The Great London:
Italy

The Museo Civico Archeologico is hosting Egypt. Millennia of Splendour. Beneath the two towers, the splendour of a civilisation that lasted thousands of years and has always fascinated the entire world, has sprung back to life: the Egypt of the pyramids, pharaohs and multiform gods, but also that of sensational discoveries, captivating archaeology, passionate collecting and rigorous scholarship.

The exhibition ‘Egypt’, which is being held at the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna, is not just an exposition of high visual and scientific impact, but also an unprecedented international enterprise: the Egyptian collection of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Netherlands – among the top ten in the world – and that of the Bologna museum – among the most important in Italy for the quantity, quality and state of conservation of its collections – have been brought together in an exhibition space measuring around 1,700 metres, filled with art and history.

500 finds, dating from the Pre-Dynastic Period to the Roman Period, gave been brought from the Netherlands to the Bologna museum. And, together with the masterpieces from Leiden and Bologna, the exhibition also includes important loans from the Museo Egizio in Turin and the Museo Egizio in Florence, creating a network of the most important Italian museums.

For the first time, the masterpieces of the two collections are being displayed side by side, including the Stele of Aku (Twelfth–Thirteenth Dynasty, 1976–1648 BC), the ‘major domo of the divine offering’, with a prayer describing the otherworldly existence of the deceased in a tripartite world divided into sky, earth and the beyond; gold items attributed to General Djehuty, who led the Egyptian troops to victory in the Near East for the great conqueror Pharaoh Thutmose III (1479–1425 BC); the statues of Maya, superintendent of the royal treasury of Tutankhamen, and Merit, a chantress of the god Amun, (Eighteenth Dynasty, reigns of Tutankhamen and Horemheb, 1333–1292 BC), the most important masterpieces in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden have left the Netherlands for the first time for the Bologna exhibition; and, among the numerous objects attesting to the refined lifestyle of the most wealthy Egyptians, a Mirror Handle (1292 BC) in the shape of a young woman holding a small bird in her hand.

Lastly, for the first time 200 years after the discovery of his tomb in Saqqara, the exhibition offers the unique and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the important Reliefs of Horemheb reunited: Horemheb was the head commander of the Egyptian army during the reign of Tutankhamen, then rising to become the final sovereign of the Eighteenth Dynasty, from 1319 to 1292 BC and the reliefs are divided between the collections in Leiden, Bologna and Florence.

Thousands of years of the history of a unique civilisation revealed in a major exhibition that brings together masterpieces from important world collections and tells of the pyramids and pharaohs, the great captains and priests, the gods and other divinities, and the people that made Egyptian history and that, thanks to discoveries, archaeology and collecting, never stop enchanting, revealing, intriguing, fascinating and charming generation after generation.

The Seven Exhibition Sections

The Pre-Dynastic and Archaic Periods – At the Origins of History: The transition from raw material to form, from the oral tradition to the written one and from prehistory to history was a fundamental moment for Egyptian civilisation. The Leiden collection is rich in materials documenting the central role played by nature during this long cultural and artistic evolution.

The exhibition opens with a selection of these objects, which are strikingly modern in style, including a vase from the Naqada IID Period (named for a site in Upper Egypt and datable between 3375 and 3325 BC) decorated with ostriches, hills and water motifs. The scene depicted on this vase takes us back to an Egypt characterised by a flourishing landscape later changed over time by climatic changes. Ostriches, here painted red, along with elephants, crocodiles, rhinoceros and other wild animals were common in the Nile region at the time.

The Old Kingdom – A Political/Religious Model Destined for Success and its Weaknesses: The historic period of the Old Kingdom (from the Third to the Sixth Dynasty, roughly between 2700 and 2192 BC) is known for the pyramids and for the consolidation of a bureaucracy at the apex of which stood an absolute sovereign, considered a god on earth and lord of all of Egypt.

This definition of State and its worldly and otherworldly rules, which were highly elitist, are well documented by funerary objects, of which the Leiden museum has a particularly rich collection, including a calcite (alabaster) table for offerings.

Offerings to the deceased were a fundamental part of the funerary ritual, ensuring life after death. The uniqueness of this table, which belonged to a high state official named Defdj, lies in its circular shape, which was unusual, as well as the repetition of the concept of the offering as indicated by the inscription, the sculpted receptacles and, most importantly, the central depiction corresponding to the hieroglyph hotep (offering), or a table upon which one places a loaf of bread.

The Middle Kingdom – The God Osiris and a New Perspective on Life in the Afterworld: The end of the Old Kingdom and the period of political breakdown that followed it led to major changes in Egyptian society, within which the individual had greater responsibility for his own destiny, including in the afterworld. Any Egyptian with the means to build a tomb complete with a sufficient funerary assemblage could now aspire to eternal life. The god Osiris, lord of the afterworld, became Egypt’s most popular divinity.

Many steles now in Leiden and Bologna came from his temple in Abydos, one of Egypt’s most important cult centres. Among them is that of Aku, major domo of the divine offering, who dedicated the stele to Min-Hor-nekht, the form of the ithyphallic god Min worshipped in the city of Abydos. Aku’s prayer to the god describes an otherworldly existence in a tripartite world: the sky, where the deceased were transfigured into stars, the earth, where the tomb was the fundamental point of passage from life to death, and the beyond, where Osiris granted the deceased eternal life.

From the Middle to the New Kingdom – Territorial Control at Home and Abroad: The defeat of the Hyksos, ‘princes from foreign lands’ who invaded and governed northern Egypt for a few generations, marked the beginning of the New Kingdom. An extremely aggressive foreign policy enriched Egypt, and this was one of its periods of greatest splendour. The social class of professional warriors rose to the top of the state hierarchy and spawned a number of ruling dynasties.

The wealth and prestige of these soldiers was also expressed in the production of sophisticated objects, including the gold items attributed to Djehuty, a general under the pharaoh Thutmose III. The Egyptian goldsmith’s art has survived in works of high artistic and economic value, an example being the pectoral element on view in the exhibition.

This piece is a sophisticated exemplar attributed to the tomb of General Djehuty, the man to whom the sovereign Thutmose III entrusted control of his foreign territories. Representing a blue lotus flower, a symbol of rebirth and regeneration, it must have served as the central element of an elaborate pectoral. The scroll engraved on the back suggests that the piece was given personally by Thutmose III.

The Saqqara Necropolis of the New Kingdom: The Leiden and Bologna museums can be considered ‘twins’ in a certain sense, since they house two important groups of antiquities from Saqqara, one of the necropolises of the city of Memphis. During the New Kingdom, this early Egyptian capital returned to its role as a strategic centre for the expansionist policy of the sovereigns of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

This is seen in the funerary monuments of high state officials who held administrative, religious and military roles, including the tombs of the superintendent of Tutankhamen’s royal treasury, Maya, and his wife, Merit, chantress of Amun, and that of Horemheb, head commander of Tutankhamen’s army and the pharaoh’s crown prince.

The statues of Maya and Merit arrived in the Netherlands in 1829 as part of the collection of Giovanni d’Anastasi. More than a century and a half would pass before, in 1986, a British/Dutch archaeological expedition identified the tomb from which they came, southeast of the pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. These statues, which are the greatest masterpieces in the collection of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, left the Dutch museum for the first time to be displayed in the exhibition.

It should be noted that, when the Egypt Exploration Society of London and the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden began excavation work southeast of the Djoser pyramid in 1975, the goal was to find the tomb of Maya and Merit. It was therefore a great surprise when they instead discovered the burial of General Horemheb, who had capped off his stunning career by becoming the last sovereign of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

His tomb, which has a temple structure, is characterised by a pylon entrance, three large courts and three cult chapels facing onto the innermost court, which has a peristyle structure. This court is where most of the reliefs preserved in Leiden and Bologna were found, narrating Horemheb’s most important military feats against the populations bordering Egypt: the Asians, Libyans and Nubians.

The New Kingdom – Prosperity after the Conquest: Refined furnishings, musical instruments, table games and jewellery: these are just a few of the luxury goods attesting to the widespread prosperity enjoyed in Egypt as a result of the expansionist policy of the sovereigns of the New Kingdom. Through these sophisticated objects, it is possible to conjure up moments of everyday life, imagining what it was like living inside a royal palace or the residence of a high official. One example in the exhibition is a mirror handle in the graceful, sensual shape of a young women holding a small bird in her hand.

Egypt in the First Millennium: In the first millennium BC, Egypt was characterised by the increasingly clear weakness of its central power to the advantage of local governors who gave themselves the role of ruling dynasts. The loss of political and territorial power weakened Egypt’s defence capacity at its borders, opening the way for Nubian, Assyrian and Persian invasions. The temples remained strong centres of power, and managed a sizeable portion of the economy and the transmission of knowledge, taking on the role of a political intermediary between the ruling power and the devout populace.

Many of the masterpieces on view in the exhibition were part of the funerary assemblages of priests and came from important temple areas. Among them is the sarcophagus of Peftjauneith, which represents the likeness of the god Osiris, wrapped in a linen shroud and with a green face evoking the concept of rebirth. The refined decoration of this sarcophagus confirms the high rank of its owner (the superintendent of the possessions of a temple in Lower Egypt) in the temple sphere. Of particular note is the interior scene of the sky goddess Nut swallowing the sun every evening (to the west) to then give birth to it in the morning (to the east).

Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BC ended the ‘pharaonic’ phase of Egyptian history. The period of Greek domination was begun by his successors, the Ptolemies, the last of whom was the renowned Cleopatra VII.

The golden decline of Egypt would continue for many more centuries, beyond the Roman conquest in 31 BC up to Arab domination in the sixth century AD.

The dialogue between old and new, local and foreign that distinguished the Greco-Roman period brought a return to high artistic achievements, including the celebrated Fayum portraits, exquisite examples of which from the Leiden collection are on view in the exhibition

Source: Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna [October 19, 2015]

The head of an ancient Greek statue of extraordinary artistic and historical value will finally arrive back in Italy on Friday – almost three decades after being illegally ripped from the ground.

The stunning statue had been on display at the J.Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles but was eventually discovered to be Italian property after archaeologists identified one of the statue's beard curls among fragments found at a looted site in Sicily.

The unique terracotta head depicts Hades, god of the underworld. He is shown with a bushy blue beard and curly hair, which still bear a good deal of the blue and red pigments with which they were painted 2,400 years ago.

But the mission to bring Hades home has taken years.

“It was great to be able to work with our Sicilian counterparts to identify the provenance of the head,” a spokesperson for the museum told The Local.

"The process of identifying the head took two years and the museum agreed to give it back in 2013. Since then it's been in storage while we waited for instructions from Sicily for its eventual return. Officials finally arrived to pick up the statue this week.”

The head had been on display in Los Angeles since 1985, when the museum acquired it from Belgian businessman - and long time partner of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy - Maurice Tempelsman, for $500,000 (€460,000).

Templeman sold the piece through successful London art-dealer Robin Symes, who specialized in fencing looted antiques, often of Italian provenance. In January 2005, Symes was sentenced to 21 years in jail (of which he served a mere seven) for trafficking stolen pieces.

On Friday, the statue will finally take pride of place at Enna's Adione museum, a stone's throw from the site where it was originally taken: an outcome which has satisfied Italians on both sides of the Atlantic.

“We owe it above all to the archaeologists who helped identify that ceramic lock of blue hair among the remains of a fraudulent dig site,” said Italy's Consul General in LA, Antonio Verde.

In January 2014, several other pieces of looted art were returned to Enna's Adione museum by the J. Paul Getty museum.

Items included a two-metre Greek marble statue of Venus, which the museum had also bought from Symes in 1988 for an eye-watering $18 million (€16.4 million).

Former curator of the museum, Marion True, was placed on trial in Italy in 2005, but was acquitted after the charges against her expired in 2012.

But the institution is not alone in giving Italy back illegally acquired objects. In recent years pieces have been returned from other high-profile institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

According to one Italian prosecutor, artworks from more than 100,000 raided tombs worth in excess of €460 million have been illegally taken out of the country.

Author: Patrick Browne | Source: The Local [January 31, 2016]

The Italian mafia is selling assault rifles to Islamic State leaders in Libya in return for looted archaeological treasures, according to an Italian newspaper.

The feared ‘Ndrangheta gangsters sell on the priceless artefacts to Russian and Asian collectors.

La Stampa reports that the Calabrian network, which dominates Europe’s drug trade, works with the Camorra in Naples to buy Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers smuggled out of Ukraine and Moldova by the Russian mafia.

The armaments are then traded in return for ancient Roman and Greek statues that Isis fighters have dug up illegally in Libya, which was a colony of the two ancient cultures. Isis has ruled over swathes of the country for months.

A journalist from La Stampa posed as a collector to be taken to a salami factory in southern Italy by a member of an ‘Ndrangheta clan from Lamezia in Calabria. For $87,000 he was offered the marble head of a Roman sculpture looted from Libya.

The Mafioso also showed photographs of a larger head from a Greek statue, for sale at $1.2 million.

Antiquities are brought from Libya to the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro by Chinese-operated cargo ships, it is claimed. The treasures are sold on to collectors from Russia, China, Japan and the Gulf. After expanding into Libya, Isis has been pinned back by local militias. The jihadists, however, are believed to have tried to profit from trafficking in artefacts, as they have done in Iraq and Syria.

Libyan archaeologists working to protect the country’s five UNESCO-listed sites have received death threats.

Italian investigators have long suspected the mafia of selling guns to Isis. “In Naples, Islamic militias and the Camorra have been trading guns and drugs since the 1990s,” a veteran investigator said yesterday (Sunday).

The gangsters have also been involved in the wholesale looting of Etruscan Roman tombs in Italy. Trading guns for artefacts with Isis is a natural evolution of its business. The widespread excavation and selling of Greek and Roman treasures boomed in Libya after the death in 2011 of Colonel Gaddafi, well before the arrival of Isis.

A rare 4ft marble statue believed to have been dug up in the ancient city of Cyrene in 2011 and worth $3.2 million was found in a west London warehouse two years after the uprising.

Susan Kane, a Libyan expert at Oberlin College in Ohio, said: “There was a major land grab after the revolution and more earth has been moved since 2011 than in the preceding centuries. Antiquities are turning up and there is a great synergy between trafficking them, drugs and arms.”

Author: Tom Kington | Source: The Times [October 17, 2016]

For the earliest Egyptologists, a trip to the Egyptian Museum in Turin was considered indispensable. The museum's new director is seeking to return the almost 200-year-old museum to its one-time prominence, boosted by an overhaul of the collection and exhibit space of near-pharaonic proportions.

Museum director Christian Greco, who arrived in Turin 10 months ago, well into an ambitious five-year reinstallation of the museum's considerable treasures, aims to make the Egyptian Museum the second-most important in the world, after Cairo.

"Our museum needs to be back on the international scene," Greco said in an interview in front of the ancient Temple of Ellesjia on Tuesday, as the museum showed off its five-year, 50-million-euro ($53.6-million) reinstallation. `'For too many years we have been absent. For too many years, the focus has been on building and renovating the museum."

The museum, founded in 1824, is filled with treasures found in digs commissioned by Savoy kings and completed with the finds of Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli. The vast holdings include a captivating statue of Ramses II, one of the world's most important papyrus collections and nearly the entire contents of an architect's tomb dating back well over 3,000 years.

The large-scale renovations nearly doubled the space, allowing many artifacts to be taken out of storage and a more complete and modern exposition of those already on display. The museum remained open during the years of work, rotating closures of wings.

"It is a very important improvement from an archaeological and Egyptological point of view," said Guillemette Andreu, former director of Egyptology at the Louvre in Paris and member of the Turin Egyptian Museum board who toured the museum on Tuesday. She praised the chronological organization of the reinstallation from the 4th century B.C. to the Coptic period, new lighting and modern showcases.

Andreu said the Turin collection is unique because alongside masterpieces, it includes many objects that describe daily lives, funerary customs, religion as well as architecture and philosophy. "Even if you are not a scholar of Egypt, you can see how great this civilization was," she said.

The revamp puts the 6,500 objects on display in their archaeological context, transforming it from what Greco called `'an encyclopedia of Egyptology from A to Z," and includes 3-D films using historical photos that depict the moment of discovery.

"Turin has a fantastic collection and an incredible history, and to have it redisplayed in a modern museological way is fantastic," said Neal Spencer of the British Museum, who attended the Turin museum's opening and is on the advisory board. `'It is a very immersive experience. The collection really can tell the story of Egypt across several millennia."

The museum already belongs on the European itinerary of any Egyptologist, amateur or otherwise, along with the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin. But Greco's ambition is to make it a more integral part of the scientific community, restoring its standing to the one it enjoyed when one of Egyptology's founding figures, Jean-Francois Champollion, famously declared: `'The road to Memphis and Thebes passes through Turin."

Greco, a 39-year-old Italian who was previously at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, announced on Tuesday that the Turin museum in May will join an ongoing, 40-year-old dig in Saqqara, Egypt, that was founded by his former employer and the University of Leiden. Greco is also working on a coffin project with the Vatican and trying to organize a joint exposition of artifacts from the craftsmen's village of Medina with the Louvre.

"I suspect Greco has a lot of irons in the fire that are going to be very exciting that will be of real benefit to Egyptology and to world culture," said Kara Cooney at the University of California, Los Angeles, who will be traveling to Turin in June to look at the museum's coffins.

The museum is among the top 10 visited in Italy, with a record 567,000 visitors last year. Greco could like to increase that to more than 700,000. The opening of the expanded museum a month before the Expo 2015 world's fair in Milan, just a 40-minute train ride away, is expected to bring a boon in visitors, along with the rare exposition of the Shroud of Turin from April 19-June 24.

More information: 

EGYPTIAN MUSEUM: Turin, Italy. Tuesday-Sunday, 8:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m.; Sundays, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Full admission, 13 euros.

Author: Colleen Barry | Source: The Associated Press [March 31, 2015]

An unidentified fossilised bone in a museum has revealed the size of a fearsome abelisaur and may have solved a hundred-year old puzzle.

Alessandro Chiarenza, a PhD student from Imperial College London, last year stumbled across a fossilised femur bone, left forgotten in a drawer, during his visit to the Museum of Geology and Palaeontology in Palermo Italy. He and a colleague Andrea Cau, a researcher from the University of Bologna, got permission from the museum to analyse the femur. They discovered that the bone was from a dinosaur called abelisaur, which roamed the Earth around 95 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period.

Abelisauridae were a group of predatory, carnivorous dinosaurs, characterised by extremely small forelimbs, a short deep face, small razor sharp teeth, and powerful muscular hind limbs. Scientists suspect they were also covered in fluffy feathers. The abelisaur in today's study would have lived in North Africa, which at that time was a lush savannah criss-crossed by rivers and mangrove swamps. This ancient tropical world would have provided the abelisaur with an ideal habitat for hunting aquatic animals like turtles, crocodiles, large fish and other dinosaurs.

By studying the bone, the team deduced that this abelisaur may have been nine metres long and weighed between one and two tonnes, making it potentially one of the largest abelisaurs ever found. This is helping researchers to determine the maximum sizes that these dinosaurs may have reached during their peak.

Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, co-author of the study from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial, said: "Smaller abelisaur fossils have been previously found by palaeontologists, but this find shows how truly huge these flesh eating predators had become. Their appearance may have looked a bit odd as they were probably covered in feathers with tiny, useless forelimbs, but make no mistake they were fearsome killers in their time."

The fossil originated from a sedimentary outcrop in Morocco called the Kem Kem Beds, which are well known for the unusual abundance of giant predatory dinosaur fossils. This phenomenon is called Stromer's Riddle, in honour the German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer, who first identified this abundance in 1912. Since then scientists have been asking how abelisaurs and five other groupings of predatory dinosaurs could have co-existed in this region at the same time, without hunting each other into extinction.

Now the researchers in today's study suggest that these predatory dinosaur groups may not have co-existed so closely together. They believe that the harsh and changing geology of the region mixed the fossil fragment records together, destroying its chronological ordering in the Kem Kem beds, and giving the illusion that the abelisaurs and their predatory cousins shared the same terrain at the same time. Similar studies of fossil beds in nearby Tunisia, for example, show that creatures like abelisaurs were inland hunters, while other predators like the fish eating spinosaurs probably lived near mangroves and rivers.

Chiarenza added: "This fossil find, along with the accumulated wealth of previous studies, is helping to solve the question of whether abelisaurs may have co-existed with a range of other predators in the same region. Rather than sharing the same environment, which the jumbled up fossil records may be leading us to believe, we think these creatures probably lived far away from one another in different types of environments."

Fossilised femora are useful for palaeontologists to study because they can determine the overall size of the dinosaur. This is because femora are attached to the thigh and tail muscles and have scars, or bumps, which tell palaeontologists where the ligaments and muscles were attached to the bone and how big those muscles and ligaments would have been.

Andrea Cau, co-author from the University of Bologna, said: "While palaeontologists usually venture to remote and inaccessible locations, like the deserts of Mongolia or the Badlands of Montana, our study shows how museums still play an important role in preserving specimens of primary scientific value, in which sometimes the most unexpected surprises can be discovered. As Stephen Gould, an influential palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, once said, sometimes the greatest discoveries are made in museum drawers."

The study is published in the journal Peer J. Chiarenza did the underpinning analysis with Cau while at the University of Bologna.

The next step will see the team looking for more complete remains from these predatory dinosaurs trying to better understand their environment and evolutionary history.

Author: Colin Smith | Source: Imperial College London [February 29, 2016]

The copper used to make Ötzi’s axe blade did not come from the Alpine region as had previously been supposed, but from ore mined in southern Tuscany. Ötzi was probably not involved in working the metal himself, as the high levels of arsenic and copper found in his hair had, until now, led us to assume.

His murder over 5,000 years ago seems to have been brought about due to a personal conflict a few days before his demise, and the Iceman, despite his normal weight and active life-style, suffered from extensive vascular calcification.

Scientists from all over the world presented these and other new insights, at the 3rd Bolzano Mummy Congress. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Ötzi’s discovery, the three days of the Congress, from 19th to 21st September, are all dedicated to the Iceman.

Since the Iceman came on the scene on 19th September 1991, he has not ceased to fascinate scientists from all over the world. No corpse has been more thoroughly investigated. “In terms of his significance for science, Ötzi is not simply an isolated mummy discovery. He could be seen as a typical European from earlier times and is precious for this reason alone,” explained the anthropologist Albert Zink from EURAC Research, the scientific leader of the congress.

“Ötzi is so well preserved as a glacier mummy and through this alone, he serves us researchers as a model for developing scientific methods which can then be used on other mummies,” said Zink.

“What concerns us most these days is to know who the Iceman was, what role he played in society and what happened to him in the last days of his life. Sophisticated procedures, now available to scientists, are continually supplying us with new evidence,” said Angelika Fleckinger, Director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology which co-organised the Congress.

Links to Central Italy

One surprising new fact has been unearthed which concerns the most extraordinary item amongst Ötzi’s equipment – the valuable copper axe. In contrast to what had previously been presumed, the copper used in the blade does not derive from the Alpine region (researchers had suggested East or North Tyrol as the most likely provenance) but from Central Italy. Professor Gilberto Artioli‘s archaeometallurgy research group at the University of Padua has discovered that the metal had been obtained from ore mined in South Tuscany.

In order to determine its origin, Italian scientists took a tiny sample from the blade and compared the proportion of lead isotope – a kind of “finger print” of the ore deposits which remains unchanged in any objects subsequently made from the ore – with the corresponding data from numerous mineral deposits in Europe and the entire Mediterranean region. The result pointed unequivocally to South Tuscany.

“No one was prepared for this finding. We will commission further analyses in order to double-check these first results” stressed Angelika Fleckinger. If the original results are confirmed, this new evidence will give researchers some interesting food for thought.

Was Ötzi as a trader travelling possibly as far as the area around today’s Florence? What was the nature of the trading and cultural links with the south in those days? Did the exchange of goods also involve movements of the population? That is to say, did people from the south venture into the Alpine region and vice versa?

“This is a particularly exciting insight especially with respect to questions about population development”, explained Albert Zink.

Was he or was he not involved in smelting copper?

Another question long debated amongst the scientific community, is whether Ötzi was perhaps involved himself in the process of copper smelting. Scientists have advocated this thesis because raised arsenic and copper levels have been measured in the mummy’s hair, a fact which might possibly be explained, for example, by breathing in the smoke which is released when melting and pouring metal.

Geochemist Wolfgang Müller of Royal Holloway, University of London, who had already used isotope analysis to establish Ötzi’s South Tyrol origins, has now turned to this question once more. Using highly developed methods of analysis such as laser mass spectrometry and speciation analysis, Müller’s team examined not just hairs but also samples from Ötzi’s nails, skin and organs for possible heavy metal contamination.

His, so far still provisional, findings suggest that the hypothesis that Ötzi was involved in processing metal was premature. Müller did indeed find slightly raised arsenic values in the nail sample, but not in other tissue samples. Raised copper levels were only present at the extremities and this correlates with other change indicators, and thus it is doubtful if one can establish a heavy metal contamination for Ötzi’s actual life time: raised values might also be due to environmental influences over the 5,000 years since his death.

Radiological investigations with the latest CT equipment

A new computer tomography (CT) scan of the Iceman was undertaken by radiologists Paul Gostner and Patrizia Pernter in January 2013 in the Department of Radiology of Bozen-Bolzano Hospital. To do this they used a CT-scanner of the latest generation which, thanks to its large opening, allowed the doctors to run Ötzi rapidly through the machine from head to toe despite the way his arm is angled. In addition to the vascular calcification in the arteries of his stomach and legs which had already been known about, the superior image allowed doctors to spot three small areas of calcification near to the outflow tracts of the heart which had hitherto escaped their notice. This substantiates the earlier finding made by molecular biologists in EURAC that Ötzi had a strong genetic predisposition to cardiovascular diseases and that this was probably also the main reason for his general arteriosclerosis.

Investigations of a “profiler”

Ötzi was murdered. The arrow head discovered in 2001 in his left shoulder suggests this. But what were the circumstances surrounding the crime? In 2014 the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology commissioned Chief Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Criminal Investigation Department to investigate the “Ötzi Murder Case” using the latest criminological methods.

Horn interrogated various “acquaintances” of the murder victim such as archaeologists from the museum who had been looking after Ötzi for years, or experts from forensic medicine, radiology and anthropology. Members of the project team also took part in an on-site inspection of the location in Schnals Valley in South Tyrol Italy where the body was found.

The results of this investigation were that Ötzi probably did not feel threatened shortly before his murder, because the situation at the Tisenjoch location where he was found indicates that he had been resting while enjoying a hearty meal. In the days prior to the murder he had incurred an injury to his right hand, probably as a result of defensive action during the course of a physical altercation. No further injuries could be found, and this might serve to indicate that he had not been defeated in this particular conflict.

The arrow shot, which was probably fatal, seems to have been launched from a great distance and took the victim by surprise, from which we may infer that it was an act of treachery. Further medical findings suggest that the victim fell and that the perpetrator used no further violence. The perpetrator probably did not wish to risk a physical altercation, but instead chose a long distance attack to kill the Iceman. As valuable objects such as the copper axe remained at the crime scene, theft can be excluded as the motive.

The reason for the offence is more likely to be found in some sort of personal conflict situation, in a previous hostile encounter – “a behavioural pattern which is prevalent even today in the bulk of murder crimes”, as Alexander Horn explained.

Source: Eurac Research [September 20, 2016]

Archaeologists have uncovered a stone grinding tool in southern Italy which shows signs it was used to make flour that was boiled into gruel or baked into bread.

The discovery, which predates the dawn of farming, suggests that stone age man's first cultivated meal may have been a bowl of porridge made from grains growing wild and is the earliest known instance of human consumption of oats.

The find was made by a team led by Marta Mariotti Lippi at the University of Florence in Italy who made analysed starch grains found on the artefact.

They found evidence that the stone's creators also heated the grains before grinding them, perhaps to dry them out in the colder climate of the time and make the grain easier to grind and longer-lasting.

This multi-stage process would have been time consuming, but beneficial, while turning it into flour would have been a good way to transport it, which was important for Palaeolithic nomads.

Evidence of porridge consumption in Scotland dates back to 4,000 BC, when oats and other grains began to be cultivated by the first farmers.

Mariotti Lippi’s team hopes to continue studying ancient grinding stones to find out more about the stone age plant diet.

The stone was found in the Grotta Paglicci, Apulia, which was home to stone age hunter gatherers between 34,000 and 32,000 years ago and contains mural paintings, depicting horses and handprints. Images of goats, cows, a serpent, a nest with eggs, and a hunting scene have also been found engraved on bone.

Archaeologist Matt Pope, of University College London, said that the find shed light on the diet of early humans and the spread of food cultivation.

He said: “There is a relationship there to be explored between diet, experimentation with processing plant food and cultural sophistication.

“We’ve had evidence of the processing of roots and cattails, but here we’ve got a grain, and a grain that we’re very familiar with.

“If we were to look more systematically for ground stone technology we would find this is a more widespread phenomenon.”

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Author: Jody Harrison | Source: Herald Scotland [September 08, 2015]