Archeology: Ancient mysteries from the Titanic to Stonehenge yield their secrets to high-tech tools of space exploration, medicine, physics and 'common sense.'By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, Associated Press
When British archeologist Howard Carter unearthed King Tut's tomb in 1922, he revealed history's most dazzling cache of artifacts using tools found in any gardener's potting shed--trowels, a fine screen to sift tons of Sahara sand, and wheelbarrows to cart off golden loot. As the millennium turns, researchers in Egypt's Valley of the Kings and thousands of other archeological sites worldwide still lay bare the bones of lost civilizations using the most humble of household utensils. But that's just the beginning of the job. The Victorian image of a solitary scientist dressed in a linen suit and pursuing lost worlds with a whisk broom has been zapped into oblivion by lasers and particle accelerators. The search for ancient cultures now is an expensive, high-tech enterprise that borrows from space exploration, medical research and nuclear physics. Orbiting satellites use the same kind of radar that pierced the clouds of Venus to work like electronic machetes, "clearing" the jungles that obscure long-buried cities and tombs. DNA analysis of mummies and skeletons determines family relationships and human migration patterns over continents and thousands of generations. Scanning electron microscopes examine the silica skeletons of grain from humankind's first harvests. Undersea robots crawl around shipwrecks like crabs, transmitting haunting video images of still-brimming wine jugs in Mediterranean galleys and empty leather shoes amid the Titanic wreckage. "Men and women in white coats, toiling away in their laboratories, have become as important as rugged fieldworkers slogging away under the hot sun," said Christopher Scarre of Cambridge University in England, who has prepared a sweeping analysis of "high-tech digging" for Archaeology magazine. "One day we may be able to excavate a site without ever setting a spade to earth," Scarre said. Some of the mysteries that have been with us for generations, such as Easter Island, still elude definitive solutions. Others can easily be demystified with a simple dose of common sense, as one researcher is trying to do at Stonehenge. But elsewhere, high-tech methods are revealing surprises, even at the most famous and well-documented sites. Egypt's pyramids director, Zahi Hawass, believes that decades of conventional digging have uncovered only 30% of his nation's ancient monuments. Now the work Carter made famous is being accelerated by remote sensing. In the Nile Delta, French marine archeologist Franck Goddio is using the global satellite navigation system to map Cleopatra's palace submerged beneath Alexandria's murky port. Nearly 2,000 years after her suicide by snakebite, authorities hope to reopen the site as an underwater park. In nearby waters, Goddio also has found Napoleon's flagship and other vessels destroyed in 1798 by British Adm. Horatio Nelson. (Descendants of Napoleon and Nelson flew in to witness the discovery in June.) At the Giza Plateau, archeologists are using remote sensing and animation graphics to map the vast public works system that supported the pyramids' construction by 20,000 laborers more than 4,000 years ago. Pyramid workers typically died in their 30s, two decades earlier than royalty. Many suffered from spinal trauma, broken bones and amputations. Some had syphilis. How do we know? Genetic analysis and CT scans. In Peru, U.S. pathologists using CT scans determined that the Ice Maiden, a mummy of an Inca girl, died of a blow to the head as a human sacrifice 500 years ago rather than freezing to death as was initially surmised. At Angkor in Cambodia, NASA researchers using a synthetic aperture radar are mapping 1,000 temples obscured by the dense forest canopy, as well as a network of now-dry canals and reservoirs. In 1100, the images suggest, Angkor may have been the world's largest city, with 1 million people. The radar is mounted on a DC-8. As the jet flies over the tropical jungle, the different pings bouncing off stone, water, plants and soil create a three-dimensional map. Halfway around the world, in the Valley of Mexico, different technologies are peeling back the past. Later this year, researchers expect to pierce the core of the massive Pyramid of the Moon, perhaps revealing the contents of a royal tomb that has lain undisturbed since it was sealed 2,000 years ago. This part of the job remains slow and dirty. Blame it on the architecture. Egypt's pyramids are constructed like a giant anthill, with strong walls and grand galleries leading to a pharaoh's sarcophagus. But at Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City, first-century pyramids are built more like a huge Tootsie Pop, with layers of unstable rubble covering a deeply buried tomb. Burrowing into the Moon temple, archeologists can hear the footsteps of tourists ascending the same impossibly steep stairs once climbed by astronomer-priests and their unlucky sacrificial victims. "We might find Tutankhamen of the West," said forensic anthropologist Michael Spence of the University of Western Ontario, referring to the lavish burial of the Egyptian boy popularly known as King Tut. "Or we might find nothing." At the far end of Teotihuacan's creepy Avenue of the Dead, researchers have reassembled the remains of 200 people sacrificed during the city's zenith in AD 200 at the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, or Quetzalcoatl. Spence and others are applying crime-lab methods to preserved biological evidence--DNA, bone isotopes and skeletal traits--to reconstruct the story behind this ancient mass grave. Many victims have bound hands. But none show broken ribs that might confirm historical accounts of still-beating hearts being ripped from chests in homage to the gods. "We think they were buried alive," Spence said. Artifacts suggest the victims were related soldiers. Spence and colleagues are trying to trace their origins by comparing oxygen isotopes in their bones. Ground water in different locations has varied chemical signatures, and bones absorb the oxygen isotopes. And the victims' bone isotopes are not found in ground water around Teotihuacan. Spence believes they were the human trophies of a far-flung military campaign, or perhaps a political housecleaning of the empire. "A clan would not volunteer to lose 30 of its young men," Spence said. One doomed young man tried to kick his way to freedom. Discovering his 1,800-year-old agony was unnerving. "Sometimes at night, when you think about what you've done and seen, it gets kind of spooky," Spence said. "You hear the echoes of some long-past grief." Two thousand miles north, near St. Louis, scientists are using geophysical instruments to electronically peer deep inside a different type of pyramid. Monk's Mound is perhaps the most mysterious ancient structure in the United States. The earthen terrace rises 100 feet over the remnants of the aboriginal city of Cahokia, now a 2,200-acre protected site at Collinsville, Ill. The city of 15,000 flourished around 1300. Researchers have drilled core samples and used remote sensing instruments to investigate a stone tomb or ritual platform deep inside the mound. Stone construction is unheard of at Cahokia. "It's a large structure, and it's very special," said project director William Woods of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. "It looks as if there was at least one mound here before Monk's Mound was built." Above the stone layer, researchers recorded a pair of magnetic anomalies 25 meters apart. Each anomaly is about 2 meters wide and up to 6 meters deep. More tests are being conducted this summer to determine whether they are walls. In contrast, stone is the only material at Easter Island. The 63-square-mile black lava outcrop in the Pacific Ocean, also called Rapa Nui, is the planet's most remote year-round settlement, and it's about 1,000 years past its prime. All that remains of its prehistoric culture are 900 monstrous statues --busts of basalt weighing up to 60 tons, gazing blankly out to sea. For decades, Western archeologists have crisscrossed the island searching for clues to what happened on Rapa Nui. Forget the space aliens blather of the 1960s. Analysis of skeletons, tools, fishing debris and the microscopic pollen of hardwood forests suggests a settlement that thrived for centuries, then ran out of food, turned to cannibalism and toppled the statues in defiance and panic. But who built them, why and to what end? The mystery endures. High-tech methods may be most necessary at underwater sites, where slate-gray seas offer no hint of what might be hiding miles below. Explorer Robert Ballard employs an ever-expanding array of robots, cameras and mini-subs to find celebrated deep-water wrecks, among them the Titanic and the Bismarck. In June, Ballard located two 2,500-year-old Phoenician cargo galleys, upright and in pristine condition, 30 miles off the coast of Israel and about 1,500 feet deep. Among their contents: hundreds of wine-filled ceramic jugs. On deck, an incense stand was ready to burn an offering to the gods. "Human history lost on the high seas is waiting to be discovered," Ballard told reporters. But not every ruin needs robots or satellites. Consider Stonehenge, the ring of stone pillars that has brooded over Salisbury Plain in England for 5,000 years. Aubrey Burl, a British authority on stone circles, recently abandoned a lifelong index-card system in favor of personal computer. In minutes, he was able to compare 1,300 sites throughout the British Isles and northern France. Burl's new book, "Great Stone Circles," has bad news for the cloaked Druids, naked nature-lovers and day-tripping tourists who flock to the megalith. Brawny, sky-worshiping ancestors of modern Britons, without the help of writing or the wheel, are widely thought to have hauled its massive stones 200 miles in an epic trek from Wales. They erected them to precisely intersect with the seasonal journeys of the sun and moon. A "lovely story," Burl sniffs. But look again. Stonehenge is not really a circle at all. And, almost certainly, its blocks are leftovers from the Ice Age that Neolithic engineers pried from nearby fields. Impressive, yes. Heroic? Hardly, says Burl. He argues that common sense is enough to debunk the Wales theory. Moreover, Stonehenge's shape and carvings are similar to those found in Brittany, the western province of modern-day France. Stonehenge is French? Sacre Bleu! "I won't say Stonehenge is a mongrel, but it certainly is a hybrid," Burl said. "The entire design is foreign. It is a paradox of construction and nationality." In other words, still a bit of a mystery.