Roundup: Digging up the Past

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"Ancient Ancestors Come to Life," National Geographic, January 3, 2014

See our ancient ancestors come to life through paleoartist John Gurche's realistic human likenesses for the Smithsonian's Hall of Human Origins.

"The human story is really nothing short of the story of a little corner of the universe becoming aware of itself," says Gurche.>>>

Louise Iles, "Year in digs: How 2013 looked in archaeology," BBC, December 31, 2013

. . . . This year's research also gave us a glimpse into the private lives of our hominid cousins, reopening debates that might shed light on the evolution of our species.

The first complete Neanderthal genome was published, at the same time showing inbreeding within Neanderthal groups as well as reports of interbreeding between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans.>>>

In Small Things Forgotten Redux

Robin Fleming

Sometimes the most unimpressive objects, like this little Romano-British ceramic pot, found in Baldock, in Hertfordshire (in the UK), can speak volumes about the lives of long forgotten individuals. To appreciate the value of this pot, which was manufactured in the 4th century but still in use in the 5th, we need a little context. Although Britain in 300 CE was as Roman as any province in the Empire, within a single generation of the year 400, urban life, industrial-scale manufacturing of basic goods, the money economy, and the state had collapsed. Because of these dislocations ubiquitous, inexpensive, utterly common everyday objects––including mass-produced, wheel-thrown pots like this one––began to disappear.

The dislocations caused by the loss of such pottery were immense, and it is easy to imagine the ways the disappearance of cheap, readily available pots would have affected the running of kitchens, the rhythms of daily work and the eating of meals. But pots like our pot had also long been central in funerary rites, and the fact that they were no longer being made must have caused heartache and anxiety for bereaved families preparing for the burial of a loved one in the brave new world of post-Roman Britain.

Baldock, the site of our find––which, in the 4th century had been a lively small town with a hardworking population of craftsmen and traders––ceased in the early 5th century to be a town, and in the decades after 400 it lost most of its population. Still, a few people continued to bury their dead in the former settlement’s old Roman cemetery.

During the Roman period, a number of typical Romano-British funerary rites had been practiced here, including postmortem decapitation (with the head of the dead person placed carefully between the feet of the corpse!) and hobnail-boot burial. Most of the dead during the Roman period were placed in the ground in nailed coffins, and a number were accompanied in their graves by domestic fowl and mass-produced, wheel-thrown pots, many of them color-coated beakers like our pot.