Philippa Kaur

The PHerc.172 scroll as revealed by X-ray imagingVesuvius Challenge
An ancient Roman scroll has been read for the first time since it was charred in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius two millennia ago, thanks to artificial intelligence and a high-powered X-ray facility.
The papyrus scroll was one of 1800 rescued from a single room in an ornate villa in the Roman town of Herculaneum during the 1750s, which is now the Italian town of Ercolano. All of them were carbonised by the heat of the volcanic debris that buried them.
Advertisement
Initially, locals unknowingly burned the scrolls as firewood, but once it was discovered that they contained text, they were saved. Around 200 have since been painstakingly opened and read by mechanical devices based on clocks, which slowly tick and prise the scrolls open millimetre by millimetre.
Three of these scrolls are kept at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, having been gifted by the future King George IV in 1804. The then-prince of Wales had traded a troop of kangaroos to King Ferdinand IV of Naples in exchange for the scrolls. (The Neapolitan king was constructing an elaborate garden and a collection of animals for his lover.)
One of these three scrolls, known as PHerc. 172, has now been imaged and analysed using machine learning algorithms. It was scanned at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, home to an extremely high-powered X-ray machine known as a synchrotron, and the resulting data was made available to participants in the Vesuvius Challenge – a competition with a $700,000 grand prize for interpreting text from scrolls.

This method is much better than trying to open the scrolls mechanically,  says Peter Toth, a curator at the Bodleian Library. “The only problem, or risk, is that the imaging is so special that it cannot be done here, which means that the scroll had to leave the premises. And we were very, very nervous about that,” he says.
Researchers have so far revealed several columns of text, with about 26 lines in each column. Academics are now hoping to read the whole scroll, but can already make out the Ancient Greek word διατροπή, meaning “disgust.” Toth suspects that it will relate in some way to the philosopher Epicurus, as so many of the other scrolls found at the same site have.
PHerc. 172 was the only one of the three scrolls at the Bodleian Library deemed stable enough to travel, and then only in a specially 3D-printed case inside another padded box. “The hope is that the technology can improve so much [in the future] that the items do not have to travel anywhere, but the technology can come to us,” says Toth.

Topics:archaeology/AI More

Today, clothes are a means of self‑expression and group identity – and we wouldn’t go out without themMartin Parr/Magnum Photos
Venus figurines are most famous for their sexual features. These often-voluptuous carvings of female forms, made between around 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, have been interpreted as ritual fertility figures, mother goddesses and self-portraits. One thing they are generally not seen as is fashion plates. Yet some of them provide tantalising glimpses of what the well-dressed Stone Age woman was wearing. One, from Kostenki in Russia, sports a wrap-style robe with straps. Others have string skirts. And the famous Venus of Willendorf wears just a woven hat – but a very fine one.
These statuettes are a far cry from our popular conception of prehistoric humans draped in animal furs. The lavish detail with which their garments are depicted indicates the importance of clothing to societies tens of thousands of years ago, according to archaeologist Olga Soffer, professor emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Something that began as a necessity, to keep people warm, had by then morphed into a canvas for aesthetic expression and meaning. Now, the story of how that happened has taken a twist, thanks to some new discoveries.

Clothing is perishable, and the oldest remains are only around 10,000 years old. But, as the Venus figurines illustrate, we can follow trends back in time in other ways. These archaeological clues reveal the origins of both simple capes and complex tailoring to be remarkably ancient. Most… More

Stone plaques with sun motifs found on Bornholm island, DenmarkAntiquity Publications/John Lee, National Museum of Denmark
Hundreds of mysterious engraved “sun stones” unearthed in Denmark may have been ceremonially buried because a volcanic eruption in about 2900 BC made the sun disappear.
A total of 614 stone plaques and fragments of plaques engraved with decorative motifs of the sun or plants have been unearthed in recent years at the Vasagård West archaeological site on the Danish island of Bornholm. They were found in a layer that dates to some 4900 years ago, when Neolithic people were farming the area and building enclosures encircled by earthworks of banks and ditches.
Advertisement
Most of the carved sun stones were found in the ditches around these enclosures and they had been covered by a stone pavement containing bits of pottery and other items. The pottery is typical of the late Funnel Beaker culture, which was present in this region until about 2900 to 2800 BC.
It was originally proposed that the stone carvings of the sun were buried to ensure good harvests. The sun was the focal point for early agricultural cultures in northern Europe, says Rune Iversen at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
“But why have they deposited all these images at the same time?” asks Iversen. “The last thing that they basically did here was depositing these sun stones and then covering them with pieces of animal bone, all the artefacts and stuff like that. And we see that reoccurring from ditch to ditch. So, it is kind of an act or an event.”
Now, he and his colleagues have an answer. They looked at data from ice cores extracted in Greenland and Antarctica and found higher concentrations of sulphate, which is deposited in the years after a volcanic eruption, in the period around 2900 BC.
The relative ratio of sulphate deposition in Greenland and Antarctica implies the eruption was somewhere close to the equator, say the researchers, and its effects seem to have covered a huge area. Ash clouds may have blocked out the sun, lowering temperatures for years.
A period of severe cooling around 2900 BC is corroborated by sources including tree rings in preserved wood from the Main river valley in Germany and those of long-lived bristlecone pines in the western US.
The eruption would been devastating for the Neolithic peoples of northern Europe. “If you don’t have the harvest and you don’t get the crops in, you won’t have anything to sow next year,” says Iversen. “They must have felt pretty punished at that time because it’s just an endless catastrophe coming at them.”
He and his colleagues say that burying the carvings could have been an attempt to get the sun back or a celebration after the skies did finally clear.

“It’s a good explanation,” says Jens Winther Johannsen at Roskilde Museum in Denmark. “You can be sure die-hard farming societies have to trust in the sun.”
Lars Larsson at Lund University in Sweden asks why we have evidence of such behaviour only on Bornholm, and not elsewhere in southern Scandinavia, if the climate effect was widespread.
It could be because people there had plentiful hard stone – slate ­– which they carved the sun images on, but much of the rest of southern Scandinavia is mostly clay, so there is less suitable stone to carve, says Iversen. “They could also have made engravings on pieces of wood or leather elsewhere,” he says, but these wouldn’t generally have been preserved.
Alternatively, it might reflect cultural differences, says Johannsen. “These societies aren’t isolated, but you are more isolated on an island, which could be why they developed a unique practice and culture.”

Topics:archaeology More

A late Iron Age Durotrigan burial at Winterborne Kingston in Dorset, UKBournemouth University
Genetic analysis of people buried in a 2000-year-old cemetery in southern England has bolstered the idea that Celtic communities in Britain placed women centre-stage, showing that women remained in their ancestral homes while men moved in from other communities – a practice that lasted centuries.
The work supports growing archaeological evidence that women had high status within Celtic societies across Europe, including Britain, and gives credence to Roman written accounts that were often thought to be exaggerated for Mediterranean audiences when they described Celtic women as empowered.
Advertisement
Since 2009, human remains of the Durotriges tribe have been unearthed during excavations of an Iron Age burial site at Winterborne Kingston in Dorset, UK. The Durotriges occupied the central southern English coast from around 100 BC to AD 100 and probably spoke a Celtic language.
Human remains from Iron Age Britain are rare because prevailing funerary customs, including cremation or depositing bodies in wetlands, destroyed them. However, the Durotriges buried their dead in formal cemeteries in the chalk landscape, which aided their preservation. Archaeologists have found that Durotrigan women were more often buried with valuable items, suggesting high status and possibly a society focused on women.
Lara Cassidy at Trinity College Dublin and her colleagues have now analysed the genomes of 55 Durotrigan individuals from Winterborne Kingston to untangle how they were related to one another and other Iron Age populations from Britain and Europe.
Cassidy says there were two big “aha moments”. Both were related to mitochondrial DNA – small loops of DNA that we inherit only through the maternal line, since they are passed down via the egg cell and don’t integrate with other DNA.
As the mitochondrial DNA results for each individual came in, the team noticed the same genetic sequence appearing again and again. It became apparent that more than two-thirds of the individuals were descended from a single maternal lineage, originating from a common female ancestor a few centuries earlier.
“My jaw dropped at that moment,” says Cassidy. “This was a clear signature of matrilocality, or husbands moving to live with their wives’ families – a pattern we’d never seen before in prehistoric Europe.” Patrilocality, in which a woman moves to her male partner’s community, is usually the norm.
To find out if the matrilocal pattern was a distinct phenomenon of the Durotriges or if it could have been more widespread across Britain, Cassidy began trawling through data from an earlier large genetic survey of Iron Age Britain and Europe. Her jaw dropped again. She noticed cemeteries across Britain where most individuals were maternal descendants of a small set of female ancestors.
It adds to the growing pile of evidence that Iron Age women were relatively empowered, says Cassidy. “Matrilocality typically co-occurs with cultural practices that benefit women and keeps them embedded in their family support networks,” she explains.
In modern societies, matrilocality has been associated with higher female involvement in food production, higher paternity uncertainty and protracted male absence. In such societies, it is the man who migrates into a new community as a relative stranger and depends on his partner’s family for his livelihood.

“Men typically still dominate formal positions of authority, but women can wield huge influence through their strong networks of matrilineal relatives and their central role in the local economy,” says Cassidy.
Cassidy’s team went on to compare the British DNA dataset with data from other European sites, revealing repeated waves of migration from the continent, aligning with archaeological evidence. This showed that southern Britain was a hotspot for cultural and genetic exchange between 2500 BC and 1200 BC during the Bronze Age, as well as during a previously unknown Late Iron Age influx at the time of the Durotriges.
Previous studies have suggested that Celtic languages probably arrived in Britain between 1000 BC and 875 BC, but the new findings widen that window. “Celtic languages were possibly introduced on more than one occasion,” says Cassidy.
“This is very exciting new research and is revolutionising how we understand prehistoric society,” says Rachel Pope at the University of Liverpool, UK, who has previously found evidence of female-focused kinship in Iron Age Europe. “What we are learning is that the nature of society in Europe before the Romans was really very different.”

Topics:archaeology More

Erta Ale Volcano in EthiopiaShutterstock/Tatyana Druzhinina
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.
So, volcanoes are scary. I have vivid memories of visiting Pompeii and Herculaneum with my parents and seeing the twisted preserved corpses of people that were buried under the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius. The people in question lived in what was, at the time, one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet – yet they died in their thousands. Volcanoes are one of those… More