History is Not Written in Stone

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The last few years have been filled with great archaeological revelations rewriting history. In November alone, a team of archaeologists working in the ancient Saqqara necropolis discovered a new Egyptian queen, 300 coffins, and more than 100 mummies, among other antiquities. In addition, they found a pyramid belonging to the new queen in the same excavation. “We have since discovered that her name was Neith, and she had never before been known from the historical record,” said Egyptologist Zahi Hawass, the nation’s former antiquities minister. “It is amazing to literally rewrite what we know of history, adding a new queen to our records.”

Zahi Hawass and his team also discovered 22 interconnecting tunnels that he says date to the New Kingdom, 1570 and 1069 BC. “Burials from the New Kingdom were not known to be common in the area before, so this is entirely unique to the site,” Hawass added. “The coffins have individual faces, each one unique, distinguishing between men and women, and are decorated with scenes from the Book of the Dead. Each coffin also has the name of the deceased and often shows the Four Sons of Horus, who protected the organs of the deceased.”

On the other hand, Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist at the University of Santo Domingo, has been searching for Cleopatra’s lost tomb for almost 20 years, and now she believes she has made a breakthrough. Together with his team, they discovered a 1,305-meter tunnel located 13 meters underground. An architectural design that experts called an “engineering miracle.”

“The excavation revealed a huge religious center with three sanctuaries, a sacred lake, more than 1,500 objects, busts, statues, gold pieces, a huge collection of coins representing Alexander the Great, Queen Cleopatra, and the Ptolemies,” Martínez said to CNN.

And these are just some of the several discoveries made in November. Recently, there have been many others that show how little is really and concretely known about the past. In 2018, archaeologists found remains in Peru along with hunter projectile points and tools for preparing skins, so they assumed it was a man. In 2020, experts published that it was a woman. Previously, it was thought that any hunter was a man, so this discovery led to examining dozens of burials and concluding that between 30 and 50% were women.

The oldest pet cemetery in the world

According to LiveScience, many scholars have long believed that for much of human history, any animals kept after death served utilitarian or religious purposes. This changed in 2021 after a project led by archaeologist Marta Osypinska of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw discovered the oldest pet cemetery to date. The pet cemetery is located just outside Berenice in Egypt; the site dates back to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. C. contained animals such as monkeys, cats, dogs, and even a fox and a hawk. Many were wrapped in blankets, with carefully crafted bead necklaces they had worn in life, and some were also buried with other artifacts. Several skeletons showed signs of advanced age or deformities, showing that they required special care and someone was providing it.

“We have old, sick, and deformed animals that had to be fed and looked after by someone. We have animals (almost all) that are very carefully buried. The animals are placed in a sleeping position — sometimes wrapped in a blanket, sometimes covered with dishes. So, we thought that in Berenice, the animals were not sacrifices to the gods, but just pets,” Osypińska said. “Many scholars argue that the ancient world had no concept of ‘pets,’ but our discovery shows that humans have a deep need for animal companionship.”

Footprints over 20,000 years old

Ice sheets are believed to have covered much of what is now Canada during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). It was not until after that glacial period that humans crossed into the Americas around 13,500 years ago. This was until last year when archaeologists working at White Sands National Park in New Mexico reconstructed footprints left along what was once ancient Lake Otero, which disappeared some 10,000 years ago. This was a 2,575-square-kilometer lake. Radiocarbon dating of the seeds preserved along the tracks shows that they have been there for between 21,000 and 23,000 years.

A fifth-century mosaic

In 2020, a fifth-century mosaic was discovered in a house in Chedworth, UK. Although more than this appears to be needed to change history, it is crucial because Rome was believed to have decided to leave Britain in 410, leaving little documentation, records, and archaeological evidence from the Dark Age era.

National Trust archaeologist Martin Papworth explained: “What is so exciting about the dating of this mosaic at Chedworth is that it is evidence for a more gradual decline. Creating a new room and laying a new floor suggests wealth, and a mosaic industry continuing 50 years later than had been expected.”

“The dating shows that sophisticated life had continued within this luxury mansion, decades, after Britain ceased to be part of the Roman Empire and the country had entered the ‘Dark Ages.'” He says this “revealed that a mosaic within Room 28 of the Villa was designed and created in the middle of the 5th century. Up until now, it has generally been believed that, following the economic crash at the end of the 4th century, all towns and villas were largely abandoned and fell into decay within a few years.”

The Dyar mound

In 2020 at Washington University in St. Louis, archeologists were studying the Dyar mound, initially excavated in the 1970s, and found that the indigenous people of the Americas used it until 1670. This means they did not fall to the Europeans and maintained their culture. and practices for 130 years after first contact.

The archeology professor and author of the study, Jacob Lulewicz, emphasized that it is not the only place that is believed to have been used beyond contact with the Europeans. Still, with their discoveries, they had scientific proof that the indigenous people resisted for much longer than what was written above. And that’s a big deal: Lulewicz calls the earlier history “myths [that] were purposively racist, denying what would have been a recent collective memory of Indigenous use in favor of explanations that stole, and disenfranchised, these histories from contemporary Indigenous peoples.”

The end of the Neanderthals

According to the BBC, Neanderthals have been believed for years to have developed around 40,000 years ago and disappeared when modern humans appeared about 10,000 years ago. In 2022, archaeologists from the University of Toulouse revealed a shocking find: Homo sapiens teeth and stone tools in southern France 54,000 years ago. This shows that they have been present for 14 thousand years earlier than previously thought. It also suggests that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted during those same years.

These are just a few of the many archaeological discoveries that have been made in recent years. History is something that evolves depending on what is discovered. As mentioned at the beginning, there is a new queen in Egypt, and they may be close to finding Cleopatra’s tomb. It is crucial to keep an eye on historical events and be updated on what is happening in archaeology.

Tell us in the comments which discovery impressed you the most. Did you know about some of these findings?

---

Translation by Daniel Wetta

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0