Headdress reconstruction throws light on hunter-gatherer rituals

A research team led by archaeologists at the University of York used traditional techniques to create replicas of ritual headdresses made by hunter-gatherers 11,000 years ago in North Western Europe.

Flint blades, hammerstones and burning were among the tools and techniques they employed to fashion reproductions of shamanic headdresses discovered during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire.

The research published today in PLOS ONE is the first scientific analysis of the oldest known evidence of a shamanic costume in Europe. It challenges previously held assumptions over the care and time invested in the modification of the animal's "skull cap" in order to create these ritualistic artefacts.

Instead the study, part of a five-year project supported by the European Research Council, Historic England and the Vale of Pickering Research Trust, suggests that hunter-gatherers achieved this through expedient manufacturing techniques. These may have involved packing the skull with damp clay and placing it in a bed of embers for up to four hours both to facilitate skin removal and make the bone easier to work.

Archaeologists unearthed a total 24 red deer headdresses at Star Carr representing around 90 percent of all such known artefacts across early prehistoric Europe. The artefacts are formed from the upper part of a male red deer skull with the antlers attached - the lower jaw and cranial bones having been removed and the frontal bone perforated.

The majority of the headdresses were discovered during archaeological investigations at Star Carr in the 1940s though researchers unearthed a further three during excavations in 2013. The most complete of these is likely to have come from a male adult red deer though the animal was 50 per cent larger than its modern counterparts.

Using techniques including 3D laser scanning allowed the team to observe and analyse a number of cut marks radiating out of perforations on both sides of the crania.

The researchers, which also involved researchers from the universities of Bradford, Chester, Manchester, Groningen and Leiden, concluded that hunter-gatherers were likely to have removed the head and superficially cleaned it before starting work on producing the headdress.

The first stage of the process may have involved removal of a large amount of antler possibly to reduce the weight of the headdress and make it easier to work. Some of the removed antler may have formed 'blanks' for the production of barbed projectile tips used for hunting and fishing.

But it is also possible that, in some cases, antler blank removal happened much later after the headdress had been used; in which case the process may have been a form of decommissioning of the headdress and/or the recycling of antler. The researchers say that given the amount of worked antler present at Star Carr, including over 200 barbed projectile tips, this is a plausible theory.

Lead author Dr Aimée Little, of the BioArCh research centre in the Department of Archaeology at York, said: "This research shows how experimental archaeology can give important insights into rare ancient artefacts. Knowing fire was used invokes a real sense of atmosphere surrounding the making of these ritual shamanic headdresses."

Professor Nicky Milner, co-director of the excavations at Star Carr, added: "These headdresses are incredibly rare finds in the archaeological record. This is the only site in Britain where they are found, and there are only a few other headdresses known from Germany. This work into how they might have been made has given us an important glimpse into what life was like 11,000 years ago."

Dr Andrew Wilson, Senior Lecturer and co-director of Bradford Visualisation in the School of Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford, said: 'This exciting collaboration enabled the team to use a range of complementary 3D capture methods to document and investigate the modification of the deer crania at a variety of scales, before these waterlogged organic artefacts were subject to conservation treatment. This is a great showcase for how 3D documentation and analysis can transform our ability to understand objects of past societies."
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2016. “Headdress reconstruction throws light on hunter-gatherer rituals”. Phys.org. Posted: April 13, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-headdress-reconstruction-hunter-gatherer-rituals.html

Archaeological discovery in Sweden reveals site of Stone Age rituals

Archaeologists unearth a 9,000-year-old ritual site in a Swedish cave on an island with a long history of superstition and witchcraft.

A 9,000-year-old ritual site has been discovered in caves on the uninhabited island of Blå Jungfrun in Sweden. The island has a long history of witchcraft and religious ceremonies,writes LiveScience.com.

The finds, some of which are shown in the gallery above, were presented at the European Association of Archaeologists annual meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.

At the meeting, the archaeologists behind the discovery described it as “astonishing” and say that it “reveal[s] extensive human activities on the island in the Mesolithic Stone Age," according to LiveScience.

Among the discoveries is an altar that shows clear signs of having been shaped with grinding tools. The archaeologists suspect that offerings to deities might have been made here.

There is also an area of the cave that looks like a stage, which could be where ceremonies were performed.

They also discovered the remains of a fireplace that they suspect would have been viewed from above as onlookers watched the ceremonies. It could even have been a theatrical part of the ceremonies held within the caves.

Other finds include stone tools and the remains of seals that date to around 9,000 years ago, found within a shelter between the two caves.

"A few people could’ve been sitting or standing, perhaps just resting or spending the night during sporadic stays on the island," says Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay from Kalmar County Museum to LiveScience. He is one of the archaeologists that discovered the site.

"However, more specific activities with ritualistic elements to [them] cannot be ruled out, such as feasting in connection to the rituals performed in the nearby caves," he explains to LiveScience.
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Reference:

Science Nordic. 2016. “Archaeological discovery in Sweden reveals site of Stone Age rituals”. Science Nordic. Posted: September 29, 2015. Available online: http://sciencenordic.com/archaeological-discovery-sweden-reveals-site-stone-age-rituals

Cremated human bones in pot found in Crossrail dig suggest gruesome ritual

Almost 2,000 years ago somebody neatly packed cremated human bones into an old cooking pot, put the lid on, and set it by the banks of a smelly little urban river, the Walbrook in London. The discovery has deepened the mystery of scores of Roman skulls found nearby, polished till they gleam by tumbling among the pebbles of the riverbed.

It had been suggested that the skulls ended up in the river – which vanished into culverts centuries ago – by accident, eroded out of a Roman cemetery and washed downstream until they came to rest at bends in the bank. The new finds suggest a grimmer explanation.

Jay Carver, Crossrail’s lead archaeologist on the site yards from the bustling commuters at Liverpool Street station, said the thrifty reuse of the old pot, and its deliberate placing by the river, will force archaeologists to look again at the skulls found in this excavation and generations of previous digs around the river. “We now wonder again if the skulls were deliberately placed on the banks. Certainly no river ever carried off the cooking pot with its cremated bones which was unquestionably deliberately placed here. And the horse skull we found with one of the skulls didn’t come out of some equine graveyard, that was clearly also placed there,” he said.

The finds are now beginning to suggest gruesome ritual deposits of skulls, set along the river bank as offerings and boundary markers. Scientific tests are continuing on both the cremated remains and the skulls, and may confirm an early theory that most are the heads of young men who may have been executed criminals and rebels. Some could even be from the major rebellion Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, led in the first century of Roman rule.

“I think we now have to look back at earlier finds in this area – we have found 40 human and two horse skulls, but if you add them up over the last two centuries you’re talking hundreds of skulls in a very small area – and try and work out what is actually going on,” Carver said.

This one small site, part of a massive archaeology programme as Crossrail carves its route across the capital and through two millennia of its history, has produced a mass of Roman and medieval objects, as well as thousands of skeletons from a 17th-century burial ground which became the last resting place of thousands of victims of the last great plague of London in 1665.

Finds include 15 Roman iron horseshoes, more than from any other London site – expensive objects which the archaeologists assume were accidentally shed and then trampled into the surface of the road. “They would have been expensive to make and expensive to replace, but they were obviously clunky, clumsy affairs – and clearly they hadn’t perfected the technique of getting them to stay on,” Carver said.

A little gilt bronze phallus, a valuable lucky charm, was probably lost when the ring holding it to a belt or garment broke, and a shackle just the right size to secure an ankle is a reminder that slavery was a pillar of the Roman empire. The road leading to the river was an excellent example of Roman engineering, part of what Carver describes as the North Circular passing all the main gates in the city walls. It was heavily used, regularly repaired, and completely resurfaced at least three times, preserving cart ruts several layers below the final surface. For more than 1,000 years the site was a grotty, smelly bit of working-class London outside the city walls, a place where no travellers on the Roman road would have wanted to linger. On Thursday, a digger punched through the floor of what was a 19th-century underground lavatory, releasing a pungent reek of marsh gas and Victorian sewage. The buildings were shoddy structures, probably workshops. Rubbish dumps yielded skiploads of evidence of medieval industries including leather tanning, a notoriously smelly trade.

The land became the gardens and orchards of a medieval monastery complex which became the famous Bedlam mental hospital, the oldest in the world. It was still open land when in 1569 a two-acre plot was bought for a new burial ground because the small city church graveyards were full to bursting. The Bethlem burial ground took its name from the hospital which had recently moved to nearby Moorfields and held not just poor unclaimed inmates of the asylum, but people of all classes from across the capital. It was in use from 1569 until 1738, and so eventually held thousands of victims of the great plague, the last major outbreak which devastated London in 1665.

The archaeologists from Museum of London Archaeology worked all the hours of daylight to excavate the remains, eventually recovering more than 2,500 skeletons, far more than expected from a swimming pool sized site. During the worst plague months, they found people were being buried seven or eight to each pit.

Volunteers are attempting to compile a complete burial list for the cemetery, but when the excavation began Carver was not optimistic about identifying any individuals, as the records were scattered across all the original parishes of the dead.

To his surprise they have found tiny nails from the decayed wood of several coffins which spell out initials and dates. Several broken tombstones have also been found reused in a Georgian wall, including that of Mary Godfree who died at the height of the plague in September 1665. One small section remains to be excavated this summer, so Carver has not given up all hope of finding two of the most famous people known to have been buried there, the Levellers and Cromwellian soldiers John Lilburne and Robert Lockyer. Lockyer was executed by firing squad in 1649 for his radical political beliefs.

“I’ve had to warn the Levellers Association that our site is only about 20% of the original burial ground. But if he was buried in our section, more than 4,000 people are said to have followed his funeral procession – I can’t believe he would have gone into his grave without something to identify his coffin. We might yet find him.”
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Reference:

Kennedy, Maev. 2015. “Cremated human bones in pot found in Crossrail dig suggest gruesome ritual”. The Guardian. Posted: Sunday 26, 2015. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/26/cremated-human-bones-in-pot-found-in-crossrail-dig-suggest-gruesome-ritual