This article titled “Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik – review” was written by Robin McKie, for The Observer on Monday 17th June 2013 08.01 UTC

In 1961, Oxford archaeologists uncovered a pit at the site of General Gnaeus Julius Agricola’s headquarters at Inchtuthil in Scotland. Unsavoury Caledonians had made his troops’ position untenable. So the Romans decided to quit their empire’s northernmost outpost, though not before going to extraordinary efforts to ensure they left nothing behind that could aid their enemies.

They dismantled and burned their fort. Then they dug a large hole into which they dumped their most precious metal items: 763,840 2in nails, 85,128 medium nails and 25,088 large nails. “These had held the fort together and would have been as useful as leaving a cache of weapons, so the Roman troops buried them,” writes Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at University College London. All other steel items were taken south: weapons, armour – and the soldiers’ razors, which “allowed the Romans to retreat clean-shaven, groomed in order to distinguish them from the savage hordes that had driven them out”.

It is an intriguing observation. From this perspective, outlined by Miodownik, Roman civilisation appears to be the result not of advanced military expertise, but of an ability to manufacture and mould superior materials, in this case high-quality steel.

Nor is Miodownik short of other examples. Consider concrete. The Romans invented the stuff. Using cement from Pozzuoli near Naples, which they mixed with small rocks, they constructed ports, bridges, aqueducts and the rest of their empire’s infrastructure. Best of all, they used it to build the dome of the Pantheon in Rome. Still standing today, it is 2,000 years old but remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

Then there is glass. Both the Egyptians and Greeks manufactured it. However, the Romans perfected glass-making and brought it into everyday life – with profound consequences. “Before the Romans, windows were open to the wind (the word means ‘wind eye’)”, we are told. Glass changed that experience and also transformed our appreciation of wine, after the Romans started using glass to create drinking vessels which had previously been made of opaque materials such as metal, horn or ceramic. As Stuff Matters tells us: “The invention of drinking glasses meant that the colour, transparency and clarity of their wine became important too.” Certainly, from this perspective, it’s not hard to pinpoint what the Romans have done for us.

There is more, however. The Chinese, although highly proficient at manufacturing steel, porcelain and paper, never quite got the hang of glass. Yet it led to the invention of the telescope and the microscope, each critical to the scientific and medical revolutions that started in the west but which failed to ignite in China. And you can see why. Without a telescope, you cannot observe Jupiter’s moons and make measurements that underpin an understanding of the universe. And without a microscope, you cannot see bacteria and understand their role in the spread of disease.

In short, a proficiency with materials has consequences, a point expertly illustrated in this deftly written, immensely enjoyable little book. A vast library of modern materials underpins our lives today and makes them bearable: chocolates that are artfully structured to explode like taste-bombs in our mouths; silica aerogel, the world’s lightest solid, which is actually 99.8% air and which provides almost perfect thermal insulation; and carbon-fibre technology, which has transformed sports including cycling, tennis and Formula One, and which might be used one day to construct a “space ladder”, an elevator that would rise from Earth’s equator to a satellite, carrying passengers and tourists.

Our awareness of the importance of materials is also revealed by the names we have given to the key stages of civilisation: the stone age, the bronze age and the iron age. The steel age probably arrived with the Victorians, while we can consider ourselves to be in the silicon age today. Who knows what will follow.

Whatever it is, it will define our world. As Miodownik says: “We may like to think of ourselves as civilised but that civilisation is in large part bestowed by material wealth. But without this ‘stuff’, we would quickly be confronted by the same basic struggle for survival that animals are faced with.”

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With help from a University of Chicago group, a craft beer maker has been working for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer.

The beer was full of bacteria, warm and slightly sour.

By contemporary standards, it would have been a spoiled batch here at Great Lakes Brewing Company, a craft beer maker based in Ohio, where machinery churns out bottle after bottle of dark porters and pale ales.

But lately, Great Lakes has been trying to imitate a bygone era. Enlisting the help of archaeologists at the University of Chicago, the company has been trying for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon.

“How can you be in this business and not want to know from where your forefathers came with their formulas and their technology?” said Pat Conway, a co-owner of the company.

As interest in artisan beer has expanded across the country, so have collaborations between scholars of ancient drink and independent brewers willing to help them resurrect lost recipes for some of the oldest ales ever made.

the full article can be read here… on www.nytimes.com

A wispy-haired mummy’s head, bleached skulls, and arm and leg bones are piled outside looted tombs.

A mummified hand with leathery-skinned fingers pokes from the sand.

Ancient burial wrappings from mummified bodies — torn apart to find priceless jewelry — unravel across the desert like brown ribbon, or tangle near broken bits of wooden coffins still brightly painted after nearly 3,000 years underground.

With bones scattered everywhere, this 500-acre plot looks like the aftermath of a massacre rather than an ancient burial ground.

“You see dogs playing with human bones, children scavenging for pottery,” says Egyptian archaeologist Monica Hanna, stepping cautiously around grisly remains and deep pits dug into tombs by looters.

  Full shocking news on triblive.com

A team of archaeologists and volunteers led by Newcastle University’s Professor Ian Haynes with site director Tony Wilmott has started work in Maryport until 22 July.

This is the third year they have excavated at this important Roman site, commissioned by the Senhouse Museum Trust with in kind support from Newcastle University and the permission of the landowners the Hadrian’s Wall Trust.

Five year programme

The Temples project is the start of a new phase in the five year programme designed to learn more about the internationally famous altars which form the core of the Senhouse Roman Museum display.

Professor Ian Haynes said: “The last two years’ excavations focused on the area in which the altars were discovered in 1870.

“This year sees some further work at the 1870 site and the start of a three year project focusing on the place where, in 1880, local bank manager and amateur archaeologist Joseph Robinson uncovered further altars and two possible temples.

“Photographs and other documents from the 1880s indicate that the antiquarian investigation only unearthed part of the site and it is clear that much remains to be discovered.

“The excavations have yielded some remarkable and surprising results over the last two years, and it’s exciting to be back this season.”

Rachel Newman of the Senhouse Museum Trust said: “We’re delighted to have Ian and Tony’s team back on site. As in previous years any finds from the excavation will be included in the museum’s collections, donated by the Hadrian’s Wall Trust as landowners, and will join finds discovered previously by Joseph Robinson.

“The team of archaeologists and students from Newcastle University is being supported by 28 local volunteers. Two archaeology students from Germany are also joining the dig this year, as part of an initiative to twin the Senhouse Roman Museum with a similar museum on the Roman frontier in Bavaria.”

Nigel Mills, director of world heritage and access for the Hadrian’s Wall Trust said: “This is a fantastic site, yielding very interesting information indeed.

“The excavations are an important step towards the establishment of a long-term programme of archaeological research at Maryport, which is a key element in the development of the proposed Roman Maryport heritage and visitor attraction being taken forward in partnership by the Hadrian’s Wall Trust and the Senhouse Museum Trust.

“There is a lot more to be discovered about life on the Roman frontier and Maryport will be a major part of that.”

Significant element of the coastal defence

The Roman fort and nearby civilian settlement at Maryport were a significant element of the coastal defences lining the north western boundary of the Roman Empire for more than 300 years. They are part of the transnational Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site.

Geophysical surveys of the Maryport site commissioned by the Senhouse Museum Trust show that it was extremely complex and of considerable size, and that it is well preserved.

The 23 Roman altars dedicated to Jupiter and other Roman gods by the commanders of the Maryport fort provide information of international importance for the study of the Roman army and its religious practices. In some cases their career histories can be established from the inscriptions on the altars, tracing their movements across the Roman Empire as they moved from posting to posting.

First complete altar stone unearthed

In 2012 partial plans of buildings on the site were recovered showing at least two phases of construction and the first complete altar stone was unearthed at the site since 1870. The altar has the fifth inscription recovered from the Roman Empire to record T Attius Tutor, commander of the Maryport garrison, and a man known to have served at other times in Austria, Hungary and Romania.

A late Roman/early Medieval cemetery was also discovered.  Finds from the graves were few but included a glass bead necklace, bracelet and loose beads, now on display in the museum, and a tiny fragment of ancient textile.  Radiocarbon dating of the textile shows that the wool from which it was woven was most probably sheared sometime between AD 240 and AD 340.

Source: Hadrian’s Wall Heritage

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Ascertaining the meaning of the ancient script Linear B becomes a detective story.

On March 30, 1900, during the excavation of the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, site of the legendary labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus took flight, workmen unearthed a clay tablet inscribed with an unknown script. Some of the characters of the script looked like the letters of an alien alphabet, others like alien hieroglyphics. In the following weeks and months workmen unearthed more tablets, several hundred of which had fallen from a floor above into a terra cotta bathtub.

The tablets contained messages sent from the dawn of history, from before the time of Homer, but they were messages that could not be received. No one knew what language people spoke 30 centuries ago on Crete, and there was no Rosetta stone among the discoveries at Knossos. (There were, however, other enchanting wonders — elaborate lavatories, murals of griffins and dolphins.) For 50 years, the inscriptions seemed impossible to crack. The code’s ultimate decipherment would turn out to be one of the great scientific detective stories of the 20th century — The Mysterious Case of Linear B…..

Read more on nytimes.com>

An team of scientists and researchers from across the world have managed to reconstructed a dozen medieval and modern leprosy genomes. The results suggest a European origin for the North American leprosy strains found in armadillos and humans, and there is a common ancestor of all leprosy bacteria within the last 4000 years.

A breakthrough in sequencing ancient bacteria

It is the first time scientists have reconstructed an ancient genome without a reference sequence (de novo) due to the extraordinary preservation of the medieval pathogen’s DNA. This finding indicates that ancient bacterial DNA may survive in some cases much beyond the one million year boundary suggested for vertebrate DNA.

Leprosy, a devastating chronic disease caused by the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium leprae, was prevalent in Europe until the late Middle Ages. Today, the disease is found in 91 countries worldwide with about 200,000 new infections reported annually.  When untreated, the disease leaves lesions in and on the bones of its victims.

Identifying the pathogen

These pathologies allowed Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues to identify five skeletons from mass graves in the UK, Sweden and Denmark, that contained DNA of Mycobacterium leprae, and these were compared with seven biopsy samples from modern patients.

The researchers compared the medieval European M. leprae genomes with 11 worldwide modern strains, including the seven biopsy strains, revealing that all M. leprae strains share a common ancestor that existed within the last 4000 years.

This is congruent with the earliest osteological evidence for the disease in the archaeological records dated to 2000 BC from India. The genome comparisons indicate a remarkable genomic conservation of the bacteria during the past 1,000 years. The team of scientists could furthermore show that M. leprae genotypes in medieval Europe are today found in the Middle East, whereas other medieval strains show a striking similarity to modern strains found today in North American armadillos and leprosy patients suggesting a European origin of leprosy in the Americas.

One skeleton from Denmark (Jorgen 625) showed extraordinary preservation of the pathogen DNA, allowing a genome reconstruction without using a modern reference sequence, which was never done before for an ancient organism’s genome. The scientists found that almost half of the DNA recovered from that particular specimen derived from M. leprae bacteria; this is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of pathogen DNA usually observed in skeletons and modern patients. They furthermore found that the M. leprae DNA was far better preserved compared to the human DNA, which may explain the unusually high amounts of bacterial DNA in these skeleton samples.

According to the authors this may be due to the extremely thick and impervious waxy cell wall of the leprosy bacillus that protects their DNA from degradation. Therefore, the authors speculate that some bacterial DNA may be preserved much longer than any vertebrate DNA, which is usually less protected. “This opens the possibility that certain types of bacterial DNA may survive well beyond the maximum age for mammalian DNA of around one million years,” says Krause and adds, “This gives us a real perspective to trace back the pre-historic origins of a disease.”

Source: University of Tübingen

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A mist-covered mountain in Cambodia gives up its treasure, writes Lindsay Murdoch.

Scratched and exhausted, Damian Evans pushed through dense jungle into a clearing where mountain villagers long ago attempted to grow rice, stepping on to a weed-covered mound.

”Bingo,” the Australian archaeologist said as he picked up and examined an ancient sandstone block.

 
See on www.theage.com.au

Archaeological field surveys on sites along the Corridor 10 route in construction through the region of Pirot, south-eastern Serbia, culminated in a discovery of graves from the Iron Age that contain skeletal remains of warriors together with their spears and knives.

More images on inserbia.info

Ancient rock art is under threat due to climate change, and a project has been launched to develop methods to enable everyone to contribute to its protection.

The CARE project is a collaboration between heritage and science research interests at Newcastle University and Queen’s University Belfast. Its primary objective is to co-produce a user-friendly, non-intrusive Condition Assessment Risk Evaluation (CARE) toolkit for gathering and organising information essential for the long-term safeguarding of ancient rock art that exists out in the open.

Major risk factors

Heritage and science working together ensures that heritage management resources and techniques are underpinned by solid scientific research so that conservation and management approaches are more effective. In the case of open-air rock art, or possibly any open-air stone structure, this means that the rock can be analysed in order to discern those environmental factors that are the cause of decay, as well as the influence of factors such as climate change. Scientific research has been carried out to determine the major risk factors for open air rock art and further field work will be undertaken throughout the project’s life span to firm up this scientific evidence.

Tool kit

These scientific insights into the risk factors for open air rock art will under pin the materials produced by the project. They will be translated into a simple and practical form that can be used by anyone to aid their management. In order to do this, the project will produce a tool kit, to evaluate the rock art’s condition, and a management guide, to aid its conservation. This project will run focus groups, consultations and pilot activities with the key stakeholders, land managers, heritage professionals, rock art enthusiasts and other interested people, in order to co-produce these materials with them. This will take into account their needs, concerns and suggestions and produce a truly valuable tool that can be adapted and used in the UK, Republic of Ireland and other parts of the world.

The CARE project has close ties with the Science and Heritage Programme, which gives a broader context to this Heritage and Science collaboration. The Science and Heritage Programme is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and is supported by Research Councils UK. This programme will provide a locus for those wishing to engage with science and heritage and ensure that knowledge is disseminated widely so that our cultural heritage is in better shape to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

An initial workshop is being held on 29th June in Northumberland, UK for rock art enthusiasts.

Source: CARE

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Turkey’s well-known ancient site of Alacahöyük, which currently draws around 50,000 visitors a year, is located in the Central Anatolian province of Çorum. Works at the site are set to continue, to uncover more clues like those found last year in order to prove that the settlement in the ancient site of Alacahöyük began 1,500 years earlier than previously thought.

The head of the Alacahöyük excavations, Professor Aykut Çınaroğlu, said that the first excavations had started at the ancient site in 1907, and lasted only 15 days, and were then restarted in 1935 on the order of Atatürk.

Çınaroğlu said that this year’s digs in Alacahöyük, which is known as Turkey’s first national excavation area, would begin next month, adding that the works would focus on following up the pieces that were found last year and proved that the first settlement was seen in the area much earlier than thought.

In the light of data to be revealed during excavations, Çınaroğlu said they had previously estimated that housing dated back to 8,500 years ago in Alacahöyük, “But we had suspicions that it might date back to earlier times. Last year we began finding pieces from the Neolithic age, confirming our suspicions. We could not have found a Neolithic settlement but objects that will shed light on this settlement. Thus we saw that housing dated back to 1,500 years earlier than we have known so far. This year we will focus on these objects and try to find the traces of this settlement.”

Read the full story on www.hurriyetdailynews.com