Grave matters

Today we take a trip into the past with three new discoveries from the world of archaeology, sent my way by my eagle-eyed friend and fellow writer, Gil Miller.

The first one has to do with ancient fashion.  Have you ever wondered how our distant ancestors dressed?  Whether it was crudely stitched-together rags, as the peasantry are often depicted?  Leopard-skin affairs, like the Flintstones?  Or nothing but a brass jockstrap, like this guy?

Turns out it wasn't so different from what you and I are wearing.  (I'm assuming you're not naked except for a brass jockstrap.  If you are, I won't judge, but I also don't want to know about it.)  An analysis of the clothing worn by a 3,200 year old mummy recovered from China's Tarim Basin was wearing tightly-woven, intricately-made trousers, built to be durable and allow maneuverability -- a little like today's blue jeans.

The pants worn by "Turfan Man" [Image from M. Wagner et al./Archaeological Research in Asia, 2022]

The cloth is a tight twill weave -- something that was assumed to be invented much later -- and had a triangular crotch piece that seems to be designed to avoid unfortunate compression of the male naughty bits while riding horseback.  The decoration, including an interlocking "T" pattern on the bands around the knees, is very similar to patterns found used on pottery in the area, and as far away as Kazakhstan and Siberia.

From ancient Chinese fashion items, we travel halfway around the world for something a little more gruesome -- a burial in the Lambayeque region of Peru that seems to contain the skeleton of a surgeon, along with his surgical tools.

The burial has been dated to the Middle Period of the Sican Culture, which would have been somewhere between 900 and 1050 C. E., and was recovered from a mausoleum temple at the rich archaeological site of Las Ventanas.  The man was obviously of high standing; he was wearing a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, a bronze pectoral, and a garment containing copper plates.  But most interesting was the bundle of tools he was buried with -- awls, needles, and several sizes and shapes of knives.  This, the researchers say, identifies him as a surgeon.

It's hard for me to fathom, but surgery was done fairly regularly back then -- up to and including brain surgery (called trepanning).  There was no such thing as general anesthesia, so it was done under local anesthesia at best, probably supplemented with any kind of sedative or painkilling drugs they had available.  Still, it was a horrible prospect.  But what is most astonishing is that a great many of the patients, even the ones who had holes drilled into their skulls, survived.  There have been many cases of skeletons found that show signs of surgery where the surgical cuts healed completely.

But still, the ordeal these poor folks went through is horrifying to think about, so let's move on to the third and final article, that comes to us from England.  An archaeologist named Ken Dark has led a team of researchers in studying 65 grave sites in the counties of Somerset and Cornwall that date back to a time of history I've always had a particular fascination for -- the Western European "Dark Ages," between the collapse of the Roman Empire as a centralized power in the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. and the reconsolidation of Europe under such leaders as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, four hundred years later.

The "darkness" of the so-called Dark Ages isn't so much that it was lawless and anarchic (although some parts of it in some places probably were), but simply because we know next to nothing about it for sure.  There are virtually no contemporaneous records; about all we have, the best-known being Gildas's sixth-century De Excidio et Conquesto Britanniae, are accounts that contain legend mixed up with history so thoroughly it's impossible to tell which is which.  I bring up Gildas deliberately, because his is the only record of King Arthur written anywhere close to the time he (allegedly) lived, and the graves that Dark and his team are studying date from right around that pivotal time when Christianized Romano-Celtic Britain was being attacked and overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The burial practices of noble sixth-century Britons stands in stark contrast from Anglo-Saxon burials from the same period; the Britons, it's believed, scorned the ostentation and ornate decorations of pagan funerals, and by comparison even high-status individuals were buried without much pomp.  What sets these graves apart from those of commoners is that they were set apart from other graves, had a fenced enclosure, and were covered with a tumulus of stones that the early Celts called a ferta, which was a sign of high standing.

"The enclosed grave tradition comes straight out of late Roman burial practices," Dark said.  "And that's a good reason why we have them in Britain, but not in Ireland -- because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and Ireland wasn't...  We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others.  When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials."

So that's today's news from the past -- ancient blue jeans, primitive surgery, and Dark Age noble burials.  Sorry for starting your day on a grave note.  But it's always fascinating to see not only how things have changed, but how similar our distant ancestors were to ourselves.  If we were to time travel back there, I'm sure there'd be a lot of surprises, but we might be more shocked at how much like us they were back then.  To borrow a line from Robert Burns, a person's a person for a' that and a' that.

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Grave conditions

When I retired in June of 2019, I made the big mistake of saying aloud, "Wow, I'm going to have so much free time now!"

Literally the week after my last day at work, we found out that one corner of our house foundation was sinking, and that if we didn't do something, the slab was going to crack, leading to the walls destabilizing.  Our house, basically, was sliding down the hill it was built on.

The upshot of it all was that we spent the next few months completely gutting our (formerly finished) downstairs so that foundation specialists could drill down, inside and outside, and install twenty-six hydraulic piers to prop the slab up and prevent further subsidence.  Pulling up the carpet and pulling down the wall coverings and ceiling uncovered a myriad other old-house problems, leading to a domino effect of increasingly costly repairs.  Almost a year later, we still haven't completed putting the downstairs back together, although I'm comforted by the fact that our house didn't fall down.

And at least we didn't find what a couple in Seivåg, Norway did when they pulled up the floor in their house to install insulation.  Mariann Kristiansen, whose great-grandfather built the house in 1914, was unaware that she'd been living on top of a Viking-era grave that archaeologists have dated to between 950 and 1050 C.E.

Amazingly enough, there were no ghosts involved.  I would have thought that a house built on a grave site would have been a perfect opportunity to bring out the ghosts, but no.  The whole thing, apparently, was handled completely pragmatically.

The grave came to light when Kristiansen found a bead of dark blue glass that at first she thought was the wheel of a toy car.  But when she poked around a little more and found an axe, she decided that her initial hypothesis wasn't correct.

It turns out that a layer of flat stones immediately beneath the house is probably the remains of a cairn built over a grave, although preliminary digging has yet to uncover any bones.  But the artifacts found are consistent with "grave goods" of the Viking era.

"I never heard of anything like that and I've been in business for nearly thirty years," said archaeologist Martinus Hauglid.  "They did a magnificent job, they reported it to use as soon as they got the suspicion that it actually was something old."

The grave site underneath the Kristiansens' house [Image courtesy of the Nordland City Council]

My first reaction was to wonder why other people had all the luck, since all we found when we ripped up the foundation was cracked plumbing and disgusting 1950s-era vinyl tile.  But a friend of mine pointed out that (1) living in upstate New York, it was unlikely that we'd find Viking graves anywhere nearby, and (2) it was probably better that we didn't find anything of the sort.  "This is going to be so expensive for that family, depending on the laws in Norway," she said.  "If you find bones here [in Canada], you’re on the hook for the cost of the archeologists, the exhumation, and reburial.  Could be 50k at least.  Not to mention the months of digging, your yard trashed, possibly your house.  A nightmare."

I hadn't even considered that downside.  I mean, we thought we had delays and setbacks in getting our house put back together; if we'd discovered some kind of valuable archaeological site underneath the floor, it's an open question as to whether we could even legally rebuild over the top of it.  At that point, the best option might be what Carol suggested, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, after finding out about the sinking-slab problem last June: "Hmm, let's see -- forty thousand dollars to prop up the foundation, or fifteen bucks for five gallons of gas and a box of matches.  Hard decision, right there."

I pointed out that twenty years in prison for arson was kind of a downside of the latter option, which she grudgingly admitted was a valid point.

I'm hoping that the laws in Norway support some kind of compensation for Kristiansen's find and the inconvenience thereof.  Archaeologist Hauglid gives me hope that'll happen.  "I guess, they will get some reward, that is normal in Norway, that people that find old artifacts get a reward from the state," he told reporters.

So I suppose I should be careful what I wish for.  I got enough of an object lesson in that by speculating about how bored I'd be once I retired.  At least we've now covered the floor back up, so anything down there is gonna stay buried.  Unless we're, like, sitting on top of a fault line or a volcanic vent or something.  Which, considering some of the other things that have gone wrong since we started this Adventure In Home Ownership, wouldn't be all that surprising.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one: acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way: A New Look at how Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.

It's been known for some years that a lot of birds are a great deal more intelligent than we'd thought.  Crows and other corvids are capable of reasoning and problem-solving, and actually play, seemingly for no reason other than "it's fun."  Parrots are capable of learning language and simple categorization.  A group of birds called babblers understand reciprocity -- and females are attracted to males who share their food the most ostentatiously.

So "bird brain" should actually be a compliment.

Here, Ackerman looks at the hugely diverse world of birds and gives us fascinating information about all facets of their behavior -- not only the "positive" ones (to put an human-based judgment on it) but "negative" ones like deception, manipulating, and cheating.  The result is one of the best science books I've read in recent years, written in Ackerman's signature sparkling prose.  Birder or not, this is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in biology or animal behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]