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Archaeology News
Death and the maidens
04-19-07 - North America — , Pennsylvania
Penn researchers tackle Mesopotamian mystery.
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Dozens of maidens, wearing headdresses of gold and lapis lazuli, walked down into a tomb in Mesopotamia 4,600 years ago. Each raised a cup to her lips, drank some poison, and lay down to die, hoping to join a king or other royal figure in the afterlife.
It is an enduring tale from one of archaeology's most famous excavations, pieced together in the late 1920s after the discovery of several such "death pits" full of jewel-encrusted skeletons with clay cups at their sides.
Yesterday, Aubrey Baadsgaard set out to prove the story wrong.
Like some members of the team that dug up the remains nearly 80 years ago, she works at the University of Pennsylvania. But unlike them, she has access to the tools of modern science.
At 7 a.m., the skull from sacrificial maiden number 53 left its home at Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Baadsgaard and other Penn scholars drove it across the street to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where it would receive a CAT scan - the first of several tests to determine who the young woman was, how she died and why.
Such scans are all the rage among museums with an Egyptian mummy or two. Tutankhamun's remains have undergone the procedure, as has an anonymous Ptolemaic mummy at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences.
But yesterday's scan of the Mesopotamian maiden is part of a massive effort at Penn, funded by $250,000 from the National Science Foundation.
Researchers are taking high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the university's entire historic collection of human and primate remains - roughly 10,000 skulls in all, some with other bones still attached. The images can then be sent around the world for study while the skulls remain safely on a shelf.
"We want to create a virtual museum," said Janet Monge, the Penn museum's acting curator of physical anthropology.
Baadsgaard's project, which includes the maiden and a helmeted soldier also scanned yesterday, is both scholarship and detective work.
The graduate student and her adviser, Penn professor Richard Zettler, believe the maiden and her 73 companions in the pit - most of them women - were indeed part of a mass sacrifice. But there has never been direct evidence of poisoning in the pit, and cups have been found in other tombs with no suggestion of sacrifice. Rather, Baadsgaard and Zettler suspect that the women were killed above ground, mummified in some primitive fashion, then carried down into the tomb. It is unclear whether the women were willing participants.
The scientists also hope to flesh out a theory by a University of Wisconsin scholar that the victims were not native to the area, but were brought from hundreds of miles away in what is today Pakistan.
It is tricky work. Both skulls were flattened during their long-ago burial and are caked with ancient dirt. But with a CAT scan - which uses X-rays to create three-dimensional pictures, one wafer-thin slice at a time - the two heads began to reveal their secrets.
First came the maiden.
Hospital technologist Scott Steingall pushed a button, and her skull moved slowly into the white, doughnut-shaped scanning device. An image appeared on the screen.
The woman's golden headdress and other jewelry obscured some of the bone fragments, as the radiation did not penetrate the metal. But Baadsgaard quickly spotted one thing she was after: the teeth.
She and Monge looked for a tooth that could be removed easily without damaging the artifact, with two goals in mind:
Some genetic material may be left in the tooth's inner chamber that once held fleshy pulp. If so, her DNA can be tested.
In addition, the tooth would be sent to Wisconsin, where scientists hope to discern the woman's diet by studying levels of various strontium isotopes in her enamel. If she and the other maidens did not eat Mesopotamian foods, that would support the theory that they were brought from far away.
Monge spotted one molar with a shallow root hole, which meant it might easily be extracted once she drills into the mass of hardened earth and bone.
"Basically, this person had periodontal disease," Monge said. "That'll help us out." "
Full story:
philly.com
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