Mysterious Stone Spheres in Costa Rica Investigated

From: ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2010)
— The ancient stone spheres of Costa Rica were made world-famous by the opening sequence of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when a mockup of one of the mysterious relics nearly crushed Indiana Jones.

John Hoopes, University of Kansas associate professor of anthropology and director of the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program, recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica where he and colleagues evaluated ancient stone spheres for UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization that might grant the spheres World Heritage Status. (Credit: Courtesy of John Hoopes)

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So perhaps John Hoopes is the closest thing at the University of Kansas to the movie action hero.

Hoopes, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program, recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica where he and colleagues evaluated the stone balls for UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization that might grant the spheres World Heritage Status.

His report will help determine if sites linked to the massive orbs will be designated for preservation and promotion because of their "outstanding value to humanity."

Hoopes, who researches ancient cultures of Central and South America, is one of the world's foremost experts on the Costa Rican spheres. He explained that although the stone spheres are very old, international interest in them is still growing.

"The earliest reports of the stones come from the late 19th century, but they weren't really reported scientifically until the 1930s -- so they're a relatively recent discovery," Hoopes said. "They remained unknown until the United Fruit Company began clearing land for banana plantations in southern Costa Rica."

According to Hoopes, around 300 balls are known to exist, with the largest weighing 16 tons and measuring eight feet in diameter. Many of these are clustered in Costa Rica's Diquis Delta region. Some remain pristine in the original places of discovery, but many others have been relocated or damaged due to erosion, fires and vandalism.

The KU researcher said that scientists believe the stones were first created around 600 A.D., with most dating to after 1,000 A.D. but before the Spanish conquest.

"We date the spheres by pottery styles and radiocarbon dates associated with archeological deposits found with the stone spheres," Hoopes said. "One of the problems with this methodology is that it tells you the latest use of the sphere but it doesn't tell you when it was made. These objects can be used for centuries and are still sitting where they are after a thousand years. So it's very difficult to say exactly when they were made."

Speculation and pseudoscience have plagued general understanding of the stone spheres. For instance, publications have claimed that the balls are associated with the "lost" continent of Atlantis. Others have asserted that the balls are navigational aids or relics related to Stonehenge or the massive heads on Easter Island.

"Myths are really based on a lot of very rampant speculation about imaginary ancient civilizations or visits from extraterrestrials," Hoopes said.

In reality, archaeological excavations in the 1940s found the stone balls to be linked with pottery and materials typical of pre-Columbian cultures of southern Costa Rica.

"We really don't know why they were made," Hoopes said. "The people who made them didn't leave any written records. We're left to archeological data to try to reconstruct the context. The culture of the people who made them became extinct shortly after the Spanish conquest. So, there are no myths or legends or other stories that are told by the indigenous people of Costa Rica about why they made these spheres."

Hoopes has a created a popular Web page to knock down some of the misconceptions about the spheres. He said the stones' creation, while vague, certainly had nothing to do with lost cities or space ships.

"We think the main technique that was used was pecking and grinding and hammering with stones," said Hoopes. "There are some spheres that have been found that still have the marks of the blows on them from hammer stones. We think that that's how they were formed, by hammering on big rocks and sculpting them into a spherical shape."

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Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by University of Kansas.

The First Hints Of A Dinosaur's True Colors

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

from: http://www.npr.org/

Enlarge Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing

An artist's rendition of two Sinosauropteryx dinosaurs, showing their short, bristle-like feathers along the midline of the head, neck, back and around the tail, forming irregular stripes.

Scientists have found evidence of some of the original coloration of a dinosaur that lived about 125 million years ago, showing that it had rings of orange-brown bristly feathers around its tail.

Fossils have revealed a lot about the lives of dinosaurs, but researchers always used to think that the fossil record couldn't show what color they were. "This was the one point at which we had to give up," says paleontologist Mike Benton at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who explains that fossils tend to preserve an animal's hard parts, like bones and teeth, and not soft parts like skin.

But feathers are made of tough proteins. "And, in fact, they can survive even in conditions where other internal organs, you know, muscles and guts and brains and so on, will disappear," says Benton.

That created the possibility of learning something about what colors could be found in the primitive feathers of early birds and recently discovered feathered dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, these fossilized, ancient feathers just look like rock to the naked eye, because of the way they were preserved. "When you look at the feathers, you don't know what the colors were. The feathers are a mixture of brownish colors," says Benton. "They're just preserved either as sort of dirty, whitish, beige kind of color and a kind of darker, equally dirty kind of brownish color."

Enlarge The Nanjing Institute

The fossil of a small Chinese theropod dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx.

Clues About The Original Color

But Benton and his colleagues thought they could get clues about the original color by looking at tiny structures inside these fossilized feathers.

After all, they knew that in the feathers of living birds, some color comes from pigments called melanins. And inside of a hair or a feather, "the melanin is actually contained within a kind of capsule," says Benton.

The shape of the capsule depends on the color. "The black or dark brown kind of melanin goes into a somewhat sausage-shaped capsule," says Benton, while a reddish-brown kind of melanin goes into a more rounded capsule shaped like a ball.

With this in mind, the researchers used a sophisticated, powerful microscope to peer inside primitive feathers on a turkey-sized dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx. "It's a flesh-eater. It's got sharp little teeth in its mouth, and it's got grabby little hands," says Benton. "It's a two-legged dinosaur, so very slender limbs. It's got a sort of straightish backbone and a long thin tail."

Fossils show that this tail was ringed with dark bands of primitive feathers that look like bristles. And inside these bristles, Benton and his colleagues found melanin capsules in the shape associated with the orange-brown color.

"These dark stripes, as far as we can tell, were exclusively ginger, and so this early dinosaur with its long thin tail had ginger and white stripes up the tail," says Benton.

'Watertight Evidence Of The Original Color'

He says they assume the tail must have been completely covered with primitive feathers, with alternating orange-brown and white stripes. The white feathers would not have contained any melanin capsules, which means they would have had less structural strength and would have decayed rather than being preserved in the fossil.

"For the first time ever, we have evidence, we believe fairly watertight evidence, of the original color," says Benton.

The researchers also looked inside feathers from fossils of the early bird Confuciusornis and found that this species appears to have had patches of white, black and orange-brown coloring.

Enlarge Jim Robbins

The Sinosauropteryx was a turkey-sized, flesh-eating dinosaur that scientists believe had primitive feathers and dark rings around its tail.

Benton's team reported all of these findings in the journal Nature. Other paleontologists said the work was an impressive feat.

From Artistry To Science

"This is a really exciting result," says Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University. He and his colleagues had previously shown that melanin capsules fossilize very well in feathers. "But that work was based on much more recent fossil bird feathers," says Prum, adding that this new study extends the work to much older specimens from feathered dinosaurs.

"This study begins to bring the colors of dinosaurs out of the realm of artistry and into the realm of science," says Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland.

But Holtz says this approach will only be possible for feathers and maybe scales on those dinosaurs that are extremely well-preserved in fossils. That doesn't include a famous one that he studies — Tyrannosaurus rex.

"I would love to know if Tyrannosaurus was green or brown or, you know, chartreuse," says Holtz. But he doesn't think that's going to be possible. "It's unlikely that I'll ever know or that anyone will ever know the colors of some of our favorite dinosaurs."

For these extinct creatures, at least, it looks like artists trying to create images of a long-lost world will continue to be limited only by their imagination, and not by science.

Listen Discovering Dinosaur Color From Fossilized Feathers

All Things Considered

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Giant sculptured Mayan head found

January 27, 2010 by Lin Edwards

Enlarge

Maya mask at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Image: Wolfgang Sauber, via Wikipedia.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A decorated Mayan head measuring three meters (10 feet) at the base and sculptured out of stucco has been unearthed in northern Guatemala, near the border with Mexico. The sculpture had been buried for centuries under the thick jungle, and its presence may suggest the site could have been part of a Mayan city.

Archaeologists from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Valencia in Spain recently found the sculpture in the Chilonché ruins in the jungle-covered Petén region. The team are experts in stuccoed artifacts and their restoration and conservation. They have dated the giant head to the early Classical period of 300-600 AD, which is considerably older than other artifacts found at the site, and means the site is older than thought previously. The find is in excellent condition and some of its original colors have been preserved.

One of the archaeology team, Professor Gaspar Muñoz Cosme, said the find was “spectacular” and the sculpture could be linked to Mayan mythology, and possibly represents an imaginary being such as a Mayan god, or an underworld figure. He said the discovery provides important scientific data that helps us understand the architecture of the Mayans of the time. The team hopes to find similar heads at the site, since the Mayans often built and arranged multiple items symmetrically.

The Petén region is close to well-known Mayan cities such as Tikal and Nakum. It contains dozens of Mayan ruins, but the site at Chilonché has not been excavated to a great extent, largely because the thick jungle region is home to poachers, looters looking for artifacts to sell on the black market, and drug smugglers carrying cocaine to nearby Mexico. The giant head was found inside one of the tunnels built by looters at the site. As soon as the find was located, the archaeologists contacted Guatemalan authorities to ensure security around the site was tightened because of the significance of the find.

The giant figurehead sculpture is similar to other sculptured heads found at Uaxactun, where they decorated a solar observatory. In the Classical period from 300 to 900 AD the Mayans built vast cities and towering pyramids in an extensive area of Central America from Mexico through Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Belize. The reasons for the collapse of the Mayan civilization in the last century or so of the Classical period remain a mystery, but may have been linked to deforestation and resulting climate change and extended droughts and crop failures.

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

Mummies found in newly discovered tomb in Egypt

By MAGGIE MICHAEL, Associated Press Writer

AP – In this photo released Monday, Feb. 9, 2009 by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egypt's top archaeologist …

• Slideshow:Anthropology & Archaeology

CAIRO – A storeroom housing about two dozen ancient Egyptian mummies has been unearthed inside a 2,600-year-old tomb during the latest round of excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara south of Cairo, archaeologists said Monday.

The tomb was located at the bottom of a 36-foot deep shaft, said Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass. Twenty-two mummies were found in niches along the tomb's walls, he said.

Eight sarcophagi were also found in the tomb. Archaeologists so far have opened only one of the sarcophagi — and found a mummy inside of it, said Hawass' assistant Abdel Hakim Karar. Mummies are believed to be inside the other seven, he said.

The "storeroom for mummies" dates back to 640 B.C. during the 26th Dynasty, which was Egypt's last independent kingdom before it was overthrown by a succession of foreign conquerors beginning with the Persians, Hawass said. But the tomb was discovered at an even older site in Saqqara that dates back to the 4,300-year-old 6th Dynasty, he said.

Most of the mummies are poorly preserved, and archeologists have yet to determine their identities or why so many were put in one room.

The name Badi N Huri was engraved into the opened sarcophagus, but the wooden coffin did not bear a title for the mummy.

"This one might have been an important figure, but I can't tell because there was no title," Karar said.

Karar also said it was unusual for mummies of this late period to be stored in rocky niches.

"Niches were known in the very early dynasties, so to find one for the 26th Dynasty is something rare," he said.

Excavations have been ongoing at Saqqara for 150 years, uncovering a necropolis of pyramids and tombs dating mostly from the Old Kingdom but also tombs from as recent as the Roman era.

In the past, excavations have focused on just one side of the site's two most prominent pyramids — the famous Step Pyramid of King Djoser and that of Unas, the last king of the 5th Dynasty. The area where the current tomb was found, to the southwest, has been largely untouched by archeologists.

In December, two tombs were found near the current discovery of mummies. The tombs were built for high officials — one responsible for the quarries used to build the nearby pyramids and the other for a woman in charge of procuring entertainers for the pharaohs.

In November, Hawass announced the discovery of a new pyramid at Saqqara, the 118th in Egypt, and the 12th to be found just in Saqqara.

According to Hawass, only 30 percent of Egypt's monuments have been uncovered, with the rest still under the sand.

Another Stonehenge Discovered Under Lake Michigan?

By Annalee Newitz

A group of researchers using sonar to find shipwrecks on the bottom of Lake Michigan have found something far older than crashed cargo ships. They believe they've found a 10-thousand-year-old stone structure like Stonehenge, including a rock carved with the image of a mastodon. io9 pal Geoff Manaugh reports over at BLDG BLOG that the researchers' report (with cool sonar images) was released last year to surprisingly little fanfare.

And yet the possibility of a Stonehenge-esque worship site wouldn't be out of place at the bottom of Lake Michigan. The region already has its share of petroglyphs from ancient tribes and other standing stone sites. These submerged stones could have been raised by local populations at a time when part of the lake bed was dry, in the late Ice Age. More research is needed to determine whether these stones were arranged by humans, or merely look that way.

SOURCES:

Mastodon? Rock Brings History to Surface [via Associated Press]

Stonehenge Beneath Lake Michigan? via BLDG BLOG (with sonar pics!)

io9 * next » Mega archaeology 2,900-Year-Old Gravestone Reveals Ancient Belief System

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Discovery in Turkey Comes from Major Iron Age Site

Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body.

University of Chicago researchers will describe the discovery, a testimony created by an Iron Age official that includes an incised image of the man, on Nov. 22-23 at conferences of biblical and Middle Eastern archaeological scholars in Boston.

The Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago found the 800-pound basalt stele, 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide, at Zincirli (pronounced "Zin-jeer-lee"), the site of the ancient city of Sam'al. Once the capital of a prosperous kingdom, it is now one of the most important Iron Age sites under excavation.

The stele is the first of its kind to be found intact in its original location, enabling scholars to learn about funerary customs and life in the eighth century B.C. At the time, vast empires emerged in the ancient Middle East, and cultures such as the Israelites and Phoenicians became part of a vibrant mix.

The man featured on the stele was probably cremated, a practice that Jewish and other cultures shun because of a belief in the unity of body and soul. According to the inscription, the soul of the deceased resided in the stele.

"The stele is in almost pristine condition. It is unique in its combination of pictorial and textual features and thus provides an important addition to our knowledge of ancient language and culture," said David Schloen, Associate Professor at the Oriental Institute and Director of the University's Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli.

Schloen will present the Kuttamuwa stele to a scholarly audience at the meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research on Nov. 22 in Boston, the major annual conference for Middle Eastern archaeology. Dennis Pardee, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago, will present his translation of the stele's 13-line inscription the following day at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, also in Boston, in a session on "Paleographical Studies in the Near East."

German archaeologists first excavated the 100-acre site in the 1890s and unearthed massive city walls, gates and palaces. A number of royal inscriptions and other finds are now on display in museums in Istanbul and Berlin. Schloen and his team from the University of Chicago have excavated Zincirli for two months annually since 2006.

"Zincirli is a remarkable site," said Gil Stein, Director of the Oriental Institute. "Because no other cities were built on top of it, we have excellent Iron Age materials right under the surface. It is rare also in having written evidence together with artistic and archaeological evidence from the Iron Age. Having all of that information helps an archaeologist study the ethnicity of the inhabitants, trade and migration, as well as the relationships of the groups who lived there."

The stele was discovered last summer in a small room that had been converted into a mortuary shrine for the royal official Kuttamuwa, self-described in the inscription as a "servant" of King Panamuwa of the eighth century B.C. It was found in the outer part of the walled city in a domestic area—most likely the house of Kuttamuwa himself—far from the royal palaces, where inscriptions had previously been found.

The inscription reads in part: "I, Kuttamuwa, servant of Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber(?) and established a feast at this chamber(?): a bull for [the storm-god] Hadad, ... a ram for [the sun-god] Shamash, ... and a ram for my soul that is in this stele. …" It was written in a script derived from the Phoenician alphabet and in a local West Semitic dialect similar to Aramaic and Hebrew. It is of keen interest to linguists as well as biblical scholars and religious historians because it comes from a kingdom contemporary with ancient Israel that shared a similar language and cultural features.

The finding sheds a striking new light on Iron Age beliefs about the afterlife. In this case, it was the belief that the enduring identity or "soul" of the deceased inhabited the monument on which his image was carved and on which his final words were recorded.

The stele was set against a stone wall in the corner of the small room, with its protruding tenon or "tab" still inserted into a slot in a flagstone platform. A handsome, bearded figure, Kuttamuwa is depicted on the stele wearing a tasseled cap and fringed cloak and raising a cup of wine in his right hand. He is seated on a chair in front of a table laden with food, symbolizing the pleasant afterlife he expected to enjoy. Beside him is his inscription, elegantly carved in raised relief, enjoining upon his descendants the regular duty of bringing food for his soul. Indeed, in front of the stele were remains of food offerings and fragments of polished stone bowls of the type depicted on Kuttamuwa's table.

According to Schloen, the stele vividly demonstrates that Iron Age Sam'al, located in the border zone between Anatolia and Syria, inherited both Semitic and Indo-European cultural traditions. Kuttamuwa and his king, Panamuwa, had non-Semitic names, reflecting the migration of Indo-European speakers into the region centuries earlier under the Hittite Empire based in central Anatolia (modern Turkey), which had conquered the region.

But by the eighth century B.C., they were speaking the local West Semitic dialect and were fully integrated into local culture. Kuttumuwa's inscription shows a fascinating mixture of non-Semitic and Semitic cultural elements, including a belief in the enduring human soul—which did not inhabit the bones of the deceased, as in traditional Semitic thought, but inhabited his stone monument, possibly because the remains of the deceased were cremated. Cremation was considered to be abhorrent in the Old Testament and in traditional West Semitic culture, but there is archaeological evidence for Indo-European-style cremation in neighboring Iron Age sites, although not yet at Zincirli itself.

In future excavation campaigns, the Zincirli team, generously supported by University trustee Joseph Neubauer and his wife Jeanette, plans to excavate large areas of the site in order to understand the social and economic organization of the city and its cultural development over the centuries. Schloen and his associate director Amir Fink hope to illuminate Iron Age culture more widely through this richly documented ancient city.

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PHOTOS

A funerary monument recovered in southeastern Turkey reveals that people who lived in an important Iron Age city there believed the soul was separate from the body. They also believed the soul lived in the funerary slab.
(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

Students looking at stele recovered in Zincirli are Virginia Rimmer and Benjamin Thomas, both Ph.D. students in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago. The inscription on the stone reveals the first evidence that people in the region believed the soul was separate from the body.
(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

A funerary monument recovered in southeastern Turkey reveals that people who lived in an important Iron Age city there believed the soul was separate from the body. They also believed the soul lived in the funerary slab.
(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

Students looking at stele recovered in Zincirli are Virginia Rimmer and Benjamin Thomas, both Ph.D. students in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago. The inscription on the stone reveals the first evidence that people in the region believed the soul was separate from the body.
(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

David Schloen (left), Director of the Neubauer Expedition, and Amir Fink, Associate Director, on site at Zincirli in August 2008
(Photo: Sandra Schloen)

A sketch that is a reconstruction of the citadel at Zincirli.
(Photo: Robert Koldewey)

The northeast city wall of the site of Zinceril.
(Photo: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

The geomagnetic map showing the buried walls
(Photo: Jason Herrmann, University of Arkansas)

Neubauer Expedition Photos for Download

• Photo 1: The soul in the stone - A funerary monument recovered in southeastern Turkey reveals that people who lived in an important Iron Age city there believed the soul was separate from the body. They also believed the soul lived in the funerary slab.
  (Credit: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)
• Photo 2: Students looking at stele recovered in Zincirli are Virginia Rimmer and Benjamin Thomas, both Ph.D. students in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago. The inscription on the stone reveals the first evidence that people in the region believed the soul was separate from the body.
  (Credit: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)
• Photo 3: David Schloen (left), Director of the Neubauer Expedition, and Amir Fink, Associate Director, on site at Zincirli in August 2008
  (Credit: Sandra Schloen).
• Photo 4: A sketch that is a reconstruction of the citadel at Zincirli.
  (Credit: Robert Koldewey)
• Photo 5: The northeast city wall of the site of Zinceril.
  (Credit: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)
• Photo 6: The geomagnetic map showing the buried walls.
  (Credit: Jason Herrmann, University of Arkansas)