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- to discover (something) or remove it from a place where it is put away or hidden. During his studies, he unearthed several new facts about the history of the place.
www.thefreedictionary.com/unearthed
Archaeologists have unearthed longhouse remains that extend more than the length of a football field. Agriculture was the main source of food. In Iroquois society, women held a special role.
In the Song Empire (960–1279) of imperial China, Chinese scholar-officials unearthed, studied, and cataloged ancient artifacts, a native practice that continued into the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) before adoption of Western methods.
Sep 27, 2021 · But American history has betrayed that idea through centuries of state-imposed inequality, discrimination, and disenfranchisement.
- Jill Lepore
- Overview
- Ice Age Artists
- Ötzi the Iceman
- The Black Pharaohs
- A Maya King’s Domain
- Buddhist Shrines and Mines
- The Swahili Empire
- Machu Picchu
- Marvels Revealed by the Thaw
- Finding the Titanic
Two centuries of excavations on six continents have given voice to a past that previously lay mostly hidden. Now breakthroughs in technology promise even more revelations.
Digging for treasure is as old as the first plundered grave.
The urge to uncover buried wealth has obsessed countless searchers, enriching a few and driving others to the brink of madness.
“There are certain men who spend nearly all their lives in seeking for—kanûz—hidden treasures,” wrote the British traveler Mary Eliza Rogers after she visited Palestine in the middle of the 19th century. “Some of them become maniacs, desert their families, and though they are often so poor that they beg their way from door to door, and from village to village, they believe themselves to be rich.”
Not all the fortune hunters whom Rogers came across were desperate vagabonds. She also encountered sahiri, roughly translated as necromancers, “who are believed to have the power of seeing objects concealed in the earth.” These esteemed clairvoyants, often women, entered a trance that Rogers said allowed them to describe in minute detail the hiding places of valuable goods.
Archaeology transformed those “objects concealed in the earth” from simple treasures into powerful tools that allow us to glimpse the hidden past.
20,000 years ago, France
The lifelike cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet represent an explosion in human creativity thousands of years ago—and show artistry that was stunningly advanced.
On a September afternoon in 1940, four teenage boys made their way through the woods on a hill overlooking Montignac in southwestern France. They had come to explore a dark, deep hole rumored to be an underground passage to the nearby manor of Lascaux. Squeezing through the entrance one by one, they soon saw wonderfully lifelike paintings of running horses, swimming deer, wounded bison, and other beings—works of art that may be up to 20,000 years old.
The collection of paintings in Lascaux is among some 150 prehistoric sites dating from the Paleolithic period that have been documented in France’s Vézère Valley. This corner of southwestern Europe seems to have been a hot spot for figurative art. The biggest discovery since Lascaux occurred in December 1994, when three spelunkers laid eyes on artworks that had not been seen since a rockslide 22,000 years ago closed off a cavern in southern France. Here, by flickering firelight, prehistoric artists drew profiles of cave lions, herds of rhinos and mammoths, magnificent bison, horses, ibex, aurochs, cave bears. In all, the artists depicted 442 animals over perhaps thousands of years, using nearly 400,000 square feet of cave surface as their canvas. The site, now known as Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, is sometimes considered the Sistine Chapel of prehistory.
For decades scholars had theorized that art had advanced in slow stages from primitive scratchings to lively, naturalistic renderings. Surely the subtle shading and elegant lines of Chauvet’s masterworks placed them at the pinnacle of that progression. Then carbon dates came in, and prehistorians reeled. At some 36,000 years old—nearly twice as old as those in Lascaux—Chauvet’s images represented not the culmination of prehistoric art but its earliest known beginnings.
The search for the world’s oldest cave paintings continues. On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, for example, scientists found a chamber of paintings of part-human, part-animal beings that are estimated to be 44,000 years old, older than any figurative art seen in Europe.
Circa 3300 B.C., Ötztal Alps, Italy
Frozen in time under a glacier in the Alps, this Neolithic hunter felled by a foe’s arrow about 5,300 years ago is the oldest intact human ever discovered.
In 1991, hikers high in the mountains on Italy’s border with Austria discovered a mummified body protruding from a glacier. Little did they suspect that this “iceman” was a time traveler from the Copper Age. Indeed, further investigation revealed that the 5,300-year-old Ötzi the Iceman—named for the Ötztal Valley near his death site—is the oldest intact human ever found. “Not since Howard Carter unlocked the tomb of King Tutankhamun in the early 1920s had an ancient human so seized the world’s imagination,” wrote mountaineer and author David Roberts.
Over the ensuing three decades, scientists have used an array of high-tech tools, including 3D endoscopy and DNA analysis, to examine the iceman and refine his biography in exquisite detail. What at first appeared to be a tale of a solitary Neolithic hunter overtaken by the elements has morphed into a riveting murder mystery.
He was in his mid-40s, a rather elderly man for his time. He suffered from worn joints, hardened arteries, gallstones, advanced gum disease, and tooth decay. While these health factors made his life uncomfortable, they did not kill him.
In 2001, a radiologist x-rayed Ötzi’s chest and detected a stone arrowhead, smaller than a quarter, lodged beneath the left shoulder blade. The forensic evidence became even more intriguing in 2005, when new CT scan technology revealed that the arrowhead, probably flint, had made a half-inch gash in the iceman’s left subclavian artery. Such a serious wound would have been almost immediately fatal. The conclusion: An attacker, positioned behind and below his target, fired an arrow that struck Ötzi’s left shoulder. Within minutes, the victim collapsed, lost consciousness, and bled out.
730-656 B.C., Sudan and Egypt
In a long-ignored chapter of history, kings from a land to the south conquered Egypt, then kept the country’s ancient burial traditions alive.
In the year 730 B.C., a man named Piye decided the only way to save Egypt from itself was to invade it. The magnificent civilization that had built the Pyramids at Giza had lost its way, torn apart by petty warlords. For two decades Piye had ruled over his own kingdom in Nubia, a swath of Africa located mostly in present-day Sudan. But he considered himself the rightful heir to the traditions practiced by the great pharaohs.
By the end of a yearlong campaign, every leader in Egypt had capitulated. In exchange for their lives, the vanquished urged Piye to worship at their temples, pocket their finest jewels, and claim their best horses. He obliged them and became the anointed Lord of Upper and Middle Egypt.
When Piye died at the end of his decades-long reign, his subjects honored his wishes by burying him in an Egyptian-style pyramid at a site known today as El Kurru. No pharaoh had received such entombment in more than 500 years.
Piye was the first of the so-called Black pharaohs, the Nubian rulers of Egypt’s 25th dynasty. Over the course of 75 years, those kings reunified a tattered Egypt and created an empire that stretched from the southern border at present-day Khartoum all the way north to the Mediterranean Sea.
1000 B.C.–A.D. 900, Honduras
Extraordinary finds at the site of the ancient city of Copán in recent decades have helped archaeologists take a giant step forward in learning about the Maya.
In a tunnel 50 feet below the grassy plazas of Copán, an ancient Maya city in what is now Honduras, National Geographic staff archaeologist George Stuart peered through an opening in a wall of dirt and stone. There, in a hot, stuffy, earthquake-prone space, he saw a skeleton on a large stone slab. Stuart’s archaeological colleagues had discovered a royal burial—most likely that of K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, or Sun-Eyed Green Quetzal Macaw. The revered god-king, whose name appears in many of the site’s hieroglyphic texts, was the founder of a dynasty that maintained the power of this Maya valley kingdom for some 400 years.
That momentous discovery was made in 1989, but Maya scholars had long recognized the enormous significance of Copán. From more than a century of research, they knew that the ruined buildings beside the Copán River served as the political and religious capital of an important kingdom before its collapse more than a thousand years ago. Early on, investigators came to realize that the section now known as the Acropolis—a roughly rectangular area that rises high above the river—served not only as the locus of some of the city’s most spectacular architecture and sculpture but also as the seat of governing power during the height of the Maya Classic period, from about A.D. 400 to 850.
The rulers of Copán claimed descent from the sun and ruled by that right. They presided over a kingdom of some 20,000 subjects, ranging from farmers who lived in pole-and-thatch houses to the elite who occupied palaces near the Acropolis. As the archaeologists tunneled into the Acropolis, they came upon the most elaborately constructed and furnished tomb yet uncovered at the site. The remains of a noble lady rested on a thick rectangle of stone. She was richly attired and wore one of the most extraordinary arrays of Maya jade ever found. She was probably the wife of the founder, archaeologists believe, the queen mother of the next 15 rulers of the Copán dynasty.
With the discovery of the queen’s tomb, it soon became evident that this part of the Acropolis constituted a sort of axis mundi—in effect, a sacred stack of burials and buildings hallowed by the presence of one of almost unimaginable power in the eyes of the inhabitants of Copán. Given all the clues pointing to K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, it seemed that his final resting place could not be far away. The eager archaeologists dug deeper into the complex.
A.D. 200-800, Afghanistan
A spectacular Buddhist complex is threatened by a huge copper mine and the Taliban takeover.
An hour’s drive along the Gardez highway south of Kabul, there is a sharp left turn onto an unpaved road. The path continues along a dry riverbed, past small villages, paramilitary roadblocks, and sentry towers. A little farther on, the view opens over a treeless valley creased with trenches and exposed ancient walls.
In 2009, a team of Afghan and international archaeologists and local laborers began to uncover thousands of Buddhist statues, manuscripts, coins, and holy monuments at this epic site. Entire monasteries and fortifications have come to light, dating back as far as the third century A.D. The excavation was by far the most ambitious in Afghanistan’s history.
A fluke of geology put these cultural treasures in jeopardy, though. Mes Aynak means “little copper well” in the local dialect, but there is nothing little about it. The lode of copper ore buried below the ruins is one of the world’s largest untapped deposits, an estimated 12.5 million tons. In 2007, a Chinese consortium won the rights to extract the ore on a 30-year lease. The company made a bid worth more than three billion dollars and promised to provide infrastructure for this isolated, underdeveloped district.
Before the deal with Chinese interests became public, artifacts already were in danger of being plucked out piecemeal by looters and lost to science. Afghan cultural heritage advocates demanded that the treasures be excavated and recorded properly before open-pit mining began.
800–1500, East Africa
Swahili city-states on the shores of the Indian Ocean enjoyed centuries of wealth, thanks to trade linking them to Arabia, India, and beyond.
“The city of Kilwa is amongst the most beautiful of cities and elegantly built,” wrote Ibn Battuta, one of history’s great travelers. The city minted its own coins and had houses with indoor plumbing. Its residents wore clothing of imported silk. During its golden age, from the 12th to the 18th centuries, Kilwa was one of some three dozen prosperous ports that dotted what is known as the Swahili coast. Those ports, which stretched from present-day Somalia to Mozambique, had evolved into powerful city-states that grew rich from Indian Ocean trade. They flourished as ships from Arabia, India, and China called at their ports to carry away goods that made the Swahili wealthy.
Arabian sailors arriving in Africa found good harbors, a sea full of fish, fertile land, and opportunities for trade. Many stayed to marry local women, bringing with them the Islamic faith. The interplay of African and Arabian languages and customs created an urban and mercantile culture that is unique to this coast.
At its core, though, the culture was African—a fact that early archaeologists failed to recognize. Subsequent excavations at sites along the coast have shown how wrong they were. On Songo Mnara Island in Tanzania, for example, archaeologists uncovered a planned community that boasted a palace hung with tapestries, several dozen blocks of houses, six mosques, and four cemeteries, all inside a wall.
The Swahili trade network fell apart as the Portuguese muscled in and redirected goods toward the Mediterranean and Europe. But even as the trade hubs became backwaters, the rich Swahili culture endured through centuries of colonial occupation. “Swahili history is about adaptation and incorporation,” explains Abdul Sheriff, a Tanzanian historian. “Swahili culture may not be quite the same tomorrow as today, but then nothing living is.”
1400s, Peru
A ghost town in the Andes became a treasured window into Inca history after explorer Hiram Bingham introduced it to the world.
On hands and knees, three men crawled up a slick and steep mountain slope in Peru. It was the morning of July 24, 1911. Hiram Bingham III, a 35-year-old assistant professor of Latin American history at Yale University, had set out in a cold drizzle from his expedition camp on the Urubamba River with two Peruvian companions to investigate reported ruins on a towering ridge known as Machu Picchu (“old mountain” in Quechua, the Inca language). The explorers chopped their way through thick jungle, crawled across a “bridge” of slender logs bound together with vines, and crept through underbrush hiding venomous fer-de-lance snakes.
Two hours into the hike, at nearly 2,000 feet above the valley floor, the climbers met two farmers who had moved up the mountain to avoid tax collectors. The men assured an increasingly skeptical Bingham that the rumored ruins lay close at hand and sent a young boy along to lead the way.
When Bingham finally reached the site, he gaped in astonishment at the scene before him. Rising out of the tangle of undergrowth was a maze of terraces cut from escarpments and walls fashioned without mortar, their stones fitting so tightly together that not even a knife’s blade could fit between them. The site would prove to be one of the greatest archaeological treasures of the 20th century: an intact Inca ghost town hidden from the outside world for nearly 400 years. “It seemed like an unbelievable dream,” he wrote later.
Bingham acknowledged that he was not the first to discover Machu Picchu. Local people knew about it, and a Peruvian tenant farmer, Agustín Lizárraga, had even inscribed his name on one of its walls nearly a decade earlier. But Bingham did bring the mountaintop citadel to the world’s attention as the account of his work there, and at other sites in the region, filled the April 1913 issue of National Geographic.
1600s, Southwestern Alaska
Centuries-old artifacts of the Yupik people, preserved in permafrost, are emerging as temperatures rise. Now the rush is on to save these treasures.
The archaeological site of Nunalleq on the southwest coast of Alaska preserves a fateful moment, frozen in time. The muddy square of earth is full of everyday things the Indigenous Yupik people used to survive and to celebrate life here, all left just as they lay when a deadly attack came almost four centuries ago.
As is often the case in archaeology, a tragedy of times past is a boon to modern science. Archaeologists have recovered more than 100,000 intact artifacts at Nunalleq, from typical eating utensils to extraordinary things such as wooden ritual masks, ivory tattoo needles, pieces of finely calibrated sea kayaks, and a belt of caribou teeth. The objects are astonishingly well preserved, having been frozen in the ground since about 1660.
Climate change is now hammering the Earth’s polar regions. The result is a disastrous loss of artifacts from little-known prehistoric cultures—like the one at Nunalleq—all along Alaska’s shores and beyond.
A massive thaw is exposing traces of past peoples and civilizations across the northern regions of the globe—from Neolithic bows and arrows in Switzerland to hiking staffs from the Viking age in Norway and lavishly appointed tombs of Scythian nomads in Siberia.
1912, Atlantic Ocean
In 1912 the largest, most luxurious cruise ship of its day sank. Its discovery after decades of searching revealed stunning details of the tragedy.
At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” R.M.S. Titanic disappeared beneath the waves, taking with her some 1,500 souls. Why does this tragedy exert such a magnetic pull on our imagination more than a century later? The sheer extravagance of the Titanic’s demise lies at the heart of its attraction. This has always been a story of superlatives: A ship so strong and so grand, sinking in water so cold and so deep. The ship’s fate was sealed on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. At 11:40 p.m. it sideswiped an iceberg in the North Atlantic, buckling portions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward compartments to the ocean’s waters. From this moment onward, sinking was a certainty.
Over decades, several expeditions sought to find the Titanic without success—a problem compounded by the North Atlantic’s unpredictable weather, the enormous depth (12,500 feet) at which the sunken ship lies, and conflicting accounts of its final moments. At last, 73 years after it sank, the final resting place of the Titanic was located by National Geographic Explorer at Large Robert Ballard and French scientist Jean-Louis Michel on September 1, 1985. The Titanic lay roughly 380 miles southeast of Newfoundland in international waters.
Recently declassified information has revealed that the discovery stemmed from a secret U.S. Navy investigation of two wrecked nuclear submarines, the U.S.S. Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion. The military wanted to know the fate of the nuclear reactors that powered the ships, and to see if there was any evidence to support the theory that the Scorpion had been sunk by the Soviets. (There wasn’t.)
Ballard had met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic. The military was interested, but for the purpose of gathering its own intel. Once Ballard had completed the submarine inspection, if there was time, he could do what he wanted. He was finally able to begin looking for the Titanic with less than two weeks to spare. And then, suddenly one night at 1:05 a.m., video cameras picked up one of the ship’s boilers. “I cannot believe my eyes,” he wrote about the moment of discovery.
Mar 4, 2019 · Borrow Bread, Dear Bought and Purgatory are just some of the dark names given to fields across history by angry farmers frustrated with poor crops, according to a newly published dictionary of field-names.
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely ...
verb [ T ] uk / ʌnˈɜːθ / us / ʌnˈɝːθ / to discover something in the ground: Building at the site was halted after human remains were unearthed earlier this month. to discover proof or some other information, especially after careful searching: A private detective has unearthed some fresh evidence. Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples.
