Kiribati Armour is a traditional type of armour found in the Independent Republic of Kiribati in the central Pacific Ocean, made from woven coconut fibres and the remains of aquatic animals.
It is thought that the Gilbert Islands within Kiribati were settled sometime between 3000 BC and AD 1300, with the later emergence of the Kiribati culture, a sea-faring people that are renowned for building maneaba (large communal buildings) and swift outrigger sailing canoes.
The Kiribati people utilised the vegetation growing on the islands to provide food and oil, timber for canoes and houses, leaves for making mats, baskets, containers, and crucially, coconut fibre to create string.
The islanders also created complex suits of armour using thickly woven sennit from the coconut fibre string (known as te kora). Both men and women contributed to the creation of armour, with women producing te kora which is the basis of the major components.
The historical provenance of the armour is largely speculated due to no written language, with only elements of surviving oral tradition that has been supressed over the centuries due to colonial expansion by Europeans.
Image Credit : Daderot – CC0 1.0
It is suggested that the armour was used for ritualistic one-on-one combat over land and resources, where those involved took turns to inflict wounds on each other according to strict rules. The combatants used weapons that resembled medieval broadswords with a serrated edge made from shark teeth, whilst wearing protective headgear made from dried blowfish.
Anthropologist Katharine Luomala, who worked in Kiribati during the 1940s, noted that “the intent was to wound and not to slay; a slayer was regarded as a murderer and had to pay compensation in land”.
The first Europeans to arrive at the Gilbert Islands was the Spanish and Portuguese during the 16th century AD, but the first encounter with the islanders was when John Byron, commodore of HMS Dolphin arrived in AD 1765.
By the 19th century, the Gilbert Islands were being visited weekly by whaling vessels who noted of the distinctive armour and weapons, with Europeans often trading with the islanders for supplies and ‘curios’ such as shark teeth weapons and the coconut fibre armour.
In AD 1892 the islands were placed under the protectorate of the British Empire, in which the fibre armour was banned due to its association with combat, and were destroyed along with other items of ritual and spiritual significance by Christian missionaries.
Antikythera Shipwreck Continues To Yield Artifacts After 120 Years
BY ASHLEY ALVARADO
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Divers recently found a marble head depicting Hercules on the Antikythera shipwreck (Credit: Antikythera.org.gr)
A Roman-era cargo ship that sank near the Greek island of Antikythera over two thousand years ago has been yielding abundant ancient treasures since its discovery in 1900. In late June 2022, researchers revealed their latest find — a marble head depicting the Greek and Roman demigod Hercules. The expedition team believes it belongs to a headless sculpture of Hercules found during the first visit to the shipwreck.
"In 1900, [sponge divers] pulled out the statue of Hercules, and now in all probability, we've found its head," explained lead researcher and archeologist Lorenz Baumer. "It's a most impressive marble piece. It is twice life size, has a big beard, a very particular face, and short hair. There is no doubt it is Hercules."
The Antikythera Mechanism is believed to be the world's first computer (Credit: National Archaeological Museum)
The ancient Roman vessel, which dates to approximately 60BCE, when Greece was under the rule of the Roman Empire. Captain Dimitrios Kondos and his team led the first wave of excavations in 1900. The divers salvaged 36 marble statues, including renditions of mythological figures like Hermes, Apollo, and Hercules.
They also recovered several bronze statues. These artifacts are rare since most bronze sculptures from ancient Greece were melted to make coins and weapons. The most significant find, however, was the Antikythera Mechanism. Often referred to as the world's oldest computer, it calculated and displayed information about astronomical phenomena, such as eclipses, decades in advance.
The exploration project came to an abrupt halt in the summer of 1901 after a diver was killed and two others were paralyzed from decompression sickness. In 1976, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his crew revisited the shipwreck and retrieved human skeletal remains and various other objects.
The divers also recovered a marble plinth portraying the lower legs of a sculpture (Credit: Nikos Giannoulakis/Hellenistic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece)
The latest discovery is part of the "Return to Antikythera" expedition launched in 2012. The marble head was found in the ship's unexplored hull area, previously covered by large boulders. The divers also found a marble base with the legs of another statue, parts of the ship's equipment, and two human teeth. The artifacts will be added to the already impressive collection on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Species of the horse genus Equus first appeared on the North American continent during the Pliocene era and spread to and across Eurasia beginning around 2.5 million years ago. They disappeared from the Western Hemisphere during the megafauna extinction event at the end of the Pleistocene and the last glacial period. The return of equids to the Americas through the introduction of the domestic horse (Equus caballus) is documented in the historical literature but is not explored fully either archaeologically or genetically. Historical documents suggest that the first domestic horses were brought from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caribbean in the late 15th century CE, but archaeological remains of these early introductions are rare. In new research, scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Georgia Museum of Natural History sequenced the mitochondrial genome of a 16th century horse from the Spanish colonial site of Puerto Real, northern Haiti.
Delsol et al. support early colonial accounts that suggest Spanish Andalusia was the source of the first horses brought to the Caribbean.
Located on the island of Hispaniola, the town of Puerto Real was one of Spain’s first colonized settlements.
It was established in 1507 and served for decades as the last port of call for ships sailing from the Caribbean.
But rampant piracy and the rise of illegal trade in the 16th century forced the Spanish to consolidate their power elsewhere on the island, and in 1578, residents were ordered to evacuate Puerto Real. The abandoned town was destroyed the following year by Spanish officials.
The remnants of the once-bustling port were inadvertently rediscovered by the medical missionary William Hodges in 1975.
Archaeological excavations of the site led by the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Dr. Kathleen Deagan were carried out between 1979 and 1990.
Horse fossils and associated artifacts were incredibly rare at Puerto Real and similar sites from the time period.
“Horses were reserved for individuals of high status, and owning one was a sign of prestige,” said lead author Dr. Nicolas Delsol, a researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
“There are full-page descriptions of horses in the documents that chronicle the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Mexico, demonstrating how important they were to the Spanish.”
In a new study, Dr. Delsol and his colleagues examined a tooth fragment, originally misidentified as cow, found at Puerto Real.
They sequenced the mitochondrial genome, not only allowing for a correct identification, but also making this the earliest known complete mitogenome of a post-Columbian domestic horse in the Americas.
According to the team, this horse belongs to a genetic lineage called equine haplogroup A, whose members are well known from Southern Europe, supporting the hypothesis that they originated on the Iberian Peninsula.
Furthermore, this horse’s closest living relatives are the feral ponies of Chincoteague Island, Virginia, said by local folk stories to have become stranded after a Spanish shipwreck.
Although the study presents only a single mitochondrial genome, the authors suggest the results are significant in multiple respects.
First, this horse’s position within a common Iberian lineage supports documentation of the Iberian Peninsula as the source of many early American domestic horses.
Second, the relationships between this horse and others in the Americas will help clarify our understanding of the path horses took as they colonized the Americas.
“Our study highlights how ancient DNA can help us understand cultural and historical processes, not only in the remote past but also in understudied episodes of more recent history,” the authors said.
“The analysis of the introduction of European domesticates (e.g. the horse) in the Americas is such a fascinating yet understudied topic.”
“Our results support the Iberian origins of these animals but they also highlight another narrative: the exploration of the mid-Atlantic coast by the Spanish early during the colonial period.”
N. Delsol et al. 2022. Analysis of the earliest complete mtDNA genome of a Caribbean colonial horse (Equus caballus) from 16th-century Haiti. PLoS ONE 17 (7): e0270600; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270600
NOAA has asked the public for suggestions on what they could be
The holes appear as a closely aligned, regularly repeating pattern. Tiny piles of sediment are piled around them.(Image credit: NOAA)
Explorers have discovered a series of mysterious, "perfectly aligned" holes punched into the seafloor roughly 1.6 miles (2.6 kilometers) beneath the ocean surface, and they have no idea who or what made them.
The strange holes were spotted by the crew of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Okeanos Explorer vessel as they investigated the Mid-Atlantic Ridge — a mostly unexplored region of the seafloor that is part of the world's largest mountain range.
The holes form a straight line and appear at regularly repeating distances, and they are surrounded by tiny mounds of sediment. This isn't the first time that holes have been spotted in the area; two marine scientists from the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service also spotted mysterious hollows in the ocean floor during a dive in 2004.
"These holes have been previously reported from the region, but their origin remains a mystery," the NOAA researchers wrote onFacebook. "While they look almost human made, the little piles of sediment around the holes make them seem like they were excavated by... something."
In 2004, scientists proposed that an organism living in or sifting through the seafloor's sediment made the holes, but because no one has seen such creatures make them, their exact origins are unknown. Public speculation under the NOAA post's Facebook page ranged widely — from cracks in the floor's surface made by escaping gas, to underwater human craft digging for treasure, to ants, aliens and even starfish doing cartwheels.
The unresolved mystery is reminiscent of an underwater "yellow brick road" to Atlantisthat ocean explorers discovered on top of an underwater mountain near Hawaii in May. Scientists explained that discovery — they suspected that heating and cooling of the seafloor across multiple volcanic eruptions created the strange path.
What is creating the holes, on the other hand, may take a little longer to figure out. The researchers will continue to explore the region until September as part of the Voyage to the Ridge 2022 expedition, which aims to map out the region'scoral reefsand sponge habitats alongside studying the region's hydrothermal vents and its fracture and rift zones. Maybe if they're lucky, they might just catch the hole-maker in the act.
