Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  In our usual fashion, this show features 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!

A new effort is under way in Florida to explore sites endangered by sea level rise.  New data suggest that olive trees were domesticated first in Israel, more than 7000 years ago.  Ostrich eggshell beads dated 33,000 years old in southern Africa.offer evidence of long-distance social networks. And the earliest cave art in the Basque Country of Spain appears to display two distinct graphic traditions.

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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 8th through 14th, 2020.

Ancient Floridians were building mounds in Florida before ancient Egyptians were building the pyramids in Egypt.

As reported by NPR, in Florida's Palm Beach County, researchers are planning how best to protect and preserve the ancient sites most at risk from rising seas.

One of 16,000 sites is in a county park in Boca Raton, where most visitors are unaware that it's one of the oldest settlements in America.  Thousands of years ago, the site was part of an extensive village complex. One particular spot is a shell midden.  Ancient Floridians here harvested a lot of shellfish, including giant coquina, which requires diving 18 feet underwater to catch.  But they were mostly going for oysters, which live at a different level.  One archaeologist says we can learn from this is how ancient Floridians adapted to sea-level change.

Working with students from Lynn University, Watson excavated sections of this settlement.  She and her collaborators are now dating and analyzing the artifacts.  It was the first time in nearly a half century that archaeologists had worked there.

In the wake of modern-day climate change and rising seas, Watson says there’s renewed urgency to investigate sites that will one day be underwater.

About 50 miles north, the Jupiter Lighthouse sits atop another Native American settlement.  This site has been occupied continuously for 6,000 years, according to Sara Rigsby-Ayers, with the Florida Public Archaeology Network.

Along with the Historic Preservation department in Palm Beach County, she's been identifying sites most at risk.  This pre-Columbian settlement tops the list.  Its shoreline erodes at an accelerated pace, in some areas up to seven feet a year.  Some erosion is from storms and boat wakes.  But rising sea levels and record high tides are also washing away bits of Florida's history. 

Peter DeWitt, with the Bureau of Land Management, says work will soon begin on a 'living shoreline,' which includes in-water structures to mitigate wave action as well as planting mangrove and salt marshes to try to hold the sand in place.  

In Palm Beach County alone, Rigsby-Ayers says that a three-foot rise in sea level expected by the end of the century will damage more than 200 archaeological sites.

Similar protective work is going on is some other countries, notably Scotland.  In the U.S., archaeologists are raising alarms about vulnerable coastal sites from Louisiana to Virginia.  But particularly in Florida, a lot of prehistory is at stake.  

Villagers in what is today Israel were the first to cultivate olive trees, according to the conclusions of a new study.

In a story from Heritage Daily, archaeological data and genetic evidence on the olive tend to contradict each other, according to Dr. Dafna Langgut, an archaeobotanist at Tel Aviv University who led the new study published in the journal, Holocene.  To try and resolve the conundrum, Langgut and colleagues analyzed fossilized pollen samples from across the Mediterranean.

Palynology is the study of ancient pollens and provides us with information on everything from which crops ancient peoples grew to the crippling effects of environmental disasters that occurred millennia ago.  

The researchers looked for spikes in olive pollen.  They found that 7,300 years ago, just 3.5 percent of the pollen that fell into the Sea of Galilee came from olive trees.  Four hundred years later, the figure had grown massively, to above 17 percent.

The spike was unaccompanied by the increased presence of plants with similar habitat requirements, such as oaks and pistachios.  This means that large-scale cultivation of olive trees had begun in the vicinity of the lake, according to Langgut.

Archaeological finds in the area suggest that olive consumption and production could have been happening in the Galilee even earlier.  Archaeologists found 7,600-year-old crushed olive pits, likely meaning olive oil production.  And analysis of ancient clay vessels turned up traces of olive oil.

At that time, farmers probably managed wild trees by pruning their branches in order to increase yield.  Though wild olives are small and bitter, it’s still possible to produce oil from them.  Langutt stated that since domesticating fruit trees is a huge investment, people must have known there was something useful there.

The pollen record also says that the second area of mass olive cultivation was in Crete and the Aegean islands.  By the 6th century BC, the Athenian legislator Solon had passed laws to protect the plant, sentencing to death anyone convicted of cutting down an olive tree. 

A few centuries later, olive farming spread to Syria and Turkey, then to Italy, and finally to the Iberian Peninsula some 2,500 years ago, likely traveling with Greek and Phoenician colonizers.

Olive oil continued to play a central role in Mediterranean cultures, given out as a prize at sports competitions, anointing kings and religious leaders, fueling international trade, preserving food, and dressing salads.

Thousands of years ago, as reported in a story from CNN, hunter-gatherers took the remains of ostrich eggshells and made them into decorative beads.  The beads tell a story of gift exchanges over great distances -- a 30,000-year-old social network.

Modern hunter-gatherer societies, like those in southern Africa's Kalahari Desert, use ostrich eggshell beads to maintain relationships with other groups.

Researchers recovered these beads in Lesotho [li-SOO-too], a small, mountainous country encircled by South Africa.  Thousands of years ago, its high elevation and wealth of rivers would have provided an imposing spot for hunter-gatherers to live.  Evidence of life at the site dates back to 85,000 years ago.

There was no evidence that the ornaments were produced in the area, or that the eggs were laid in Lesotho.  Ostriches don't typically live in highland environments.

The beads were tested using strontium isotope analysis to determine their origin.  Much like radiocarbon dating, which analyzes the rate of decay of an element over time, strontium isotope analysis relies on detecting strontium-87, the product of the radioactive element rubidium-87 as it decays.  Old rock formations such as granite have more strontium than younger rocks like basalt.  When animals eat grass from around these rocks, the strontium incorporates into their tissues, and even eggs.  Lesotho is at the heart of the Karoo Supergroup, a geologic formation with volcanic basalt at the center and older rings of rock stretching hundreds of miles outward.

According to Brian Stewart, study author and University of Michigan paleolithic archaeologist, the ornaments came from no closer than 202 miles away, and may have been made as far as 621 miles away.  The oldest bead had the third highest strontium isotope value, meaning it came from the farthest distance.

Sharing beads would have been useful for living in a hunter-gatherer society 30,000 years ago.  Ostrich eggshell beads and jewelry affirmed relationships with some people while alerting others to the statuses of those relationships.

Not only were the beads shared and exchanged over large distances, but also over long periods of time.  Such practices could have enabled the survival of modern humans.  Stewart believes that people exchanged the beads during a time of enormous climate shifts, so they could turn to each other when the weather worsened, and pool resources.  The exchange networks could have communicated about the condition of landscapes, animals, plant foods, other people, and perhaps marriage partners.

A new study of Paleolithic artwork recently discovered in the Basque Country of Spain suggests the region had two distinct artistic traditions.  These included its own so-called Iberian style as distinct from what is known as the French or Continental style. 

As reported by the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the eroded, Iberian-style images found in Mount Ertxiña’s [air-TSIN-ya?] Danbolinzulo Cave date between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago, during a period when it had been previously thought that very little artwork had been created in what is now the Basque Country.  The Iberian style is common in areas to the south.

The paintings could not be dated directly because they were drawn using inorganic paint that can’t be radiocarbon dated, and have been exposed to the elements since their creation.  For that reason,, the authors had to date the art by comparing its style and execution with known sites.  All of them clearly incorporate the same culturo-graphic tradition.  Motifs archaeologists identified included five ibex, two horses and a possible human, as well as several unidentified figures.  They are crudely outlined in red and some are filled in with a color wash, a technique typical of pre-Magdalenian art.  At least one animal’s outline wasn’t drawn as a line but as dots, reminiscent of a painting of a horse with dots that was discovered in Spain's Altamira Cave.

Some animals discovered at the Danbolinzulo site may have been drawn without heads.  This might merely be due to poor preservation, but it isn’t unique to this cave.

Some other caves in the region, not too far away, display only the Continental style of rock art, which is common in nearby France.

Blanca Ochoa of the Universidad del Pais [pah-EES] Vasco and her colleagues Marcos García-Diez and Irene Vigiola-Toña said the differences between the two styles of artwork are surprising because the groups lived in close proximity to each other and are likely to have come in contact as they roamed in search of food.  

Ochoa noted that perhaps they had different cultural backgrounds.  Between 20,000 and 13,000 years ago, in the Magdalenian Period, she added, the differences in styles disappeared.

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!