Dealing with the doldrums on a Viking voyage

The outline of a foot on the Gokstad Ship gives us an inkling of what it might have been like for Vikings to cross the ocean


He’s crowded into a sleek sailing ship with 65 other men. Scarcely room to move. It’s been days since anybody has seen land − longer since anyone bathed. The old-timers’ repeated tales of bygone raids and voyages are beginning to wear thin.
His place is behind an oar, but there is no need to row continuously on the North Sea. With wind in the sail, the boat surges towards England, where riches await.
But what is there to do while waiting to reach a foreign coast?
Maybe it was a teenager engaged in a Viking version of tagging a school desk. In any case, someone took out his knife, bent down and traced the outline of his foot on the deck of the Gokstad Ship.
Today, 1,100 years later, researcher and storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad shows us a couple of deck planks that are among her favourite artefacts at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo.
“I think this particular item gives us a clear idea of what it was like to be living in the Viking Age, in a way that few other things do,” she says.

“I was here”

The Gokstad Ship was excavated in the late 1800s and is a permanent feature of the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo.
For about a decade, from 890 to 900, the ship sailed on ocean voyages. The holes cut for oars along the upper hull are well worn, evidence that the ship had been used for more than just a funeral ceremony.
The ship’s deck was fitted with loose floorboards. These could be lifted up so that supplies and plundered treasure could be stored below deck. The outline of a foot covers two of these floorboards.
“My guess is that some time or another a person was bored and simply traced his foot with his knife. It’s a kind of an ‘I was here’ message,” says Aannestad.

A person behind the myths

There are two outlines of feet on the Gokstad Ship. One is a distinct right foot. The other is a weaker outline of a left foot on a different floorboard.
The ship was buried on land in a massive grave and the loose floorboards were helter-skelter when it was excavated. So we don’t know whether the planks with left and right feet had been originally next to each other or had been the capricious result of two separate individuals.
This makes the footprints no less fascinating for Aannestad:

This is an artefact that gives us an empathetic understanding of a person behind the myths of the Viking Age. We know something about major events, of wars and battles and the building of kingdoms and all that, but this little outline puts you right down at the level of an individual,” she says.
“You can’t add a chapter to history with this. It shows that Vikings had feet, but we knew that. Yet it gives us an immediate emotional connection on a general human level. These were real people who went on Viking voyages, not cartoonish stereotypes. The voyages could be boring as well as harrowing.”
The outlines weren’t discovered until 2009. The floorboards were being moved from the museum at Bygdøy when one of Aannestad’s colleagues spotted the carved footprints.
So even 130 years after its excavation, researchers continue to make discoveries about one of Norway’s most famous and thoroughly studied vessels.

A young man on his first voyage?

Aannestad has measured one of her own feet against a tracing of the carved outline – because no one can actually step on the fragile floorboard, of course. The foot was smaller than hers, and even though people were generally shorter in the Viking days, this was probably a little person.
“It could have been a young man. People were treated as adults much earlier in those days. They took off sooner than we would allow young boys to do today,” says Aannestad.
So we are free to let our imaginations run:
A young lad is bored with the tedium of a long voyage. On a whim he looks down at his foot and considers something that would provide a little diversion.
He was sufficiently dedicated to the task to in

clude his toenails in his outline.
Maybe this was his first voyage and the drawing of his foot took his mind off the test of his manhood awaiting him in English or Irish towns? Perhaps this outline is the foot of a person who grew famous and whose name has been passed down to us through the sagas?
“We can only speculate. We’ll never know. In any case, we see the outline of an individual here,” says Aannestad.

 http://sciencenordic.com/dealing-doldrums-viking-voyage

Europe’s Hypocritical History of Cannibalism

From prehistory to the present with many episodes in between, the region has a surprisingly meaty history of humans eating humans

In 2001, a lonely computer technician living in the countryside in Northern Germany advertised online for a well-built man willing to participate in a mutually satisfying sexual act. Armin Meiwes’ notice was similar to many others on the Internet except for a rather important detail: The requested man must be willing to be killed and eaten.
Meiwes didn’t have to look far. Two hundred and thirty miles away in Berlin, an engineer called Bernd Brandes agreed to travel to Meiwes’ farmhouse. There, a gory video later found by police documented Brandes’ consensual participation in the deadly dinner. The cannibalism was both a shock to the German public and a conundrum to German prosecutors wanting to charge Meiwes with a crime.
Cannibalism might be humanity’s most sacred taboo, but consent of a victim typically eliminates a crime, explains Emilia Musumeci, a criminologist at the University of Catania, in Italy, who studies cannibalism and serial killers.
More technically, cannibalism is not designated as illegal in Germany’s extensive criminal code: Until that point, laws against murder had sufficed to cover cannibalism. If Brandes had volunteered his own life, how could Meiwes be accused of murder?
Because of his victim’s consent, Meiwes was initially found guilty of something akin to assisted suicide, and sentenced to eight years in jail. Had there not been widespread uproar about the seemingly lenient penalty, Meiwes would be out of jail by now. Instead, the uproar led to a subsequent retrial, where Meiwes was found guilty of killing for sexual pleasure. He will likely spend the rest of his life in jail.
The unusual Meiwes case is just one of the topics to be discussed this weekend at an interdisciplinary cannibal conference to be held at the Manchester Museum—the world’s first, say many attending the meeting.
The idea of a cannibalism conference might sound like the basis for a macabre joke about coffee-break finger food. However, there’s serious cannibal scholarship taking place in many disciplines, says conference organizer Hannah Priest, a lecturer at Manchester University, who has previously hosted other academic meetings on werewolves and monsters under the banner of her publishing company Hic Dragones. “From contemporary horror film to medieval Eucharistic devotions, from Freudian theory to science fiction, cannibals and cannibalism continue to repel and intrigue us in equal measure,” advertises the conference’s website.
When the call for abstracts went out last fall, “our first response was one from anthropology, another one was on heavy metal music and the third was on 18th-century literature,” Priest says. “Academics will quite happily discuss very disturbing things in quite polite terms and forget that not everybody talks about this stuff all the time.”
It is perhaps fitting that the conference should take place in Europe because the region has a long chronicle of cannibalism, from prehistory through the Renaissance, right up to the 21st-century Meiwes case. In addition, the area has bequeathed us a bounty of fictional cannibals, including Dracula, who is arguably the world’s most famous consumer of human blood and a gory harbinger of the current pop culture fascination with vampires and zombies.
Europe boasts the oldest fossil evidence of cannibalism. In a 1999 Science article, French paleontologists reported that 100,000-year-old bones from six Neanderthal victims found in a French cave called Moula-Guercy had been broken by other Neanderthals in such a way as to extract marrow and brains. In addition, tool marks on the mandible and femur suggested that tongue and thigh meat had been cut off for consumption.
The cannibalism at Moula-Guercy wasn’t an isolated incident in prehistory. In the past decade, researchers have reported other evidence that Neanderthals continued eating each other until just before their disappearance. In one particularly grisly discovery at the El Sidrón cave in Spain, paleontologists discovered that an extended family of 12 individuals had been dismembered, skinned and then eaten by other Neanderthals about 50,000 years ago.
When early Homo sapiens began engaging in cannibalism is a topic of debate, although it is clear they eventually did, says Sandra Bowdler, an emeritus professor of archeology at the University of Western Australia. Evidence is scant that this happened in early human hunter-gatherer communities, she says, although in 2009 Fernando Rozzi, at the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, in Paris, reported finding a Neanderthal jaw bone that may have been butchered by early humans.
Even if Europe’s Homo sapiens didn’t consume each other in prehistory, they certainly did in more modern times. References to acts of cannibalism are sprinkled throughout many religious and historical documents, such as the reports that cooked human flesh was being sold in 11th-century English markets during times of famine, says Jay Rubenstein, a historian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
However, the world’s first cannibal incident reported by multiple, independent, first-hand accounts took place during the Crusades by European soldiers, Rubenstein says.
These first-hand stories agree that in 1098, after a successful siege and capture of the Syrian city Ma’arra, Christian soldiers ate the flesh of local Muslims. Thereafter the facts get murky, Rubenstein says. Some chroniclers report that the bodies were secretly consumed in “wicked banquets” borne out of famine and without the authorization of military leaders, Rubenstein says. Other reports suggest the cannibalism was done with tacit approval of military superiors who wished to use stories of the barbaric act as a psychological fear tactic in future Crusade battles.


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Europes-Hypocritical-History-of-Cannibalism-204752351.html#ixzz2SVlzRRfn
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Why Did Ancient Civilizations Build Such Huge Monuments?

The “Dialogue of Civilizations” conference in Guatemala brought together archaeologists studying five ancient cultures to discuss their similarities and differences and what they can tell us about human society as a whole. You can still be a part of the conversation, commenting on this post or tweeting using #5Civilizations.
On the final day of the conference, after two days of individual presentations on ancient China, the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Maya, all the presenters and hosts sat together on stage to discuss the nature of civilization and what we can apply today from the lessons of yesterday, or as the tagline for the Dialogue put it, how to view “the past as a window to the future.” Two days later, sitting on top of Temple IV in Tikal, looking out over the city’s ruins and miles and miles of jungle canopy, the group engaged in another conversation, centered around the collapse of civilizations.
Pulling from both of those, and the experience of recapping the presentations in these blog posts, here are the main questions and themes that seemed to arise from the Dialogue. Leaving the conference there was a distinct feeling that this was simply the beginning of the conversation. Keep it going in the comments below.

 http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/01/the-ancient-past-as-a-window-to-the-future-part-2-of-3/

Gold-Bedecked Skeleton May Have Been Ancient Queen

Comprobado: Los británicos practicaban el canibalismo en el Nuevo Mundo

Los primeros colonos británicos del asentamiento de Jamestown, ubicado en Virginia (EE.UU.), dejaron unas huellas claras de canibalismo. Los arqueólogos del Instituto Smithsonian aseguran que recurrieron a esas prácticas en más de una ocasión.


 Los científicos han presentado al público varios hallazgos y un busto femenino recreado a partir de dos fragmentos del cráneo que pertenecían a una supuesta víctima de los caníbales. En esta criatura, apodada convencionalmente 'Jane', no consideran tan impresionante el rostro como el tratamiento post mortem aplicado al cadáver.


La adolescente tenía solo 14 años cuando murió o fue asesinada, estiman los expertos. Sus huesos fueron cortados y desollados de una manera profesional, que aplican los carniceros, inmediatamente después del deceso. Los paisanos (las herramientas usadas evidencian que no eran indígenas) quitaron raspando todos los tejidos blandos, incluido el cerebro.

Según dice el antropólogo Douglas Owsley, jefe de una división del Museo de Historia Natural del Instituto Smithsonian, los restos muestran que hubo "una intención clara" de desmembrar el cuerpo, remover el cerebro y la piel del rostro para su posterior consumo.

Además de la calavera y la mandíbula inferior, de 'Jane' se conservó una pierna. Y asimismo tiene marcas de una cuchilla afilada, aplicada primero de forma tentativa y luego con fuerza, muestran los arqueólogos.

Distintas fuentes históricas señalaban que los pobladores del asentamiento, fundado en 1607 sobre el río James, dos años más tarde padecían hambruna y algunos se salvaron recurriendo a la antropofagia. Se estimaba que hasta el 80% de los colonos que habían viajado desde Gran Bretaña falleció durante el mortal invierno entre 1609 y 1610. Pero no todos los historiadores confiaban en aquellos testimonios.

Ahora se trata de "una prueba muy sólida" de esa terrible práctica en Jamestown, considera Owsley. Y otros restos humanos, aunque peor conservados, también lo confirman.


Texto completo en: http://actualidad.rt.com/ciencias/view/93354-britanicos-carniceros-canibalismo-calavera-jamestown

Meet Jane, eaten by her 17th century Jamestown co-settlers

by Liat Clark

Forensic scientists say they have found the first real proof that English settlers in 17th century Jamestown resorted to cannibalism during the "starving time", a period over the winter of 1609 to 1610 when severe drought and food shortages wiped out more than 80 percent of the colony.
The remains of 14-year-old "Jane" were uncovered in 2012 during a 20-year-long excavation of the doomed fort by a team headed up by William Kelso from the Jamestown Rediscovery Project at Preservation Virginia and James Horn, vice president of research and historical interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg. They were found in what was once a cellar room, along with butchered horse and dog bones.

"The clear intent was to dismember the body"

Douglas Owsley, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

Kelso took the remains -- part of a skull and a tibia bone -- to the Smithsonian for analysis. After dental analysis revealed her age, the team looked into the unusual markings on the bones. What they found was a pretty brutal and thorough stripping of flesh from the bone, indicated by indentations and scrapes in specific places. For instance, whoever set about dismembering Jane wanted to get to the brain -- which has been found in 17th-century recipes (at least non-human brains were) -- as demonstrated by four shallow cuts across the forehead, initial attempts to hack it open. The inexperienced butcher then turned to the back of the head where other, deeper blows are visible, presumed to be made with a hatchet or cleaver. In addition, there are scrapes from a fine knife all over the side and base of the mandible (the jawbone) indicating whoever was doing the dismembering wanted every last ounce of flesh.
According to Douglas Owsley, the division head for physical anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the marks on the bones appear to be tentative. It's assumed that this is because it was done by someone with no experiencing of butchering, but off course the act of taking apart your co-settler for consumption probably didn't sit too well either.


The recovered bone fragments have unusually patterned cuts and chops that reflect tentativeness, trial and complete lack of experience in butchering animal remains," he said. "Nevertheless, the clear intent was to dismember the body, removing the brain and flesh from the face for consumption."
"From my experience working with prehistoric skeletons where I've seen postmortem processing of remains, this is absolutely consistent with cannibalism we see in those types of cases."
There's no indication that the girl was killed -- settlers were dying all over the place, so there was essentially no need. However, the speed with which the act of dismembering her took place after her death indicates historic accounts of cannibalism are in fact accurate, and that the act was perhaps all too common. "The attempt to [remove] the brain is something you would need to do very quickly because brains do not preserve well," Owsley told the BBC.
The act, is of course one of desperation. Some of the first permanent English settlers in the colonies, the Jamestown inhabitants never had an easy go of it. After setting sail in December 1606 their ship landed in Chesapeake Bay in April 1607. After sailing up the James river for about 80km, the group reached a marshy peninsula it chose as home. It was not a great choice. The wells within the fort were located between the James River, which has high salt levels depending on the season, and a Pitch and Tar Swap. To top it off, the settlers did not put their all into cultivating the land, preferring to trade with the local Powhatan people who welcomed them at first. As conditions worsened and droughts came, the Powhatan only had enough food to feed themselves and all but ceased trading with the settlers, causing the relationship between the two to turn sour. Without their leader John Smith, who had returned to England, the settlers grew more isolated, afraid of those outside the fort walls. With no reserves, no crops and no ties with local tribes, the community turned to eating its domestic animals -- cats, dogs and horses -- then snakes and rats.

Jane's skullFour shallow chops to the skull are visible here

"If the English had tried to find a worse time to launch their settlement in the New World, they could not have done so," Dennis Blanton, director of the Centre for Archaeological Research at the College of William and Mary, told National Parks magazine in a piece on the "starving time". "The Jamestown settlement was plagued by the driest seven-year episode in 770 years." Blanton was part of a team investigating the mystery of the lost settlers by studying the growth patterns of 1,000-year-old bald cypress trees in the region. Core samples demonstrated that drought was most severe during the settlement years at Jamestown, and earlier at Roanoke Island -- also known as the "Lost Colony", for the disappearance of its settlers.
In January 2013 William and Mary geologists joined with the National Geographic Society to get to the root of the cause, and are now investigating the possibilit

y of water contamination. Piping was installed to get water samples from the three original wells and the shallow aquifer that supplied them. It turned out the water was barely drinkable, and at times toxic.
"There's evidence that things were worse in Jamestown than they were in other settlements nearby," William and Mary geologist Jim Kaste said. "There was something about Jamestown that caused very high death rates." The theory is that the aquifier at Jamestown was contaminated by the James River -- where water quality is affected by tide and rainfall, making it too salty to drink at times -- and by the nearby Pitch and Tar swamp. The team is trying to ascertain whether the deaths of settlers coincided with the months when the wells would have been saltiest, in the summer.

As they continue to investigate the mystery of the lost settlement, which was eventually abandoned, we now have a physical reminder of the loss in a reconstruction of 14-year-old Jane. Her remains were scanned and, after facial reconstruction, Medical Modeling printed her skull in 3D and New York's StudioEIS brought it to life. The model will be on display at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, while Jane's remains will be displayed at Historic Jamestowne.

 http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/2/jamestown-cannibalism#./jamestown-cannibalism

Beaker burial

Karen Nichols
Archaeological excavations at CEMEX’s Kingsmead Quarry in Berkshire not far from Windsor have revealed a rare 'Beaker' burial of 'Copper Age' date (2500-2200 BC). Found within the grave were some of Britain’s earliest gold ornaments (five tubular beads), along with 29 bead fragments of amber and 30 beads of black lignite.
The burial contained the possible remains of a woman who was at least 35 years old. At the time of her burial, she wore a necklace containing small tubular sheet gold beads and black disc beads of lignite - a material similar to jet. A number of larger perforated amber buttons/fasteners were also found in a row along her body, which may indicate that she was wearing clothing, perhaps of patterned woven wool, at the time of her burial. Further lignite beads from near her hands suggest that she wore a bracelet.

The woman’s burial represents an unusual and important find as only a small number of Beaker burials from Britain contain gold ornaments, and most are associated with male skeletons. It would appear that their religious beliefs dictate that most men were buried in a crouched position with the head resting to the north and facing east. With women the body position is often reversed with the head to the south.

The woman was found with a large drinking vessel, unusually placed on her hip rather than by her feet or shoulder. The fine pottery vessel had been decorated with a comb-like stamp.

Beaker using communities lived across Europe around 2,500 BC around about the time of Stonehenge. In more Western regions, such as Britain, they were the first people to use copper and gold (giving rise to the term Copper Age or Chalcolithic). They buried their people in special ways, characteristically with a distinctive type of pot, known to archaeologist as a Beaker. They were also buried with other fine objects such as metal, stone and bone.

Site Director Gareth Chaffey, of Wessex Archaeology, who has been excavating the site for the last seven years, said: “It is interesting to think who this woman was within her community. She was probably an important person in her society, perhaps holding some standing which gave her access to prestigious, rare and exotic items. She could have been a leader, a person with power and authority, or possibly part of an elite family - perhaps a princess or queen.”

Osteologist Jacqueline McKinley (Wessex Archaeology) has examined the skeletal remains, which appear to be those of an adult aged 35 or over, possibly a female. Unfortunately the acid nature of the 'brickearth' soil is far from ideal for the preservation of bone and a lack of surviving collagen limits the possibility of scientific research, such as radiocarbon dating and DNA.

Dr Stuart Needham (an expert in Copper Age metalwork) who is presently studying the gold beads said: “Beaker graves of this date are almost unknown in South East England and only a small number of them, and indeed continental Europe, contain gold ornaments. The tubular beads that were found at Kingsmead Quarry are certainly rare in Britain, and this gives the grave tremendous research importance”.

It is possible that the beads have been fashioned by cutting up other objects made from sheet gold.

The gold beads have been examined by scientists at the University of Bristol and at the University of Reading.

Dr Chris Standish (University of Bristol) who is currently investigating the sources of gold exploited during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, has used lead isotope analysis to characterise a number of British and Irish gold deposits. This technique has been performed on the five gold beads from the Horton burial.

Dr Standish concludes that “their isotopic signatures are consistent with natural gold deposits located in south-east Ireland and southern Britain”.

Further compositional analyses will shed light on where this gold originated from, and will provide important information relating to the patterns of gold procurement and the extent of trading networks that were in existence prior to the interment of the Kingsmead Quarry burial.

Dr Stuart Black, an archaeological scientist at the University of Reading, has examined the beads using the cutting edge technology at the University’s Centre for Advanced Microscopy (CfAM) to reveal signs of decoration and details of how the beads were made and attached. This includes fine stitching holes on at least three of the beads and scored lines.

The ornaments found within the grave are all the more interesting when you consider where they came from. The gold may have originated from Southern England or Ireland, the lignite beads from Eastern England and the amber buttons/fasteners from as far away as the Baltic or made from amber collected from the east coast of England.

Beaker burials of this type are rare in this region of England and, it was an unexpected find. However, as Dr Alistair Barclay of Wessex Archaeology notes “we know from recent research that an extensive prehistoric landscape is buried beneath the edge of West London and East Berkshire. The Kingsmead Quarry project is currently adding much new and significant information to this unfolding story and challenging our perception and understanding of prehistory.”

The beads will go on display at the end of April at a special two day event organised by CEMEX UK and Wessex Archaeology. And later in the year it is hoped to display the grave finds at a local museum.

The excavations are part of CEMEX’s £4 million archaeological programme on the site, which has been in operation since 2003. Andy Spencer Sustainability Director, CEMEX UK, said : “Kingsmead Quarry has given us some wonderful finds, rare and interesting ones like this Beaker burial and the Neolithic houses. Today, as well as an insight into the lives of our ancestors, the site is providing valuable building materials for construction.”

 http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/blogs/news/2013/04/19/beaker-burial