Amanda Ruggeri: Skara Brae, first settled 5,000 years ago, is the best-preserved prehistoric village in northern Europe // Ian Sample: Archaeologists discover 'exceptional' site at Lake Titicaca

By Dilip -
Orkney’s number of Stone Age sites implies that the remote Scottish islands once may have been at the centre of it all. But why? An exciting new discovery could hold the clues.
When the owners of Brodgar Farm ploughed up a large notched stone in their field in 2003, they knew it was no normal rock. Someone had altered it. And given the farm’s location, it wouldn’t have been surprising if that someone had lived a very, very long time ago. Even so, no one had any idea of the discovery that lay ahead. “I don’t think anyone could have predicted what we found,” said head archaeologist Nick Card. “It’s rewriting aspects of prehistory.”

Brodgar Farm – now best known for the site found on its property, called the Ness of Brodgar – is on the Mainland island of the Orkney archipelago, about 30 miles off Scotland’s northern coast. The site sits on a finger-like peninsula between the lochs of Harray and Stenness – and at the centre of an archaeological gold mine. On a hill half a mile northwest is the Ring of Brodgar, a stone circle erected around the same time as Stonehenge, some 4,500 years ago. A third of a mile in the other direction are the Stones of Stenness, erected two centuries before that.

Within a mile and a half, you’ll also find the Barnhouse Settlement, the remnants of a village inhabited 5,100 years ago; Maeshowe, the most spectacular chambered tomb of its kind in northwest Europe, built around 3,000 BC and forgotten until Vikings broke in in 1153, leaving runes in their wake; and more than a dozen other prehistoric burial mounds, as well as standing stones and slabs. (Before the 2003 discovery, Brodgar Farm already had two ancient standing stones in the front garden). Skara Brae, the best-preserved prehistoric village in all of northern Europe, lies just another five miles away... read more:
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20151210-were-these-remote-wild-islands-the-centre-of-everything

Archaeologists discover 'exceptional' site at Lake Titicaca
An ancient ceremonial site described as exceptional has been discovered in the Andes by marine archaeologists, who recovered ritual offerings and the remains of slaughtered animals from a reef in the middle of Lake Titicaca. The remarkable haul points to a history of highly charged ceremonies in which the elite of the region’s Tiwanaku state boated out to the reef and sacrificed young llamas, seemingly decorated for death, and made offerings of gold and exquisite stone miniatures to a ray-faced deity, as incense billowed from pottery pumas.
Tiwanaku state arose in the Lake Titicaca basin, around the border of modern Bolivia and Peru, between the 5th and 12th centuries AD, and went on to become one of the largest and most influential in the Andes. Formed by a natural fault that divides the Andes into two mountain ranges, the basin is a unique ecosystem with an “inland sea” set 3,800m above sea level. At the time of the Spanish conquest, the basin was home to an estimated 1 million people.

Marine archaeologists decided to explore the Khoa reef after amateur divers found a number of ancient items at the site. The reef is submerged in more than 5m of water about 10km off the northwestern tip of the Island of the Sun, a central feature of Lake Titicaca. The researchers excavated a trove of artefacts including a lapis lazuli puma figurine and other miniature stone animals, ceramic puma incense burners and gold ornaments including engraved sheets, a medallion, and an L-shaped piece marked with puma and condor silhouettes. Perforated gold leaves still attached to fragments of leather may have been used to make ear tassels and other regalia to dress young llamas killed in the ancient ceremonies, the researchers believe...read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/01/archaeologists-discover-exceptional-site-at-lake-titicaca

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