YEAR IN REVIEW 1999: ARCHAEOLOGY

Eastern Hemisphere. Evidence reported in 1998 from a project in Egypt suggested that humans living approximately 7,000 years ago enjoyed a social and spiritual life considerably more complex than previously thought. In the Nubian Desert, about 800 km (500 mi) south of Cairo, researchers reported the discovery of numerous standing stones and megalithic structures aligned north to south, east to west, northeast to southwest, and approximately northwest to southeast. The alignments of the megaliths, dated to 6,000-7,000 years ago, reveal similarities to later Egyptian structures, such as the pyramids at Giza and Abusir, which are also laid out along a northeast-southwest axis. A stone circle, consisting of four sets of upright slabs, was also found and may have been used by the ancient nomadic peoples for sighting along the horizon. Project leaders speculated that the megaliths, which stand in a playa inundated by summer rains, might have formed a symbolic geometry that integrated death, water, and the Sun. The French government succeeded in expropriating the land above Chauvet Cave, where hundreds of Paleolithic wall paintings were discovered in 1994. Researchers began a four-year program of study that had been on hold while the government and the principal landowner fought over rights to the cave. The project aimed to inventory and photograph completely the 30,000-year-old paintings. In Ireland a stone tomb at the site of Carrowmore was dated to 7,400 years ago, which made it the earliest-known freestanding stone structure in Western Europe and the only one in all of Europe from the Mesolithic Period before the introduction of agriculture. The discovery was greeted with some skepticism because agriculture had long been thought to have been the technological development that made much of complex civilization, including stone architecture, possible. In the Mediterranean Sea southwest of Sicily, Italian fishermen netted a bronze statue of a nude young man, which researchers immediately compared to the Riace Bronzes, two remarkable sculptures found off the coast of Italy in 1972. The statue may represent Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds. Working from its style, scholars estimated that it dates to the 2nd or 3rd century BC. In Rome excavations beneath the Trajan Baths uncovered a wall painting depicting a bird's-eye view of an ancient megalopolis. It was not clear to researchers what city was being portrayed in the fresco, which probably dates to the late 1st century AD. The new find was the largest-known Roman fresco with an image of a city in the entire corpus of Roman wall painting. One hypothesis was that the image represented ancient Rome before the Great Fire in AD 64. Nearby, part of the Museo Nazionale Romano, one of the world's greatest repositories of Roman art, reopened in its new home, the Palazzo Massimo, after 14 years of renovation. Excavations in the Holy Land uncovered the earliest-known ruins of a synagogue and the remains of what may have been the oldest structure in the world designed for use as a church. Found outside Jericho, the synagogue, which dates from 50 to about 70 BC, was a mud-brick and stone construction that included a ritual bathing area, a small courtyard with seven or eight adjoining rooms, and a large rectangular main hall. The church, discovered in the Red Sea port of Al-'Aqabah, Jordan, was dated to the late 3rd or 4th century AD on the basis of pottery fragments found among its ruins. A stone slab marked with the 6th-century Latin inscription Pater Coliavi ficit Artognov, meaning "Artognou, father of a descendant of Coll, has made this," was unearthed by archaeologists digging at Tintagel Castle, the legendary home of King Arthur on the Cornish coast of England. Some scholars rushed to claim that this was proof of the historicity of King Arthur, whereas others argued that Artognov was not close enough to Arthur to be conclusive. In what was called the find of the decade in Japan, archaeologists recovered 33 Chinese bronze mirrors from a 3rd-century burial mound in the Yamato region of Honshu, Japan's main island. The discovery fueled a long-running debate over the location of the ancient Japanese kingdom of Yamatai, known only from the Wei chih, a Chinese historical text. According to the text, envoys of the Yamatai queen, Himiko, sent gifts to China in AD 239, and the return gifts included 100 bronze mirrors. Numerous Chinese mirrors had been recovered on the southern island of Kyushu, which led some Japanese historians to name it as ancient Yamatai. Other researchers, however, noting the similarity between the names, believed that the ancient civilization had been located in Yamato. The year also was notable for two important legal developments in the ongoing debate between archaeologists, dealers, collectors, and museums for control of the past. In the United States a lawsuit before the Court of Appeals was to decide whether non-U.S. countries could claim national ownership of archaeological remains under the National Stolen Property Act to gain their return. A case in the 1970s set the precedent that artifacts covered by such laws do count as stolen as long as a country explicitly declares ownership. The case on appeal concerned a classical Greek gold phiale, a type of libation bowl, that was illegally exported from Italy and in 1991 sold to a New York collector for $1.2 million. In 1995, after the Italian government discovered the transaction, U.S. government officials seized the antique. Two years later a federal judge ruled that the phiale was to be returned to Italy. The collector subsequently appealed. Because of its implications for future repatriations of antiquities, the case had become an important test, with a coalition of museums supporting the collector's appeal and another alliance of scholars and preservation groups supporting Italy's side. The 1995 Unidroit Convention on the Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects went into effect among the first five countries to ratify it: Romania, Lithuania, Paraguay, China, and Ecuador. Eighteen other countries had signed the convention, of which five were working toward ratification. The collecting of cultural artifacts by museums, preservation societies, and similar institutions was largely regulated by two international treaties, the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The Unidroit Convention was meant as a supplement to the 1970 convention and, as of late 1998, had not been signed by a number of countries, including the United States. Perhaps the most important feature of the Unidroit Convention was that it explicitly defined illegal excavation as theft, which could in theory eliminate the need for repatriation suits by foreign countries. ANDREW SLAYMAN Western Hemisphere. When Christopher Columbus explored the Caribbean islands in 1492, he encountered the Taino people, Arawak-speaking Native Americans who once flourished on the islands of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. The Taino became extinct within 100 years after the Spanish conquest of the late 15th century, and little was known about their distinctive culture. Digging at the newly discovered underwater site of Los Buchillones in Cuba's Ciego de Avila province, archaeologists uncovered evidence for Taino history between AD 1220 and 1620, a period encompassing the first Spanish settlement. The excavations yielded a collapsed 400-700-year-old oval building more than 18 m (60 ft) in diameter that may have served as a community centre. Until this discovery Taino architecture had been known only from Spanish accounts. Archaeologists had assumed that the Santa Cruz River valley in Tucson, Ariz., was largely uninhabited until the Hohokam people, a group of North American Indians who lived in the semiarid region of what is now central and southern Arizona, arrived about AD 600. Excavations in 1998, however, revealed seven riverside settlements dating between 800 BC and AD 150. The largest settlement, discovered at the Santa Cruz Bend site, was occupied between 760 and 200 BC and contained at least 500 semisubterranean pit houses. Scientists agreed that the settlement was surprisingly sophisticated for such an early farming village in the southwestern desert. Nearby they found traces of simple water-control ditches dating to 800 BC, fragments of the earliest such communal structures in the Southwest. The inhabitants may have been the ancestors of the Hohokam culture, which flourished during the 1st millennium AD. Researchers discovered evidence of a large farming settlement at a site called Cerro Juanaquea in northern Chihuahua, Mex. It was believed that the site was inhabited at least 3,000 years ago, almost 2,000 years earlier than sites of such scale in the region. The village covers about 4 ha (10 ac) and is remarkable for its many hillside terraces, which extend over some eight kilometres (five miles). Archaeologists believed that the inhabitants lived on the terraces, where various kinds of occupation debris were found. Important discoveries added new chapters to Maya history. Yaxun is a Classic Maya site in northern Yucatn, Mex., dating to about AD 250. The ancient city was founded about 500 BC as a stopping point in a trade route that linked southern Maya cities with salt deposits on the northern coast. In 1996 archaeologists excavated the North Acropolis and uncovered a sealed tomb. The nearly square burial chamber held burial 24, the archaeologists' code name for a collection of remains, which included the bones of a man about 55 years old who had been decapitated. An obsidian knife, perhaps used for ceremonial bloodletting, lay near his shoulders, and fragments of a polished white shell headdress worn by high lords were strewn at his feet. The bones of an adolescent girl and a young woman, also adorned with royal headdresses, flanked the male skeleton. Altogether archaeologists recovered the bones of 11 men, women, and children from the tomb. The city was sacked in the late 4th or early 5th century AD; thus, archaeologists believed that the remains represented the sacrifice of a royal family when the city was conquered by its enemies. Scientists were able to use deciphered Maya glyphs to reconstruct the events that accompanied burial 24. In a nearby temple they discovered a black stone ax and greenstone gems jammed in a black jar. It was believed that the artifacts commemorated a decapitation sacrifice, such as was often performed at change of leadership ceremonies. In 1998 archaeologists reported the discovery of the oldest known ball court in the Americas, from a site called Paso de la Amada in the Soconusco area of Chiapas, Mex. When Spanish conquistadors came in contact with Maya communities in the Yucatn, they were impressed by the elaborate ball courts where players competed to knock a rubber ball through a wall-mounted hoop. Well-preserved courts were known from major Maya cities like Copn and Tikal, and the remains of latex balls and paintings of ball players indicated that the game had been established by at least the mid-13th century BC. The new ball court, unearthed in 1995, dates to about 1700 BC, which makes it at least five times older than any previously excavated ball court in Mesoamerica. The court is 79 m (260 ft) long and flanked on both sides by long mounds with benches built into them. The court lies among dwellings built by nobility, which suggests that the game was played by those of high status. An examination of more than 200 well-preserved mummies discovered in Peru in 1996 and excavated in late 1997 revealed that they were members of an elite group called the "cloud people," the remote Chachapoya culture that dominated the Amazon River basin before the Inca conquered the area 500 years ago. In addition to the mummies, which were discovered high in the Andes Mountains at a place called Laguna de los Cndores, scientists also recovered clay pots, baskets, decorated gourds, and carved wooden figures with stylized human faces. Unlike many Andean mummies in drier areas, the Chachapoya bodies had been deliberately mummified, the abdominal cavities emptied and the corpses embalmed. Ginned cotton was placed under the skin and in the mouth and nostrils to preserve the facial features. The people deliberately selected cold, dry areas that helped in the preservation of the dead. Archaeologists planned to study the mummies with modern medical technology and to excavate a 200-house settlement found nearby in an attempt to determine whether the burials were associated with that village. BRIAN FAGAN