Two of the burial pits were neatly laid out, with two rows of corpses,
each containing at least 13 layers of bodies. In a third pit the bodies
were initially laid out in an orderly fashion, but later corpses appear
to have been tossed in chaotically.

In 14th-century Britain, half the popu-lation – around 3 million people
– died during the most devastating episode of the Black Death, which began
in 1349.

The excavation, just outside the city’s cathedral, has unearthed 940
other complete skeletons buried between 1143 and 1791, as well as the disarticulated
remains of around 5000 late Anglo-Saxon and Norman skeletons.

‘The mass graves are important because they give us a complete cross
section of society – almost a snapshot of a medieval city’s population,’
says Nic Appleton-Fox of the City of Hereford Archaeological Unit.

About a quarter of the complete skeletons show evidence of periostitis
– a bone disease caused by septic infections such as skin ulcers, open sores
or ulcerated varicose veins. Apart from the probable plague victims, most
men seem to have been between 30 and 50 years old when they died. Most
women died between the ages of 25 and 45, often as a result of complications
in pregnancy.

(see Graphic) Fragments of the world’s oldest ocean-going boats have been found on the coast of Oman, at Ras Al Junayz, 200 kilometres southeast of Muscat on the Indian Ocean. Discovered by a team of French and Italian archaeologists, the pieces appear to have come from large reed vessels around 4300 years old, which might have crossed more than 800 kilometres of ocean on trading voyages.FIG-mg18790401.jpg

Along with the fragments, the archaeologists have unearthed dozens of pieces of ancient Indian pottery and other objects which must have been imported into Oman by sea.

The ships themselves, some perhaps 20 metres long, could have been local vessels or they may have been built and sailed by seafarers from the Indus Valley Civilisation, which flourished in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. In its heyday towards the end of the third millennium BC, the Indus valley was the home of one of the world’s three great early civilisations, ranking alongside Mesopotamia and Egypt.

With the boat fragments were an Indus valley ivory comb, an Indus valley copper trading seal, various Indian carnelian beads, and quantities of broken pottery containers from the Indus valley which were probably used for transporting butter or other foodstuffs. A copper axe and a necklace of copper beads, both of possible Indus valley origin, have been unearthed on the site.

So far, after six years of excavations, the archaeologists, led by Serge Cleuziou of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, and Maurizio Tosi of the University of Naples, have found 300 boat fragments. All are lumps of bitumen, most of them with imprints of reed bundles, ropes and mats. Many of the lumps are encrusted on one side with barnacles, suggesting that they spent some time immersed in seawater.

The pieces of boat and the imported Indus valley pottery and other items were all found among the remains of a group of ancient houses and buildings in which fishing families processed their catches and made jewellery out of seashells. The bitumen fragments were stored inside the houses, presumably as spare material for boat repair work.

The next step will be to discover where the boats were built. Chemical investigations of the bitumen and botanical studies of the impressions made by the reeds should soon enable archaeologists to pinpoint precisely which ancient people built them.

Archaeologists in the Norwegian Arctic have found a spectacular prehistoric
outdoor art gallery with at least a hundred carvings of Stone Age people,
animals, and the world’s oldest images of boats.

Hidden under the turf on the island of Soroya, excavations have uncovered
carved bas-relief images of reindeer, elk, bears, whales, birds, humans
and boats. The images – carved on a series of small boulders – are believed
to date from between 7000 and 9000 years ago. One carving shows a fisherman
seated in a boat in the process of catching what appears to be a halibut.
Four other images show boats with prows carved in the shape of elks’ heads.
Each boat is carrying up to six people.

The excavations, conducted by archaeologists from the Troms Museum,
have also revealed strange carved images of bears’ paw prints. So far, the
team has found 100 carvings, but they have excavated less than 5 per cent
of the site and are likely to find hundreds more.

Soroya lies 450 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, making this the
most northerly collection of rock art in the world. The discovery also pushes
back the date of the early development of rock art in northern Europe by
as much as 2000 years.

Charlotte Damm, one of the leaders at the excavation, said: ‘We were
extremely surprised by the age of these carvings. We found them under gravel
which was deposited 6000 years ago.’ It is likely that the images had some
sort of religious significance, perhaps relating to animals seen as being
ancestral to the hunter-gatherer peoples who lived in the area. The archaeologists
have also found their camp sites, complete with quartzite flint axes, knives,
arrowheads and scrapers for cleaning animal skins.

Also unearthed were the remnants of lumps of red ochre, which people
probably used to paint themselves, or the rock carvings. No painted surfaces
have survived, however. The art-loving hunter-gatherers of Soroya were probably
the ancestors of the Lapps who still inhabit northern Scandinavia.

The site, on an island promontory facing the mainland opposite the town
of Hammerfest, is strung out along a 2 kilometres stretch of prehistoric
beach 12 metres above the present sea level.

Archaeologists have also found the remains of 200 turf-built round houses
constructed around 6500 years ago, well after the last carving was created.