In the 1600s, Europeans exploring the American southeast wrote of a purification ritual practiced by the native people, involving dancing, vomiting, and large amounts of what the travelers called black drink. Served from shell cups, the highly caffeinated tea was brewed from the shrub Ilex vomitoria, a species of holly. In a new study, researchers have found the first direct evidence of black drink — not in shells from Florida or Mississippi, but in ceramic beakers at the ancient city of Cahokia outside what’s now St. Louis, Missouri. The finding hints at a trade network that flourished centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, in which caffeinated drinks had Starbucks-like importance and possibly religious significance.

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Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.

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The remains of the Curtain Theatre, which opened in 1577, were found behind a pub in Shoreditch, east London, as part of regeneration works.

The venue was immortalised as “this wooden O” in the prologue to Henry V.

It is hoped the site could be opened to the public, with plays staged there in the future.

Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) stumbled across parts of the playhouse’s yard and gallery walls after development began on the site last October.

“This is a fantastic site which gives us unique insight into early Shakespearean theatres,” lead archaeologist Chris Thomas said.

‘Significant discovery’

The Curtain was operated by theatre manager James Burbage and was home to Shakespeare’s Company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from 1597 until The Globe opened two years later.

The theatre disappeared from historical records in 1622 but could have remained in use until the outbreak of the Civil War, 20 years later.

Plays thought to have premiered there include Henry V, Romeo and Juliet and Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.

“This is one of the most significant Shakespearean discoveries of recent years,” a spokesman for Plough Yard Developments, which owns the site, said.

“Although The Curtain was known to have been in the area, its exact location was a mystery.

“The quality of the remains found is remarkable and we are looking forward to working with Mola, [the] local community and Shakespearean experts to develop plans that will give the public access to the theatre remains as part of a new development.”

Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd added: “I look forward to touching the mud and stone, if not wood, and feeling the presence of that space where Shakespeare’s early work, including the histories, made such a lasting impact.”

Further excavations are expected to take place later this year.

[ verbatim source: bbc news ]

March 10, 2009—Among the many medieval plague victims recently unearthed near Venice, Italy, one reportedly had never-before-seen evidence of an unusual affliction: being “undead.”

The partial body and skull of the woman showed her jaw forced open by a brick (above)—an exorcism technique used on suspected vampires.

It’s the first time that archaeological remains have been interpreted as belonging to a suspected vampire, team leader Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Florence, told National Geographic News.

Borrini has been digging up mass graves on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, where the “vampire” was found, since 2006.

(See mass grave pictures of plague victims on another island near Venice.)

“I was lucky. I [didn’t] expect to find a vampire during my excavations,” he said.

Belief in vampires was rampant in the Middle Ages, mostly because the process of decomposition was not well understood.

For instance, as the human stomach decays, it releases a dark “purge fluid.” This bloodlike liquid can flow freely from a corpse’s nose and mouth, so it was apparently sometimes confused with traces of vampire victims’ blood.

The fluid sometimes moistened the burial shroud near the corpse’s mouth enough that it sagged into the jaw, creating tears in the cloth.

Since tombs were often reopened during plagues so other victims could be added, Italian gravediggers saw these decomposing bodies with partially “eaten” shrouds, Borrini said.

Vampires were thought by some to be causes of plagues, so the superstition took root that shroud-chewing was the “magical way” that vampires spread pestilence, he said. Inserting objects—such as bricks and stones—into the mouths of alleged vampires was thought to halt the disease.

[ source: national geographic news, via steve niles ]

For well over a century, the contorted features of ancient mummies have led to speculation of untold pain and horrible deaths. The examples quoted above are from the examination of Egyptian mummies more than 120 years ago. Today, similar descriptions can still be found in television programs and academic writings. “Is this the face of a queen? What kind of terrible end did she meet?” and “a terrible head wound, an agonized scream,” intones the narrator of “Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen,” a 2007 documentary. A photo caption in the scholarly volume Mummies and Death in Egypt (2006) reads “mummy of a boy five years of age, fixed in agony.” And the widely covered 2007 discovery of Chachapoya mummies in Peru prompted this newspaper headline “Moment 600 years ago that terror came to Mummies of the Amazon” and copy “Hands over her eyes and her face gripped with terror, the woman’s fear of death is all too obvious.”

Mummies with their mouths agape or lips pulled back as if they are screaming or writhing in pain are truly startling. Two of the most famous–designated Unknown Woman A and Unknown Man E–are from a cache of royal mummies found in 1881 at Deir el-Bahri in Egypt. When first unwrapped in the late nineteenth century, they provoked the shocked reactions quoted above.

Such mummies, however, are found not just in Egypt but worldwide, in Palermo, Sicily, Guanajuato, Mexico, and, as noted above, in Peru. Some of these bodies were purposefully preserved, though by various methods, while others are natural or, you might say, accidental mummies. What does that say about the supposed frozen-mask-of-agony phenomenon? Are screaming mummies really testaments to horrific deaths? Or are they the result of natural processes, botched or ad hoc mummification jobs, or the depredations of tomb robbers?

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