Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  For your listening pleasure in these coronavirus days, our 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 newly published study describes a huge structure made of mammoth bones found in Russia and dating 25,000 years old.  A new book debunks the idea that Ponce de Leon was the first European explorer to see Florida.  Small carvings dating 26,000 years old are the oldest such artifacts to be found in Indonesia. And a Buddhist monument in Bangladesh is the first known to be in the shape of a pyramid.

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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 15th through the 21st, 2020.

We go first to Russia, where archaeologists have uncovered a huge, 25,000 year old structure made of mammoth bones.  The circular structure is 41 feet wide, or 12 and a half meters across, and contains the bones of as many as 60 different mammoths.

The find comes from the Kostenki 11 site, located 300 miles south of Moscow, near the Don River, outside of the western Russian city of Voronezh.  The area is home to many similar, but smaller, structures discovered since the 1950s.  Throughout Russia and Ukraine, as many as 70 have been documented, typically surrounded by pits thought to have contained food or waste.

A team led by Dr. Alexander Pryor, of the University of Exeter in the UK, discovered the large circular structure in 2013, along with three large pits around the outside.  Samples from both bones and many charcoal fragments from burnt wood provided radiocarbon dates pinpointing the occupation to about 25,000 years ago. 

The function of the circular platform of 64 individual mammoth skulls and 51 lower jaws remains enigmatic.  Previous smaller structures were thought to have been houses to shield these ice-age people against the bitter cold.  

The new structure, however, seems too large for a house.  

The many charcoal fragments suggest one possibility: that as these hunter-gatherers worked to salvage meat from the mammoth carcasses, they burned the greasy bones to provide warmth, light, and a defense against equally hungry wolves and other predators.  Alternatively, they may have stockpiled the animal parts here in a giant primitive freezer pile, for future use.  Finally, it may still be that this was also a house -- one giant house, able to shelter a larger group.

As reported by ZME Science online, the excavation also identified charcoal, burnt bones, stone tools, and soft plant tissue, suggesting some of the hunter-gatherer diet in the late Pleistocene epoch.

The charcoal came from conifers such as spruce, larch and pine, suggesting that trees still grew in the harsh, frozen environment.

According to Pryor, the mammoths and humans both could have come to the location for water-- a rarity in this time period.  Some of the bones appear to have been brought from other locations, already clean of flesh, while others still had bits of tissue still attached as though butchered in this location.  

According to Pryor, the find shows us how people can adapt to extreme cold.   Many parts of Europe at the same latitude were abandoned by this time, but these late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers managed to find food and create a shelter here.

The giant structure is the third mammoth bone pile found at Kostenki 11.  The discovery was published Monday in the journal, Antiquity.

If there is one myth that Florida cannot seem to get rid of, it's that Ponce de Leon discovered the area in his search for the fabled Fountain of Youth.  Now a new book entitled “The Florida Keys: A History through Maps,” suggests we should instead credit John Cabot, the Italian explorer who visited the coast in 1497 during a voyage surveying and claiming much of the North American east coast for King Henry the SeventhI of England.

As reported by the Miami Herald, while Cabot was searching for a passage to China through the Northwest, he followed the North American coast south to Florida.  According to Brian Schmitt, a map collector in the Florida Keys, early maps show visits to the area long before Ponce de Leon ever set foot in Florida. 

One of the more prized maps in Schmitt’s collection belonged to the famed Italian Peter Martyr, who worked in the Spanish court, building his map data from conversations with mariners of the day and studies of their ship’s logs.  His map of the New World is the earliest still in existence.

Two other maps also suggest discovery before Ponce de Leon.  The first, from 1500, depicts a vast land above Cuba with English flags, a result of Cabot’s exploration, while another from 1502 was by the Italian spy Alberto Cantino. 

The new book’s co-author, Bob Carr, adds archaeological evidence to the argument, in the form of a shell midden found near the mouth of the Miami River.  The midden appeared to have conch shells that had gaping holes in the sides of them, indicating hard labor by someone to open them.  According to Carr, this shows that someone who had no prior knowledge of how to extract the meat of a conch out of its shell was working hard for the meal.  The Spanish had already learned from Natives to the south how to extract the meat properly, so these inexpertly opened conches must indicate other Europeans.

Ponce de Leon had a charter from Spain to colonize Florida, showing he had prior knowledge of the land before setting foot there in 1513. 

According to the book’s other co-author, Todd Turrell, it is because of Washington Irving’s best-selling nineteenth century fiction that  Ponce de Leon got the credit, instead of the other previous explorers who actually deserved it.

We go now to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, where two stone engravings discovered in 2018 are the oldest small artworks found in the region.  The stone carvings were found in the cave of Leang Bulu Bettue, and show an anoa or dwarf buffalo, and a sun, star, or eye.  Associated materials suggest a date of 26,000 years ago, making these the oldest Pleistocene era artworks in the southeast Asian and Australasian regions. 

As reported by the online science website, Phys.org, the artifacts were analyzed in Brisbane, Australia, where it became clear that the seeming geometric lines on one piece actually depict an animal.  The style is comparable to other artifacts found in Eurasia dating back to around the same period.  The anoa, a small native buffalo, is an unsurprising choice for a small stand-alone carving, as anoa are already known well from Sulawesi cave art as far back as 44,000 years ago.

The stone with the sunburst or eye carving is less clear in subject.  Small depictions of the sun or a star are known from the area, so archaeologists are more confident that the image is something similar, based on the line arrangement as well as remains of red pigment inside the lines.  The pigment wasn’t located anywhere else on the artifact, indicating that it was painted that way on purpose. 

We end this week in Bangladesh, where a pyramid-shaped stupa came to light in Bikrampur at the archaeological site known as Nateshwar.  According to carbon-14 dating, the pyramid is thought to date between AD 780 and 950.  Other stupas are known from this period in the region, but the new stupa’s pyramid shape is unique.  Previous finds in the area are all dome-shaped.

Stupas are Buddhist monuments, often containing relics, and are used as places of religious devotion, meditation and related ritual practices.

The new stupa find is also Bangladesh’s largest to date, measuring 44 meters across, or nearly 150 feet.

Excavation of the site is under the direction of Dr. Sufi Mustafizur Rahman, professor of archaeology at Jahangirnagar University, and Dr. Nuh-ul-Alam Lenin, chair of the Agrasar Bikrampur Foundation.

As reported by the Bangladeshi newspaper, The Daily Star, completed excavations of the southern wing of the pyramid revealed the structure’s nature and shape, began to indicate the size and architecture of this large, major site.  

The new discoveries will shed new light on the history of Bikrampur.  The directors of the excavation are working to make the site a UNESCO world heritage site and hope to make the finds available to the public soon.

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!