Ancient Egyptian Soldier's Letter Home Deciphered.

A newly deciphered letter home dating back around 1,800 years reveals the pleas of a young Egyptian soldier named Aurelius Polion who was serving, probably as a volunteer, in a Roman legion in Europe.

In the letter, written mainly in Greek, Polion tells his family that he is desperate to hear from them and that he is going to request leave to make the long journey home to see them.

Addressed to his mother (a bread seller), sister and brother, part of it reads: "I pray that you are in good health night and day, and I always make obeisance before all the gods on your behalf. I do not cease writing to you, but you do not have me in mind," it reads. 

"I am worried about you because although you received letters from me often, you never wrote back to me so that I may know how you ..." (Part of the letter hasn't survived.)

Polion says he has written six letters to his family without response, suggesting some sort of family tensions.

"While away in Pannonia I sent (letters) to you, but you treat me so as a stranger," he writes. "I shall obtain leave from the consular (commander), and I shall come to you so that you may know that I am your brother …"

Found in an ancient Egyptian town

The letter was found outside a temple in the Egyptian town of Tebtunis more than a century ago by an archaeological expedition led by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. They found numerous papyri in the town and did not have time to translate all of them.

Recently Grant Adamson, a doctoral candidate at Rice University, took up the task of translating the papyrus, using infrared images of it, a technology that makes part of the text more legible. His translation was published recently in the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists.

Adamson isn't sure if the soldier's family responded to his pleas, or if Polion got leave to see them (it's unlikely), but it appears this letter did arrive home.

"I tend to think so. The letter was addressed to and mentions Egyptians, and it was found outside the temple of the Roman-period town of Tebtunis in the Fayyum not far from the Nile River," Adamson wrote in an email to Live Science.

Polion, who lived at a time when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt, was part of the legio II Adiutrix legion stationed in Pannonia Inferior (around modern-day Hungary)

He may have volunteered for the pay and food legions got. However, that doesn't mean Polion knew that he was going to be posted so far away from home.

"He may have volunteered and left Egypt without knowing where he would be assigned," writes Adamson in the journal article. According to the translation, Polion sent the letter to a military veteran who could forward it to his family.

An ancient soldier, a modern problem

The situation seen in this letter, a young man serving as a volunteer in a military unit far away from home, facing tensions with his family and seeking leave to see them sounds like something that happens in modern-day armed forces.

Although soldiers today have an easier time communicating and traveling back home (Polion would have had to travel for a month or more to reach Tebtunis from his posting in Europe), there are some themes that connect both ancient and modern soldiers, Adamson said.

"I think that some aspects of military service belong to a common experience across ancient and modern civilizations — part of our human experience in general really. Things like worry and homesickness."

The letter is now in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Source: LiveScience

Shamanic figurine guarding shaft tomb discovered in Colima.

A shaft tomb containing skeletal remains along with a rich assemblage of grave goods, has been discovered in a later cemetery in the state of Colima, Mexico by researchers at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

Archaeologist Marco Zavaleta Lucido explained, shaft tombs such as this are targeted by looters because of the beauty of the materials deposited within them. The excavators have produced a detailed record of this burial area which unusually, was found intact.

Shaman sculpture

The sculpture of a long faced shaman holding a blowpipe is the guardian of the shaft tomb sealed up more than 1500 years ago.

In April 2013 archaeologists uncovered and began excavating a cemetery that contained the remains of 35 adults, of both male and females, as well as three infants, all within stone cists dating to what is called the Colima phase, AD400 to 600. Near these burials Marco Zavaleta located a sealed vertical shaft of 1.50 metres square, which represented the entrance to the tomb, dating to a slightly earlier date (AD0-500).

Within this probably family tomb chamber they found the skeletal remains of one or two individuals placed deliberately on top of  another older internment. Once the archaeologists had excavated to floor level, they found another individual lying on its back.

Source: Past Horizonts / INAH

Prehistoric fossil collectors.

Ken McNamara on the earliest evidence of the fossil collecting instinct in humans

Geoscientist 22.05 June 2012

It was a cold Spring day in 1887 on the Chilterns when amateur archaeologist Worthington Smith made one of his most impressive discoveries – the skeletons of a young woman and a child that had lain entwined in their shallow grave for about 4000 years. But there was something very strange about this burial. They were not alone. Hundreds of balls of flint, each engraved with a five-pointed star, lay with the fragile bones – a cornucopia of fossil sea urchins. And to Smith’s expert eye, they all seemed to have been buried very carefully with the bodies in their chalky grave. Yet of all the possible grave goods that could accompany the deceased pair into the afterlife, why choose such strange objects?

Image: Drawing by Worthington G. Smith of skeleton of woman (he called Maud) and child that he found on Dunstable Down in 1887. The skeleton was buried with hundreds of fossil sea urchins.

PETRIFIED

It has only been for the last three hundred years or so that most people have accepted the view that fossils represent the petrified remains of organisms that once lived millions of years ago. In 1665 the great English physicist, astronomer, geologist, chemist, architect and microscopist Robert Hooke published his seminal book Micrographia, in which he argued that fossils “do owe their formation and figuration, not to any kind of Plastick virtue inherent in the earth, but to the Shells of certain Shell-fishes which...came to be.... filled with some kind of Mudd or Clay or petrifying Water, or some other substance, which in tract of time has been settled together and hardned [sic] in those shelly moulds into those shaped substances we now find them.”.

Image: Neolithic skeleton from Whitehawk causewayed camp, Brighton, found in 1933 buried with a fossil sea urchin (top left).

This may come as no surprise to us today, but in 17th Century Europe such thoughts were not only radical, but verged on the heretical. One who found this out to his cost was the late 16th Century Frenchman Bernard Palissy, who became the first martyr to palaeontology. He died of malnutrition and consumption two years after being incarcerated in the Bastille for having had the temerity to propose that some fossils were “sea-hedgehog [sea urchins] which in the course of time had been turned to stone”.

Hooke’s similar ideas had, in part, been prompted by the little fossils he called ‘button-stones’ and ‘helmet-stones’ that he had collected as a boy on the Isle of Wight. The former are what we now know as ‘regular’, radially symmetrical, sea urchins, the latter being the bilaterally symmetrical ‘irregular’ heart urchins. Both types occur commonly as fossils in Cretaceous and Jurassic rocks in England, and throughout much of Europe and the Mediterranean region.

COLLECTING

Archaeological evidence from these areas reveals that, like Hooke, people have been intrigued by fossil sea urchins and have been collecting them for literally hundreds of thousands of years. Fossil collecting has, undoubtedly, a proud and extraordinarily long heritage. But what did these prehistoric collectors make of their fossil finds? Did they see them as sports of the Devil? Or were they gifts from the Gods? And why did they sometimes bury them with their dead?

Image: Fossil urchin Echinocorys scutatus preserved in flint, collected by Mr Alan Smith from a field in Linkenholt, Hampshire, and known by him as a ‘shepherd’s crown’ and kept by the front door of his cottage.

Long before people began popping fossil urchins in their graves, their distant ancestors had found more practical ways to use them in their daily lives. But these were not the kind of people that you and I would immediately recognise, for it is not just our species, Homo sapiens, that collects fossils. Other species of our genus Homo, living hundreds of thousands of years ago, were equally fascinated by them. But why fossil sea urchins in particular? What was it about these particular fossils that made them attractive to people so long ago? The answer lies, I believe, in the distinctive five-pointed star emblazoned on them.

The earliest evidence we have for someone collecting a fossil sea urchin is a flint handaxe made about 400,000 years ago and found in the gravels of Swanscombe, Kent. Taking pride of place on the axe is the distinctive five-rayed star pattern of the fossil urchin Conulus. Such an Acheulian hand axe is usually worked to a sharp edge on both sides. This one, though, has only been worked on one side. The last blow caused a sliver of the fossil to break off, making it likely that the flint knapper reasoned he would only destroy more of the fossil if he worked the other side. This prescient collector was probably a member of the species Homo heidelbergensis and appears to have been particularly taken by its five-pointed star. It seems that ours was not the first species to evolve an aesthetic sense.

A third species, Homo neanderthalensis, also liked collecting fossil urchins. A number of distinctive Mousterian culture scrapers have been found in France, some made entirely from these fossils, others, like the Swanscombe handaxe, incorporating them into the tool. And this tradition seems to have continued right through to Homo sapiens, many flint tools made about 5000 years ago that contained, or were constructed from, fossil urchins, having been found near a Neolithic flint mine at Spiennes in Belgium.

NEOLITHIC

and incorporating the base of a fossil sea urchin, displaying the five-pointed star motif to best effect.Homo heidelbergensis The Neolithic marks the time when many societies gave up their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence and established permanent settlements. This is when we first find evidence of fossil urchins being used as grave goods. For thousands of years before the Common Era, people had been burying all sorts of items with their loved ones, to the great delight of archaeologists. As well as objects of personal adornment, such as clothing and jewellery, articles were usually those considered to be of some practical use in the afterlife – weapons, animals, pots, bowls, tableware and such like. So why place fossil urchins in graves? Either they must have meant much to the deceased when they were alive, or they had a meaning to them in the afterlife.Graves with both cremated and interred remains have been found to contain fossil urchins. In an Anglo-Saxon grave in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England, a woman lies grasping a fossil urchin in her hand; in a grave of the same age near Cambridge another woman, who suffered from leprosy, is buried in her bed with a leather bag around her neck, containing a sole fossil urchin to accompany her into the afterlife. And high on the chalk downland in the Isle of Wight, five out of a cluster of 12 Bronze Age barrows excavated in the mid-19th Century contained burnt human bones, and all bar one contained a fossil urchin.

All this points to a great spiritual significance attached to these fossils for thousands of years, from at least the Neolithic. Although the Bronze Age grave found by Worthington Smith yielded an impressive haul of more than 300 fossil urchins, this pales into insignificance when compared with the two to three cubic metres of fossil urchins found in a Bronze Age site near Héricourt in France. It has been calculated that this could represent an astonishing 20–30,000 fossils. At the other extreme large barrows (burial mounds) are known from Brittany that when excavated were found to contain nothing but a single fossil urchin - not even a body.

Image: Church-in-the-Wood, a Gypsy “tin tabernacle”, Bramdean, Hampshire. The date it was built, 1883, has been framed using fossil sea urchins.

Fossil urchins were not always found with the dead. Sometimes they show evidence of having been valued by the living, though not as tools. For instance, a cache of fossil urchins discovered in the remains of a settlement in Studland, Dorset that was inhabited between the first and fourth centuries seems to have been deliberately buried under the houses a number of times during this period - and always close to doors and windows! As no written record exists of why people did these things, the only way we can glean some insight into their motives is from the folklore attached to the fossils. Further, it may even be possible to link this with the myths that may have grown up around them – myths that may now be represented merely by a folk name, such as ‘shepherds’ crowns’ or ‘fairy loaves’. Together, archaeology, mythology and folklore allow a greater understanding of the motives behind the activities of prehistoric fossil collectors.

THUNDERSTONE

One myth is that of the ‘thunderstone’. A fossil urchin with a stone axe in a pot in an Iron Age cremation deposit in Kent indicates a link with Norse mythology through the god Thor. Folklore gathered in Denmark and southern England in the early 20th Century revealed that both fossil sea urchins and stone axes were called ‘thunderstones’ and were thought to have been thrown to Earth by Thor. But Thor was not only a malevolent thunder god. He was also the peasants’ god, who gave them protection. So these fossils were placed near windows and doors not only to ward off Thor’s frequently over-exuberant lightning strikes, but also to protect the house from evil.

Image: St Peter’s church Linkenholt, Hampshire, which has fossil urchins inserted around two of the church windows.

The other folk names commonly used for fossil urchins in England - ‘shepherd’s crowns’ and ‘fairy loaves’ - both likely derived from Celtic or pre-Celtic terms and beliefs in the association of these objects with the afterlife. Their frequent occurrence in burial mounds (sites of passage from this life to the next) points to a significance attached to ensuring the rebirth of the bearer. These spiritual beliefs degenerated in Christian times into folk traditions of ‘good luck’, so that ‘fairy loaves’ placed on window sills were thought to ensure that bread would rise and help keep the milk fresh. They were still also placed bear to doors to help keep the devil at bay. Perhaps this is why at the entrance to the churchyard surrounding a gypsy church (known as a ‘tin tabernacle’) constructed in Hampshire in 1883, 40 fossil sea urchins were set in cement in the shape of the date.

One of the more obvious clues to the activity of prehistoric fossil collectors comes from fossil urchins that have had a hole deliberately drilled through them. This activity goes back to the Upper Palaeolithic when, 35,000 years ago, fossils were drilled and used in necklaces. At one of the earliest known Neolithic settlements in the eastern Mediterranean, a site in Jordan nearly 11,000 years old called ‘Ain Ghazal, all fossil urchins recovered had been drilled. This behaviour continued for thousands of years, but was not just confined to the eastern Mediterranean. Drilled urchins have turned up in archaeological sites from North Africa, to France, to Gloucestershire. Was the only reason for drilling these fossils to wear them as necklaces? Probably not. Many were almost certainly used as spindle whorls while spinning wool. There may also have been a spiritual element to this activity related to the five-pointed star motif.

The importance of the five-pointed star pattern is reinforced by the discovery of some fossil urchins from Neolithic and Iron Age sites in Jordan that have been altered to enhance the five-rayed star pattern. Could these people have been seeing an image of themselves in this pattern – like the classic ‘stick drawing’ of the human form? Just think of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ – arms outstretched, legs apart, head held aloft – a human five-pointed star. This might explain one of the drilled urchins from ‘Ain Ghazal, where the hole was drilled off-centre, through what could be interpreted as the junction of the legs – a potent fertility object, perhaps.

APOTROPAIC

But of all the altered urchins found by prehistoric collectors, the most striking, surely, is one found at Heliopolis in Egypt which had hieroglyphs inscribed on it in about 1500 BCE. These tell us the name of the priest, Tja-nefer, who found it and also where he found it – in ‘the quarry of Sopdu’, a god sometimes known as the ‘Morning Star’. The presence of the distinctive five-rayed star on this fossil and the extensive use of this symbol by ancient Egyptians in their burial chambers to symbolise the stars in the sky to which the spirit of the pharaoh returned, suggests that these fossils might have played an important role in Egyptian funeral rites.

Image: Fossil urchin from Ain ‘Ghazal in Jordan that about 9000 years ago had a hole drilled through it, implying that the five-pointed star was representative of the human body.

As the perceived powers of fossil urchins declined with changing belief systems, so we find the five-rayed star pattern increasingly being used on its own in many societies. It was as though the star had been sloughed off the fossil. Five-pointed stars were being used in decorations nearly 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and the symbol’s use as an apotropaic object (one that protects against evil) was widespread throughout Europe and the Mediterranean region through to the Middle Ages. Not unlike fossil sea urchins, it was used commonly in mediaeval times above doors of houses or stables to protect against the devil. This star also came to symbolise traits such as chivalry, courtesy, piety and kindness, which is why Sir Gawain’s shield was decorated with such a star.

These days it is not easy to escape this star. It spangles our clothes, sits on our footballs and proudly appears on more than 50 national flags. It clings to our food packaging, our clothes, our beer bottles and coffee shops. It even tattoos our bodies. And at Christmas you can’t walk down a street without being assailed by this heavenly symbol glittering in decorations and sitting smugly on top of the Christmas tree.

The fossil sea urchin with its distinctive star is unique as an object whose significance can be traced through many cultures over hundreds of thousands of years. Its importance has changed from an early aesthetic attraction of the five-pointed star by early hominid species to being an object imbued with power and great spiritual significance, one that was thought to ease the passage into the afterlife. Its power then faded as it firstly came to be seen more as an object that protects against evil, before becoming just a lucky object.

To find out where the urchin lies in our imagination today you just have to travel to the north-west corner of Hampshire. Here, high on Salisbury Plain, sits the little village of Linkenholt. For millennia, those who have ploughed the flinty fields around the village found an abundance of ‘shepherd’s crowns’. And what did they do with them? They collected them of course, and in the 12th Century when they built their flint church, what else to do but set some around a window on the north side of the church – the devil’s side – no doubt to try to keep him out. When rebuilt in the late 19th Century, the villagers could not bear to lose this window and its protective fossil wreath, so they were reinstalled. As the fossils had obviously done such a good job, why not have more? So a window on the south side was also garlanded with fossil urchins.

And what of the local farmers? They still collected the fossils, in days of horse and plough, and took them home where they were placed in pots by the front door – faint, fossilised memories of protecting the house. But if you asked them why, they would simply reply, “Well, it’s just something you do, isn’t it?”.


* Ken McNamara is a Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Sedgwick Museum. He is author of The Star-Crossed Stone, published by University of Chicago Press.

Source: The Geological Society

California couple may have to return $10 million treasure trove.

A US couple who unearthed gold coins worth more than $10 million might have to return them as they may have been stolen, a report said.

The California couple uncovered eight cans filled with more than 1,400 coins on their property, in what is believed to be the most valuable treasure trove ever discovered in the United States.

They took them to a firm specializing in ancient coins, Kagin’s Inc, which valued them and announced last week that they will sell them, via online retail giant Amazon.

But on Monday the San Francisco Chronicle linked the find — called the Saddle Ridge Treasure trove — to a robbery at the San Francisco Mint.

It published a newspaper report from January 1, 1900, referring to the recent theft which it said mostly involved mint, uncirculated coins, with an overall face value of up to $27,000 — similar to the Saddle Ridge trove.

Company boss Donald Kagin however told AFP he was “very confident” that the Saddle Ridge trove was not linked to the San Francisco Mint theft.

“There’s a number of reasons why they can’t possibly be” connected, he said.

He cited records from the time of the San Francisco theft suggesting it involved five canvas sacks filled with $20 gold coins — whereas the Saddle Ridge horde also had $10 and other coins.

In addition the stolen coins “would have all been mint state, recently struck coins,” he said.

“But only some of the coins in the Saddle Ridge horde are. Many others are circulated coins, struck over a long period of time and clearly buried over a long period of time.

“The only parallel here is the similar (face) value. But again, not even that’s that close because of the different denominations,” he said.

He also pointed to a statement from the US Mint in Washington, sent to him in an email, which said: “We do not have any information linking the Saddle Ridge Hoard coins to any thefts at any U.S. Mint facility.”

Kagin said plans to sell the Saddle Ridge hoard in about two months remain in place.

Asked if he could guarantee to the couple, named only as John and Mary, that there would be no hitches in the sale, he said: “Nobody can guarantee anything.

“But we are absolutely on our timeline with Amazon.com and kagins.com, to be selling these coins sometime in May,” he added.

Source: Raw Story

Why Everyone from the Mormons to the Muslim Brotherhood is Desperate for a Piece of Tutankhamun.

We can’t get enough of magical Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. After telling us how Mormons want to posthumously convert Tutankhamun to their religion, Jo Marchant writes at Medium:

…The possibility that Mormon researchers were trying to convert the ancients was a particular, peculiar threat to Egypt’s sense of self, but it soon became apparent that it wasn’t just the Mormons that the Egyptians were worried about: it was all foreigners.

In 2000, Sakuji Yoshimura, the respected director of the Institute of Egyptology at Waseda University in Japan, secured the permission of Egypt’s antiquities service to test Tutankhamun’s DNA. He hoped to determine the king’s lineage by comparing his genetic code to that of several other royal mummies thought to be his relations. But Yoshimura’s project, too, was cancelled, reportedly, just an hour before he was due to take his samples in the Valley of the Kings. The excuse given by the authorities was brief and vague: security reasons.

The press reported that the idea of anyone testing the mummies, even a team with impeccable credentials, had provoked anger within Egypt. Critics complained that foreigners were once again meddling with their country’s heritage, this time by trying to alter the established view of the pharaohs and their succession. One of those opposed to the project was Zahi Hawass, who was then in charge of the great pyramids at Giza. Hawass told a local newspaper that he refused to allow DNA tests on the bones of Giza mummies because there are some people who try to tamper with Egyptian history.

Such a response is perhaps understandable after decades of interference by foreigners, but that does not necessarily make it a security threat. It seems the biggest fear, as with Woodward’s work, was something else: what the results of genetic data might show about Tutankhamun’s origins.

The editor of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, reported in 2002 that the work was cancelled “due to concern that the results might strengthen an association between the family of Tutankhamun and the Biblical Moses.” An Egyptologist with close links to the antiquities service, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, agreed: “There was a fear it would be said that the pharaohs were Jewish.”

Specifically, if the results showed that Tutankhamun shared DNA with Jewish groups, there was concern that this could be used by Israel to argue that Egypt was part of the Promised Land.

This might seem an outlandish notion, but given the context of the Middle Eastern history, it is understandable. Egypt has waged several wars with Israel in recent history, and lost most of them, with territories like the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula falling under Tel Aviv’s control. Israel even crossed the Suez Canal into the Egyptian mainland during the Yom Kippur War of 1973…

Source: Disinformation

The 16th century plan to weaponize cats and birds with rocket packs.

Back during the 1530s, a military planner in what is now Germany devised a rather strange means of siege warfare that would have seen cats and birds strapped with bombs to "set fire to a castle or city which you can't get at otherwise."

The strange depictions appear in a manual that was discovered by BibliOdyssey in 2012. The book, which was written by artillery master Franz Helm of Cologne, has since been analyzed by University of Pennsylvania humanities expert Mitch Fraas, who, when first encountering the strange depictions, said, "I really didn't know what to make of it...It clearly looks like there's some sort of jet of fire coming out of a device strapped to these animals."

The manual, which was circulated widely at the time, was written when gunpowder was changing warfare. It's filled with all sorts of bizarre ideas, including bombs packed with shrapnel, missile-like explosives studded with spikes — and of course these weaponized cats and birds.

Here's Fraas's translation of the German text:

Create a small sack like a fire-arrow. If you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.

So, the idea is that you capture a cat from enemy territory, attach a bomb to its back, light the fuse — and hope like hell it runs back home where it starts a raging fire.

Fraas describes it as a sort of harebrained scheme. "It seems like a really terrible idea, and very unlikely the animals would run back to where they came from," he says. "More likely they'd set your own camp on fire."

Source: io9

[ Associated Press | Images via University of Pennsylvania/Fraas]

Melting glaciers in northern Italy reveal corpses of WW1 soldiers.

The glaciers of the Italian Alps are slowly melting to reveal horrors from the Great War, preserved for nearly a century.

At first glance Peio is a small alpine ski resort like many others in northern Italy. In winter it is popular with middle-class Italians as well as, increasingly, Russian tourists. In summer there’s good hiking in the Stelvio National Park. It has a spa, shops that sell a dozen different kinds of grappa, and, perhaps, aspirations to be the next Cortina. A cable car was inaugurated three years ago, and a multi-storey car park is under construction.

But in Peio, reminders of the region’s past are never far away. Stroll up through the village and, passing the tiny First World War museum on your left, you come to the 15th-century San Rocco church with its Austro-Hungarian cemetery and sign requesting massimo rispetto. Here, one sunny day last September, 500 people attended the funeral of two soldiers who fell in battle in May 1918.

In Peio, you feel, the First World War never quite ended. And in one very real sense, it lives on, thanks to the preserving properties of ice. For Peio was once the highest village in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and had a ringside seat to a little-known but spectacular episode of that conflict called the White War.

In 1914 both Trentino – the province in which Peio lies – and the neighbouring South Tyrol were Hapsburg domains. Italy, recently unified and eager to settle her frontiers permanently, looked on the two provinces, along with Trieste, as ‘unredeemed lands’. In May 1915, with the aim of reclaiming them, she entered the war on the side of the Allies. Conflict was already raging on the western and eastern fronts; now a third front opened up. It stretched from the Julian Alps, which Italy now shares with Slovenia in the east, to the Ortler massif near the Swiss border further west – some 250 miles.

As much of the front was at altitudes of over 6,500ft, a new kind of war had to be developed. The Italians already had specialist mountain troops – the Alpini with their famous feathered caps – but the Austrians had to create the equivalent: the Kaiserschützen. They were supported by artillery and engineers who constructed an entire infrastructure of war at altitude, including trenches carved out of the ice and rudimentary cableways for transporting men and munitions to the peaks.

In the decades that followed the armistice, the world warmed up and the glaciers began to retreat, revealing the debris of the White War. The material that, beginning in the 1990s, began to flood out of the mountains was remarkably well preserved. It included a love letter, addressed to Maria and never sent, and an ode to a louse, ‘friend of my long days’, scribbled on a page of an Austrian soldier’s diary.

_{The front line between the Allied forces and those of the Central Powers as seen from Punta Linke, 1918. Photo: Museo della Grande Guerra, Peio}

The bodies, when they came, were often mummified. The two soldiers interred last September were blond, blue-eyed Austrians aged 17 and 18 years old, who died on the Presena glacier and were buried by their comrades, top-to-toe, in a crevasse. Both had bulletholes in their skulls. One still had a spoon tucked into his puttees — common practice among soldiers who travelled from trench to trench and ate out of communal pots. When Franco Nicolis of the Archaeological Heritage Office in the provincial capital, Trento, saw them, he says, his first thought was for their mothers. ‘They feel contemporary. They come out of the ice just as they went in,’ he says. In all likelihood the soldiers’ mothers never discovered their sons’ fate.

One of the oddities of the White War was that both the Alpini and the Kaiserschützen recruited local men who knew the mountains, which meant that they often knew each other too. Sometimes family loyalties were split. ‘There are many stories of people hearing the voice of a brother or a cousin in the thick of battle,’ Nicolis says.

For both sides the worst enemy was the weather, which killed more men than the fighting. At those altitudes, the temperature could fall to -30C, and the ‘white death’ — death by avalanche — claimed thousands of lives.

_{The remains of two Austrian soldiers found on the Presena Glacier in 2012. Photo: Office for Archaeological Finds, Autonomous Province of Trento}

The people of Peio lived these stories because unlike the inhabitants of other frontline villages, they stayed put. ‘The Emperor decreed that this village should not be evacuated,’ Angelo Dalpez, Peio’s mayor, says. ‘As the highest village in the empire, it was symbolic — a message to the rest.’ They worked as porters and suppliers of food. They tended the injured, buried the dead, and witnessed the remodelling of their ancestral landscape (shelling lowered the summit of one mountain, San Matteo, by 20ft).

In 1919 the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye awarded Trentino to Italy. ‘There was never any clash,’ Nicolis says. ‘No revolution. It was an entirely smooth transition.’ People here had always felt autonomous, in their mountainous border region, and under the new arrangement the Italian government granted them a degree of autonomy. They carried on drinking grappa, eating knödel and speaking Italian (which had been one of the 12 official languages of the empire), but they never forgot their history. Many of their relations had fought on the Hapsburg side, and when the soldiers started melting out of the ice, they looked on them as their grand-fathers or great-grandfathers.

This became clear in 2004, when Maurizio Vicenzi, a local mountain guide and the director of Peio’s war museum, whose own family fought for the Austrians, stumbled on the mummified remains of three Hapsburg soldiers hanging upside down out of an ice wall near San Matteo — at 12,000ft, scene of some of the highest battles in history. The three were unarmed and had bandages in their pockets, suggesting they may have been stretcher-bearers who died in the last battle for the mountain, on September 3 1918. When a pathologist was granted permission to study one of the bodies, to try to understand the mummification process, there was an outcry among local people who felt that the dead were being profaned.

_{The mummified remains of three Hapsburg soldiers found in 2004. Photo: Museo della Grande Guerra, Peio}

The three now lie in the cemetery at San Rocco next to the two from the Presena glacier, in five unmarked graves. All have passed through the lab of the forensic anthropologist Daniel Gaudio and his team, in Vicenza. His priority is to name the mummified soldiers if he can. It is rare that he succeeds for although he can almost always extract DNA, contextual information about the circumstances of their deaths tends to be lacking, meaning that he can’t locate potential living relations to find a match.

In 2005 Vicenzi started exploring a site called Punta Linke, almost 6,500ft above Peio. He found a natural cave in the ice and material scattered over the surface — steel helmets, straw overshoes, boxes of ammunition — and realised there was a structure beneath. With friends from Peio, Great War enthusiasts all, he investigated. Nicolis’s team arrived on the scene two summers later, and together they excavated a wooden cabin — a station on one of the cableways that provided vital supplies to the troops.

The cabin is built against the rocky peak of Punta Linke, and behind it a tunnel runs for 100ft through that peak. When the team first found the tunnel, which is the height of a man, it was filled with ice that they cleared with the help of giant fans. During the war wooden crates brought up on the cableway were pushed through the tunnel before being launched on the final stage of their journey – an impressive 4,000ft leap – using an unsupported cableway, across the glacier to the front line. Beside the tunnel’s exit is a window through which a lookout watched the crates go.

_{The tunnel dug by Austrian soldiers behind the cableway station at Punta Linke. Photo: Laura Spinney}

Inside the cabin is a Sendling engine, made in Munich, dismantled by the departing Austrians and now restored. The archaeologists have left in place three documents they found pinned to the wall: handwritten instructions for operating the engine, a page from an illustrated newspaper, Wiener Bilder, showing Viennese people queuing to buy food, which by 1916 was in short supply in the crumbling empire, and a postcard addressed to a surgeon in the engineering corps, Georg Kristof, from his wife in Bohemia. The card shows a woman sleeping peacefully and is signed, in Czech, ‘Your abandoned lover’.

In their lab in Trento, Nicolis and his colleague Nicola Cappellozza show me the love letter written to Maria, which was found in a box of letters ready to be posted, on Punta Cadini (11,500ft), and dated late in 1918. (The archaeologists do not want to reveal the contents of the letter until they can trace Maria’s family.) ‘Perhaps hostilities ended before they could be sent,’ Nicolis says. Other finds include fragments of newspaper printed in Cyrillic. The Russian tourists who visit Peio today may not know it, but other Russians were there before them — prisoners brought from the eastern front and used as pack mules, or put to work weaving the straw overshoes that protected the Austrians’ feet from frostbite.

_{Documents pinned to the wall by soldiers at the Punta Linke cableway station. Photo: Laura Spinney}

Peio’s war museum fills out the picture. Inside its display cases are primitive-looking surgical instruments of the kind Kristof might have used, rosaries, porcelain pipes that resemble small saxophones, decorated in the Tyrolian style, and ‘trench art’ carved out of fragments of shells or shell casings. In the hungry period following the armistice, the villagers roamed the mountains looking to salvage material they could reuse or sell. Some pieces they kept as souvenirs, donating them to the museum when it opened 10 years ago. ‘They consider the museum their collective property,’ Dalpez says. ‘They’re proud of it.’

More than 80 soldiers who fell in the White War have come to light in recent decades. There are certainly more to come, but one body continues to elude the rescuers – that of Arnaldo Berni, the 24-year-old captain who led the Italians to their conquest of San Matteo on August 13 1918. Berni’s story illustrates the tragedy of a war where, as the British historian Mark Thompson explained in his 2008 book, The White War, Herculean feats produced trivial territorial gains, and no one down below took much notice.

_{An Austrian rifle found melting out of the ice. Photo: Museo della Grande Guerra, Peio}

After his victory, in a letter that must have slipped past the censors, Berni complained to relations about the press coverage. ‘There is a short and confused description of our battle, which was in fact brilliant and incurred very little loss of life… The journalists don’t come to us at such high altitudes, so the prodigious efforts of our men are not known.’ He died three weeks later, when the Austrians — on their way to recapturing San Matteo — dropped a shell on the crevasse in which he was sheltering. Two months later, the Italians dealt a shattering blow to the Austro-Hungarian war effort at Vittorio Veneto, on the Venetian plain, and the war was over.

There have been many attempts to find Berni over the years, first by his own men, then by his devoted half-sister, Margherita — the once skinny little girl he nicknamed Ossicino, or ‘Little Bone’ — who for long after the war made annual pilgrimages to the mountains, and finally by Vicenzi, Cappellozza and others, who in 2009 climbed down into the crevasse where the hero almost certainly met his death. They found no trace of him, but Cappellozza hasn’t forgotten the experience. ‘We were able to walk horizontally a long way. I remember the colours in the ice — the blues, the violets.’

_{Inside the Peio's war museum. Photo: Laura Spinney}

In the summer of 2013, just before the snow came, Nicolis’s team put the finishing touches to the restoration of the way-station at Punta Linke. From next summer, intrepid hikers will be able to visit this simple monument and, as he puts it, ‘smell the war’. Sometimes, Nicolis says, he looks through the window at Punta Linke and tries to see the mountains as the soldiers did. Those, like Kristof, who came from distant corners of the empire, must have been mystified by the struggle for this inhospitable wilderness. For others, local highlanders, the mountains were the prize and the Emperor the abstraction, but one for whom they were expected to fight men they had climbed with all their lives.

In both cases, he believes, the mountains signified death before they signified beauty. ‘Snow is truly a sign of mourning,’ Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Italian war poet, wrote in 1917. Peio’s mayor has a different take on things. At the funeral of the Presena pair, three anthems were played — the Italian, the Austrian and the Ode to Joy. ‘The people who fought here,’ he says, ‘were Europeans before their time.’

Source: Telegraph