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| Image Caption: The ‘Rangki Papa’ (‘Father of all Rafts’) built using Palaeolithic technology and approaching the coast of Komodo, Bali, having succeeded in crossing from Sumbawa, 7 October 2004. The vessel travelled 36.4km in 9 hours 22 minutes, |
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| Jerome M. Eisenberg, Ph.D. and Dr Sean Kingsley |
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For decades archaeologists have rightly respected the Neolithic period c. 8500 BC as a revolutionary era of the most profound change, when the wiring of mankind’s brain shifted from transient hunter-gathering to permanent settlement in farming communities. Hearths, temples, articulated burials, whistling ‘wheat’ fields and security replaced the uncertain ravages of seasonal running with the pack. Or so stereotypes maintain.
Now, from the remote shores of Budrinna on Lake Fezzan in Libya, and Melka Konture on the banks of the River Awash in Ethiopia, a series of stunning discoveries are set to challenge the originality of the Neolithic Revolution. After 39 years of surveys and excavations, Professor Helmut Ziegert of Hamburg University presents his results as a world exclusive in Minerva (pp. 8-9). In both African locations he has discovered huts and sedentary village life dating between an astonishing 400,000 and 200,000 Before Present - if correct, literally a quantum leap in our understanding of man’s evolution. Near aquatic resources, and not alongside agricultural fields, Professor Ziegert contests that our ancestors settled down for the first time in small communities of 40-50 people.
This sensation just scratches the surface of one of prehistory’s most incredible revelations: from Choukoutien in China to Bilzingsleben in Germany, Ziegert claims to have identified 35 other Lower Palaeolithic villages with comparable huts and even cemeteries. A pattern prevails. After decades of fieldwork and contemplation, Helmut Ziegert is convinced that future discoveries will uphold his conclusions. His discoveries have nothing to do with luck, he maintains, but are a matter of applying problem-oriented research. Where evolutionary biologists have typically hunted ancestral humans bones exclusively to understand adaptations to mankind - missing links - as an archaeologist Professor Ziegert has asked more specific, holistic questions of the wider evidence.
At the heart of this new Lower Palaeolithic ‘out of Africa’ village theory are two world-changing ideas. First, that Homo erectus, Upright Man, had far more modernistic tendencies than previously believed; and second, that as unique as the farming villages of Jericho in the West Bank and Catalhoyük in Turkey are, their occupants were not the brains behind the origins of sedentism. The innovative capacity of Homo erectus has challenged scholars for decades and remains a scholarly cauldron. Anthropologists such as Richard Leakey have long insisted that Upright Man was socially more akin to modern humans than to his primitive predecessors because the increased cranial capacity coincided with more sophisticated tool technology. Other scientists contend that Homo erectus was sufficiently advanced to have even mastered maritime transport. Yet both this assertion and the very idea that he ever got to grips with controlled fire are still considered controversial.
Only three years ago, however, Nira Alperson of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem discovered the oldest evidence of fire management at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov on the banks of the Jordan River in Israel’s northern Galilee. The team analysed over 50,000 pieces of wood and nearly 36,000 flints from two hearths associated with a Homo erectus settlement dating back 790,000 years.
More contentiously, Robert Bednarik is convinced that Upright Man ushered in the dawn of trans-ocean travel between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago as part of a wider revolution, usually attributed to the anatomically modern Homo sapiens, that included communicating with a spoken language and eventually carving and painting art 400,000 to 300,000 Before Present. To test his theory, Bednarik built a 17.5m-long, 2.8-ton bamboo raft, Nale Tasih 4, and crossed the 29km-wide stretch of sea from the east coast of Bali to the neighbouring island of Lombok. The results have convinced Bednarik that ‘Between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, hominins are also known to have crossed to at least two islands in Europe, Corsica, and Sardinia. This is soundly demonstrated, but in addition it is possible that much earlier they managed to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. Unfortunately, that cannot be proved conclusively, because the alternative of reaching Europe by land has always existed’. Stone Age ‘seafaring appears to have been possible’, agrees anthropologist Tim Bromage of Hunter College of the City University of New York, who has identified 30cm-wide South-east Asian bamboo as providing a versatile material for building rafts with simple stone tools.
So, Professor Ziegert’s ‘Out of Africa’ aquatic model for the rise of village life in the Lower Palaeolithic does not emerge out of a cultural and intellectual void. As a veteran of over 81 archaeological surveys and excavations from Germany to Ecuador, ranging in date from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Islamic period, Ziegert is nothing if not scientifically cautious, which makes the current revelation all the more exciting. Between 2007 and 2010 he will be back in the field, returning to Budrinna and Melka Konture to fine-tune his life’s work. To delve in greater depth into the mystery of the ecology, function, structure, and economy of these villages, he plans to search out cemeteries (complementary signs of fixed settlement) and use potassium argon isotopic dating, stratigraphy, and tool typology to measure the ebb and flow of village life in this dizzy, distant prehistoric past.
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| Photo caption: Excavations along the Avenue Jean-Jaurès in Nîmes, France, by INRAP have uncovered Roman houses of the 2nd to 3rd centuries, including figurative mosaics along a Roman road. Photos: © Denis Gliskman, INRAP. |
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Since its inauguration in 2001, INRAP, France’s official preventive archaeology institute, has made huge strides forward in the safeguard and study of the nation’s archaeological heritage. The latest discoveries of international importance have come to light along the 18th-century Avenue Jean-Jaurès in the heart of ancient Nîmes. This tract of land is fortuitously located for archaeologists between the Gallic oppidum to the north and the Roman city rampart to the south. Following preventive excavations from 1980 to 2000, a new 10-month programme of fieldwork commenced in October 2006 within the central lane of the avenue in a long, narrow band of approximately 400 x 15m, encompassing an area of 6500 square metres.
Roman Nîmes (Nemausus) is best known for its splendid aqueduct bridge, the Pont du Guard, and temple known as the Maison Carrée, both completed by Agrippa in 19 BC. Crucially, results from the nearby excavations have illuminated the development of the city from the 2nd century BC to the end of the 3rd century AD, when it was abandoned after barbarian raids. Unlike many Roman cities, the street plan of this part of Nîmes was not laid out as a grid, but had diverging paved streets, which suggests that urbanisation in the Roman period was progressive, only reaching a peak in the 2nd century.
Many of the characteristic trappings of a typical Roman city unearthed so far include prosperous quarters with street porticos and nymphaea (fountains) bordering groups of finely decorated houses with wall paintings and mosaics. Alongside are areas devoted to craft production, with pottery kilns and storage rooms. Especially interesting is a well-preserved public nymphaeum with well-dressed paving and a curious access ramp and statue base for Neptune, which also served as a waterspout. In the private sphere, excavators unearthed a relatively intact 2nd-century floor mosaic with a central emblema panel depicting a woman from Roman mythology (as yet unidentified), enclosed by simple geometric motifs and a two-stranded guilloche/ ‘saw-tooth’ border. With several weeks of scheduled excavations remaining at Avenue Jean-Jaurès, the prospect of further exciting discoveries is tantalising.
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| Photo captions: 2nd-century AD mosaics from a Roman bathhouse excavated at Santa Maria Nova on the Appian Way. A referee called Antonius supervises a fight with Montanus |
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| a retiarius gladiator who holds a fighting net in one hand and a trident in the other. This panel was subsequently destroyed by treasure hunters trying to steal the floor. Photo: Ufficio stampa Electa per la Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma. |
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A 2nd-century Roman bath-house excavated in the spring at Santa Maria Nova on the Appian Way, near the Villa dei Quintilii, has turned up two remarkable mosaic floors from the caldarium and tepidarium. These focus on a racing horse called Invictus, obviously a revered horse of the age, a referee known as Antonius, and Montanus, a retiarius gladiator who holds his fighting net in one hand and a trident in the other. Depicted in the act of leaping on his opponent, one of his shoulders is covered by a galerus cuirass. Montanus was a popular name in the reign of the emperors Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-180) and Commodus (AD 180-193) amongst followers of a Christian heretic from Phrygia brought to Rome by Marcus Aurelius. The Montanus sect then moved to North Africa, where one of its distinguished members was the early Church Father Tertullian. Such images of gladiators are rare in the Imperial period: a famous example was found in the Baths of Caracalla and another near the Via Casilina, now paving a room in the Museum at Villa Borghese in Rome.
The Santa Maria Nova baths must have been built just before or during the reign of Commodus, who was infamous as a great lover of gladiatorial fights and who entered the arena for sport himself. The latest discovery was made in an area of 3.5 hectares recently acquired by the Italian government next to the 24-hectare Villa dei Quintilii that the emperor Commodus misappropriated after eliminating the Quintilii brother owners. The baths are situated at the fifth mile of the Appian Way, where the city of Rome ended and Albano began (and where a funerary pyramid near the monumental nymphaeum of the Quintilii still awaits excavation).
Regrettably, the ancient heritage in this part of ‘downtown’ Rome remains unprotected. The immediacy of safeguarding the monuments and ongoing excavations was dramatically proved at the end of April, when vandals destroyed the lower part of the bath-house mosaic scene showing Montanus while attempting to steal it. Part of the tepidarium walls were also pulled down. Carabinieri are now investigating the crime to find the culprits and determine whether this is a case of theft or a warning to archaeologists not to work in an area where illegal building over protected zones of archaeological value continues to be a very serious problem. The archaeologist and scholar, Adriano La Regina, was appointed President of the Appian Way Archaeological Park in the spring precisely to counteract the damage produced by traffic and unlawful activities, including waste dumping and rife prostitution along the magnificent ancient road, monuments, and tombs that line and surround this ancient highway.
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| Photo caption: A 5th-century BC bronze horse found in 1849 in excavations on the Vicolo delle Palme, Trastevere, Rome. Probably crafted by Hegias, who worked in Athens c. 490-460 BC. Now restored and on display in the Capitoline Museums Rome. Photo: courtesy of Ufficio Stampa Zètema Progetto Cultura. |
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The restoration of a rare 5th-century BC Greek bronze statue of a horse has been completed, with the statue presented to the public in May in the frescoed rooms of the Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi of the Capitoline Museums in Rome, where it will remain on view for a few months. The horse was found in 1849 during an excavation in Vicolo delle Palme in the Trastevere district of the capital. So spectacular was the find that it led to the horse being set up in the square of Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, after which it was transferred to the Vatican Museums by the papal authorities. Through political upheaval when Rome was torn between an independent Republic and the Vatican, the statue ended up finally in the Capitoline Museums, where it was put on display along with other bronze fragments found with it. A first restoration was immediately undertaken by the sculptor Pietro Tenerani.
Soon after, and near the site where the horse was found, the marble statue of the Apoxyomenos now in the Vatican Museums was also unearthed. Then in December 1849 the left hindquarter of a colossal bronze bull, extraordinary because of the thinness of the metal and its huge dimensions, were retrieved. Finally, in 1850 the left foot and leg of a horseman were dug up from the same site, possibly those of a rider for the bronze horse. Altogether, these chance finds acquired during hasty excavations in a densely built up area, never properly documented, with formal excavations never later resumed, seem to belong to a group of statues brought to Trastevere at an uncertain date for reuse or melting down.
Scholars date the statue to between the second half of the 5th century BC (because of similarities with the horses of the Parthenon Sculptures) and the 4th century BC, when the horse may have been made in Athens, possibly even by Lysippus. If correct, the horse might have been cast by order of Alexander the Great for a monument to commemorate the battle of Granicus in 334 BC. This famous group of 34 equestrian riders and horses was later plundered from Greece as war spoils by Quintus Metellus Macedonicus and set up in front of the two temples enclosing the Porticus of Octavia in the Field of Mars in Rome. On stylistic grounds, however, it seems more likely that the artist who crafted the horse was Hegias, who worked in Athens around 490-460 BC, and who is said to have taught Pheidias bronze casting. The fact that the horse was found in Rome may substantiate this attribution because in his Natural History Pliny mentions a group of the Dioscuri attributed to Hegias set on the Capitol near the temple of Jupiter by Augustus.
An inscription on the left hind leg of the horse, incised L I XXIIX after casting, seems to be an inventory number used when the statue was shipped from Greece to Rome, or is a registry number corresponding to works of art curated in the capital. A letter C on the right shoulder of the horse and XIII on the left possibly reflect changes in the inventory records.
The horse was cast in the lost wax technique in separate pieces, then soldered together. The back was left open to allow the statue of a horseman to be fitted above. The statue was damaged when a heavy weight fell on it, distorting its proportions. The head and neck, however, are intact and clearly in the style of the greatest masterpieces of early Greek bronze statues.
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