Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2014 - 10

from the trenches
bon who ruled France approximately
200 years before Louis XVI. Upon
his death in 1610, Henry IV was
embalmed, but his head had gone
missing in 1793, when the grave was
pillaged during the revolution. The
badly preserved head was rumored to
have been his.
Lalueza-Fox was only able to compare six genetic markers between the
head and the gourd blood, but five of
those markers, including one that's
exceedingly rare, matched. While he
could not definitively say the blood
belonged to Louis XVI, Lalueza-Fox

There are three main sections of
historic Prague in the Czech
Republic: Old Town, Lesser Town,
and New Town. King Charles IV, the
Holy Roman Emperor who moved
his capital to Prague, designed New
Town himself in 1348 on farmland
east and south of the original city.
Construction of a new mall from
2003 to 2006, and the rescue
excavations that were part of it,
revealed that there was even more
to historic Prague. East of Old Town,
the archaeologists working on the
city's largest-ever dig uncovered
the remains of yet another urban
center outside Old Town, dating to
150 years before Charles IV's burst
of urban planning. According to

explains, it was roughly 200 times
more likely that the blood's donor
and the head's owner were paternally
related than unrelated.
However, a study released in October, led by Cassiman, might make the
comparison moot. Cassiman compared
sections of the Y chromosomes of the
mummified head and the gourd blood to
that of three descendants of the Bourbon
family and found they did not match-
though they are related to each other,
the two relics in question were likely not
royal in origin. "For the blood, I'm 100
percent certain it is not original," says

archaeologist Pavel Titz of Charles
University, this occupation outside
Old Town had a "sometimes quite
splendid urban character."
The site
Prior to the construction of the Palladium, now the Czech Republic's
largest shopping center, archaeologists found the foundations of twelfthcentury structures that predate the
construction of Old Town's city walls.
The remains consist primarily of three

Romanesque structures, including
what Titz refers to as a "palace," one
of only three such buildings in Prague.
It had many rooms and several stories,
along with a well-preserved cesspit
and bits of flat window glass, possibly
the oldest in the city. The foundations
of the buildings were constructed of
timber and masonry, the first evidence
in Prague of such an approach to
construction. The digs also turned up

Cassiman. "For the head, the DNA that
has been analyzed is not of Henry IV
."
Lalueza-Fox agrees with Cassiman's
assessment. "One possible explanation
would be that both relics are forgeries
and that, by bad luck, we retrieved
a partial Y-chromosome profile that
was almost identical between them,"
he says. "It is difficult to understand
building an object like the gourd and
putting the blood of someone else
inside. But in the eighteenth century,
many false relics were forged for economic reasons."
-Nikhil SwamiNathaN

more than five million pieces of pottery, animal bone, glass, and ceramics.
Following the excavation, archaeologists and developers were faced with
the challenge of how to preserve the
important remains. A visit to the Neoluxor bookstore reveals the solution:
Amid the shelves of books for sale are
the actual foundation and walls of the
"palace" building, along with Romanesque column bases. Stonework, artifact cases, and informational signage
pop up throughout the shopping
experience.
"The Palladium
shows that
it is possible
to preserve
and present
archaeology in
modern buildings," says Titz.
While you're
there
The Palladium
has more than
200 shops and
30 restaurants
and cafés, but
the rest of
historic Prague is right on its doorstep.
No visitor can miss Prague Castle
in Lesser Town, the largest castle
complex in the world; the ornate
Astronomical Clock on the facade of
Old Town Hall; and bustling Wenceslas
Square in New Town, in addition to
countless museums, churches, Jewish
monuments, and architectural wonders both old and new.
-Malin GrunberG banyasz

ArchAeology * January/February 2014

Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2014