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September/October 2025 Issue

Howard Goldbaum/allaroundnevada.com

Features From the Issue

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  • Features

    How to Build a Medieval Castle

    Why are archaeologists constructing a thirteenth-century fortress in the forests of France?

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    © D. Gliksman

  • Features

    Spirit Cave Connection

    The world’s oldest mummified person is the ancestor of Nevada’s Northern Paiute people

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    Howard Goldbaum/allaroundnevada.com

  • Features

    Here Comes the Sun

    On a small Danish island 5,000 years ago, farmers crafted tokens to bring the sun out of the shadows

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    Courtesy the National Museum of Denmark

  • Features

    Myth of the Golden Dragon

    Eclectic artifacts from tombs in northeastern China tell the story of a little-known dynasty

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    Photograph courtesy Liaoning Provincial Museum, Liaoning Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and Chaoyang County Museum

  • Features

    Remote Sanctuary at the Crossroads of Empire

    Ancient Bactrians invented distinct ways to worship their gods 2,300 years ago in Tajikistan

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    Excavations of the sanctuary in the village of Torbulok in southern
    Gunvor Lindström/Excavations supported by the German Research Foundation

Letter from Greece

Letter from Greece

Searching for Washingtonia

How archaeologists located a forgotten nineteenth-century utopian community

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View looking northeast along the Isthmus of Corinth, Greece
Albert Sarvis
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Artifact

Artifacts

Anglo-Saxon Coin

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Courtesy Adrian Marsden
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Digs & Discoveries

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  • Digs & Discoveries

    Law & Order

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    Shai Halevi, Courtesy of the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, Israel Antiquities Authority

  • Digs & Discoveries

    African Swordcraft

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    Courtesy Ron Lawrence Anderson

  • Digs & Discoveries

    Crypto Power

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    Courtesy Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier

  • Digs & Discoveries

    Nordic Metal

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    Photograph by Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty, © Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo

  • Digs & Discoveries

    Dead Drunk

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    Photo: Shatil Emmanuilov, Israel Antiquities Authority

  • Digs & Discoveries

    The Things They Carried

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    Courtesy Jared Carballo-Pérez

  • Digs & Discoveries

    Master of Puppets

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    Julia Przedwojewska-Szymańska/PASI

  • Digs & Discoveries

    Ancient Air Freshener

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    © Hans Sell

  • Digs & Discoveries

    A Day at the Hunt

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    Courtesy Elazığ Archaeology and Ethnography Museum

  • Digs & Discoveries

    A Chinese Frontier Fort

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    Alexey Kovalev, Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences

  • Digs & Discoveries

    Good Night, Sweet Prince

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    Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection

Off the Grid

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Off the Grid September/October 2025

Necropolis of Pantalica, Italy

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Photo by Ilana Herzig

Around the World

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  • BOLIVIA

  • FRANCE

  • EGYPT

More Locations

Slideshow: Building the Last Medieval Castle

Philip II, the first ruler to style himself king of France, reigned from 1180 to 1223, but some of the 100 or so surviving French castles designed in the Philippian style postdate the king’s death by decades. In fact, work on the newest example of the style, Guédelon Castle, began in 1998. In the quarter-century since construction started in the forested Puisaye region of Burgundy, Guédelon has become one of the world’s most comprehensive and longest-running experimental archaeology projects. Everything done on site, from mixing lime mortar to cutting timber beams to weaving baskets, uses only thirteenth-century tools, techniques, and materials. Guédelon’s 40 stonemasons, woodcutters, weavers, painters, blacksmiths, and other artisans draw inspiration from contemporaneous sites and texts. Each obstacle they encounter is an opportunity to solve a problem, medieval-style, and to fill a gap in archaeologists’ knowledge of the era.

In 2023, carpenters and tilers completed the cupola atop Guédelon Castle’s Pigeon Tower (shown under construction in foreground). Each year, the castle’s builders focus on a handful of architectural elements, but only about half of the job concerns sticks and stones. The other half involves demonstrating and explaining medieval work to the 300,000 visitors who come annually. It may be taking much longer to build Guédelon than it did to build castles 800 years ago, but at least there aren’t as many sieges to deal with these days.
Guédelon Castle sits on the site of an old quarry for ferruginous (iron-streaked) sandstone, and most of the structure is built from this material. A nearby limestone quarry supplies raw material for decorative carved stonework, such as the Chapel Tower’s Gothic window mold, shown here, which took years to complete. “We always imagine the medieval stonemasons who are cutting or carving the stone, because it’s really a noble profession,” says archaeologist Anne Baud of Lumière University Lyon 2.
A carpenter fits a finished wooden frame into the Chapel Tower window mold. When the window is completed, it will be the final piece of the tower, a showpiece space crowned with a rib-vaulted ceiling executed using only stone, mortar, and a temporary wooden framework. There was little room for error during its careful construction. “Everything would have collapsed,” says master mason and Guédelon site director Florian Renucci. “It is the only thing that sometimes makes me lose sleep!”
Inside the castle below the wall-walk, artisans use measuring sticks and drawing compasses to teach visitors about medieval architecture. By 1228, the fictional founding date of Guédelon, Gothic arches and flourishes had begun to replace Romanesque ones in monumental construction. As this sketch in the sand shows, these Gothic structures could climb higher because they distributed weight more evenly on more slender supports. Every artisan at the castle can draw, and all sketches for all designs needed to construct Guédelon are handmade.
Masons insert a voussoir stone into an arch over the castle’s east gate. All masonry at Guédelon is joined and sealed with a period-appropriate lime mortar mixture. Archaeologists studied the mortar at the nearby thirteenth-century castles of Ratilly and St.-Fargeau to formulate the recipe. Archaeologist Anne Baud has observed trowel marks in the lime mortar at medieval sites all over the world. At Guédelon, she noticed that when masons made similar scrapes in the mortar, calcite squeezed out, drying into a protective facing over the seams between stones. This is one of many medieval construction techniques that the Guédelon experiment has demystified.
Painter Valérie Lachény spoons freshly made pigment into a tray in her atelier. Using ores and plants from Guédelon’s surroundings, she has concocted 17 different pigments—so far—including browns, oranges, reds, yellows, blues, grays, and pinks. There is, however, no green. The color green isn’t found in the preserved medieval wall paintings at a church in Moutiers-en-Puisaye, two miles away, either, suggesting that the raw materials necessary to make a green pigment are not present in the area.
All the artisans at Guédelon appreciate the blacksmiths, who make iron tools for everyone else, each of which is custom-fitted. On an April day in 2025, the main item on the menu at the forge, however, is nails.
A woodcutter cuts logs into timber beams. Conventional wisdom held that dried, centuries-old oaks were required for large-scale medieval construction in wood, but the team at Guédelon has determined that younger oaks, worked while still green with moisture, are more pliable.
Virtually everything made at Guédelon is a team effort, but some days call for more team and more effort. The construction of a footbridge to the castle’s east gate in 2024 required carpenters, masons, winches, pulleys, ropes, tools, and cooperative weather.

Slideshow: Excavating a Bactrian Sanctuary

Archaeologists have been able to investigate only a few temples in ancient Bactria, a region encompassing parts of modern-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan, that date to the Hellenistic era (323–30 b.c.), the period following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the area in 327 b.c. In 2008, the chance find of an ancient ritual basin during construction of a school in southern Tajikistan’s village of Torbulok led to the discovery of just the third known Hellenistic sanctuary in Bactria. A joint German-Tajik team led by German Archaeological Institute archaeologist Gunvor Lindström excavated one of the sanctuary’s upper terraces between 2013 and 2019. The German Research Foundation provided support for this project.

View of the village of Torbulok, Tajikistan, with the village school at center
Torbulok’s village school (center) was built on the site where a Hellenistic sanctuary framed by mountain cliffs once stood.
Men posing with ancient limestone basin
A three-foot-wide limestone basin unearthed during construction of the school was identified as a perirrhanterion, a type of vessel used for ritual purification in ancient Greek sanctuaries.
Excavation of Hellenistic sanctuary, Torbulok, Tajikistan
Archaeologists excavate the Torbulok sanctuary.
Excavation trench showing water basin (left) and upside down sunken storage jar (right)
Next to a mortar-lined water basin, archaeologists uncovered a locally made storage jar (right) that had been buried upside down. The jar contained votive offerings.
Gold armlet with griffin head finials
A gold armlet with ends in the shape of griffin heads is among the objects dating to the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. that some scholars believe were part of a cache of votive offerings buried by Bactrian worshippers. These artifacts were unearthed in the late nineteenth century north of Tajikistan’s Oxus River.

Slideshow: Wonders of the Three Yan

Archaeologists have uncovered a vast array of artifacts from tombs associated with the Three Yan states, which ruled parts of northeastern China from A.D. 337 to 436. The Three Yan—which include the Former Yan Dynasty (A.D. 337–370), Later Yan Dynasty (A.D. 384–407), and Northern Yan Dynasty (A.D. 407–436)—were founded during a tumultuous period in Chinese history by the Murong Xianbei, a powerful minority descended from the nomads of the Eurasian steppe. A particularly well-appointed Three Yan burial has been identified as belonging to the Northern Yan general, Feng Sufu—brother to the emperor Feng Ba. Feng Sufu’s tomb was found to contain artifacts reflecting a rich combination of influences from China, the Eurasian steppe, and beyond.

Archaeologists discovered the tomb of Feng Sufu near the city of Beipiao in northeastern China in 1965.
A bronze vessel found in Feng Sufu’s tomb depicts a dragon baring its teeth.
A gold headdress called a buyao that resembles leaf-covered branches was excavated from a Former Yan Dynasty tomb at the site of Longcheng, or “Dragon City,” the Three Yan capital, in what is now the city of Chaoyang.
A gold buyao crown frame attributed to the Former Yan Dynasty was uncovered in Feng Sufu’s burial.
A Former Yan mural found in a tomb at the site of Longcheng depicts a custom of offering of food and drinks as part of a ceremony to honor the deceased. This copy is all that remains after the tomb was backfilled following the excavations.
This is a facsimile of a Former Yan tomb mural uncovered in Chaoyang that portrays the azure dragon of the East. The azure dragon is one of the four symbols used in China to represent the cardinal directions.