Philippa Kaur

James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies, left) and John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds)James Blake/Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust
The TerrorAMCShowrunners: David Kajganich, Soo Hugh
In September, an awful truth was brought to light.
Ever since contact was lost with the Franklin expedition, an 1845 attempt by the British Royal Navy to find a path through the Arctic’s Northwest Passage, historians and scientists have tried to find out what went wrong. Investigations discovered hints of the horrors the sailors may have faced, including pack ice, hypothermia, lead poisoning and starvation. Eventually, the wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the… More

Blades and other artefacts were traded across France during the Stone AgeJacques Descloitres/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team
Around 7000 years ago, long knives, bracelets and other stone goods fashioned by skilled Parisian crafters were reaching people hundreds of kilometres away, via complex trade networks that are now being mapped for the first time.
By combining archaeology with computer modelling, Solène Denis at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Nanterre and Michael Kempf at the University of Basel in Switzerland have reconstructed the lengthy and winding paths taken to supply people from what is now Normandy… More

The complete skeletal remains of the “Well Man”Age Hojem, NTNU University Museum
A Norwegian saga written more than 800 years ago describes how a dead man was thrown into a castle well – and now, researchers believe they have identified the remains of this man.
The Sverris saga is an 182-verse Old Norse text that records the exploits of King Sverre Sigurdsson, who rose to power in the second half of the 12th century AD. One part says that a rival clan who attacked Sverresborg castle, near Trondheim, Norway, “took a dead man and cast him unto the well, and then filled it up with stones”.
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The well was inside the castle’s ramparts and was the community’s only permanent water source. It has been speculated that the man thrown into the well in the saga may have had a disease and putting him there was an early act of biological warfare.
In 1938, a medieval well in the ruins of Sverresborg castle was partly drained and a skeleton was found beneath rubble and boulders at the bottom. While it was widely believed that the skeleton, referred to as Well Man, was the remains of the individual mentioned in the saga, it wasn’t possible to confirm this at the time.
Now, Anna Petersén at the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage Research in Oslo and her colleagues have used radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a tooth from the body to show that the date range the man was alive is consistent with the raid on the castle. While not definitive proof that the man was the one mentioned in the saga, the “circumstantial evidence is consistent with this conclusion”, says Perersén.
The Well Man skeleton was discovered in 1938Riksantikvaren (The Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage)
What is more, the team has been able to add to the story. “The research we have done has shown many details concerning both the event and the man that the saga episode doesn’t mention,” says Petersén.
For example, the DNA suggests he most likely had blue eyes and blond or light-brown hair. The researchers also believe his ancestors were from what is now Vest-Agder, the southernmost Norwegian county, based on comparisons with the DNA of modern and ancient Norwegians.
One thing they couldn’t find was any evidence that the man was thrown into the well because he had a disease or to render the drinking water unusable, but they also found no evidence against it, leaving the question unanswered.
Michael Martin at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim says the team’s approach of matching historical documents with DNA evidence could also be applied to construct family trees of long-dead royal families or to “physically describe and sketch out the life stories, such as movement between geographic regions, of the otherwise anonymous people whose remains are recovered from archaeological excavations”.
Researchers took DNA from one of the skeleton’s teethNorwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU)
“This is, to my knowledge, the oldest case where genomic information has been recovered from a specific character, or even a specific person, mentioned in an ancient text,” says Martin.
He says by generating genomic information from ancient skeletal remains, we can provide new details about a person. “These details are not in the original text, thus the genetic data enriches the story and provides a way to separate fact from fiction,” says Martin.

Topics:DNA/Skeleton More

Archaeologists cleaning excess mud off the Bronze Age spadeWessex Archaeology
A wooden spade from the Bronze Age has been unearthed by archaeologists in the UK. It is incredibly rare to find wooden artefacts preserved from so long ago.
The spade offers a glimpse into life during a time when people were increasingly farming crops and living in settled communities.
“It’s quite tangible,” says Ed Treasure at Wessex Archaeology in Salisbury, UK. “It’s quite an immediate connection with the past.”Advertisement

The spade was found in wetlands near Poole Harbour on the south coast of England, where Wessex Archaeology has been digging for several years. The Moors at Arne Coastal Change Project is working to restore coastal wetlands in the area, and the archaeologists are excavating to ensure that informative artefacts are not inadvertently lost.
The researchers were digging in ring gullies, circular trenches that may have originally surrounded shelters. In one of the ring gullies, they spotted the handle of the spade. “There was almost a moment of disbelief,” says Treasure, who was not there personally. “It was quite immediately apparent that it was a piece of worked wood.” The spade had been carved from a single piece of oak.
The wet conditions meant the shovel was not exposed to oxygen, slowing the decay.
The team has radiocarbon dated the spade to 3400-3500 years ago, using a shard found alongside it. “A very small bit of the spade had become broken off in burial – we used that for dating,” says Treasure. Nearby pottery indicated a similar date. This places the spade’s origins in the Middle Bronze Age.
“It’s quite a big time of change in prehistoric Britain,” says Treasure. People were becoming less nomadic and spending much more time in settled communities, farming a range of cereals and other foods.
However, there is no sign of permanent year-round settlement at the site – unsurprisingly, because it was and is a wetland. “We’re very much thinking this is a seasonal use of this landscape,” says Treasure. People may have brought animals in to graze in the summer, cut peat for fuel or perhaps collected reeds for thatching.
Future studies will try to find out how the spade was made, and what it was used for. “It might have been used to cut peat on the site,” says Treasure. “It may also have been used to dig the ring gully in which it was found.”
Preserved spades from this period are rare. One of the only other examples is the Brynlow shovel, which was found in Cheshire in 1875, rediscovered in the 1950s in a school assembly hall by the fantasy writer Alan Garner and eventually radiocarbon dated to almost 4000 years ago.

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These ancient swords have been modified by forgersAlex Rodzinka
Imaging technology has revealed that ancient swords smuggled into the UK recently have been altered by modern-day forgers, who replaced many of the original iron blades with bronze ones. What’s more, many similar swords in museums worldwide may also be tainted by modern forgery.
The swords in question come from what is now Iran and date to an important moment in history: the end of the Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron Age. As the names suggest, this marked a technological shift as iron became the metal of… More

PurpleHousePhotos/Alamy
Mark Twain famously (although possibly apocryphally) said we should never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Archaelogists might beg to differ, particularly when the story in question is a dramatic rewriting of human history that – as the president of the Society of American Archaeology, Daniel Sandweiss, has noted – has a long-standing link with racist ideologies.
This narrative claims that the familiar ancient civilisations of Eurasia, Africa and the Americas drew inspiration from a mysterious advanced culture that predated them all. Archaeologists are confident that no such civilisation ever existed, but they are also aware that persuading believers to reject the story is a tough task.
However, as we explore in our interview with archaeologist Flint Dibble in “The archaeologist fighting claims about an advanced lost civilisation”, they may have found a winning strategy in the form of the “truth sandwich”. In this debating technique, archaeologists first begin by discussing real information, what their research has revealed about the past. Then they tackle the false information – in this case explaining how the facts leave no room for this lost civilisation – before returning to and re-emphasising the real information.Advertisement

Truth sandwiches’ appear to be good at fighting misinformation in some contexts but not others

The truth sandwich gained popularity after it was formalised by linguist George Lakoff in 2018. It is tempting to assume that it can convince audiences to abandon belief in false narratives. But can it? The best way to find out, of course, is through controlled experiments. The first such research has now been conducted, and it presents a mixed picture. Truth sandwiches appear to be effective in certain contexts but not in others, where different ways to structure an argument are more persuasive.
These conflicting results might seem problematic, but they are actually evidence of scientific inquiry at work – a process that involves testing ideas and refining hypotheses in light of new data. It is only this approach that can really discover the best way to tackle misinformation. Or, to put it another way, science should never let a good story get in the way of the truth.

Topics:archaeology/ancient humans More