The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

[weatheriscool]

Ancient tombs unearthed at Paris' Notre Dame cathedral

Notre Dame was struck by a devastating fire in 2019.

Several tombs and a leaden sarcophagus likely dating from the 14th century have been uncovered by archaeologists at Paris' Notre Dame cathedral following its devastating 2019 fire, France's culture ministry has said.

The burial sites "of remarkable scientific quality" were unearthed during preparatory work for rebuilding the ancient church's spire at the central spot where the transept crosses the nave, the ministry said on Monday.

Among the tombs was the "completely preserved, human-shaped sarcophagus made of lead," it added.

The coffin might have been made for "a senior dignitary" and likely dated from the 1300s—the century following the cathedral's construction.

As well as the tombs, elements of painted sculptures were found just beneath the current floor level of the cathedral, identified as parts of the original 13th-century rood screen—an architectural element separating the altar area from the nave.

https://phys.org/news/2022-03-ancient-t ... notre.html

[weatheriscool]

Rewriting the history books: Why the Vikings left Greenland
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-rewriting ... nland.html
by University of Massachusetts Amherst

One of the great mysteries of late medieval history is why did the Norse, who had established successful settlements in southern Greenland in 985, abandon them in the early 15th century? The consensus view has long been that colder temperatures, associated with the Little Ice Age, helped make the colonies unsustainable. However, new research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends that old theory. It wasn't dropping temperatures that helped drive the Norse from Greenland, but drought.

When the Norse settled in Greenland on what they called the Eastern Settlement in 985, they thrived by clearing the land of shrubs and planting grass as pasture for their livestock. The population of the Eastern Settlement peaked at around 2,000 inhabitants, but collapsed fairly quickly about 400 years later. For decades, anthropologists, historians and scientists have thought the Eastern Settlement's demise was due to the onset of the Little Ice Age, a period of exceptionally cold weather, particularly in the North Atlantic, that made agricultural life in Greenland untenable.

However, as Raymond Bradley, University Distinguished Professor of geosciences at UMass Amherst and one of the paper's co- author, points out, "before this study, there was no data from the actual site of the Viking settlements. And that's a problem." Instead, the ice core data that previous studies had used to reconstruct historical temperatures in Greenland was taken from a location that was over 1,000 kilometers to the north and over 2,000 meters higher in elevation. "We wanted to study how climate had varied close to the Norse farms themselves," says Bradley. And when they did, the results were surprising.

[Time_Traveller]

Mystery Sarcophagus Found Below Notre Dame to Be Opened 'Very Soon'

April 15, 2022

After Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral suffered a devastating fire in 2019, an archeological excavation was ordered before full restoration could begin. In March, a month after the archeological survey began, it was revealed that the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research had discovered a sarcophagus dating back to the 14th century.

Now, we're about to find out what's inside. French archaeologists said Thursday they'll be opening the sarcophagus "very soon" after examining it using an endoscopic camera. According to Phys.org, the camera revealed the top half of a skeleton, a pillow, fabric and unidentified objects.

Carbon dating could be used to determine the age of the skeleton, the report said, while scientists will also be able to identify its gender and former health.

https://www.cnet.com/science/mystery-sa ... very-soon/

[Time_Traveller]

Lost 700-year-old ship found just five feet beneath street by construction workers

Wednesday 20 Apr 2022

This 13th-century ship was discovered barely five feet beneath an Estonian street after being lost 700 years ago.

Construction workers building offices in Tallinn were brought to a halt when the rare 80ft-long vessel was stumbled upon.

It’s believed to be a Hanseatic cog once owned by the Hanseatic League, a powerful merchant alliance spanning several European nations.

The whole area used to be undersea, with the ship sinking close to the Härjapea river mouth.

Surviving vessels belonging to the confederation are few and far between, with the most famous example being the Bremen Cog, discovered in Germany in 1962.

But the new discovery is said to be 82 years older and in even better condition.

Dated to 1298, it was built with 24-metre long massive oak logs and sealed with animal hair and tar.

https://metro.co.uk/2022/04/20/tallinn- ... i=16498703

[R8Z]

There's this misconception that food was bad in the middle ages (e.g. add salt to cover the 'rotten meat'). Probably comes from the Renaissance era, but unsure, some good explanation here which I embed below as well.

TL;DR: the food, at least for nobles, was more varied and detailed, had more courses, had more delicacies and spices that what we have today. Probably pretty good too.

[Tadasuke]

What % of people in the Middle Ages could afford good food? 3%? 4%?

[raklian]

It wasn't that the food was "bad". It was not knowing spoiled food or unsanitary cooking conditions allowed for proliferation of infectious pathogens they couldn't see with their own eyes. The lack of hygiene led to a relatively high mortality rate especially among infants and youths.

[Time_Traveller]

Ancient Viking burial ship belonging to ‘high status’ individual discovered underground

Friday 22 Apr 2022

A lost ship marking the resting place of an important Viking has been unearthed in the path of a planned highway in Norway.

Archaeologist Jani Causevic, from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), found the ‘incredibly exciting’ discovery while probing the proposed route of the E39 highway.

Mr Causevic said the presence of a ship pointed to the grave of a person of great importance.

‘Boats were an expensive thing back in the day,’ he said.

The newly-discovered boat is nearly 30ft long (9m) with seating for six men – big enough to bury more than one person.

https://metro.co.uk/2022/04/22/ancient- ... i=16516329

[caltrek]

Ancient Objects May Have Been Explosive Hand Grenades Almost 1,000 Years Ago
by David Nield
April 27, 2022

https://www.sciencealert.com/researcher ... d-grenades

Introduction:

(Science Alert) A new analysis of ancient ceramic pots from 11th–12th century Jerusalem has backed up previous propositions that some of these vessels may have been used as ancient hand grenades during the time of the Crusades.

Sphero-conical archaeological artifacts – rounded, with a cone-like base – are found in museums around the world, and have been linked to everything from carrying liquids to acting as a smoking pipe.

Their versatility and diverse use has been well documented, and the new analysis constitutes more evidence that carrying explosives was one of their functions.

In this latest analysis of four pot sherds found in the Armenian Garden location in the walled Old City of Jerusalem between 1961–67, and held in the Royal Ontario Museum, experts were able to look at the residue inside them – finding that one vessel contained what looks to be explosive material.

"This research has shown the diverse use of these unique ceramic vessels which include ancient explosive devices," says molecular archaeologist Carney Matheson from Griffith University in Australia.

[weatheriscool]

Historic graffiti made by soldiers sheds light on Africa maritime heritage, study shows
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-historic- ... itime.html
by University of Exeter

Historic graffiti of ships carved in an African fort were drawn by soldiers on guard duty watching the sea, University of Exeter experts believe.

The engravings, found in Tanzania's Zanzibar archipelago and made in the mid to late nineteenth century, open a window onto the ships that sailed on the western Indian Ocean at the time.

They were made when the area was the southern terminus of a trans-oceanic trade network that used the monsoon winds. Vessels anchored, beached and unloaded their cargoes along the length of the waterfront just outside the Old Fort, or Gereza, of Stone Town, Zanzibar's capital.

Although sometimes sketchy, the images suggest a number of vessel types, including a European-style frigate or frigate-built vessel and a number of settee-rigged ocean-going vessels often called 'dhows'. Some appear to have transom sterns, hinting at particular types of ship such as the baghla, ghanja, sanbūq or kotia. Two might also depict the prows of the elusive East African mtepe—a ship that was sewn together, rather than being nailed.

[caltrek]

Forgotten Ruins of 'Monumental' Amazonian Settlements Discovered in Bolivian Jungle
by Clare Watson
May 25, 2022

Introduction:

(Science Alert) The sprawling ruins of Amazonian settlements once home to an Indigenous agriculturalist society with a penchant for cosmology have been uncovered in the Bolivian jungle, hidden beneath seemingly impenetrable vegetation.

The 26 sites, roughly half of which were previously unknown to archaeologists, are yet another example of how the Amazon region was home to large, longstanding settlements and complex ancient societies before the Spanish invasion decimated the Americas.

"Our results put to rest arguments that western Amazonia was sparsely populated in pre-Hispanic times" and enrich existing evidence that the Casarabe culture had a "highly integrated, continuous and dense settlement system," write archaeologist Heiko Prümers of the German Archaeological Institute and colleagues in a new study.

Using remote laser scanners mounted on helicopters, the team of mostly European archaeologists scanned six areas in the heartland of the ancient Casarabe culture that developed between AD 500 and 1400 in what is now northern Bolivia.

The sprawling network of settlements they uncovered under dense forest represents a type of low-density urbanism, the first of this kind found in tropical lowlands of South America, featuring numerous elaborate ceremonial constructions including stepped platforms and U-shaped mounds, all orientated to the north-northwest.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/ruins-of-m ... ian-jungle

[R8Z]

Delightful video about peasant food during the middle ages. Those pesky peasants probably had better than us as far as food is concerned. The channel is great, covering many topics about the medieval period.

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Delightful video about peasant food during the middle ages. Those pesky peasants probably had better than us as far as food is concerned. The channel is great, covering many topics about the medieval period.

They lived a very hard life unless they bumped up in rank but it seems the eating was good. Remember that in Europe a lot of White people were peasants for centuries though I imagine there was care for all in the fiefdom because how the heck would a lot of things run including building castles? As rough as it may have been there seems to be some sort of organization they had back then.

[Time_Traveller]

Romans ventured deeper into Wales than thought, road discovery shows

Sun 5 Jun 2022



The awe-inspiring beauty of the Preseli Hills and the surrounding wild moorlands have long drawn visitors to north Pembrokeshire in Wales. Now an archaeologist has found evidence that even the Romans were drawn to the area, with the discovery of an ancient road showing they travelled farther west across Britain than previously thought.

Dr Mark Merrony, a Roman specialist, tutor at Oxford University and “a native of Pembrokeshire”, said the road had been completely missed. “This thing is just extraordinary. I’m astonished,” he said.

“I think they’ll go crazy in Wales over this because it’s pushing the Roman presence much more across Pembrokeshire. There’s this perception that the Romans didn’t go very far in Wales, but actually they were all over Wales.”

He said antiquarians in the late 17th and early 19th centuries had embraced the existence of a Roman road and it had been marked on 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps. “But the idea was then rejected and removed from those maps,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... stract.com

[wjfox]

Mystery of Black Death’s origins solved, say researchers

Wed 15 Jun 2022 16.00 BST

Researchers believe they have solved the nearly 700-year-old mystery of the origins of the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic in recorded history, which swept through Europe, Asia and north Africa in the mid-14th century.

At least tens of millions of people died when bubonic plague tore across the continents, probably by spreading along trade routes. Despite intense efforts to uncover the source of the outbreak, the lack of firm evidence has left the question open.

“We have basically located the origin in time and space, which is really remarkable,” said Prof Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “We found not only the ancestor of the Black Death, but the ancestor of the majority of the plague strains that are circulating in the world today.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... e-pandemic

[caltrek]

Ancient Stalagmites Point to a Massive Drought that Upturned Sixth Century Arabia
by Allison Parshall
June 21, 2022

Introduction:

(Inverse) STEPPING INSIDE AL HOOTA CAVE is like entering another world. The two-million-year-old structure lies at the foot of Oman’s tallest mountain and houses underground lakes teeming with blind, pale fish that have adapted to the dark environment. Massive stalagmites rise from the ground toward stalactites that stretch down from the ceiling.

These pointed rock formations, together called speleothems, create a record of the rainfall that occurred outside the cave for millennia. By studying their growth, scientists have found evidence of a 6th-century drought that may have toppled the nearby kingdom of Himyar.

WHAT’S NEW — In a paper published last week in Science, researchers used radiometric dating to chart the historic rainfall in the southern Arabian Peninsula. The team identified a significant drought that likely occurred from around the year 500 to 530 CE, coinciding with the demise of the powerful Himyarite Kingdom in what is today called Yemen. This drought may have seriously impacted the course of history, the authors say, including the rise of Islam in the region soon after.

“We have strong evidence that it was one of the driest periods of the last 10,000 years,” study co-author Dominik Fleitmann tells Inverse. Fleitmann is a geologist and paleoclimatologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Conclusion:

Still, climate plays an important role in shaping our world. “It's very important to recognize climate and the environment as a major force in how our history has occurred,” Trinity College’s Akers says, but we should not underestimate or forget the role of humans in shaping and responding to it.

Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/signif ... y-arabia

[caltrek]

Although a lot of this (see below) deals with details of the history of India, I think there are also lessons to be learned about a balanced treatment of history in English speaking countries like the United States. It is always dangerous to massively ignore the transgressions of one group simply because they are in the majority or otherwise exercise power over school curriculum.

Historian DN Jha Argues that Buddhist Shrines Were ‘Massively Destroyed’ by Brahmanical Rulers
by Ajaz Ashraf
June 19, 2022

Introduction:

(Janata Weekly) Historian DN Jha says that his new book Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History aims to challenge the depiction of the “ancient period of Indian history as a golden age marked by social harmony devoid of any religious violence”. This purported era of peace, he says, enables Hindutva ideologues to “portray the middle ages as … a reign of terror unleashed by the Muslim rulers on Hindus”.

The book says, “Central to (Hindutva) perception is the belief that Muslim rulers indiscriminately demolished Hindu temples and broke Hindu idols. They relentlessly propagate the canard that 60,000 Hindu temples were demolished during Muslim rule, though there is hardly any credible evidence for the destruction of more than 80 of them.”

There is no doubt that religious sects in ancient India were accommodative of each other. But it is just as true that Brahminical sects “bore huge animosity towards the two heterodox religions, Buddhism and Jainism”, Jha writes. This rancour resulted in attacks and the appropriation of Buddhist and Jain sacred places.

Presenting what he calls “a limited survey of the desecration, destruction and appropriation of Buddhist stupas, monasteries and other structures by Brahminical forces”, Jha says, “Evidence for such destruction dates as far back as the end of the reign of Ashoka, who is credited with making Buddhism a world religion.”

These facts seem to be at odds with India’s school-level history textbooks, which have been written – at least until recently – to promote what Delhi University professor Upinder Singh in her recent book Political Violence in Ancient India described as “the idealised Nehru model of the ancient Indian past…one in which Buddhism, Ashoka, nonviolence, and cosmopolitanism had a pride of place”. Hindutva ideologues have exploited this myth to portray the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers as a total reversal of India’s civilisational norms. Implicitly, therefore, Against the Grain highlights the problems of writing history, especially for schoolchildren.

Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/buddhist-shr ... n-dn-jha/

[wjfox]

World’s oldest trees reveal the largest solar storm in history

June 29, 2022

While humanity reckons with many problems here on Earth — war, political turmoil, an ongoing pandemic, all alongside the energy, climate, and water crises — it’s important to remember just how relentless the Universe can be. While earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes and other natural disasters haven’t exactly ceased in the meantime, there’s a looming threat for which we’re completely unprepared: a solar storm. Without any mitigations, widespread electrical fires and power station failures could come with damages costing trillions of dollars, impacting the lives of of billions.

Historically, the largest recorded solar event occurred back in 1859: the Carrington event. But more than a millennium prior to that, an even stronger cosmic event struck Earth. We know this because, back in the years spanning 774-775, there was a tremendous spike in the presence of carbon-14 in Earth’s atmosphere, and the evidence is found in tree rings all across the world. After a full decade investigating the possible causes of this spike, the scientific conclusion we’ve reached is that the Sun was to blame. A solar storm from more than 1200 years ago may have been the most powerful one recorded in natural history. The Earth, as a result, may be at an even greater risk from a worst-case solar storm than anyone thought possible.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang ... lar-storm/



Credit: Asimmetrie/INFN

[caltrek]

Climate, Conflict, and the Prehistoric Mayans
July 19, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) An extended period of turmoil in the prehistoric Maya city of Mayapan, in the Yucatan region of Mexico, was marked by population declines, political rivalries and civil conflict. Between 1441 and 1461 CE the strife reached an unfortunate crescendo — the complete institutional collapse and abandonment of the city. This all occurred during a protracted drought.

Coincidence? Not likely, finds new research by anthropologist and professor Douglas Kennett of UC Santa Barbara.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, lead author Kennett and collaborators in the fields of archaeology, history, geography and earth science suggest that drought may in fact have stoked the civil conflict that begat violence, which in turn led to the institutional instabilities that precipitated Mayapan’s collapse. This transdisciplinary work, the researchers said, “highlights the importance of understanding the complex relationships between natural and social systems, especially when evaluating the role of climate change in exacerbating internal political tensions and factionalism in areas where drought leads to food insecurity.”

“We found complex relationships between climate change and societal stability/instability on the regional level,” Kennett said in an interview. “Drought-induced civil conflict had a devastating local impact on the integrity of Mayapan’s state institutions that were designed to keep social order. However, the fragmentation of populations at Mayapan resulted in population and societal reorganization that was highly resilient for a hundred years until the Spanish arrived on the shores of the Yucatan.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/959306 and here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31522-x

[weatheriscool]

Study: Сollapse of ancient Mayan capital linked to drought
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-collapse- ... inked.html
by Bethany Bump, University at Albany

Prolonged drought likely helped to fuel civil conflict and the eventual political collapse of Mayapan, the ancient capital city of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, suggests a new study in Nature Communications that was published with the help of a University at Albany archaeologist.

Mayapan served as the capital to some 20,000 Maya people in the 13th through mid-15th centuries but collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family. Extensive historical records date this collapse to sometime between 1441 and 1461.

But new evidence shows drought in the century prior may have played a larger role in the city's demise than was previously known. The study authors note this is relevant today as humans grapple with a future of increased climate change.

Marilyn Masson, an archaeologist and professor and chair of UAlbany's Department of Anthropology, helped design and is a co-author of the study, which was assisted by an international team of interdisciplinary researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from that area and time period for signs of traumatic injury.

Masson, who serves as principal investigator for the Proyecto Económico de Mayapan, said she and the team found shallow mass graves and evidence of brutal massacre at monumental structures across the city.