Archaeology news for Sept 9-Oct 2

[archersangel]

More tombs uncovered in Etruscan site of Vulci

Archaeologists working in the Etruscan necropolis of Vulci near Viterbo have found 17 tombs containing a variety of ornaments and jewellery left by relatives of the deceased to facilitate their passage to the afterlife.

14,000-year-old campsite in Argentina adds to an archaeological mystery

For more than a decade, evidence has been piling up that humans colonized the Americas thousands of years before the Clovis people. The Clovis, who are the early ancestors of today's Native Americans, left abundant evidence of their lives behind in the form of tools and graves. But the mysterious pre-Clovis humans, who likely arrived 17,000 to 15,000 years ago, have left only a few dozen sources of evidence for their existence across the Americas, mostly at campsites where they processed animals during hunting trips. Now a fresh examination of one such campsite, a 14,000-year-old hunter's rest stop outside the city of Tres Arroyos in Argentina, has given us a new understanding of how the pre-Clovis people might have lived.

New findings give insight into life and death of 5000-year-old ice mummy

The copper used to make the axe blade of 5,000-year-old mummy Ötzi 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 man from the ice, 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 recent International Mummy Congress in Bozen-Bolzano. 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 man from the ice.

The 17th-century man who was buried face down

In 2013 archaeologists discovered a cemetery in use as long ago as the early Middle Ages in the Bernese Lakeland region of Switzerland. One of the bodies interred there was buried in an unusual way, and in order to better understand this puzzling situation coins found in the grave have been studied in detail by Empa's x-ray specialists and reconstructed on the computer.