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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2016
PARTING SHOT FROM EDWARD STRATTON
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Birds nest in a makeshift home above a fire hydrant under the awning of a log cabin at Camp Rilea in Warrenton.
ODDITY
Sacriicial lamb
A chilling
mountaintop ind
may conirm dark
Greek legend
By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS
Associated Press
THENS, Greece —
Archaeologists
have
made a sinister discovery
at the top of a Greek mountain
which might corroborate one of
the darkest legends of antiquity.
Excavations this summer
on Mount Lykaion, once wor-
shipped as the birthplace of
the god Zeus, uncovered the
3,000-year-old skeleton of a
teenager amid a mound of ashes
built up over a millennium from
sacriiced animals.
Greece’s Culture Ministry
said Wednesday that the skele-
ton, probably of an adolescent
boy, was found in the heart of the
30-meter (100-foot) broad ash
altar, next to a man-made stone
platform.
Excavators say it’s too early
to speculate on the nature of the
teenager’s death but the discovery
is remarkable because the remote
Mount Lykaion was for centuries
associated with the most nefari-
ous of Greek cults: Ancient writ-
ers including Plato linked it with
human sacriice to Zeus, a prac-
tice which has very rarely been
conirmed by archaeologists any-
where in the Greek world and
never on mainland Greece.
A
A wolf for nine years
According to legend, a boy
was sacriiced with the animals
and all the meat was cooked and
eaten together. Whoever ate the
human part would become a wolf
for nine years.
“Several ancient literary
sources mention rumors that
human sacriice took place at the
altar, but up until a few weeks
ago there has been no trace what-
soever of human bones discov-
ered at the site,” said excavator
David Gilman Romano, profes-
sor of Greek archaeology at the
University of Arizona.
“Whether it’s a sacriice or
not, this is a sacriicial altar … so
it’s not a place where you would
bury an individual. It’s not a cem-
etery,” Romano told The Associ-
ated Press. A very unusual detail,
he said, was that the upper part of
the skull was missing, while the
body was laid among two lines of
stones on an east-west axis, with
stone slabs covering the pelvis.
The mountaintop in the Pelo-
ponnese region is the earliest
known site where Zeus was wor-
shipped, and even without the
possible human sacriice element
it was a place of massive slaugh-
ter. From at least the 16th cen-
tury B.C. until just after the time
of Alexander the Great, tens of
thousands of animals were killed
there in the god’s honor.
The 11th century
B.C. skeleton
of a teenager
was excavat-
ed recently at
Mount Lykaion
in the southern
Peloponnese re-
gion of Greece,
the mountaintop
sanctuary of
Zeus, king of the
ancient Greek
gods. Scien-
tists are still
investigating
the 3,000-year
old skeleton in-
triguingly found
deep in an ash
mound seeming-
ly formed from
the remains of
animal sacrific-
es, although it is
still unclear how
the youth died.
5,000 years
Human presence at the site
goes back more than 5,000 years.
There’s no sign yet that the cult is
as old as that, but it’s unclear why
people should otherwise choose
to settle on the barren, exposed
summit.
Zeus was a sky and weather
god who later became the leader
of the classical Greek pantheon.
Pottery found with the human
remains dates them to the 11th
century B.C., right at the end
of the Mycenaean era, whose
heroes were immortalized in
Greek myth and Homer’s epics,
and several of whose palaces
have been excavated.
So far, only about 7 percent
of the altar has been excavated,
between 2007-2010 and again
this year.
“We have a number of years
of future excavation to go,”
Romano said. “We don’t know if
we are going to ind more human
burials or not.”
Greek Culture
Ministry via AP
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