Category Archives: Archaeology

Spain’s Lead-Lined Lakes

ja13-coverResearchers from the University of Granada collected mountain lake sediments from Laguna de Río Seco in southern Spain that had accumulated over 10,000 years, trapping deposits from the atmosphere. In these stacks of mud, they found fine layers of lead that reveal millennia of metalworking and migration, and may be the oldest evidence of air pollution in southern Europe. “[The mud] has been capturing the evolution of air pollution from the Neolithic to present times and giving us an idea of the activity of each of the populations that have passed through southern Iberia,” says team leader José Antonio Lozano, “such as the Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and more.”

The team dates the first man-made uptick in pollution to between 3,900 and 3,500 years ago, which matches the appearance at nearby sites of coins, weapons, and decorations that, when made, left behind lead by-products. The lead records also attest to a quiet period, when mining moved elsewhere in Iberia, and to a spike corresponding with a period of Roman mining. But all those signals are dwarfed by a more modern surge, which the team attributes to the leaded gasoline in heavy use from the 1950s to the 1970s. The good news, the researchers report, is that present-day lead levels are already below those of the worst Roman deposits.

This From the Trenches item first appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of Archaeology Magazine: [html] [pdf]

Vasa’s Curious Imbalance

The warship survived the first blast of wind it encountered on its maiden voyage in Stockholm Harbor. But the second gust did it in. The sinking of Vasa, on August 10, 1628, took place nowhere near an enemy. In fact, it sank in full view of a horrified public, assembled to see off their navy’s—and Europe’s—most ambitious warship to date. The 220-foot, triple-deck, 64-gun leviathan, elaborately adorned, had been rush-ordered for King Gustav Adolf’s war against Poland. But before it faced an opposing ship or fired a single shot, Vasa slipped beneath the waves.

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