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Archaeologists recently analyzed the partially cremated remains of a necropolis on the north side of Ischia, a volcanic island off the coast of Italy. In new research published in PLoS ONE, the team reveals that a grave believed to belong to one person actually contained three.
The finds are a change from previous interpretations of the 2,800-year-old tomb, which is located in a necropolis in Pithékoussai, a Greek site on Ischia, just outside Naples. (Ischia is volcanic, and its last eruption dates back to 1302, according to the Smithsonian’s World Volcanism Program.) Melania Gigante, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Padua and lead author of the new study, told Gizmodo in an email that previous assumptions that a single child was buried in the grave were inaccurate and that further analysis partially cremated remains, including bone fragments – actually indicate three people, as well as several animals.
A cup found inside the tomb is engraved with a poem that refers to the cup of Nestor of which Homer speaks. The verses on the cup of Pithekoussai roughly translate as “I am the cup of Nestor, good to drink.” Whoever drinks this empty cup, immediately the desire of Aphrodite with the beautiful crown will seize him ”, according to a Translation by classic John Boardman. For this reason, the cup is sometimes called the Cup of Nestor, but it should not be confused with the Golden ‘Cup of Nestor’ found in Mycenae in the 19th century.
Giorgio Buchner, one of the original archaeologists of the site who found the cup, written in 1966 that “the inscription is among the oldest known documents of Greek writing and represents the first piece of poetry from the Homeric period preserved in contemporary writing”.
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The team’s recent interpretive work has been complicated by the fact that the tomb’s burial mound has been destroyed to make way for subsequent burials. By the time Buchner excavated the tomb in the 1950s (the excavation that revealed Nestor’s cup strewn in the ground), it had already been disturbed millennia ago. Study of the remains cremated at the time determined that only one individual was buried there, with estimates of their age at death ranging from 10 to 14 years.
But the large number of goods buried in the tomb would mean that the deceased was extremely important. So the recent team re-examined the cremated remains and, indeed, came away with a different conclusion.
“Morphological analysis of the cremated remains allowed us to distinguish a few animal fragments from human ones,” Gigante said. Beyond that, she added, histological analysis indicated that the burnt bone fragments belonged to three individuals rather than one, and none of them appeared to have been a child.
Researchers were unable to determine more details, such as the ages of the people or exactly why they were buried with the cut. The animals, the team suspect, were included as food or friends for the afterlife (animal bones appeared to belong to sheep, bulls, pigs, dogs and birds, although the exact number of each animal is not determinable).
It is uncertain who was actually buried in the tomb, but now archaeologists can at least begin to rely on the deceased in the plural.
More: Greek farmer finds 3,400-year-old grave under his olive grove
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