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![Peru: Lord of Ucupe]()
Best known for the over-the-top jewelry their rulers wore to their own funerals, the Moche of northern Peru (A.D. 100-800) are the subject of intense debate over how they governed themselves. Were the Moche a collection of squabbling city-states, each in its own valley, or was there a central authority? A discovery in the village of Úcupe suggests the latter. Archaeologists found an array of gilded copper masks, shields, and diadems in the tomb of a local lord that strongly resemble those excavated in elite tombs up to 25 miles away. Since the tombs are all in different valleys, the discovery suggests a unified political order.![Russia: Palace of Mithradates]()
Archaeologist Vladimir Kuznetsov of the Russian Academy of Sciences has worked 40 years at Phanagoria, an ancient Greek city on the Black Sea that was home to Mithradates VI, a powerful first century king. After a decade puzzling over the age and function of the incinerated remains of a large building on Phanagoria's acropolis (right), Kuznetsov and his team have now uncovered more than 300 coins in the structure, including ones depicting Mithradates himself. The discovery finally allowed them to date the building to around 60 B.C.![Kazakhstan: First Domesticated Horses]()
Archaeology Magazine was impressed by new research that proves herders from the steppes were the first to tame horses 5,500 years ago. Since the 1990s, horse bones have been unearthed at Botai, a village in what is now northern Kazakhstan that was occupied from 3700 to 3100 B.C. But a new analysis of bones, teeth, and pottery sherds leaves no question that the people of Botai practiced the world's first horse husbandry.![England: Anglo-Saxon Hoard]()
Terry Herbert, a man with a metal detector, uncovered the largest-ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold buried in a farmer's field in Staffordshire, central England. Excavated by the Birmingham University Archaeology Unit, the hoard consists of more than 1,500 gold and silver items, all dating to the seventh century. The find is far larger than other significant Anglo-Saxon hoards, such as those discovered with the contemporaneous noble burials at Sutton Hoo in southeastern England.![Egypt: World's First Zoo]()
Strange animal burials at the ancient Egyptian capital of Hierakonpolis point to the existence of a large, exotic menagerie around 3500 B.C. The 2009 field season produced 10 dogs, a baby hippo, a hartebeest, a cow and calf, and an elephant. The tally for this Predynastic period zoo now stands at 112 critters, including 2 elephants, 3 hippos, 11 baboons, and 6 wildcats.![Israel: Rubaiyat Pot]()
Rina Avner didn't know what to make of an unusual ceramic fragment unearthed at a housing construction site in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. At first, Avner and her team assumed text on the vase was in Arabic or Turkish, since both languages were used in the city. But the text was Persian and, once translated, found to be a line from the Rubaiyat, a collection of poetry written around 1100. Vessels inscribed with Persian verses have been found elsewhere in regions once under ancient Persia's influence, but this is the first time such a discovery has been made in Israel.![Crete: Iron-Age Priestesses]()
The discovery of a powerful female bloodline — uninterrupted for nearly 200 years — in the Iron Age necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna is illuminating the role of women in the so-called "Dark Ages" of Greece. Last summer, the remains of four females, ranging in age from about seven to seventy, were excavated in an eighth-century BC. monumental funerary building. Artifacts from the tomb, including a possible stone altar, ritual bronze saws and knives, and a rare glass phiale for pouring libations, suggest these women played an important role in Eleutherna's religious life.![Arizona: Early Irrigators]()
For years, archaeologists in the American Southwest wrestled with a frustrating puzzle: How did ancient farmers grow corn in the cactus-studded Sonoran Desert as early as 2000 B.C.? Some form of irrigation was clearly necessary, but until 2009 no one had ever seen evidence for one of these primeval watering systems. Now outside Tucson, archaeologist James Vint and his colleagues have excavated an enormous network of canals and fields stretching over as many as 100 acres and dating to 1200 B.C. It is the oldest documented irrigation system in North America.![Guatemala: Popol Vuh Relief]()
While investigating the water collection system at the city of El Mirador in northern Guatemala's rain forest, a team of archaeologists led by Richard Hansen of Idaho State University uncovered a sculptural panel with one of the earliest depictions of the Maya creation story, the Popol Vuh. "It was like finding the Mona Lisa in the sewage system," says Hansen. The plaster panel dates to approximately 200 B.C. and depicts the mythical hero twins, Hunaphu and Xbalanque, swimming into the underworld to retrieve the decapitated head of their father.![Syria: Earliest Chemical Warfare]()
In a narrow tunnel under the fortress-city of Dura in the Syrian desert, 20 Roman soldiers met their fate defending the city from the Sasanian Empire. The archaeologists who found them in the 1930s assumed they had died in a tunnel collapse, but University of Leicester archaeologist Simon James thinks they met a more unusual demise — as victims of chemical warfare. Based on chemical residues and sulfur crystals in the tunnel, he concluded that the Sasanians readied braziers of pitch and sulfur and lit them as the Romans broke through. The resulting cloud of sulfur dioxide, rising into the higher Roman tunnel, could have knocked the soldiers out in seconds. Keep reading! Archaeology magazine's site has more information on each of these finds plus five more important discoveries, as well as the magazine's annual list of archaeology sites at risk of destruction this year.'Archaeology' Picks the 10 Most Important Finds of 2009
Archaeology is an incremental science, and eureka moments are rare. Here, the ten rarest of the past year from around the world, as determined by the experts at Archaeology magazine.
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- 'Archaeology' Picks the 10 Most Important Finds of 2009
