Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to tell you about 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!

Newly recovered artifacts from a British ship preserved in icy Arctic waters seem to tell a new story about the ill-fated Franklin Expedition.  An ancient Egyptian coffin at Harvard University turns out to contain an image of the sun god, Ra.  The collapse of a dam might be the reason Angkor Wat became the glorious capital of the Khmer Civilization and an Iron Age tomb in Italy opens a new window on a poorly known civilization.

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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 16th through the 22nd, 2020.

In icy Arctic waters, south of King William Island, Canada, an underwater archaeological mission to two 19th century shipwrecks unearthed artifacts that could elucidate the reasons behind their sinkings.  The disappearance of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, while in pursuit of the elusive Northwest Passage, has long been considered a great maritime mystery.  

Known as the Franklin Expedition, the two ships departed England in 1845, not to be heard from again until the discovery of Erebus in 2014, where it lay off the coast of King William Island.  That find showed that the ships had been trapped in ice.

Yet, the mystery remained as to what happened once the ships were ice-bound.  Now, after 93 dives and around 110 hours underwater, archaeologists have recovered over 350 remarkably preserved artifacts that are yielding clues to the final demise of the ships and their 130-man crews.

According to Canada’s National Post, Parks Canada underwater archaeologist Marc Andre Bernier says it was the largest, most complex underwater archaeological undertaking in Canadian history.

Among the many recovered artifacts were a toothbrush, a hairbrush with human hairs still intact, a fingerprint pressed in wax, epaulets believed to be from a 3rd Lieutenant’s uniform, and a Chinese coin that has left the researchers perplexed.

When the Erebus was discovered in 2014, it was followed by the discovery of the Terror two years later, about 100 kilometers away. Researchers initially thought that the crews abandoned the ice-bound ships, never to return or be seen again.

The new finds, however, are contributing to a hypothesis that some of the crew members from both ships returned to the Erebus and managed to sail it further away.  This notion is supported also  by Intuit oral histories which reference the ships.

Archaeologists are intrigued by the fact that numerous crew items from the Terror have been found on the Erebus, indicating that there was a co-mingling of the crews, although they deem it possible that the items were selected in hopes of returning them to the crew member’s families once they made it home.

Bernier stressed that the amazing find of the treasure trove, so well preserved by the icy cold waters, is only the beginning of pursuing the story in depth and determining how the doomed expedition and its crew members met their demise and disappeared for 170 years.  

At Harvard Semitic Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the examination of an Egyptian coffin has revealed an image of the Sun God, Ra-Horakhty [RA hor-AHK-TEE].  The Director of the Museum, Peter Der Manuelian, described it as a ‘heart stopping moment’!  Although the image was partially obscured, it remained a visible feature of the interior of the 3,000 year old coffin.

Manuelian and his colleagues observed a yellow, orange and blue painting and hieroglyphs that read ‘Ra-Horakhty, the great God, Lord of Heavens.’

As reported in the Harvard Gazette, the coffin was that of Ankh-khonsu, a doorkeeper in the Temple of Amun-Ra.  It was one of three coffins being examined, dating 945 to 712 BC, that originally came to Harvard from Thebes, Egypt, in around 1901. 

According to Manuelian, it’s not known why there was no documentation of the coffin’s interior when it was first opened more than 100 years ago, with the body removed, nor when it was reopened 30 years ago.  He added that the image is somewhat obscured beneath a layer of resinous material used in the funeral process.

The discovery of the Ra image was a surprisingly exciting highlight of a project led by a multi-disciplinary team conducting a week-long course entitled ‘Museum Collection Care.’ The course is part of a Harvard initiative to make its antiquity collection more publicly available.  According to Phys.org, the goal is to create comprehensive digital visual records of the three coffins to be made available to students, researchers and museum visitors.

Manuelian, who in addition to his Museum Director post is the Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology at Harvard, describes the group conducting the examination as an ‘all-star cast.’ The team included students who conducted 3-D scanning, along with pigment sampling and residue and wood analysis experts to collect information and capture imagery of the coffin materials and adornments.  The team was joined by colleagues from University College London.

Koh Ker, a 10th century temple complex in the northern jungles of Cambodia and former capital of the Khmer Empire, may have lost its status to the world-renowned Angkor Wat after the collapse of an earthen dike caused the loss of a critical reservoir.

Sarah Klassen is director of the Koh Ker Archaeological Project and post-doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  She and her team utilized ground penetrating radar, probing, and excavation to create a contour map of a large abandoned reservoir spillway that showed signs of a collapse which occurred around the end of Koh Ker’s prominence.

Smithsonian Magazine report that, at the beginning of the 10th Century A.D. the Khmer Empire ruled much of mainland Southeast Asia, but there arose a royal conflict for power that led to a crisis and a move by a former King’s grandson, Javavarman the Fourth, to leave Angkor Wat and establish a new capital at Koh Ker, about 75 miles to the northeast.  When Javavarman’s successor was killed, the new king returned the capital to Angkor Wat.

Now, a new study originally published in the journal Geoarchaeology surmises that the collapse of the reservoir dam may have played a substantial part in the relocation of the capital.  Previous researchers have determined that power in Khmer society was largely derived from the engineered water systems that provided agricultural riches to the Angkorian subjects.  And the failed reservoir at Koh Ker would have been the largest in the Khmer Empire at the time. 

As reported in Smithsonian Magazine, Klassen and her colleagues conducted light detection and ranging surveys, known as LIDAR, to examine a previously identified collapsed dam which showed that the blocks used to control water release were damaged.  The team believes that the dam was inadequate to control the water release, resulting in a catastrophic collapse that would have significantly damaged the valuable agricultural downstream lands.

The loss of the essential reservoir in the same time frame as the death of the Koh Ker ruler may have combined to create the circumstances that resulted in the relocation of the capital.  Researchers believe that it may very well be due to this disaster that today we have the extraordinary World Heritage site of Angkor Wat, at the expense of Koh Ker.

For our last story of the week, we travel to Corinaldo, in Italy’s Marche [MAR-kay] region along the Adriatic Sea, where an aerial survey of a construction site for a new sports complex unveiled the remains of a tomb dating back to the Iron Age.  As reported by the Daily Mail, upon examination, archaeologists discovered that the tomb contained an entire chariot, a bronze helmet, pottery, and weapons.  

After examining aerial photographs of the area, archaeologists conducted a resistivity survey whereby electrical impulses reveal buried metallic items.  The positive results led to a targeted geomagnetic survey that further revealed significant deposits of iron work.

According to Federica Boschi [BO-skee], an archaeologist at the University of Bologna [bol-OWN-nya], the tomb is believed to date back to the 7th Century BC, to the largely unknown Piceni [pi-SEEN-ee] people and has been covered by agricultural lands. The tomb did not contain any evidence of a body, which may have been lost to the centuries of agricultural use. 

Professor Boschi believes that the lavish tomb is that of a high-status prince, as suggested by the extraordinarily rich funerary deposits.  He also thinks that the find will provide valuable information about the meagerly documented pre-Roman Piceni.  An outstanding find among more than 100 ceramic vessels recovered was a cooking pot imported from ancient Daunia [dau-NEE-ah] to the south, further substantiating the status of the inhabitant.

Boschi believes that more study of the tomb’s artifacts will result in entirely new insights into the cultural, trading and gift-exchange relationships of the aristocracy in the region.  He says that the sports complex construction will remain on hold while the site is thoroughly examined for its cultural value and to determine whether its importance will require a new site for the complex. 

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!