Sunday, November 26, 2023

ARCHAEOLOGY

Ancient 20-inch-long hand ax discovered in Saudi Arabia may be world's largest


Laura Geggel
Sat, November 25, 2023 

We see a woman and a man looking at a long hand ax in the lab.


Archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have discovered what may be the world's largest prehistoric hand ax. The stone tool measures 20.2 inches (51.3 centimeters) long and, despite its size, is easily held with two hands, according to a statement.

An international team of researchers found the basalt hand ax on the Qurh Plain, just south of AlUla, a region in northwest Saudi Arabia. Both of the hand ax's sides have been sharpened, suggesting that it could have been employed for cutting or chopping. However, it's still unclear how the stone tool was used and which species, for instance Homo erectus or Homo sapiens, crafted it.



A long stone hand ax on the sand

It's also unknown how old the tool is, as "the handaxe requires much more research to determine an accurate date," Ömer Can Aksoy, an archaeologist and the excavation's project director, told Live Science in an email. However, other tools found at the site may date to 200,000 years ago, according to the team's assessment of their form and characteristics, so it's possible that the hand ax dates also to the Lower or Middle Palaeolithic, Aksoy said.


Related: 7,000-year-old cult site in Saudi Arabia was filled with human remains and animal bones

Researchers nearly missed the enormous hand ax, which is 3.7 inches (9.5 cm) wide and 2.2 inches (5.7 cm) thick. "It was the last 15 minutes of our daily work and it was a hot day," Aksoy said. "Two of our team members found the giant handaxe lying over the surface of a sand dune."


Three hand ax artefacts from Qurh Plain AlUla in Saudi Arabia.



Group of researchers in archaeological site in Saudi Arabia.


Group of researchers in archaeological site in Saudi Arabia.

After hearing the team members' calls, the rest of the crew joined them and then excavated the area in depth. "We recorded 13 more handaxes on the site," Aksoy said. "Each team member took off their yellow vests in order to highlight the locations of each find over the sand dune."

While the other newly found hand axes were similar in style, they were smaller in size. "After the initial excitement when we discovered this remarkable object we carried out an initial search to see if other similar sized objects had been found," Aksoy said. While the search for large hand axes continues, "this might be one of the longest," he said.

Surveys at Qurh Plain are ongoing. The 2023 field season, which lasts from October to December, is nearly over. Archaeological work is planned to start again in winter and spring 2024.

Casas del Turuñuelo, a site of repeated animal sacrifice in Iron Age Spain


Detailed analysis reveals rituals of mass sacrifice of horses and other animals


Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Mass animal sacrifice at casas del Turuñuelo (Guareña, Spain): A unique Tartessian (Iron Age) site in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula 

IMAGE: 

SACRIFICED EQUIDS FROM THE COURTYARD OF CASAS DEL TURUÑUELO SITE (BADAJOZ, SPAIN). IRON AGE TARTESSIAN CULTURE. YARD DISCOVERED AND EXCAVATED SINCE 2017.

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CREDIT: CONSTRUYENDO TARTESO, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)




The Iron Age site of Casas del Turuñuelo was used repeatedly for ritualized animal sacrifice, according to a multidisciplinary study published November 22, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mª Pilar Iborra Eres of the Institut Valencià de Conservació, Restauració i Investigació, Spain, Sebastián Celestino Pérez of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain, and their colleagues.

Archaeological sites with evidence of major animal sacrifices are rarely known from the Iron Age of the Mediterranean region, and there is a gap between information offered by written sources and by the archaeological record. This makes it difficult to establish a clear understanding of the patterns and protocols of this practice. In this study, researchers examine a well-preserved example of mass animal sacrifice from an Iron Age building in southwest Spain known as Casas del Turuñuelo, associated to Tartessos and dating toward the end of the 5th Century BCE.

The authors examined and dated 6770 bones belonging to 52 sacrificed animals which were buried in three sequential phases. The identified animals were predominantly adult horses, with smaller numbers of cattle and pigs and one dog. In the first two phases, skeletons were mostly complete and unaltered, but in the third phase, skeletons (except equids) show signs of having been processed for food, suggesting that some sort of meal accompanied this ritual. These data indicate that this space was used repeatedly over several years for sacrificial rituals whose practices and purposes varied.

This case study allows researchers to establish details about ritual protocols at this site, including the intentional selection of adult animals rather than young, and the importance of fire evidenced by the presence of burned plant and animal remains. Casas del Turuñuelo also exhibits unique features compared to other sites, such as the high abundance of sacrificed horses. This study advances efforts to contextualize ritual animal sacrifices across Europe.

The authors add: “This study highlights the role of mass animal sacrifices in the context of Iron Age European societies. Zooarchaeological, taphonomic and microstratigraphic investigations shed light on animal sacrifice practices and the Tartessian ritual behavior at the Iron Age site of Casas del Turuñuelo (Badajoz, Spain).”

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONEhttps://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293654

Citation: Iborra Eres MP, Albizuri S, Gutiérrez Rodríguez M, Jiménez Fragoso J, Lira Garrido J, Martín Cuervo M, et al. (2023) Mass animal sacrifice at casas del Turuñuelo (Guareña, Spain): A unique Tartessian (Iron Age) site in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0293654. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293654

Author Countries: Spain, France

Funding: The financial support and the results of this study stem from the National Project Construyendo Tarteso 2.0 I+D+I PID2019-108180GB-I00 ʽAnálisis constructivo, espacial y territorial de un modelo arquitectónico en el valle Medio del Guadianaʼ and from two projects of the Junta de Extremadura: PRI I+D+I IB18131 ‘Estudio de la hecatombe animal del yacimiento de ‘Casas del Turuñuelo’ (Guareña, Badajoz). La gestión de la cabaña equina y sus implicaciones socioeconómicas y rituales en época tartésica’ and PRI I+D+I IB18060 ‘Iberia a través de sus caballos: Estudio integral de la diversidad genética, enfermedades infecciosas y paleopatologías de los caballos extremeños de la Edad del Hierro’.

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