Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  You’re just a minute away from 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!

An underwater sleuth is searching for shipwrecks near California’s Channel Islands.   Discussion of the ancient Harappan diet, which included meat, is controversial in Hindu India.  A new mapping study shows how Spanish conquerors resettled people in the Inca Empire. And a very early sword has turned up in a Venice monastery museum.

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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 23rd through 29th, 2020.

In the waters of the Pacific Oceans, off the coast of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, hundreds of shipwrecks lie waiting to be found.  Robert Schwemmer, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration diver and archeologist, has spent years identifying and excavating many of them.  This year, he will investigate three areas off Anacapa Island using an ROV, or remotely operated vehicle.

Around 300 ships have perished on the jagged edges of the islands over the last two centuries.  Of all of those, historians have identified only 25.  The rest stay hidden, lurking beneath years of marine growth.  

As reported by the newspaper, The Independent, Schwemmer is the Indiana Jones of West Coast shipwrecks, using old photos and newspaper clippings to find potential multiple sites.  He looks for human-built shapes under the water, like straight lines or symmetry.  Using these methods, he’s uncovered entire wrecks along with smaller elements such as boilers, paddle-wheel shafts and engine blocks.  Dives bring up even smaller objects, such as a French perfume bottle, found in the wreck of the Winfield Scott, which went down off Anacapa Island in 1853.  Unraveling these mysteries is what keeps him going.

Occasionally his discoveries also reach those who know the human stories behind them, like Dr. Jens Frederik Jarlshoi Birkholm, who got in touch when he heard the George E. Billings was found near Santa Barbara Island.  It was his grandfather, Frederik S. Birkholm, who had captained the Billings, and he had old photographs to share with Schwemmer.  

Schwemmer stresses the importance of the regulations surrounding the wrecks.  Their location within the jurisdiction of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary means they’re closely guarded by federal antiquity laws.  A permit is required to remove or disturb the wrecks or the artifacts among them, with deterrents such as steep fines and the potential loss of any dive boat used.  The correct procedure upon discovery of a wreck site is to note the location, take a photograph and report it to officials.

Schwemmer has chosen three sites for the year ahead, but not all of them may hide shipwrecks.  One wreck he’s determined to find is the Watson A. West, a 192-foot schooner which sank in 1923.  The crew of nine escaped on a skiff and rowed for 18 hours to reach Santa Barbara.  The Watson is somewhere off San Miguel, and remains the largest vessel in the area yet to be discovered. 

At The National Museum in New Delhi, India, an exhibition on food has become the center of new controversy over the origins of vegetarian diets in India.  

As reported in the newspaper The Indian Express, the exhibit, called ‘Historical Gastronomica,’ focuses on the diet of the Harappan people who lived in the Indus Valley of northwest India, now Pakistan, about 4000 to 5000 years ago.  The part that touched off controversy was a dining experience menu, meant to give visitors a taste of the ancient people’s meals, which included both vegetarian and meat dishes.  The menu was based on ingredients found in Harappan sites -- but some modern people don’t accept that evidence.

The diet of the Harappan civilization, dated between 3300 and 1300 BC, has long been contested by right-wing conservatives in India, who reject the historical evidence for the consumption of meat by the Vedic Aryans.  These conservatives have targeted both professional historians and academic specialists for their writings on the subject.  Their vocal objections led to the removal of meat-based dishes from the National Museum exhibition.  In turn, however, that has prompted clearer discussion into how archaeologists analyze the diets of people who lived thousands of years ago.

According to Professor Nayanjot Lahiri, an archaeologist and historian, middens and rubbish piles are key sources for artifacts and objects linked to the production and consumption of food. 

At Harappan sites, archaeologists find plant remains from cereals, lentils, fruits, vegetables and spices, as well as seeds.  Pottery also provides several types of direct evidence, such as clear marks from burnt cereals stuck to the clay.  Archaeologist Arunima Kashyap has recovered microscopic starch granules from pots and grinding stones, as well as ancient people’s teeth.  These showed processing, cooking and consumption of mangoes, bananas and garlic.

Stone tool types also indicate food-harvesting activities.  For example, the identification of hooks, fish spears and nets are evidence that a civilization caught and ate fish.  The presence of arrowheads at sites and traces of hunting equipment buried with animal bones are also clear indicators of meat consumption.

Microscopic wear patterns on tools corroborates the meat-eating activities by showing use for cutting or butchering.  When these wear patterns are cross-referenced with the marks left on bones, archaeologists can identify which kinds of meat were butchered and thus, presumably, eaten.

The Indian National Museum event was based on archaeological research and museum artifacts to demonstrate the evolution of food habits, food processing techniques and related architecture of the Harappans.  The dining experience is now off the menu, but the Harappan evidence on display continues to show that land and sea were part of the ancient diet.

In the Andes, “big data” is creating a new and broader picture of the ways the Spanish conquest changed the Inca Empire.  

As reported by the online archaeology news site, Heritage Daily, researchers from Brown University in Rhode Island, USA, are building two huge new online databases that document the multiple ways the Spanish invaders forced a mass resettlement of the Inca in the 16th century.  Their work could mark a change in how archaeologists put together the often separate strands of historical evidence to spark the insights of a larger context.

The new data come from a team led by Parker VanValkenburgh, Brown Assistant Professor of Anthropology.  Working with Vanderbilt University anthropologist Steven Wernke and Japanese ethnohistorian Akira Saito, VanValkenburgh helped to develop and populate two online databases using drones, satellite imagery and proprietary online databases that held information on the Inca Empire.  Collectively, this data provided an insight into the bigger picture of the displacement of the Incan peoples.

One of the databases, called LOGAR, includes collated information from the sixteenth-century “Tasa de la Visita General,” a comprehensive record of the resettlement kept by the Spanish-appointed viceroy of Peru.  Another, titled GeoPACHA, collects new and existing imagery of resettlement period sites, from historical photos and current satellite images.  Previously, despite the movement of over a million people, the lack of a master record in historical documentation meant that half the settlements were unidentified.  Now, between the LOGAR and the GeoPACHA, three quarters of them are fully identified.

VanValkenburgh, Wernke and Saito used the collective data to create a comprehensive map of every known Spanish-founded colonial settlement, or “reducción,” [ray-DOOS-ee-own] stretching from Ecuador to Chile.  This allows scholars to understand the ebb and flow of social life on a multi-country scale.  When each reducción was pinpointed on a map of the Inca imperial highway system, it became instantly obvious how the Spanish colonialists used the indigenous infrastructure to conquer and isolate the existing peoples. 

VanValkenburgh hopes that the use of big data will make it easier to examine historical changes on a continental scale, easing analyses of, for example, how societies have historically adapted to climate change.  He acknowledged there are concerns about the effect of satellite imagery on privacy and national security.   The research appears in the newest issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Our final story comes from Venice, Italy, where Vittoria Dall'Armellina, a PhD student at the University Ca' Foscari, found a 5,000 year-old sword that turns out to be one of the oldest Anatolian weapons in the world.  The sword, made from an early effort to alloy copper and tin, shows the laborious work that led to the discovery of bronze.  The early artifact from what is now eastern Turkey had been in the collections of a monastery on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni near Venice.

As reported by the online website, Ansamed.info, the artifact was taken to the museum of San Lazzaro for analysis.  The small sword shows similarities with 5,000-year-old weapons discovered inside the royal palace of Arslantepe [ar-slan-TEP-ay], eastern Anatolia, one of the most ancient such palaces known.

After Dall'Armellina established that the sword was not listed in the catalogue of ancient Middle Eastern objects at the museum, she began researching its origins.

She worked with Professor Ivana Angelini of the University of Padua to analyze the shape and composition of the bronze, and found that they suggested a date of around 3,000 BC.  

Dall'Armellina then consulted Father Serafino Jamourlian, of the monastery of San Lazzaro, to establish how it came into their hands.  The order traces its origins to the early church in Armenia, and the monastery archives showed the sword had come to Venice from Trabezon, in that region, in the mid-1800s.

The sword was originally found with other items, in an area called Kavak, in northern Turkey.  It is made from a type of copper and tin frequently used before the Bronze Age.  These data, along with the marked similarity to twin swords from Arslantepe, will help expand understanding of the development of bronze metallurgy between the 6th and 3rd millennia BC.  

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!