Boswell of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “These people were reinventing how to express their novel ideologies and societal structures, and what we see, for example with the palaces, is a choice about how to present themselves as different and distinct from any culture before them.”   By the mid-fifteenth century, the Chimú territory, known as the Kingdom of Chimor, stretched about 600 miles along the coast from the Lambayeque Valley in the north to the Pativilca River in the south. Throughout the region, the Chimú used their irrigation expertise to maximize the production of cotton, maize, squash, lima beans, chili peppers, gourds, sweet potatoes, peanuts, avocados, and other fruits including guanabana or soursop, which, archaeological evidence indicates, seems to have been one of their favorite foods. They also ate llamas and guinea pigs and took great advantage of ample resources harvested from the sea. “I don’t think the Chimú could have survived without the sea and the marine riches available to them,” says Cutright. Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice {page} The crops grown in the regions the Chimú took over were not new to the subjugated people, but the output required by their new rulers probably was. Much of these agricultural products fed and clothed the royal family and Chan Chan’s enormous population, which, in the mid-fifteenth century, reached upwards of 40,000. The city dominated the Moche Valley to such an extent that archaeologists have excavated only one Chimú rural settlement there. “It’s almost like the urban center of Chan Chan had a centripetal force drawing everyone to it,” says Moore.   The Chimú were master craftspeople, and it is thought that perhaps as many as 12,000 artisans in the city at its height were engaged in craft production. The Chimú required large quantities of precious metals to fashion jewelry, vessels, and ceremonial weapons, some of which were decorated with mother-of-pearl and turquoise. In addition to raising their own macaws in Chan Chan, they imported macaw and tanager feathers from the Peruvian jungle to create vivid crowns and to decorate cotton and llama-wool textiles. “These finely made gold and silver vessels, glittering ornaments, and exquisite textiles were essential in the maintenance of political authority,” says Pillsbury. The Chimú also imported Spondylus shells—some of the best were from present-day Ecuador—prestige items that were carved into ornaments and beads and crushed to create a powder that was scattered in front of the king as he walked.   Chimú rulers’ desire for wealth pushed them to expand their territory and form relationships in search of new sources of food, raw materials, human capital, and tribute from the people under their control. They established provincial administrative centers at sites including Farfán in the Jequetepeque Valley and Manchan in the Casma Valley. Unlike some ancient empires, though, not all Chimú expansion was achieved through military might. “Even if there are goods that you want, that are desirable, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have an entire militarized acquisition system to get them,” Moore says. “I don’t think those rare objects or materials were always obtained through conquest.” (See “Where the Coca Grows.”)   After nearly five centuries, in about 1450, Minchançaman, the eleventh and final ruler of the Kingdom of Chimor, was defeated by the Inca ruler Tupac Yupanqui and imprisoned in the Inca capital of Cuzco. Apart from brief mentions of the Chimú in the Anonymous History of Trujillo, almost nothing is known from any written source about the Chimú style of government or religious beliefs. By the time the Spanish arrived, their language, Quingnam, had almost completely disappeared and is now extinct. And archaeologists have focused their efforts in the region more on the Moche and Lambayeque, two of the peoples whose territories the Chimú controlled. “The Chimú are missing the party of prehistory,” says Prieto. “They haven’t been invited yet.” Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice {page} When Prieto began his excavations, scholars believed that the city’s four residential neighborhoods had been filled exclusively with craft workshops, but little evidence of this had been found. Prieto says he was skeptical. Soon his team began to uncover evidence that the residents of the neighborhood they were working in held a higher socioeconomic position than that which artisans would be expected to have. Inside the two houses they have excavated thus far, they have unearthed luxury goods including macaw feathers, Spondylus shells, fine textiles, and metal objects. But Prieto has yet to unearth any solid evidence of sustained craft activity. “Based on the quantity and quality of the material we found in the residences, it’s very clear that these aren’t workshops,” he says. “These were by no means lower-class Chimú people and were definitely members of an intermediary elite not attached to royal families.” Although the team has found a great number of cotton items as well as spindles and needles in the houses, Prieto is uncertain whether the textiles were produced for household use or for the rest of the city as well.   In addition to the startling wealth Prieto’s team uncovered, he also found something else unanticipated. “I was expecting to find classic, simple Chimú wares used by people in the Moche Valley,” he says. Instead, he found ceramics from the Casma and Jequetepeque Valleys and from the Lambayeque region to the north, which may have been brought to Chan Chan by people who relocated to the city. “We knew the Chimú were conquering these regions,” Prieto says, “but we didn’t know they were incorporating people from these areas into the big city.” Macrobotanical evidence has also contributed to a new understanding of who was living in Chan Chan. The team has found remains of nonlocal foods such as quinoa, potatoes, and sauco, or elderberry, which are typical of the highlands. The textiles they have discovered also show an unexpected variety of weaving techniques and decoration. “We’re now thinking that the population in the city was much more diverse than previously thought,” says Prieto. “The way I see Chan Chan now is that it was full of people expressing their identity with different customs, different types of food, and different clothes.”   The houses Prieto and his team have excavated are directly across the street from each other, but have very different layouts, surprising for a society understood to be so dominated by those at the top. Each house measures between 850 and 1,000 square feet, but one, called House Eight, has a complex plan with more rooms, while the other, House Seven, is much simpler. “The houses aren’t cookie-cutter residences built in a certain way because the state tells you to,” Prieto says. “These people had liberty to build their homes as they wished.” Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice {page} Chan Chan grew in ways that did not adhere to a single overarching plan, but according to the changing needs of its residents. “Every time the Chimú expanded their territory and brought new people into the city, it had to accommodate more people, more ways of getting around.” Prieto says. “We see this in the archaeology even in just this one little neighborhood.” The team has found that the neighborhood’s history of occupation had at least three different phases and that modifications were made at each stage. “That leads me to think that whatever was going on at the domestic level was affected by major changes in the political organization,” says Prieto. “Maybe when they built a new palace, the ruler said that everyone had to change their own house, too.” Radiocarbon dates show that the last two levels of both houses date to after 1450, and possibly as late as 1470, well into the Inca period, after Chan Chan was thought to have been abandoned. “This is something that had never been known before,” says Prieto, “and we already have a much more complex understanding of the city than we ever thought possible.”   The power of Chan Chan’s rulers was not limited to the city’s palaces and neighborhoods. From 2011 to 2022, Prieto and Verano excavated the sites of Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, Pampa la Cruz, and El Pollo about six miles north of Chan Chan. They uncovered the remains of 451 sacrificed girls and boys ranging in age from five to 15, 36 sacrificed adults, most of whom were women, and 620 sacrificed llamas, all of which were juveniles. (See “A Society’s Sacrifice.”). Verano and other scholars have studied the children’s remains and learned that they all died in the same manner. “We see that they were sacrificed in a consistent way,” Verano says. “They weren’t bound or tied up like captives, they didn’t suffer any blows to the head, and most of the time we can identify a single horizontal cut through the sternum—a few do have hesitation cuts, perhaps made by someone less skilled—and likely the removal of their heart.” All the llamas were killed using the same process, a method that is still practiced in the Peruvian highlands today.   The only historical mention of Chimú child sacrifice is an account by a Spanish friar, Father Antonio de la Calancha, who wrote that the Chimú conducted child sacrifices during lunar eclipses. No such descriptions of Chimú mass sacrifices exist in either the records of the Inca or other Spanish chroniclers. “Unlike the very well-documented high-altitude Inca child sacrifices, called the capacocha, we don’t have any ethnohistoric descriptions of these events or the motivations or procedures accompanying them,” says Verano. “Before our discovery, this phenomenon was invisible to archaeologists.” Furthermore, Chimú art does not include images of human sacrifice. “This is completely unlike their predecessors the Moche,” says Boswell, “whose iconography is filled with vivid scenes of male warrior sacrifice.” This change is further evidence of the break from the past the Chimú seemed intent upon. “We have no firsthand accounts of Chimú ritual practices, just the archaeological remains suggesting certain activities along with later accounts describing some practices,” says Pillsbury. “Sometimes works of art can help illuminate things. For example, Moche artists excelled in creating terrifying, snaggle-toothed beings, often engaged in cosmic struggle, but you don’t see those subjects often in Chimú art, and this suggests a change in belief and practices.” Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice {page} At first, Prieto and Verano thought that the children were part of a single mass sacrifice at the various sites, perhaps connected to an El Niño weather event in 1450, but radiocarbon dates showed that there were, in fact, multiple sacrificial ceremonies beginning in about 1050 and continuing for the next 400 years at the three different locations, extending into the Inca period. “This was a series of ritual events performed as a way to communicate with the gods and mediate between people and supernatural forces,” says Verano. Ritual ceremonies of this level of standardization and complexity must, he says, have been organized at a state level and been tightly controlled by the kings at Chan Chan.   Prieto wanted to investigate where the children came from and what kinds of lives they led. A member of his team, bioarchaeologist Rachel Witt of Tulane University, conducted oxygen isotope analysis on the remains of 30 children from Pampa la Cruz and El Pollo to determine where they were born and grew up. Her work showed that 63 percent were not born in the Chimú imperial core in the Moche Valley. More than half of the children exhibit oxygen isotope values that fall outside the range of values for the water they would have drunk in the Moche Valley, suggesting that they were born outside the valley and lived there throughout infancy. “These children were drawn from many different communities, not only in the Moche Valley, but also from other valleys, and maybe even from farther inland than you would expect,” Witt says. “Perhaps this was done in tandem with Chimú imperial expansion to get everyone to buy into their worldview and the power of their empire, and they used coercive force to achieve that.” Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice {page} Witt also examined a number of the children’s skulls from El Pollo and found that 52 percent had a type of cranial modification typical of locations across the north coast of Peru: a flattening of the back of the head that is a result of women carrying infants in cradleboards strapped to their backs. At least one of the children studied had a distinct form of cranial modification typical of the northern Andean highlands, which, says Witt, is rare to see in coastal communities. “The Chimú had the ability to draw on a large terrain, and I think they were reaching out to diverse regions to find children for the sacrifices,” says Verano. “Some may have been brought there specifically or they may have immigrated from the highlands and come to live near the capital. It reminds us to think of Chan Chan as a cosmopolitan city that controlled large parts of Peru.”   Prieto believes that some of the children may have grown up with their families in the neighborhood he is excavating or moved there from locations across the empire. “The child sacrifices were such an important part of Chimú society that it makes much more sense that they were raised in a fancy neighborhood in Chan Chan than in a little fishing village like Huanchaquito,” he says. The team also found that the sacrificed children showed no signs of malnutrition, enslavement, or captivity. “These families were not lower class,” Prieto says. “They had a good diet and good health, and this says something about who was living in these neighborhoods.   Despite their revered place in Chimú society, the children were not interred in a large temple or atop a platform hidden in a palace. Instead, they were laid to rest in the valley near the ocean, the Chimú’s legendary place of origin, at locations where many people could have watched the ceremony. Most of the children were buried facing northwest, toward the ocean, and the llamas were buried facing toward the mountains—an important way, Verano says, of marking the relationship between the land and the sea and Chan Chan. “The foundation myth of Chimú civilization is that they came from somewhere else,” says Prieto. “In Chan Chan, they wanted to start all over again and create a new dynasty, and the sacrificed children played a major role in this. I think the sacrifices created new kinds of bonds within their families without any kind of political baggage rather than claiming connections to old ancestors. In carrying out the sacrifices, and by bringing them into these new spaces, they transformed this arid landscape into a green expanse that would provide for them. By sacrificing the children and burying them, they were, in a way, planting new ancestors.”   Jarrett A. Lobell is editor in chief at ARCHAEOLOGY.   Sidebar: Where the Coca Grows Related Feature: A Society's Sacrifice]]> Features Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:06:24 -0700