Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Stay tuned for four top news stories that came out this past week on Archaeologica.  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Excavation at a medieval mansion site alongside the Thames River in London are recovering some rare items from the 14th and 15th centuries.  A new study reveals that the prehistoric North American city of Cahokia indeed collapsed, but the area around it continued to be inhabited.  A cave site in Siberia suggests two distinct waves of Neanderthal migrations from Europe.   And ten ancient rock reliefs just found in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq date from Assyrian times.

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And now, here’s Laura Pettigrew with the Audio News from Archaeologica.  We hope you find this to be a valuable part of your day.

Welcome to the Audio News from Archaeologica!  I’m Laura Pettigrew and these are the headlines in archaeological and historical news from January 26th through February 1st, 2019.

We begin this week in London, in the UK, where archaeologists have uncovered a plethora of medieval artifacts from a cesspit under the Courtauld Institute of Art at Somerset House, along the Thames.  The dig is exploring what once were luxury dwellings that stood here during the medieval period.

Archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) have been excavating while Somerset House undergoes remodeling.  By coincidence, they found the site of a medieval toilet and cesspit immediately, exactly where new toilets will go.  The cesspit, over 4 meters, or 12 feet, on a side, has all four walls intact because it was repurposed in the 17th century as a cellar.

According to Antonietta Lerz, a MOLA senior archaeologist, as expected for a cesspit, a place for waste, most of the objects found in it were probably discarded when broken, with some, for instance a ring, probably dropped in accidentally.  

Many of the ceramics in the pit were almost intact as well.  

As reported by The Guardian, around 100 objects came to light, most dating to the 14th and 15th centuries.  Ceramics recovered included condiment bowls, jugs, and a rare Penn floor tile, of the kind famously used in palaces, castles and cathedrals throughout the 1300s.  Metalwork included an iron spur, a finger ring, a belt buckle, a bone-handled fork, a pendant, and a thick chain, believed to have been once part of a candlestick.

These are the first physical clues about the medieval occupants of the site.  Before Somerset House was completed in 1801, the spot held a Tudor palace where the young Queen Elizabeth I once lived.  Before that, medieval mansions stood here, the city residences where regional bishops lived when their duties called them to London.

As reported in The Guardian, only a few written sources about the grandiose dwellings are known, along with a sketch from the 1540s, which isn’t considered accurate.  According to Lerz, the cesspit’s structure and dating suggest it belonged to the London home of the Bishop of Chester.  More insight will come as the contents of the cesspit are fully analyzed.

Somerset House has Grade I listed building status in the UK, the highest protection.  Its careful refurbishment will make the artworks, research and teaching facilities of The Courtauld Institute of Art more accessible.  The MOLA archaeologists are currently conserving and studying the cesspit artifacts, and will display some of them at the gallery when it reopens to the public in spring 2021.

At the University of California Berkeley, in the USA, a new study of coprolites, or ancient human feces, contradicts presumptions about the demise of Cahokia, North America’s largest pre-Columbian city.

According to A. J. White, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology, his study contradicts old narratives about Native American decline and disappearance.  The new evidence suggests that, on the contrary, Cahokia’s huge city population was a relatively brief point in its history, but many thousands of Native Americans continued to live around the area after Cahokia’s end.

Cahokia, in what is now southern Illinois, was the center of Mississippian culture in the 1100s AD.  Its residents farmed, fished, traded, and built giant ritual mounds.  They abandoned the huge city site by the 1400s, due to floods, droughts, and resource scarcity, but many remained in the vicinity.

As reported by Heritage Daily, the new analysis indicates that population levels rebounded and held steady, though at lower levels, from the 1500s through the 1700s, when migrations, warfare, disease and environmental change as a result of the European invasion of North America reduced populations again.

The post-Cahokia population communities were more mobile, living on farming and bison hunting, typical for the network of tribes known as the Illinois Confederation.

The new evidence comes from a larger study by researchers from UC Berkeley, California State University at Long Beach, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Northeastern University that analyzed fossil pollen, the remnants of ancient feces, charcoal and other clues to reconstruct a post-Mississippian lifestyle.  

The feces evidence helped pinpoint population levels.  It began by taking core samples of mud from Horseshoe Lake, adjacent to the site of Cahokia, and measured their concentration of fecal stanols [STAN-olls], molecules produced in the human gut and preserved in feces.  The concentration of these fecal stanols is an index of population at the site over time.

Most previous research on Cahokia has focused on its decline, yet the Mississippian region beyond continued to thrive across the midwestern, southeastern and eastern United States, from AD 700 to the 1500s.  According to White, the new historical, climatic and ecological data, particularly the fecal stanol evidence, was crucial to establishing a timeline of the indigenous population beyond Cahokia.

The study helps document the complex series of migrations, warfare and ecological changes the indigenous population underwent in the 1500s and 1600s, before the European invasion.

In the Altai Mountains, Siberia, a team of researchers has uncovered stone blades similar to Neanderthal tools from modern Crimea and the northern Caucasus, suggesting that after an initial migration outward 100,000 years ago, Neanderthals from Europe also crossed into Eurasia around 60,000 years ago. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the new finds come from Chagyrskaya [chug-EAR-sky-a] Cave, which is only 60 miles from the famous Denisova Cave, where digs since 2007 have unearthed 74 Neanderthal fossils and over 90,000 artifacts.  The artifacts from Chagyrskaya Cave, around 4000 stone tools, are about 40,000 years younger than the Denisova finds.  They look distinctively different from the older tools, too, and resemble flaked Micoquian blades, which are common archaeological finds around central and eastern Europe, where they were used to hunt and butcher bison and horses.

The Neanderthals that settled in Denisova were a separate population, who moved into the area 100,000 years ago.  The differences seen in the toolmaking style at Chagyrskaya, around 60,000 years ago, suggest that the two caves represent two separate groups from Western Eurasia, who both trekked into eastern Asia independently, at very different times.

While the Chagyrskaya tools now establish that at least some Siberian Neanderthals, who have long had mysterious origins, were western, they still don’t conclusively establish the length of the journey, or whether it occurred as a gradual migration, or an intentional single move.

Whichever it was, researchers think the Neanderthal population were probably following migrating herds of prey, as warm spells shrank the size of the Caspian Sea, and made their travel across the region much easier.  A separate analysis conducted last year found that the Chagyrskaya Cave Neanderthals are a closer genetic match to Europe-based Neanderthals than are those in the Denisova Cave.

It’s hoped that a search for similar tools at suspected points along this migration route might yield a clearer picture of the timespan and motivations involved, and clarify the mystery of the origins of earth’s easternmost Neanderthals.

We should note something that Smithsonian Magazine fails to point out.  A third hominin population, called the “Denisovans,” is known from Denisova Cave, but the DNA that sets it apart from Neanderthals and modern humans comes from the finger bone of a small child dated between 30,000 and 48,000 years ago, definitely younger than the Neanderthal finds there.

In the Kurdistan region of Iraq, research has resumed following the defeat of ISIS, and has revealed ten ancient rock reliefs of Assyrian gods.  The discovery is momentous, since ISIS, or the Islamic State, terrorist group often destroyed important sites and artifacts as they swept through southwest Asia.

After an original excavation in 1973, archaeologists began surveying the site near Duhok in 2012.  The project was halted when the nearby city of Mosul fell to ISIS in 2014, and the area became unsafe.   Only last year was it safe to return, and it was then that the archaeology team discovered the extremely rare Assyrian rock reliefs.

According to Daniele Morandi Bonacossi of the University of Udine[OO-dee-nay] in Italy, the leader of the new expedition, no carvings like these have been found since 1845, and no other Assyrian rock art complex is comparable to this fresh discovery.

As reported by The Mirror, the carvings once would have decorated the banks of the Faida canal, part of a vast network of canals that brought water to the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, and irrigated the surrounding lands.  

The figures on the panels are shown in profile, facing in the same direction as the water flowed.  They include Ashur, the main Assyrian god, his wife Mullissu, the moon god Sin and the sun god Shamash, all astride mythical beasts including dragons and horned lions.  Such impressive reliefs are evidence that even this local irrigation system was part of royal administration, and celebration.

Italian and Iraqi archaeologists uncovered the reliefs 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, south of the Kurdistani city of Duhok, and only 15 miles from where ISIS fighters were based at the height of their control.   ISIS was remorseless in destroying historical sites it felt were idolatrous, and often looted artifacts to sell. 

The Duhok rock carvings are still threatened by vandalism, illegal excavations and the activities of a nearby village, with one relief illegally excavated and thereby damaged in May 2019, and the owner of one farmstead partly destroying a relief to expand his cow stable.  The Duhok Governorate has promised further security measures in the area to ensure the site’s protection.

The magnitude of the discovery continues to expand, with the recent discovery of another relief below the surface, suggesting that many more are yet to be found. Work on the site continues.

That wraps up the news for this week!

For more stories and daily news updates, visit Archaeologica on the World Wide Web at www.archaeologica.org where all the news is history!

I’m Laura Pettigrew and I’ll see you next week!