Archaeology in Bulgaria reports that researchers have found a thirteenth-century grave in the wall of a monastery church in the Frankish quarter of Tarnovgrad, the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire. A block engraved with Christian scripture verses written in Old Bulgarian and a two-barred cross was found under the head of the grave’s occupant.
“Such ‘underhead’ [or pillow] bricks were placed beneath the heads of members of the
senior clergy in their graves,” said archaeologist Hitko Vachev. “At this point, there is no
way to say with absolute certainty who the buried man was but it can be assumed that he was at least Father Superior of the monastery. There is a hypothesis that he was one of the Bulgarian Patriarchs. It is possible that he was a senior clergyman named Yoan [Ivan, John] who had requested that a quote from the Holy Gospel of John be placed beneath his head in his grave.” The verses on the block were translated by Kazimir Popkonstantinov of Veliko Tarnovo University, who cautioned that a study of the man’s clothing and crozier, or staff, would be necessary to determine his status in the church hierarchy.

By David Shultz
With recurring zigzags, spirals, and other simple geometric patterns, ancient rock art is sometimes surprisingly similar across the globe. One hypothesis is that the artists were all using psychoactive compounds, which nudged the brain toward certain patterns. Now, a new find from a roughly 500-year-old cave used by Native Americans suggests such compounds may indeed have been an important component of their rock art. But the art itself may not have depicted the experience of tripping.
“They have broken away from the ludicrous school of thought … which saw all rock art
as trance imagery produced by shamans,” says Paul Bahn, an archaeologist at
Archaeological Institute of America who was not involved in the research.
The site of the discovery is Pinwheel Cave in Southern California, about 80 kilometers
northeast of Santa Barbara. The cave gets its name for a large, red, pinwheel-shaped
drawing on its ceiling; some archaeologists have hypothesized it represents a genus of the psychoactive flower Datura. The flower contains the alkaloids scopolamine and atropine, which are considered an entheogen—a psychoactive compound used in a spiritual context. The Chumash people of Southern California called the experiences triggered by ingesting Datura “sacred dreams,” according to Jim Adams, a pharmacologist at the University of Southern California who spent 14 years studying sacred Chumash Datura ceremonies.

When David Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Central Lancashire, and his
colleagues began to excavate the site in 2007, they found chewed remnants of plant
materials—also known as quids—pushed into cracks in the ceiling of the cave. Initial
attempts to extract DNA from the quids came up short. But now, a combination of new
chemical analyses and electron microscopy has positively identified the plant as Datura,
the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “I was
like, ‘Wow, we found the smoking gun of hallucinogens at a rock art site,’” Robinson
says.
Sandra Hernandez, a Tejon tribal member who helped coordinate research for the new
paper, agrees with the interpretation that the art represents the Datura flower. “I kind of
marveled at the shapes that they captured in the rock art compared to the actual flower
unfurling,” she says.
The excavation also uncovered a plethora or arrowheads, tools, and food scraps at the
site, contradicting a once-classic model of a lone shaman hallucinating in isolation and using rock art to record his experience, as had been suggested for ancient rock art around the world.
The study argues the art may not be a depiction of the user’s experience of the Datura,
but rather a message to the community regarding the plant’s importance. “The painting
… is them representing the plant that causes the hallucinogenic experience—not the
vision that is caused by the plant,” Robinson explains. “They’re venerating the plant,
saying, ‘That plant’s cool!’”
The idea that anyone could create rock art while under the influence of Datura is
questionable, says Adams, who was not involved with the work. “I’ve never tried
painting under the influence, but personally I think I would find it difficult.”
https://www.livescience.com/rock-art-hallucinogen-california.html

ANKARA, TURKEY— Yeni Şafak reports that more goddess statues have been
discovered in central Anatolia, at the site of Kültepe, the capital of the ancient kingdom
of Kanesh. Fikri Kulakoğlu of Ankara University said that the largest of the 4,200-year-
old statues unearthed this excavation season stands about 17 inches tall. “No idols of men have been found so far,” he added. “The women statues are naked and have a decorated throne, and there are braids on their back.” The statues are likely to be connected to religious beliefs in the region, Kulakoğlu explained.”

According to a report in the Hurriyet Daily News , a floor mosaic featuring a woman’s portrait has been unearthed in southern Turkey by a team of researchers led by Ümit
Kayişoğlu of the Osmaniye Museum Directorate. He said that the woman’s pose resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. “This mosaic area is the only known mosaic area with human figures in Osmaniye,” he added. “This is the remains of a villa built in the first and second centuries A.D.” Kayişoğlu suggests that the woman featured in the mosaic may have owned the villa.

According to an Ahram Online report, Khaled el-Anany, Egypt’s Tourism and Antiquities Minister, announced the discovery of more than 100 sealed, painted coffins; some 40 gilded statues of the funerary goddess Ptah Soker; and golden funerary masks in the Saqqara necropolis, which is located about 20 miles south of Cairo. Most of the
coffins have been dated to the 26th Dynasty (688–525 B.C.), but coffins dated to the
Ptolemaic period (304–30 B.C.) were also found. The well-preserved coffins were recovered from three deep burial shafts, where they had been protected from decay. A CT scan of one of the mummies revealed the remains of a man who had died at about 40 years of age. Team member Bassem Gehad added that the body had been mummified with its arms crossed over its chest, in what was known as the Osiris shape, after the god of the dead and resurrection who was often depicted holding the crook and flail with his legs in mummy wrappings. The coffins and artifacts will be distributed between the Cairo Museum in Tahrir Square; the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is scheduled to open next year; and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization

Forest geneticist Jennifer Koch inspects cuttings in the greenhouse at the Forest Sciences Laboratory in Delaware, Ohio on September 17, 2020.

Forest geneticist Jennifer Koch hopes her ash breeding strategy could save other threatened trees.

Can an ambitious breeding effort save North America’s ash trees?

By Gabriel Popkin

DELAWARE, OHIO—On a weekday morning in August, just one pickup truck sat in the sprawling visitors’ parking lot here at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Forestry Sciences Laboratory. A decadeslong decline in research funding had been slowly quieting the place—and then came the pandemic.

But in a narrow strip of grass behind a homely, 1960s-era building, forest geneticist Jennifer Koch was overseeing a hive of activity. A team of seven technicians, researchers, and students—each masked and under their own blue pop-up tent—were systematically dissecting 3-meter-tall ash trees in a strange sort of arboreal disassembly line. Over 5 weeks, the researchers would take apart some 400 saplings, peeling wood back layer by layer in search of the maggotlike larvae of the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), the most devastating insect ever to strike a North American tree. Since the Asian beetle was first discovered in Michigan in 2002, it has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees across half the continent and caused tens of billions of dollars of damage.

“We have contests for who can successfully pull out the smallest larvae and the biggest larvae,” Koch says. “People get pretty excited and competitive about it. You have to do something, because it is very tedious—and [the larvae] are really gross.”

https://www.sciencemag.org

According to a statement released by the Max-Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology , a team of researchers from the institute and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences has analyzed a genome extracted from a 34,000-year-old fossil
discovered in 2006 in eastern Mongolia’s Salkhit Valley. The unusual skullcap had been
thought to belong to a Neanderthal or a Homo erectus individual, but the genetic study has shown that the remains belonged to a modern human woman. About 25 percent of her genetic material had been inherited from western Eurasians, who may have come from Siberia. She also carried DNA from Denisovans, who inhabited Asia before the arrival of modern humans, and Neanderthals. Diyendo Massilani of the Max-Planck Institute said that the study suggests that populations living across Eurasia frequently migrated and interacted with each other at least 35,000 years ago. The Denisovan DNA fragments in the ancient genome overlap with those found in today’s East Asians, he added, and yet are different from those found in people who currently live in Oceania. This indicates that modern humans and Denisovans are likely to have mixed multiple times

According to a report in The Scotsman , remains of the Ancrum Old Bridge have been
found in southern Scotland’s River Teviot and dated to the mid-fourteenth century. The
multiarched bridge was part of the Via Regia, or King’s Way, which stretched from
Edinburgh to Jedburgh and the Borders. Built during the reigns of David II of Scotland
and Edward III of England, the bridge stood for more than 400 years, based upon archival research and dendrochronological dating of the native oak timbers that once supported the bridge piers. “In those times, during flood or high water, the Ancrum Bridge may have been the only place to cross the Teviot between Hawick and Berwic, making it one of the most important structures in medieval Scotland,” said Geoff Parkhouse of the Ancrum and District Heritage Society.

At the site of Crkvina in Zavala, in the municipality of Ravno, a stone relief plate of the
altar partition on the site of the remains of the Church of St. Peter from the 9th century was found, which represents a large archaeological discovery.
The archeological site of Crkvina is a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The discovery of a stone relief altar partition also surprised archaeologists. The plaque
was found by chance, during the conservation of the site, which was considered a researched site. Snjezana Vasilj, an archaeologist stated: “We were surprised because we found one of the rare slabs of the altar partition, which was once built into a Romanesque church. It turned out to be the oldest church from the 9th century, the time of the Romanesque. I must point out that this three-passive church, the Romanesque church, is unique in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Apart from here, they have two more in Croatia ”, BHRT writes.
The site of the Church is a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This
archaeological site is recognizable by the remains of two churches of St. Peter and St.
Petka, and a necropolis of stećak tombstones.
Throughout history, five churches have been built on the site. The archaeological team
from the University of Mostar came to this knowledge after a revision of the research
conducted in 1957.
“The research included two churches, and when we finished the research, it turned out
that there were five churches. It is a big place with 42 excavated graves, both in church
graves and around them,” Vasilj said.
The churches are located near the Vjetrenica cave and the monastery in Zavala. After
conservation, a museum is planned to be built on the site.
This area is known for processing stone materials, the masters of this area will have the
opportunity to show their skills.

https://www.sarajevotimes.com/relief-plate-from-the-9th-century-found-in-bosnia-and-
herzegovina/