Tag: bronze age
Times of Malta news website, a MEPA spokesman remarked that there were several conditions when it came to the approval for the planning application, one of which was the requirement to consult Malta’s Superintendence of Cultural Heritage both during the planning application submission process and prior to its submission as well. As a result, the Maltese cultural heritage watchdog decided to undertake a thorough archaeological survey across the entirety of the proposed development’s footprint. The evaluation of the site on an archaeological level, as well as the analysis of what has been found already, are still ongoing and will continue to halt construction until the governmental office is satisfied there is no risk of loss or destruction of cultural artifacts. According to an interview with Superintendent Anthony Pace, reported in the Times of Malta, the region was subject to heavy transformation during the Crusades, particularly when it came to the primacy of the Order of St. John – better known as the Knights Hospitaller, a Catholic military organization that was originally conceived as an order that would tend to the wounded and weary. Soon, the chivalric order began to provide armed escort for pilgrims traveling to and from Jerusalem as well. Founded in circa 1099 and still existing in certain forms to this day, the Order of St. John found a home in Malta in the early sixteenth century when King Charles I of Spain – acting in his capacity as King of Sicily – granted them the island in 1530. Pace remarked that at the time of this transformation, this region of Qormi was turned into field terraces through extensive quarrying, cutting through and even damaging a number of archaeological remains from even older periods. The remains discovered in the survey so far include examples of cart ruts left behind from the Bronze Age. Masonry remains, in particular the remains of a Roman-era rock-cut tomb, were also discovered during the archaeological survey. In addition, a stone cistern and well were among the archaeological finds. Once the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage completes its assessment, it will issue recommendations as how to preserve the newly-discovered remains for future study. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user: Continentaleurope ]]>
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Plague Emerged in the Bronze Age
Yersinia pestis, was common among humans much earlier than the first historical records of plague epidemics suggest. An analysis of DNA extracted from Bronze Age human teeth showed that Y. pestis affected people in Asia and Europe as far back as 4,800 years ago. However, it was not for another thousand years that the bacterium developed characteristics allowing it to cause bubonic plague, the disease typically associated with it. What led the scientists, from the Universities of Gothenburg and Copenhagen, to believe that the plague is much older than commonly thought was an earlier genomics study they did on people from the Bronze Age, EurekAlert reports. That study revealed that the period, between 3000 BCE and 1500 BCE, was very dynamic in terms of migratory trends. These trends were found to have had a substantial effect on the modern-day demographic make-up of Europe and Asia. The team’s interest was sparked by the reasons behind these migrations. One of the authors of the study, Morten Allentoft from the Centre of GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, told EurekAlert that one of the reasons for migration could have been epidemics that drove people away from a certain area, or decimated the population in another area, creating conditions for its repopulation. The question they asked themselves was whether these epidemics may have been caused by pestilence. To find an answer, they studied 89 billion raw DNA sequences extracted from the teeth of 101 Bronze Age and early Iron Age individuals taken from archaeological digs and museums. In seven of the samples, dated to between 2794 BCE and 951 BCE, there was evidence of the Y. pestis bacterium. Further analysis suggested that the original pathogen that Y. pestis evolved from first emerged around 5,783 years ago. To compare, the first historical records of plague-like epidemics appear in the common era, first in the sixth century, with the so-called Plague of Justinian, and then, of course, in the Middle Ages, when the Black Death took the lives of as much as half the population of Europe. There have been suggestions that Y. pestis was responsible for the Plague of Athens from 2,500 years ago and the Antonine Plague, but no hard evidence in support of this suggestion has been presented so far. Interestingly, the DNA analysis showed that even though they could get infected by the pathogen, Bronze Age people did not get it from fleas, which are among the main vectors of plague transmission. The bacterium apparently only developed the gene that allowed it to survive in the gut of fleas later, in the Stone Age. One earlier study that New Historian recently reported, suggested that the plague is in fact older than humans, by tens of millions of years, and even as early as that a strain of it could be transmitted by fleas. For more information: “Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Years Ago” ]]>
New Historian: In the introduction to the study, you write, “This gap of nearly 1000 years, or ~50 human generations, between the two proposed hypotheses is of more than regional interest. Resolution of the issue has profound implications on theories of the cultural transfer of knowledge and the impact of metallurgy on society.” Taking the results and your conclusions into consideration, could you expand on this? Charles Higham: Smelting copper and tin ore and combining the two metals into the alloy bronze has transformational properties on human behaviour. Imagine a world today with no metal. The technical aspects of smelting and casting are very demanding indeed, it is not easy. Where did the discovery or discoveries of this technology begin, and what were the mechanisms for its spread? The answer lies in the Middle East and Anatolia, followed by a spread outward that saw the technology adopted progressively in several directions, and that which affected Southeast Asia involved the adoption of the technology eastward beyond the Urals, across the steppes and into northwestern China. From there, bronze metallurgy was adopted by the early states of China, and ultimately, into Southeast Asia. Until the discovery of our new chronology, J. White and E. Hamilton proposed a much earlier date of about 2000 BC for the arrival of bronze workers in Southeast Asia, which saw specialists travel over thousands of kilometres from the Urals to the site of Ban Chiang, avoiding any impact on the sophisticated late Neolithic societies in China. Their proposed early chronology comes from a carefully selected handful of radiocarbon dates derived from the organic temper of ceramic vessels, a technique now known to be highly unreliable because the clay used to construct pots may contain an unquantified amount of old carbon. The short chronology, a thousand years later, sees a gradual progression southward that we suggest involved the movement of skilled bronze founders that originated in the early states of China, particularly the Shang Dynasty of the Central Plains flanking the Yellow River. This latter model fits conformably with the way in which the knowledge of metallurgy spread elsewhere, that is, by the progressive expansion of experienced miners, smelters and founders, rather than a rapid and remarkable dash over thousands of kilometres, to arrive at just one site, Ban Chiang, and then stop for a millennium before further transfer of knowledge to other sites in Southeast Asia. NH: Your study focused heavily on carbon dating of bones, both human and animal. Could you clarify, for our readers, how studying burials and the dating of bones can provide an insight into the spread of a Bronze age in a region? CH: Accurate dating is the master key to identifying what actually happened in prehistory. How you radiocarbon date has developed in leaps and bounds over the past decade. We now have very sophisticated pre-treatment protocols to purify bone, removing potential contaminants, and thus obtaining radiocarbon determinations. What you date must have as much reliability as possible. There is no better context for dating a site, than employing the bones of the people who lived there, provided collagen survives in the bones. Again, one does not rely any more on a handful of dates, but one needs a lot, and then they need to be treated with Bayesian statistics to pinpoint the beginning and the end of cultural phases. When a series of five sites, as in our article, all reveal the same sequence, then it is possible to date the actual establishment of bronze technology and relate it to what was going on in adjacent regions. NH: Now this study is finished, will you be expanding on it with similar work in the region, or elsewhere? CH: My project is funded by the Marsden Fund of New Zealand, and provides for 450 radiocarbon determinations. We are also dating sites in Vietnam, China, and Myanmar. The results from these sites conform with those already published in the Plos one article. NH: Finally, is there anything else you would like to add for our readers, concerning the study? CH: The new short chronology is particularly significant, because it not only identifies when the Bronze Age started, but also reveals how rapidly it stimulated social change. This centres on the site of Ban Non Wat, where there was a seamless transition from the late Neolithic into the early Bronze Age in about 1050 BC. Unlike earlier excavations at sites like Ban Chiang, we opened a very large area, which involved seven seasons and about two years of actual excavation. Only with such large exposures does one approach prehistoric reality. We found that there was a sharp spike in the quantity and the quality of mortuary offerings with the initial Bronze Age, that lasted for a handful of generations, before in the next phase, the mortuary offerings were of such a magnitude that one could describe the dead as princely. Men, women and infants were interred with multiple exotic marine shell and marble ornaments, tens of thousands of shell beads, up to 80 fine decorated ceramic pots per burial, and copper axes, chisels and ornaments. This wealthy elite interred in the centre of the site contrasts with poorer individuals buried towards the periphery. They held a dominant social position over at least six generations. At Non Nok Tha and Ban Chiang, however, the Bronze Age dead were decidedly poor with virtually no exotic ornaments and just rarely more than three pots. We suggest that this reflects the dominant geographical location of Ban Non Wat astride a major route of exchange from Central Thailand to the valley of the Mun River. Our excavations at Ban Non Wat have been fully published in four volumes. The full study is available from: www.plosone.org]]>