Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  You’re just about to hear 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!

Ancient rock art in Australia finally is dated–with the help of wasp nests.  Archaeology now is bringing to light a historic African-American community in what is now New York’s Central Park.  Excavation of a well in Athens has turned up curse tablets and much more.   And the world’s oldest pottery, at different locations in northeastern Asia, seems to have separate origins.

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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 February 2nd through the 8th, 2019.

With the help of some mud wasps, researchers dated a part of one of the most substantial bodies of ancient art on the planet.

The Kimberly region of Western Australia is home to thousands of Aboriginal rock art pieces.  Among the extensive collection is a select gallery of images, known as the Gwion Gwion rock art, that depicts humans with slinky figures often wearing elaborate clothing and jewelry.

As reported by IFL Science, a team of archaeologists and the local Aboriginal community established a date for the Gwion Gwion rock art by carbon dating a number of mud wasp nests that were found under and on top of some of the paint.

Putting a solid date on ancient rock art can be tricky.  Aboriginal artists often paint using ochre pigments made from iron oxide, which can’t be dated easily as they contain no organic material.  However, it’s comparatively easy to date the nests of mud wasps using a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry.

The research team dated nests attached to 21 paintings at 14 different rock shelters.  In 13 of the artworks, the nests lay on top, meaning the paintings are older than the nests.  In six of them, the nests lay beneath, meaning the paintings are younger than the nests.

It was posited previously that the art was over 16,000 years old, but the new method of analysis has suggested they were most likely painted closer to 12,000 years ago, although one motif appeared to date to around 17,000 years ago.

Damien Finch, Ph.D. student at the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, said in a statement that this is the first solid evidence affirming a long-held suspicion that Gwion style paintings were made around 12,000 years ago.  

This dating also holds some wider cultural significance, as it further affirms that the artwork was created by the Kimberley peoples, an indigenous group who still live in the area today.  It also sheds some light on the ancient history of this culture, clearly showcasing some of their most vibrant traditions and everyday life.

Professor Peter Veth, director of the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute, added that one of the best-known styles showing human figures with complex headdress and body ornaments is the Gwion Gwion.  Formerly known as ‘Bradshaws,’ their extraordinary detail challenged European observers and led to over a century of speculation about the drawings' age and authorship.

The study was published in the journal, Science Advances.

For our next story, we go to the 1820s and a place on the western edge of Central Park, where a vibrant community once existed.

Seneca Village took shape in the 1820s, decades before the city created Central Park.  Stretching from what is now West 83rd to 89th streets, the village had a population of 225 people and contained churches, a school, and dozens of homes owned by free African-Americans who had entered the middle class.

Historians speculate that people came here to escape the crowded conditions and the racist climate of Lower Manhattan, according Marie Warsh, a historian for the Central Park Conservancy.

According to our New York TV network source, Spectrum News, Warsh stated that in the first half of the 19th Century, if you were African-American and you owned property, you had the right to vote – another incentive to owning property.

The village wasn't entirely black. Historians believe about a third of the population was Irish.

In the 1850s, after just thirty years, it all came to an end.  The city took over the land through eminent domain to create a park for its growing population.  The history of Seneca Village had been all but lost until researchers in the 1990s began focusing on maps and census records that gave hints of the past.  Then, nine years ago, archaeologists discovered thousands of artifacts, including plates and personal items that were buried for more than 150 years.

The artifacts helped to inform temporary signs that have been placed in the area of Seneca Village to tell the community's story.  Central Park Conservancy officials anticipate the signs will remain up until October.  Then, they hope to install something more permanent.

Warsh emphasized the importance of presenting this more comprehensive history, showing the layers of history and stories that Manhattan and New York City have to offer.

Archaeologist Meredith Linn, an assistant professor and director of master's studies at Bard Graduate Center, added that being able to touch the same things that people who had lived there in the 1850s touched and selected for themselves makes the people of Seneca Village all the more real.

Our third story takes us to Athens, where thirty lead tablets engraved with curses have emerged from the bottom of a 2,500 year old well.  

According to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the tablets come from the area of Kerameikos, the burial ground of ancient Athens.  Written on them are invocations to the gods of the underworld for assistance in harming others.

According to Dr. Jutta Stroszeck, director of the Kerameikos excavation, on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens, the person who was ordering up the curse is never mentioned by name, only the recipient.  Curses often were scratched into small bits of lead.

Before the discovery of the 30 specimens in the well, dozens of curses from about 480 to 323 BC, had been seen mainly in the tombs of those who had died in an untimely manner and were therefore thought suitable to carry the spell to the underworld.  But people had good reason for the transition of ill-will from graves to wells in ancient Athens.  Thwarted by a new law from placing their hexes in tombs of the untimely dead, Athenians sought a new avenue to the underworld gods.

A team under Dr. Stroszeck’s direction excavated the well in 2016 while investigating the water supply to a bathhouse about 60 meters beyond the Dipylon - the city-gate on the road to the Academy.  It was a public bathhouse that operated from Classical to Hellenistic times, the fifth to the first centuries BC, and is thought to be the spa referred to by the comic playwright Aristophanes.  It was also mentioned in a speech by the Greek rhetorician Isaeus. 

Despite more than a century of excavations in the burial ground, the well had remained unexcavated until now.  Previous work in the area had been done by the architect Heinz Johannes and the archaeologist Kurt Gebauer, but was interrupted by World War II.  Johannes was sent to the Russian front and died there in 1945, and Gebauer died in an airplane crash over Vienna in 1942.  Only recently were the excavations resumed.

Inside the well, the archaeologists also found a wealth of other material, including drinking vessels, wine mixing vessels, clay lamps, cooking pots, special broad-mouthed clay pots used to draw water, wooden artifacts including a trinket box, a scraper used by potters, organic remains such as peach pits, a number of bronze coins, and a wooden pulley, part of the drawing mechanism of the well. 

In our last story, potsherds from a Siberian site show what ancient hunters cooked during the late Ice Age.  The new research from the University of York also suggests there was no single point of origin for the world’s oldest pottery.

Academics extracted and analyzed ancient fats and lipids that had been preserved in pieces of ancient pottery – found at a number of sites on the Amur River in Russia – whose dates range between 16,000 and 12,000 years ago, during the final stages of the last Ice Age.

Professor Oliver Craig, Director of the BioArch Lab at the University of York, where the analysis was conducted, underscored that the pottery emerged during this frigid period, and not during the comparatively warmer times when forest resources, such as game and nuts, were more available.

Heritage Daily reported that researchers also examined pottery found from the Osipovka culture, also on the Amur River.  Pottery there had been used to process fish, most likely migratory salmon, which offered local hunters an alternative food source during periods of major climatic fluctuation.  The same research group discovered an identical scenario in neighboring islands of Japan.

The new study demonstrates that the world’s oldest clay cooking pots were crafted in myriad ways across northeast Asia, indicating a parallel process of innovation, where separate groups that possibly had no contact with each other faced similar threats and moved towards similar technological solutions in order to survive.

Professor Peter Jordan, senior author of the study at the Arctic Centre and Groningen Institute of Archaeology, University of Groningen [GROH–ning–en] in the Netherlands, adds that the evidence suggests no single origin point for the world’s oldest pottery.  In addition, we are beginning to understand that contrasting pottery traditions emerged around the same time but in different locations, and the pots were used to process very different sets of resources.

The last Ice Age reached its coldest point between 26,000 and 20,000 years ago, forcing humans to abandon northern regions, including large parts of Siberia.  Beginning around 19,000 years ago, the climate slowly warmed again, encouraging small bands of hunters to move back into these vast, empty landscapes.

This study illustrates the exciting potential of new methods in archaeological science in which we can extract and interpret the remains of meals that were cooked in pots over 16,000 years ago.

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!