Archaeologists uncover Pagan skeletons at housing development near Stonehenge

Six Pagan Saxon skeletons dating back over 1,000 years have been discovered by archaeologists just a few miles from Stonehenge.

The discoveries, which also include round barrows dating back to the Bronze Age 4,000 years ago, were unearthed at a redundant brownfield development site in Amesbury, Wiltshire, which is also famous for the Amesbury Archer – an early Bronze Age man found buried among arrowheads.

The remains are thought to be those of adolescent to mature males and females. Five skeletons were arrayed around a small circular ditch, with the grave of a sixth skeleton in the centre. Two lots of beads, a shale bracelet and other grave goods were also found, which suggest the findings are Pagan.

The site is now being excavated for other artefacts by Wessex Archaeology, led by Phil Harding, known for his work on Channel 4’s Time Team, while colleagues back at the unit’s laboratory examine the remains and jewellery, which have already been removed.

Phil said: “Given that the Stonehenge area is a well-known prehistoric burial site, it was always very likely some interesting discoveries would be made here. The fact that these round barrows were previously unknown makes this particularly exciting.

“Finding the skeletons also helps us to get a clearer picture of the history of this area. To my knowledge these are the first Pagan Saxon burials to be excavated scientifically in Amesbury. “

Landowner Aster Group is building 14 affordable homes at the redundant brownfield site, which will be available to rent from 2014.

Anna Kear, Aster’s regional development director for Hampshire and Wiltshire, said: “Wiltshire is a treasure trove of archaeology, drawing people from across the world.

"Discovering a burial site in this beautiful county is always a possibility when building affordable homes. We’re working with everyone involved to ensure Phil and his team can investigate this exciting find while the build continues.”

Contractor Mansell, a Balfour Beatty brand, was preparing the site for the build when it made the discovery.

Site manager Brian Whitchurch-Bennett, of Mansell, said: “When we’re working in an area of historical importance we always undertake archaeological investigations to make sure that our construction works don’t damage hidden remains or artefacts. The findings within this particular site really are a one off, we’ve been amazed by the number of discoveries and the level of preservation. It’s certainly a project to remember.”

The archaeologists are expected to be on site for six weeks in total. Footage from the site may also be included in an archaeological production for ITV’s History Channel, due to be aired in January 2014.

[via 24dash]

The Professor Begins: Anthropology in Action

I've never been the kind of blogger that apologizes for being too busy with school to blog, so this is a first for me. I started teaching last week, and let me just say that it's harder than you might think. There's an extensive amount of planning and preparation that takes place when you're lecturing.

You start thinking. Should I just create a Powerpoint presentation with lots of visuals and limited textual information. Should I use the whiteboard to convey my opinion, even though for most of the class time your back will be to the students? Should I memorize the information and hope I don't read from some note cards like I'm in sixth grade speech class.

Well, the easier approach for me was Powerpoints, with a splash of whiteboard thrown in. Except today, for some odd reason, my lecture was not showing on my traveldrive. Talk about going old school when all of your information is missing. It certainly helps if you know the information beforehand, and why not, you are the teacher.

To be clear, I'm not teaching anthropology classes. I'm teaching ESOL, but my class is a melting pot of cultural diversity, so my anthropology background is an enormous help, especially when I'm dissecting the nuances of language. Language is a large part of our identity, and I told myself that I would never force a student of mine to discard any part of their heritage in order to function in American society.

This is the approach I've decided to take in the classroom, and I thank my anthropology professors for providing me a broader cultural outlook and an understanding of diversity, to be successful.

In the last couple of months, I have received several emails about what you can actually do with an anthropology degree. I think the main reason I took the approach that I did, that being teaching, is because of a 3 hour meeting I had with my anthropology methods and theory teacher during my last semester at UCF. He told me to never do something because you like it. Do it because you love it! I told him about my natural affinity towards language and my love of ancient and archaic languages (unspoken). He told me to find a way to combine archaeology, anthropology, and teaching, which is exactly what I decided to do.

Do I dig in the dirt all the time like many of you? No, I honestly don't. I'm getting older, not that much older, and digging in a ditch all day long can be really hard on your body. It also takes you away from all of those young minds you could be molding. So, I look for digs during the summer. I visit local archaeology sites, and tell the local stories that aren't being told.

I think when you initially have a plan, like I did when I started Ancient Digger years ago, you do your best to follow it. Sometimes you are just presented with something completely different. For me, I was dead set on research. Get in the dirt and write about it. That was my motto. Then, along came a graduate class, where I was required to work with students, and teach them history and culture. I was hooked from the beginning.

I tried to fight it. I tried to stop myself from making elaborate lesson plans, and looking for pictures, which represented every point in history, from the civilization of Ur to Napoleon. It was like a disease, and I'm glad to say that I have been infected.

So to answer the question as to how you can actually use your anthropology degree to get a job, well, think outside of the box. The dollar signs are not inside that trench. However, you may be a university professor digging inside that trench during the summer, and you may teach the rest of the year, or curate in a museum. Either way, do it because you love it, and be as flexible as possible. The money will eventually come.

As for Ancient Digger, I would like to share as much of myself as possible, even if it's not always about archaeological finds. My life is a combination of archaeology, anthropology, and language teaching, so my hope is to share with you all of the things that can change when you plan a future in anthropology.

Study provides insight into nesting behavior of dinosaurs

A recent university study into the incubation behavior of modern birds is shedding new light on the type of parental care carried out by their long extinct ancestors.

The study, by researchers at George Mason University and University of Lincoln (United Kingdom), aimed to test the hypothesis that data from exisiting birds could be used to predict the incubation behaviour of Theropods, a group of carnivorous dinosaurs from which birds descended.

The paper, out today in Biology Letters, was co-written by Geoff Birchard from the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at Mason and Charles Deeming and Marcello Ruta from the University of Lincoln's School of Life Sciences.

A 2009 study in the journal Science suggested that it was males of the small, carnivorous dinosaurs Troodon and Oviraptor that incubated their eggs. However, by taking into account factors known to affect egg and clutch mass in living bird species, the authors found that shared incubation with mature young was the ancestral incubation behavior rather than male-only incubation, which had been claimed previously for these Theropod dinosaurs.

"The previous study was carried out to infer the type of parental care in dinosaurs that are closely related to birds," said Birchard. "That study proposed that paternal care was present in these dinosaurs and this form of care was the ancestral condition for birds. Our new analysis, based on three times as many species as in the previous study, indicates that parental care cannot be inferred from simple analyses of the relationship of body size to clutch mass. Such analyses have to take into account factors such as shared evolutionary history and maturity at hatching.

The group decided to repeat the Science study with a larger data set and a better understanding of bird biology because other palaeontologists were starting to use the original results to predict the incubation behavior of other dinosaur species.

"Irrespective of whether you accept the idea of Theropod dinosaurs sitting on eggs like birds or not, the analysis raised some concerns that we wanted to address," said Deeming. "Our analysis of the relationship between female body mass and clutch mass was interesting in its own right, but also showed that it was not possible to conclude anything about incubation in extinct distant relatives of the birds."

The project has helped in understanding the factors affecting the evolution of incubation in birds. More importantly it is hoped that the new analysis will assist palaeontologists in their interpretation of future finds of dinosaur reproduction in the fossil record.

Sago palms were major plant food prior to rice cultivation in China

According to resent reports, starch granules, discovered on Neolithic tools in China, resemble those of sago palms, bananas, and tubers.

This image shows modern starch
grains from sago palms and ancient
phytolith and starch grains recovered from
 Neolithic tools.

Before rice cultivation became prevalent, ancient populations on the southern coast of China likely relied on sago palms as staple plant foods, according to research published May 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Xiaoyan Yang and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China.

Little is known about prehistoric diets of those who lived in southern subtropical China, as the acidic soils and humid climate of the region cause poor preservation of plant remains.

Though literature and archaeological discoveries have suggested that roots and tubers were the staple foods in this region, no direct evidence has so far been found. In this study, researchers analyzed starch granules recovered from Neolithic stone tools used approximately 3,350-2,470 BC, and found these to resemble starches typically found in sago-type palms.

They found that people at this time also likely relied on bananas, acorns and freshwater roots and tubers as important plant foods prior to the cultivation of rice.

What Happened to Dinosaurs' Predecessors After Earth's Largest Extinction 252 Million Years Ago?

According to fossil records in South Africa and southwest Russia, the predecessors to dinosaurs may not have have missed the evolutionary race to take over dinosaur habitats left during Earth's largest mass extinction 252 million years ago.

It turns out that scientists may have been looking in the wrong places all along.

Newly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the mass extinction reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs in Tanzania and Zambia.

That's still millions of years before dinosaur relatives were seen in the fossil record elsewhere on Earth.

"The fossil record from the Karoo of South Africa, for example, is a good representation of four-legged land animals across southern Pangea before the extinction," says Christian Sidor, a paleontologist at the University of Washington.

Pangea was a landmass in which all the world's continents were once joined together. Southern Pangea was made up of what is today Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India.

"After the extinction," says Sidor, "animals weren't as uniformly and widely distributed as before. We had to go looking in some fairly unorthodox places."

Sidor is the lead author of a paper reporting the findings; it appears in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The insights come from seven fossil-hunting expeditions in Tanzania, Zambia and Antarctica funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Additional work involved combing through existing fossil collections.

"These scientists have identified an outcome of mass extinctions--that species ecologically marginalized before the extinction may be 'freed up' to experience evolutionary bursts then dominate after the extinction," says H. Richard Lane, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences.

The researchers created two "snapshots" of four-legged animals about five million years before, and again about 10 million years after, the extinction 252 million years ago.

Prior to the extinction, for example, the pig-sized Dicynodon--said to resemble a fat lizard with a short tail and turtle's head--was a dominant plant-eating species across southern Pangea.

After the mass extinction, Dicynodon disappeared. Related species were so greatly decreased in number that newly emerging herbivores could then compete with them.

"Groups that did well before the extinction didn't necessarily do well afterward," Sidor says.

The snapshot of life 10 million years after the extinction reveals that, among other things, archosaurs roamed in Tanzanian and Zambian basins, but weren't distributed across southern Pangea as had been the pattern for four-legged animals before the extinction.

Archosaurs, whose living relatives are birds and crocodilians, are of interest to scientists because it's thought that they led to animals like Asilisaurus, a dinosaur-like animal, and Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a dog-sized creature with a five-foot-long tail that could be the earliest dinosaur.

"Early archosaurs being found mainly in Tanzania is an example of how fragmented animal communities became after the extinction," Sidor says.

A new framework for analyzing biogeographic patterns from species distributions, developed by paper co-author Daril Vilhena of University of Washington, provided a way to discern the complex recovery.

It revealed that before the extinction, 35 percent of four-legged species were found in two or more of the five areas studied.

Some species' ranges stretched 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers), encompassing the Tanzanian and South African basins.

Ten million years after the extinction, there was clear geographic clustering. Just seven percent of species were found in two or more regions.

The technique--a new way to statistically consider how connected or isolated species are from each other--could be useful to other paleontologists and to modern-day biogeographers, Sidor says.

Beginning in the early 2000s, he and his co-authors conducted expeditions to collect fossils from sites in Tanzania that hadn't been visited since the 1960s, and in Zambia where there had been little work since the 1980s.

Two expeditions to Antarctica provided additional finds, as did efforts to look at museum fossils that had not been fully documented or named.

The fossils turned out to hold a treasure trove of information, the scientists say, on life some 250 million years ago.

Other co-authors of the paper are Adam Huttenlocker, Brandon Peecook, Sterling Nesbitt and Linda Tsuji from University of Washington; Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; Roger Smith of the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town; and Sébastien Steyer from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The project was also funded by the National Geographic Society, Evolving Earth Foundation, the Grainger Foundation, the Field Museum/IDP Inc. African Partners Program, and the National Research Council of South Africa.

[Source: National Science Foundation]