Modern science and technology is revolutionising archaeology not only improving what we know about the past, but taking in months only what archaeologists in the past took over one hundred years to discover, a bone reader has told a science lecture in Sydney.
In only a few years we have learnt that prehistoric humans over 6000 years ago used beeswax to ease toothaches along with unearthing the oldest Roman military fort in Europe dating back before the birth of Christ that was used by Roman legions as a doorstop into Eastern and Central Europe.
Advanced radiocarbon dating, satellite and X-ray imaging, neutron science and biomechanical modelling are among a handful of tools and techniques aiding scientists to uncover the past, which Professor Claudio Tuniz was on hand to explain to an audience at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) at Lucas Heights.
Professor Tuniz who was involved in both these discoveries is a Science Consultant from the Multidisciplinary Laboratory at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste Italy, which is an UNESCO institute.
In a lecture spanning thousands of years of human history, Tuniz said what made his research so exciting was not just the methods being used, but also the short time it’s taken to make these discoveries.
Speaking about the seaport northern Italian city of Trieste, Tuniz and ICTP researchers had unearthed half the number of finds in the region (12) in six months that took traditional archaeologists more than 100 years to discover (24).
“Here on this map are black dots (24 dots) showing all the historical sites discovered over the past 100yrs, Professor Tuniz showed the audience.
“The red dots (12 dots) are the ones we found using LIDAR in about 6 months. This gives you an idea of the power of this method. Airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) is an imaging technique similar to medical CT scans.
Tuniz and a team of researchers led by Dr Federico Bernardini used LIDAR imaging to reveal a large rectangular structure that turned out to be a military camp founded in 187 BC and used by Roman soldiers preparing to fight in Eastern and Central Europe.
This technique represents a revolution in landscape archaeology and archaeological mapping and can provide unexpected results even in relatively urbanised territories investigated for a long time.
“If you went there before you’d only see trees and shrubs, but using LIDAR combined with our nice software, we could clear away the vegetation and see from a computer what turned out to be Roman remains from the Republican period.”
Similar imaging techniques also were used to solve a mystery dating back to 1911 when a partial fragment of a human mandible was found in a cave in what is now modern Slovenia.
“There was a cave close to Trieste that in 1911 was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
“Giuseppe Miller was an anthropologist in Trieste at the time and was also interested in archaeology.
“He found a piece of human mandible sticking out of the cave and made a sketch of it.
People lost track of the discovery until Tuniz and his group rediscovered it.
Modern science and technology overturned what for years researchers believed was the fragment of an extinct animal.
It turned out to be the left portion of the mandible with a canine and two premolars and the first two molars belonging to a man in his twenties and dating back over 6500 years. It was kept at the Museum of Natural History museum in Trieste until 2010. It stayed there for many years with the only research of note being a paper in 1937.
“The paper came out using radiography but nothing interesting really eventuated from it,” Professor Tuniz said.
It wasn’t until around 2011 that a joke between Tuniz and his colleagues and some in depth imaging using X-ray micro tomography by the SYRMEP Elettra-Trieste synchrotron and additional lab work at ANSTO that the group including collaborators from the University of Wollongong discovered the prehistoric man had a beeswax filling covering fractures in his tooth.
“Back then (1937), they didn’t have radiocarbon accelerator mass spectrometry invented in 1977 or synchrotron radiation CT scanning invented in 1987.
“So until this type of technology was around the specimen sat there in a corner of the museum.
“Then we get to 2012 and by this time the cave is now a part of Slovenia.
“We studied different parts of the mandible and found the canine had a strange material.
“It had fractures. I mean this guy had some real problems with his tooth. As a joke we said maybe that’s some sort of dental filling. Then we had to set up a few scenarios with referees to prove this as the case.
“You can do that by studying with a CT scan high resolution. With that you could see the directions of the fractures.
“When we studied it closely it turned out it was beeswax. To qualify the results, additional tests were run in Australia and when these results came out identical there was a lot of international interest with stories in CNN, The Times, NewScientist and Sydney Morning Herald among them.”