Category: Archeonews

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RADOGOST: Where archaeological documentation goes so it doesn’t disappear

What happens to documentation after the field season ends? RADOGOST helps store and share archaeological data so it can be found, understood, and reused.

Imagine a classic scenario: fieldwork, hundreds of photos, RTK GPS files, sketches, context descriptions, 3D models, artefact tables, analytical notes. Then “after the season”, when archaeologists return home and sit down at desks and in libraries, everything lands on a hard drive. The data gets sorted and usually ends up in folders named “NEW”, “FINAL”, “FINAL_2”… and starts living a life of its own. After a year, no one remembers which file is current. After five years, no one knows whose coordinates those were, what the methodology was, or whether it’s even allowed to show it to anyone.

Now consider another perspective: science based on verification, re-analysis, and data reuse. This is exactly where RADOGOST comes in.

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The Church of the Holy Virgin of Deir al-Surian

Deir al-Surian is located in the geological depression of Wadi al-Natrun, west of the Nile delta, a region known as Sketis in Late Antiquity. Its church, dedicated to the Holy Virgin, has been in continual use since its construction in the 7th century AD. Between the 9th and 16th centuries, a mixed Syriac-Coptic community celebrated in the church, and its architecture, paintings and inscriptions testify to the cultural exchange between the two groups. 

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Beetle for adorment. A unique find from the cremation cemetery in Domasław.

Jewelry made from both organic and inorganic materials is one of the earliest and most popular material evidence of human activity and cultural development discovered at archaeological sites around the world. When we hear the word jewelry, we think of items made from precious metals, gemstones, or shells. But it turns out that past humans made decorations using a surprisingly wide range of materials. During research on burials from the extensive Lusatian culture necropolis in Domasław in Lower Silesia, Polish scientists found evidence of the deliberate deposition of chitinous beetle shells strung on a blade of grass in a grave. This unique discovery sheds new light on the culture of the communities inhabiting Lower Silesia in the early Iron Age.

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Grave Mistakes: Art, Exploitation, and the Legacy of Mummy Brown

 

“A London colourman informs me that one Egyptian mummy furnishes sufficient material to satisfy the demands of his customers for seven years. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to add that some samples of the pigment sold as ‘mummy’ are spurious,” writes Arthur Herbert Church in “The Chemistry of Paints and Painting”, published in 1890. The quote references the artist’s pigment made quite literally from the pulverized remains of Egyptian mummies, commonly known as Mummy Brown or “Egyptian Brown”. The practice of producing the mummy-based pigment dates back as early as the late 16th century. Though adored by many artists, the grisly origins of pigment raise the question of what artists are willing to use in the name of beauty.

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Prehistoric Amber Ornaments from the Żuławy Wiślane, Northern Poland: A Raw Material Perspective

Because of its beauty and unique properties, amber has fascinated people for thousands of years. With the holiday season now officially underway and many of us likely to spend at least a moment on the marine coast, today’s article focuses on the role amber played among communities living in the particular area of northern Poland during the Late Neolithic period. We will explore how its selection – based on colour, transparency, and structure – reflected the aesthetic and technological preferences of prehistoric craftspeople and users. These observations will then be compared with contemporary Polish trends in jewellery, aiming to highlight some subtle analogies between the past and the present. Join us on this fascinating journey through time, aesthetics, and technique, which proves that the choice of amber was never accidental. The inspiration for this article comes from recent research on some of the products from an amber workshop that existed around 4,500 years ago in the Żuławy Wiślane region, published by researchers from the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw and the Museum of Earth in Warsaw Polish Academy of Sciences, in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift.

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The Girl at the Olive Press. A Vignette of Peasant Life in Roman Egypt

In the year 12 CE, a man named Harthotes submitted a census declaration to the local authorities in Roman Egypt. He was a 55-year-old farmer and local priest living with his elderly mother and young son in a house within the temple precinct of Theadelphia. But from other sources we knew that he also had a daughter named Tahaunes, who was about 12 years old at the time. Where was she? Not married off young, as scholars were quick to assume. The truth is more surprising: she was at work!

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Rediscovering Khrami Didi Gora, Georgia’s Famous Neolithic Settlement

The Shomu-Shulaveri Neolithic culture, located in the heart of the Transcaucasian region, continues to captivate researchers. This prehistoric phenomenon, which spans the territories of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, is distinguished by its unique local characteristics. While much research has focused on communities in Armenia and Azerbaijan, settlements in Georgia, particularly Khrami Didi Gora – the largest of them all, remain mostly unexplored. Known for their agricultural and craftsmanship skills, the people of this society also appear to have had profound spiritual beliefs, as evidenced by the small anthropomorphic figurines discovered at this archaeological site. However, what did these beliefs entail? How did rituals shape their daily life and worldview? These lingering questions continue to challenge researchers, awaiting answers that may unlock the mysteries of the people belonging to this fascinating archaeological culture.

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Pre-Columbian ‘Puppets’ indicate ritual connections across Central America

  • Five expressive ceramic figurines have been discovered atop a large pyramidal structure at Preclassic San Isidro, El Salvador. 

  • Their movable heads and positioning suggest they were a kind of puppet, used in ritual scenes or ‘tableaus’.

  • Similarities with examples from other Central American countries imply interaction and shared ritual traditions across this vast region.

  • This contradicts the commonly-held belief that El Salvador was culturally isolated from the rest of Central America.

     

    Five figurines from the San Isidro deposit. Scale in centimetres (credit: J. Przedwojewska-Szymańska/PASI)

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Unpublished documents from Pathyris – the demotic Gebelein temple archive

The Ptolemaic Pathyris Project, funded by the National Science Centre (Polonez Bis 2 program, grant no. 2022/45/P/HS3/01807) and hosted by the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences, aims to reconstruct the urban layout and domestic architecture of Pathyris, a town located approximately 30 km southwest of Luxor in the Gebelein micro-region, using archival, papyrological, and geospatial data.

The site has yielded a vast collection of Greek and Demotic (an ancient Egyptian script used between the 7th century BCE and the 5th century CE) papyri, ostraca, and wooden tablets. To date, around 1,300 documents have been published, and many of the family archives have been extensively studied, providing a unique glimpse into various socio-economic aspects of Ptolemaic society

The lecture by Professor Quack, originally scheduled for February 18, 2025, has been postponed to April 2, 2025, at 1:00 PM.
Place: Maria Skłodowska-Curie Hall (1st floor), Staszic Palace, Nowy Świat 72, 00-330, and online.[Wykł

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Decorated Wari gourd vessels from Castillo de Huarmey

When we discover pre-Hispanic ruins, we often come across fragments of gourds, which might have been used as vessels or containers (Spanish: mates). Some are undecorated, others – much less common – bear rich shell inlay and pyrography (Spanish: mates pirograbados). Such exceptional items were unearthed at Castillo de Huarmey, a royal Wari necropolis. The technology of their production and their decoration deliver a lot of information about the iconography of power in the first empire of the pre-Colombian Andes.

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