Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  We’re just about to deliver 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!

3D documentation of Roman graffiti along Hadrian’s Wall just was named the Rescue Project of the Year in London.  A huge Medieval workshop for elephant ivory has turned up in Pakistan.  Bear bones are surprisingly numerous at a prehistoric site in Mississippi. And thanks to technology, the origins of horse domestication are a puzzle that is getting closer to a solution.

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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 March 1st through 7th, 2020.

Our first story follows up on the recording of ancient Roman graffiti near Hadrian's Wall. That work has now received an award.

While he dangled from a climbing harness 30 feet up a river gorge rock face, archaeologist Jon Allison’s latest research brought him close to the Romans who had worked on that same spot 1,800 years ago.

They left their mark in the shape of graffiti composed of inscriptions and carved faces, which reveal that soldiers of the Second and Twentieth legions were detailed to work the quarry as part of a major repair and rebuilding of Hadrian’s Wall.

Allison served as a soldier for 22 years, making it easy to imagine how the Roman troopers would have felt about being assigned to a task which was both hard work and risky.  His work to record the graffiti, which is at risk from erosion, has won the Rescue Project of the Year accolade in the annual Current Archaeology awards at a ceremony in London.

Allison drew on his skills as a former army rock climbing instructor to take photographs of the inscriptions, which are a few miles south of the Wall, near Brampton, England.

As reported by The Chronicle, a regional newspaper in Newcastle, England, the Brampton quarry is one of several surviving Roman quarries along the Wall that produced new building stone at this time.  The huge rebuilding job began when Roman Emperor Septimius Severus was gearing up for his campaign in Scotland.

According to Mike Collins, Historic England Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Hadrian’s Wall, the inscriptions had not been inspected in detail since the early 1980s, when the path that led to them dropped into the river below.

The project was designed to provide a detailed record of the site and to use 3D models to give the public safe access to the information they contain. 

The Brampton inscriptions are probably the most important on the Hadrian’s Wall frontier.  They provide insight into the organization of the construction project, as well as some very human and personal touches.  The project uncovered new inscriptions and rediscovered some that were thought to be lost.

Inscribed in the rock face are the names of two officers.  One, named Agricola, is described in the inscription as leading a detachment of the Second Legion Augusta.  The other man, Mercatius, was probably in charge of the quarry.

A face carved near Agricola’s name appears to be a water god, perhaps put there to solicit protection as the soldiers worked on the cliff above the river or transported the stone by boat.

The inscriptions also record the names of two consuls who were known to have been in Britain in a specific year, AD 207.  Thus, the quarry work has an exact date, the most precise one known for any quarry in Roman Europe.  Another carved face is associated with a name which could be Apollonius.  

Archaeologists revisiting the ruins of the 2,100-year-old port city of Bhanbhore in Pakistan’s Sindh province have found the biggest ivory carving industry known in the ancient world, certainly from the Islamic period.

As reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, archaeologists found no less than 40 kilograms, or nearly 90 pounds, of ivory fragments from workshops that date to about 800 years ago in the ruins of the ancient city – and that’s just what the workmen of antiquity were throwing out.

According to archaeologist Simone Mantellini of the University of Bologna, it’s like the wood waste at a carpentry or furniture makers workshop, with massive amounts of chips, chunks and shavings.  The excavators didn’t find finished ivory goods this time around. 

This new excavation of Trench 9 at the Bhanbhore site, halfway between the city’s grand mosque, one of the earliest in the region, and the southern city gate, began in 2017.  That’s about a century since the first archaeological exploration of the city began.  The new dig is a joint project of the Sindh government’s Department of Culture and Antiquities and the Italian Foreign Ministry, through the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan.

The new exploration is led by Milan professor emeritus Valeria Piacentini, with Mantellini from Bologna, and Agnese Fusaro, an archaeologist and ceramics specialist at the University of Barcelona. 

According to Mantellini, the discovery in Trench 9 is definitely the largest ivory workshop discovered in the world.  Yet he suspects the ivory detritus found so far, showing a massive industry of carving elephant tusks during the Islamic period, is just the beginning.  The team has only yet uncovered a small part of the industrial area.

It’s not unusual to find animal bones like deer and fish at pre-contact Native American sites in the lower Mississippi Valley.  But what Penn archaeologist Megan Kassabaum wasn’t expecting to find were so many bones from black bears.

As reported by the website Scienceblog.com, the discovery came at a site in southwestern Mississippi called Feltus, where Kassabaum’s team uncovered the remains of several large meals, including a significant number of bear bones. 

According to Kassabuam, the presence of this animal bone at archaeological sites that predate contact with Europeans is fairly unusual.  Many bones from deer, fish, cougar, and owl showed that the occupants, a culture named Coles Creek, had other food sources.  However, bear bones were strikingly numerous for such a hard-to-hunt animal.

To understand why, Kassabaum and her colleagues collected as many samples as possible.  Working with faunal analyst Ashley Peles, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, they examined the bones and other archaeological materials from the excavations.  They also consulted pertinent historical documents to better understand the specific meaning of the bear.

According to Kassabaum, their conclusions suggest that around 1,300 years ago, the Coles Creek people were eating bear as part of festive celebratory meals, not for day-to-day consumption.  

They also believe that the animals held a special place of kinship for this group.  Historical accounts emphasized Native American focus on bears as the most humanlike of animals.  Many stories feature a blurred line between bears and human beings.   Some traditions call bears “grandmother,” “brother,” or “cousin” to signal kinship.

The dig at Feltus began in 2006, when Kassabaum was a doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill studying variation in mound size and form at early Native American settlements.  The period when Feltus was occupied most often features flat-topped mounds arranged around a central plaza.  Feltus has four large earthen mounds.

The bear bones in Feltus also changed over time.  The earliest remains included bear skull fragments, leg and arm bones, hand and toe bones, even wrist bones.  Later, however, it’s mostly just bones from the animals’ hands and feet. Peles speculates that the bear paws were considered a delicacy. 

The researchers still have more to learn about the role of bear for the Coles Creek people.  Beyond the meat, bear contains a significant amount of oil, so they’re trying to understand how and if it was used.

Kassabaum has more recently been excavating at Smith Creek, a site about 35 miles from Feltus, where she’s found even more bear remains.

Until just a century ago, horseback was the main way that people, goods and ideas crossed vast distances.  From the trade routes of the Silk Road to the equestrian nations of the American Great Plains, horses were the engines of the ancient world.

Yet tracing where, when and how humans first domesticated horses has proven difficult.  Horses began in remote, dry and often cold grassland regions, moving about and leaving only ephemeral marks in the archaeological record.  In these places, historic records are often few, archaeological sites are not well studied, and research is published in a variety of languages.

As reported by Heritage Daily, at the heart of the issue is the basic question of how to distinguish a domesticated animal from its wild cousin.  Would changes occur in the size and shape of horse bones?  Would human control over horse herds change the pattern of ages and sex of horses in the record? 

And then there was uncertainty over the place of first domestication.  Was it Anatolia, Iberia, China, or North America?  Could it have been as far back as the last Ice Age?

A key breakthrough came when researchers recognized that the use of bridle mouthpieces, known as a bit, can cause unique damage to the teeth of a horse, known as “bit wear.”

One famous horse skeleton with bit wear, from the site of Derievka in Ukraine, seemed to place horse domestication in Eastern Europe as early as around 4000 BC – until scientific dating showed that it lived around only 600 BC.

Then researchers zeroed in on a site called Botai, in northern Kazakhstan, dating back to around 5,500 years ago.  Nearly all the animal bones identified there were from horses that were butchered and eaten, their bones used to make tools, and some buried in ritual pits.

Skeptics pointed out that the age and sex patterns of Botai horses were inconsistent with domestic herds.  But some teeth found at Botai showed apparent bit wear.  And in 2009, a new technique for analyzing ancient fat residues suggested that the ceramic vessels at Botai once contained horse milk products.  If affirmed, that finding would indicate humans had raised and cared for the horses that produced it.  This new evidence appeared to place horse domestication deep into the past, around 3500 BC.

But then, a 2018 French study cast more doubt on the Botai model when it showed that the horses of Botai weren't domestic, but instead the Przewalski’s horse, a wild animal with no documented evidence of management by human societies.  A second project analyzing ancient human DNA from Botai showed no genetic links between the area’s ancient residents and Indo-European groups, undermining the idea that horse domestication at Botai stimulated a continental dispersal on horseback.

However, Botai could represent a separate, failed domestication event of Przewalski’s horse.

The oldest clearly identified remains of the modern domestic horse dates back only as far as about 2000 BC, from the chariot burials of Russia and Central Asia.  Somewhere before this must have been the “big bang” of the human-horse relationship.

Archaeologists must continue to dive deeper into the archaeological record of the deserts and grasslands of the Old World – Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia, Mongolia, and elsewhere – where secrets of the past have not yet all been brought to light.

We should point out that the upcoming seventeenth edition of The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival here in Eugene, Oregon, features the topic of horse domestication.  On Sunday morning, May 17, we will screen “First Horse Warriors,” an entry submitted for the competition by WGBH NOVA.

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!