DIGGING DEEPER 4
HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT THEY ATE, WORE, AND LOOKED LIKE?
In this “Digging Deeper” chapter, I will briefly try to answer questions like these: “How do we know what they ate, what they wore, and what they looked like?” as well as “How do we know what their environment was like?” In other words, how are we able to approach reconstructing what life was like for a person living at a particular time and in a particular place in the ancient world?
Sometimes it’s very—or relatively—easy to know what people ate in antiquity and even what they looked like while they were alive. For example, because of the conditions in the bog where Lindow Man lay for all those centuries, as described in the previous chapter, his skin and hair are very well preserved, including his beard and mustache. His fingernails are also so well preserved that we can tell they were manicured. Some of his internal organs are also preserved; they contain parts of what was probably his last meal, including a piece of unleavened bread made from wheat and barley, which had been cooked over a fire.1 Similarly, because Tollund Man’s stomach and intestines were preserved, the archaeologists who were called in to examine him were also able to do analyses and to determine that his last meal had been a sort of porridge.2
However, among such accidentally preserved bodies, Ötzi the Iceman has turned out to be the most important. The scientific discoveries, emerging one after the other, have been published in a series of peer-reviewed and prestigious journals, including Science, the Journal of Archaeological Science, and The Lancet.
Among the discoveries that were made, scientists determined that Ötzi had brown hair and deep-set brown eyes, a beard, and sunken cheeks. He was probably about five feet, two inches tall and weighed about 110 pounds at the time of his death, which occurred when he was between forty and fifty years old. The strontium isotopes in his tooth enamel, which can be used to determine where people lived during their childhood years, indicate that he probably spent his whole life near where he died, within a sixty-kilometer radius and most likely in a nearby valley in Italy.3
Ötzi’s lungs were blackened, probably from inhaling smoke from campfires, either inside caves or outdoors. He suffered from tooth decay and had been ill several times in the months just before he died. Scientists and archaeologists were able to analyze the contents of his intestines, including pollen, which indicated that he had probably died in late spring or early summer. His last meal included red deer meat, bread made from einkorn, and some plums. In addition, his second-to-last meal included ibex meat, cereals, and various other plants.4
In 2016 scientists who were continuing to study the contents of Ötzi’s stomach also announced that they had mapped the genome of the oldest known pathogen, a bacterium named H. pylori that can cause ulcers. The bacterium may provide a clue to human migration patterns, for it is an Asian strain, and not the more usual Asian-African hybrids present in today’s European population. This discovery suggests that the additional migrations that brought African strains to Europe had not yet taken place by Ötzi’s time.5
More and more such genetic studies are taking place, investigations ranging from King Richard III’s body, discovered under a parking lot in England, to King Tut’s mummy.6 It is likely that such studies will become even more important to archaeology in the future, as we will discuss further in a moment.
FIG. 16. Reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman (photo by Robert Clark, courtesy of National Geographic)
Ötzi also had sixty-one tattoos, which he or a companion made by rubbing charcoal into cuts made in his skin. These are the oldest tattoos known; they are mostly lines and crosses rather than designs or images. In an interesting, and unexplained, related piece of trivia, the actor Brad Pitt now reportedly has a tattoo of Ötzi on his left forearm—Hollywood meets archaeology? Personally, I think that a tattoo of Achilles would have made more sense, since he (Pitt, not Ötzi) played the role of that Greek hero in the 2004 movie Troy.7
Ötzi was apparently quite the well-dressed man, with three layers of clothing. He wore undergarments made from goatskin, leggings made of fur, a coat of leather, and a grass cape over it all, plus a hat made of fur from a brown bear. On his feet, he had leather shoes insulated with straw. In 2004 a professor in the Czech Republic made a pair just like them and went hiking; he said that he didn’t get blisters, and that the shoes were more comfortable than his normal hiking footwear.8 All this has now been re-created in several places, including the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in northern Italy, which is Ötzi’s current home.
Among his other possessions and equipment were a number of objects that shed additional light on Ötzi, his environment, and his way of life. He had two arrows with flint tips and a kit to repair them, plus a quiver full of half-finished arrows; a partly finished longbow; a dagger with a flint blade; and an ax with a copper blade. Archaeologists also recovered a firestarter kit, a birchbark container for embers from his fire, and a bone needle. And Ötzi had a backpack in which he carried many of these possessions.9
We know all of this, in rather incredible detail, because Ötzi and his possessions were preserved by the ice that buried him, as mentioned in the previous chapter. His unfortunate demise proved most fortunate for us.
Other ancient catastrophes have also turned out to be gold mines and treasure troves for archaeologists trying to reconstruct the lives of ancient people. For example, the catastrophe that enveloped Pompeii when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE quite literally stopped the city and its citizens in their tracks. The ash and pumice mixed with the rain that fell, blending into a cementlike concoction that quickly hardened and impeded attempts by survivors to come back and retrieve their belongings. In addition, dozens of bodies, as well as the rest of the town and everything in it, were entombed. Over time, the perishable materials, ranging from wood to bread to body parts, slowly decayed. Hollow cavities formed, with each cavity bearing the shape of the object, or body, that had once been there.
In 1863 Giuseppe Fiorelli, the Italian archaeologist in charge of excavating Pompeii at that time, figured out what the hollow cavities were, or rather what they had been. He realized that his workers could borrow a sculptor’s technique, using what is known as the lost-wax method, treating the hollow spaces as if they were molds for making bronze statues.10
So whenever his team came across a cavity while digging, Fiorelli poured plaster of Paris into the opening. When the ash was then excavated away, an exact duplicate in plaster remained of whatever had been there originally. They were able to recover the remains of numerous bodies, including entire families huddled together, as well as everything else organic, such as wooden tables and other furniture, and even loaves of bread.11 They also recovered some of the pets, including a dog still chained where its owner had left it. It was found upside down in a contorted position, with the impression of its collar still plainly visible in the plaster.
Although Fiorelli’s method worked well for things like loaves of bread and wooden objects, it had a major flaw when it came to the human bodies, for his plaster casts made it impossible to see the bones and other artifacts that had remained in the cavity after the body disintegrated; these were now encased within the newly created plaster cast. One solution would be to use some sort of transparent material, like resin, instead of plaster, but that is a much more expensive process. It has been used for only one victim of Vesuvius, in 1984. This is the so-called Resin Lady, who is still wearing her gold jewelry and hairpin.12
Archaeologists also realized that it was possible to restudy the plaster casts themselves, including the bones and other materials that Fiorelli’s workers had unintentionally incorporated. In September 2015, a team that included specialists such as radiologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists began doing laser imaging, CT scans, and DNA sampling of the plaster-encased remains. The CT scans especially revealed amazing details, one from a four-year-old boy who was found with his parents and a younger sibling. It is possible to see how scared he must have been just before he died, although it is not clear what killed him. The scans also show that many of the victims had suffered head injuries, perhaps from collapsing buildings or falling rocks, and that they included people of all ages, not just the young, old, and sick city dwellers, as had previously been thought.13
After three hundred years of nearly continuous excavation, archaeologists have unearthed a large amount of ancient Pompeii, though much more remains to be dug. The plan of the city has become clear so that we can tell that prosperous inhabitants lived in some of the areas, and middle- or even lower-class inhabitants were the primary residents in other sections.14 Today it is possible for tourists to see the various quarters of the town and the buildings that went with them: bathhouses, tanneries, shops, and other dwellings.
For instance, in 2014 Dr. Steven Ellis and a team of archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati who were digging by the Porta Stabia, one of the main gates into the city, announced that they had found ten buildings with twenty shopfronts from which food and drink were sold or served.15 Such an arrangement seems typical in Pompeii, where even the private houses frequently had shops installed on the street side.
So what did the inhabitants of Pompeii eat and drink? The answer comes from a variety of contexts, which, upon reflection, makes sense. Ellis and his team have excavated a number of drains, latrines, and cesspits. The thought of excavating such places may seem disgusting to some, but the truth of the matter is that the material found within such areas can sometimes be worth more to the archaeologists than gold, if it means being able to reconstruct what life was like for the inhabitants two thousand years ago. In eras before trash collection, the garbage of the city was frequently thrown into the latrines, where it remained for the archaeologists to find it.
This was exactly the case for Pompeii, for in these areas Ellis and his team found the remains of “grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lentils, local fish, and chicken eggs, as well as minimal cuts of more expensive meat and salted fish from Spain.” In a drain on a more centrally located property that may have belonged to someone wealthier, they found the remains of “shellfish, sea urchin, and even delicacies, including the butchered leg joint of a giraffe.”16 Not only does this give us clues about what people were eating in Pompeii at the time of the eruption, but it also confirms the unsurprising fact that the different classes ate different types of food.
In a somewhat similar fashion, we were able to discover what type of wine the inhabitants of our site at Tel Kabri were drinking nearly four thousand years ago. As I mentioned briefly above, in 2013 we uncovered what turned out to be the oldest and largest wine cellar yet discovered in the world, dating to about 1700 BCE. Within a single room in the Canaanite palace, we found a total of forty jars, each about three feet high. It turned out that each jar would have held more than one hundred liters of liquid. In subsequent seasons (2015–19), we have discovered nearly one hundred more such jars within additional nearby rooms in this area, which seems to have been a storage complex for the palace.
Andrew Koh, our associate director, tested the sherds to determine what had been in the jars. He used Organic Residue Analysis (ORA), which operates on the principle that a ceramic jar that once held some sort of liquid probably absorbed some of that liquid into its walls over time. If you are able to extract that organic residue from within the ceramic and test it, then you might be able to figure out not only what the liquid was, but also what additives it may have contained.
When Koh tested sherds from each of the jars, most came back positive for syringic acid, which is found in red wine. A few came back positive for tartaric acid, which is found in both red and white wine. They also came back positive for acids that are found in things like honey, juniper berries, and mint, all of which would have been used to flavor and sweeten the wine, as well as substances like resin, which would have helped to preserve the wine, preventing it from going bad right away.17 One of these days we hope to partner with a winery to try to re-create the wine, but we have yet to find a partner willing to experiment with us.
However, other archaeologists have had similar ideas. Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware has worked with archaeologist Patrick McGovern to create several beers based on ancient recipes, including Midas Touch (my favorite), which is based on ingredients that were found in the so-called tomb of Midas, at the site of Gordion in Turkey. More recently, Israeli archaeologists worked with local breweries to re-create ancient beer and mead, or as close an approximation as they could get.18
It used to be that studying ancient diet and the environment was reasonably simple, at least with the proper background and training … and sometimes it still is. For example, if you are a physical anthropologist studying the human remains from a site and there are six right femurs in the pile of bones that you are sorting through, then you know that there were at least six individuals present, since each person only has one right femur. This is known as the minimum number of individuals (MNI), since there might have been more than six people represented in your pile of bones, but there cannot have been fewer. The same holds true if you are an archaeozoologist studying the animal remains from that site.
At the heart of it all, what we are trying to do is to reconstruct the lives of the ancient people. For example, to figure out what people were eating, we need to ascertain not only their actual diet but also how they got their food, and what kind of food was even available to them at particular moments in history.19
So one of the things that we have to determine is what the environment was like at that particular time and in that particular place. This is why we now need interdisciplinary teams, and it’s where all of the experts who visit the dig, or look at our material afterward, come into play. We need, for example, to know what the archaeobotanists and palynologists can tell us about the plant remains; what the archaeozoologists can tell us about the animal remains; what the osteologists and/or physical anthropologists can tell us about the human remains; and what all of them together, plus other experts, can tell us about the ancient climate and environment in the region. And occasionally we end up studying things that we never thought we would, such as ancient feces (which can tell us more than you might think).20
So, one way to figure out what people were eating in antiquity, and what animals lived in their local environment, is to study the animal bones that come up during your excavations. These require the expertise of archaeozoologists, who can easily tell the bones of a horse from those of a pig, or lion, or bird, or a sheep or goat (though sheep and goats can be so hard to tell apart that they are sometimes jokingly referred to as “geep” or “shoats”).
Retrieving these bones can often be quite straightforward, especially if they are large enough to be picked up and put into a “bone bag” during excavation, but just as frequently recovering them requires wet sieving the soil, using running water to help flush away the dirt and then picking out the bone fragments from among the pebbles and small bits of pottery that remain. It’s much like panning for gold, except that you’re left with animal bones rather than gold nuggets (though, for us, the bones are just as valuable). We do such wet sieving especially when our excavation is approaching a floor, so that we can gather up what might have been left there—hoping that the ancient inhabitants weren’t very good housekeepers.
FIG. 17A–B. Wet sieving soil samples at Tel Kabri (photos by E. H. Cline)
From this, you can figure out not only what kind of animals were being raised, and/or eaten, and/or kept as pets by the inhabitants at your site, but also how many of each were present in the areas that you are excavating. This usually involves some basic mathematics. For instance, we derive the number of identified specimens (NISP) by counting up the different species that are represented among the bone fragments, while the minimum number of individuals (MNI), mentioned above, is based on looking at the fragments from each type of animal and determining the minimum number that they represent.21
In addition to the animals, we are also interested in the plants and vegetables that people were eating. However, since we don’t usually have the actual plants left to us, except perhaps for some seeds, this generally involves studying and analyzing ancient pollen under a microscope, which takes a fair amount of expertise (specialists are known as palynologists).22 From this, we can tell what sort of plants and trees were present in any given period and, based on that, can make educated guesses about changes in the environment and the climate during those times.
On an active excavation, this involves “floating” the soil samples. It is similar to wet sieving, but in this case the bags of soil that have been collected are dumped one at a time into a flotation machine, which agitates the water. Since the seeds and pollen float more often than they sink, the person in charge will first skim this material from the surface of the water. Then, after team members have collected the heavier material left at the bottom and let it dry, they will pick through all of this material (both light and heavy), gathering up the seeds and other plant remains (often with some small animal bone fragments mixed in as well).23
However, retrieving ancient pollen can also involve using a long borer to take a core sample down through the layers of a dried-up lagoon or ancient water source, since pollen will have settled to the bottom long ago. The core, consisting of a long tube of soil, will be cut into pieces, each of which will be examined by an archaeobotanist or a palynologist under a microscope to tally the grains of pollen—counting again both numbers and types, just as with the bones, as described above—that are present during each period of a site throughout its history.
FIG. 18. (a) Flotation machine (left); and (b) picking through the remains (right) for seeds and other materials at Tel Kabri (photos by E. H. Cline)
This is what was done, for example, by David Kaniewski and his team, who took coring samples in ancient lagoons and water sources located at sites in northern Syria and Cyprus. Another team did the same thing in Israel, in the Sea of Galilee and on the shores of the Dead Sea, while other studies were done in Greece. From all of these, the various teams were able to determine that there was a drought in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions beginning at the end of the twelfth century BCE and lasting for at least 150 years and as long as 300 years in those regions, for the pollen indicated that only trees and plants capable of thriving in an arid and barren environment were present during those years. In other words, they found evidence for ancient climate change, which may have contributed to the collapse of this entire region at the end of the Late Bronze Age.24
Another example comes from Jerusalem, dating to a few centuries later. After 1967, excavations were conducted near the Wailing (Western) Wall in the Old City. There the team found several ancient toilets, including one that they thought perhaps dated to 586 BCE, based on the pottery that they found and the radiocarbon dates.25 According to textual sources, including the Hebrew Bible, this is when Nebuchadnezzar and the Neo-Babylonians besieged and then captured the city after an eight-month-long siege.
The toilet seat has two holes in it, one large and one small, through which one presumably did one’s business. There was also a small ceramic bowl next to the toilet, presumably used to dump lime into the toilet after one finished said business, which is what we used to have to do in porta-potties not so long ago. The archaeologists picked up the toilet seat and started digging underneath it, excavating what we would euphemistically call “night soil”—containing the urine and feces from whoever had been using the toilet back in the sixth century BCE.
And what they found is fascinating.
They looked at this material under a microscope and found out first that whoever was using this toilet was suffering from tapeworm and whipworm. Tapeworms usually show up when people are eating undercooked meat, such as beef or pork, while whipworms are usually the result of unsanitary conditions or the use of human feces as fertilizer. This, in turn, indicates that there was probably a shortage of wood, to cook the meat properly, and a shortage of water, to provide the proper sanitary conditions. Both might be indications that this was a city under siege at that time.
Further circumstantial evidence was provided when the team realized, in looking under the microscope at the undigested seeds and other vegetative material, that whoever was using the toilet was not eating what we might usually expect. They should have been eating peas, legumes, wheat, barley, and other grains. Instead, they were eating what we might call “backyard plants”: dandelions, weeds, and other things that grow in the yard but are not necessarily planted and not usually eaten. This might also be an indication that this was a city under siege: that the inhabitants could not get out to conduct their usual grain harvest and were reduced to eating whatever they could find near their houses.
So while we don’t have conclusive proof, it really does look as if this toilet provides evidence of what the inhabitants of Jerusalem were eating in about 586 BCE. They may really have been under siege, as the texts and tradition have long told us.
Now, with recent and rather spectacular advances in science, things can also get much more complicated and costlier, involving new sets of highly trained professionals to help extract information from what you have found. This includes, for instance, studies of ancient DNA (aDNA) from ancient skeletons, from which we can derive information about their genetic makeup.
Studying human remains is both similar to and quite different from studying animal bones and plant/pollen remains. Most skeletons are retrieved when one is excavating an ancient tomb or an entire cemetery, but bits and pieces, such as teeth, can frequently be retrieved during the wet sieving as well. Here is where many of the most recent and exciting advances in archaeological science come into play. The study of human remains used to involve primarily osteologists, who determined the number of individuals, their gender, their probable age at the time of death, whether they suffered from any diseases, and so on. Now many new types of specialists, and specializations, can be involved as well. These include geneticists (and archaeogeneticists) studying ancient DNA, who can tell us what the ancient person probably looked like and from where his or her ancestors came, as well as experts who can do strontium isotope analysis on the teeth and tell us where the person most likely grew up.
Such new studies are being done with increasing frequency, though not all scholars have embraced the findings, and many have urged caution—rightly so, in many cases, especially when the scientific results are picked up in the media and claims are made linking modern populations with ancient ones. Of great interest to many members of the general public was a study involving human remains from the Bronze Age found at ancient Sidon in Lebanon, which were then compared to the modern population in that region.26 Another example that garnered much media attention is a study that was done of remains from ancient Ashkelon, which indicates that the Philistines (known from the Bible as well as from archaeology) may have migrated to the area of what is now Israel and nearby areas from southern Europe—most likely mainland Greece, Crete, or Spain—at the very time that the environmental problems we’ve just discussed were causing upheaval at the end of the Late Bronze Age.27
In the latter case, the results fit with what we already knew from the pottery and other material remains, which indicated that the Philistines probably migrated from somewhere in the western Mediterranean or the Aegean, but there has been pushback from some archaeologists. They have argued that the number of skeletons that yielded the relevant DNA—of which there were four, all infants buried under the floors of houses—is simply too small a sample to sustain the claims that were made. I happen to believe that the findings will be shown to be correct, but also agree that we need more samples and more testing before we can be fully confident of the results.
We are currently in an era that some are calling the Third Scientific Revolution in archaeology.28 The first took place when the field was established in the 1850s, alongside (and influenced by) other fields, such as geology and zoology. The second took place a century later, with the implementation of radiocarbon (C-14) dating and other associated developments in the 1950s. The third is now, utilizing advances in the exact sciences, including aDNA, ORA, strontium isotope analysis, and other analytic techniques, which often involve big data and expensive devices in dedicated laboratories. It is a very exciting time to be an archaeologist, needless to say, but it now involves collaboration with other scientists in fields that heretofore have typically had little to do with archaeology. We shall see what the future brings, but one thing is certain—we should be able to learn more and more about the lives of ancient peoples, including garnering ever more information about what they looked like, what kind of clothes they wore, what kind of food they ate, what types of animals they raised and/or hunted, what species of plants they gathered or cultivated, and what their environment was like.