ARCHAEOLOGY March/April 2022

The last time I saw Martha—at some point, I’m not sure when, she stopped being Professor Joukowsky and was just Martha—she ran across the room calling my name and beckoning me with her huge smile and arms open wide. I had written some time before to tell her that I had been asked to be editor in chief of ARCHAEOLOGY, and that day she said, “I am so proud of you.” As she had every time I saw her since I was an 18-year-old student in her Introduction to Archaeology class, she made me feel like the most important person in the room. Martha stirred me with her love for the ancient world and encouraged me to follow my passion for the past, and it is her inspiration that led…

One of the great pleasures of the AIA’s annual conference is the discovery of new voices, new topics, and new approaches in archaeology. This January we continued our new tradition of Society Sunday, the public program inaugurated last year to celebrate the AIA’s 100-plus Local Societies. This event featured the presentation of awards thanking our lay enthusiasts and a fascinating public lecture by Debby Sneed of California State University, Long Beach, “Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece.” Sneed dispelled the myth of widespread exposure of disabled infants by the Greeks, focusing on both literary and material evidence to show the efforts ancient families took to encourage their survival, including the production and use of special feeding bottles like the one shown here. During the conference proper—successfully flipped to virtual thanks to…

FACING THE PAST I am an avid ARCHAEOLOGY reader. The January/February 2022 article “At Face Value” struck me for what the ancient artists kept in—wrinkles, under-eye bags, a double chin, uneven facial features, and messy eyebrows—3,000 years before the modern-day Realism movement was born. It may indicate the value placed on realistic depictions, especially for the subjects’ journeys into the afterlife where they had to be recognized, or it may show that the people’s conception of beauty was very different from our photoshopped culture today.Anna MandelNew York, NY I enjoy every issue of your wonderful magazine and am learning so much. After reading “At Face Value,” I was wondering if any animals were in any of the portraits discovered, or perhaps even an animal with its own portrait?Laurie DeFazioSandy, OR Conservator Marie Svoboda…

λέγουσιν They say ἃ θέλουσιν What they like λεγέτωσαν Let them say it οὐ μέλι μοι I don’t care σὺ φίλι με Go on, love me συνφέρι σοι It does you good The past can be a silent place for archaeologists. Despite recovering the belongings of ancient people, analyzing their diets, and even studying their bones, scholars can only imagine how they might have sounded. One way philologists investigate how spoken words were pronounced in antiquity is by tracing changing spellings, especially in non-elite texts. “In popular texts, spelling is more likely to be adapted to the sound of the word and less likely to be tethered to some conservative idea of ‘proper’ spelling,” says classicist Tim Whitmarsh of the University of Cambridge. Another approach involves looking at surviving texts of all kinds, including poetry, to…

While on a recreational dive last summer in Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota, Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologist Tamara Thomsen discovered an ancient dugout canoe carved from a single white oak. Resting on the lake bottom 27 feet underwater, the canoe contained seven notched stones of a type known as net sinkers that were used to hold down fishing nets. Photos of the canoe showed it to be in such pristine condition that Wisconsin state archaeologist James Skibo suspected it had been made recently. But radiocarbon dating showed it was in use around A.D. 800, likely by ancestors of today’s Ho-Chunk Nation. Indigenous people in the region traditionally submerged their canoes in shallow water in the fall to protect them during the winter months and then recovered them in the spring. Skibo notes…

Archaeologists working on the site of a future railroad station at Ebreichsdorf, 18 miles south of Vienna, have discovered a golden bowl decorated with geometric motifs and an image of the sun with 11 solar rays. The bowl is 90 percent gold and measures two inches high and eight inches wide. Inside the vessel were gold bracelets, wires, and remnants of fabric. Over the past two years, a team led by archaeologist Michał Sip of the archaeological firm Novetus has also unearthed nearly 500 bronze artifacts including pins, daggers, and knives at the site, which was a swamp in antiquity. Like the gold bowl, all these objects are in excellent condition, suggesting that they were deliberately deposited during religious rituals of some kind. The bowl and many of the other artifacts…