Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Let’s forget the pandemic long enough to review 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!

Perishable artifacts preserved by melting Norwegian ice are telling a story about ancient uses of a mountain pass.  A new study of animal proteins in potsherds is looking at thousands of years of animal husbandry in East Africa.  Excavation of sites in Iron Age Britain shows that chickens and brown hares were revered and not eaten. And a forbiddingly cold mountain pass in Alaska’s Brooks Range is giving up surprisingly abundant evidence of ancient use.

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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 April 12th through the 18th, 2020.

In our first story this week, we go to Norway, where melting ice in a remote mountain pass tells a new story of ancient travel and trade.

The ice patches vanishing from the slopes of Norway's Innlandet County are exposing artifacts that provide new insight into the livelihood of hunters, traders and travelers along a route that is thousands of years old.

As reported by The New York Times, the new finds include tunics and mittens of wool or animal pelts, leather shoes, arrows that still have their feathers, and wood and sinew snowshoes made for horses, along with antlers, bone and animal dung.  Giant cairns, or piles of stones, mark old pathways once used by traders to find their way through fog and heavy snow.

The discoveries, reported in the scientific journal Antiquity, were made on Norway’s central mountain range by the Glacier Archaeology Program, one of many programs worldwide studying what glaciers and ice patches are laying bare as they shift and melt because of climate change. 

According to project archaeologist Lars Holger Pilo, the discoveries show that a mountain pass at Lendbreen, on the Lomseggen ridge, was part of a larger network connecting it to the wider Viking world and making it the first such ice site discovered in northern Europe.

According to Pilo, the new data show that the mountains were used more than previously thought.

The Glacier Archaeology Program began work on the ice patch at Lendbreen in 2006, but attention increased after a wool tunic, which later was dated to the Bronze Age, was found in 2011.  Subsequent surveys found pieces of sleds, kitchen utensils, and the remains of horses, suggesting the route was used for trade, hunting and farming.

Travelers used the pass from about A.D. 300 to 1500, with a peak of activity during the Viking Age around the year 1000, a period of long-range trade and commerce in Scandinavia.

The finds yield new insights about transhumance, the practice of regular movement from one place to another for trade, food, marriage, or other social customs, sometimes using these icy mountain passes rather than making longer trips along valleys.  The evidence also reflects other local uses of the pass, such as summer farming at higher elevations.  The pass was well traveled, connecting to other parts of the country and ultimately to seaports and broader world trade.

The Lendenbreen ice patch is the only mountain pass on the Lomseggen ridge to have a large number of cairns, as well as an undated stone-walled shelter.  Transportation-related artifacts found there include remains of sleds, walking sticks and pieces of a Bronze Age ski.  The finds do not include human remains.

In East Africa, researchers are working to trace the prehistory of the milk-based diet of cattle-herders.  

A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from the University of Florida, used molecular and isotopic science to provide the first direct evidence about the diet of historic East African pastoralists.

As reported by the online science site, Phys.org, pastoralism transformed human diets and societies in grasslands worldwide.  Cattle-herding has been the dominant way of life across the vast East African grasslands for thousands of years.

This is indicated by numerous large animal bone assemblages found at archaeological sites across the region, which show the long use of cattle, sheep and goats.

Today, people in these areas, such as the Maasai and Samburu of Kenya, live off milk and milk products, and sometimes the blood of their animals, gaining 60 to 90 percent of their calories from milk.  Meat becomes more important only during times of drought, when malnutrition looms. 

However, little direct evidence has come to light for how long people in East Africa have been milking cattle.  Indirect evidence comes from the broad spread of the C-14010 lactase persistence allele in East African populations, which suggests a long history of reliance on lactose-containing milk products.

Now researchers have identified a line of direct evidence by examining ancient potsherds for milk remains.  The potsherds come from four sites in Kenya and Tanzania, occupied from 1200 to 5000 years ago, during the time known as the Pastoral Neolithic.  The scientists used  a combined chemical and isotopic approach to identify and quantify the food residues found within the vessels, specifically fatty acids, which are residues of animal fats, that were absorbed into the pot wall during cooking.

The findings, published in the journal, PNAS, showed that most of the sherds had evidence of cooking meat, bones, marrow, and fat from ruminants, or cattle, sheep and goats, along with some cooking of plants, probably in the form of stews.

Potsherds preserving milk residues were less common, probably because like modern pastoralist groups, people cooked meat and bones in ceramic pots, but milked their cattle into gourds and wooden bowls, which are rarely preserved at archaeological sites.

The findings of at least minor levels of milk processing from this far back are consistent with the time it must have taken for the C-14010 lactase persistence allele to become common.  Future work will expand to studies of other sites within the region.

We go now to Iron Age Britain, where new analysis shows that when chickens and domestic rabbits first arrived, they were treated almost like gods, rather than food.

Archaeological evidence shows that the first brown hares and chickens to arrive in Britain were buried with care, individually, with their bodies intact.  The bones showed no signs of butchery, which suggests they were not imported for people to eat.

As reported by Heritage Daily.com, a team from the universities of Exeter, Leicester and Oxford is curious to know when brown hares, rabbits and chickens were introduced to Britain, and how they became incorporated into modern Easter traditions.

New radiocarbon dates from sites in Hampshire and Hertfordshire suggest that brown hares and chickens came to Britain at about the same time in the Iron Age, between the fifth and the third centuries BC.  The skeletons show that neither animal was eaten until the Roman period, which began hundreds of years later.

In Julius Caesar's famous book on the Gallic Wars, he wrote that the Britons considered it contrary to divine law to eat the hare, the chicken or the goose.  According to Caesar, they instead were raising them for pleasure.  

Two hundred years later, the third-century AD historian Dio Cassius reported that Queen Boudicca released a live hare before battle with the Romans, calling upon the goddess Andraste to secure their victory.

During the Roman period, both chickens and brown hares were farmed and eaten, and rabbits were introduced.  But after AD 407, when the Roman army withdrew from Britain, rabbits became extinct locally, while populations of chickens and brown hares crashed.  

According to Naomi Sykes, of the University of Exeter, who is leading research into the origin of the customs surrounding Easter, or the festival of spring, the puzzle is to trace how three non-native animals became key symbols of Easter.  

Historical accounts like that of Dio Cassius suggest that it started with the importance of chickens and hares to the gods.  Chickens were associated with an Iron Age god akin to Roman Mercury, and hares were identified with a female hare goddess.  This religious significance endured throughout the Roman period, despite growing consumption of the animals.

Archaeological evidence shows that as the populations of these animals grew, they were increasingly eaten, and hares were farmed as livestock.  Rather than being buried intact, like pets, their bones were discarded individually, with other food waste.

After the Romans left Britain, people stopped hunting hares, and few hare remains are found in sites until the medieval period.  By contrast, chicken populations increased.  This is likely because in the sixth century, Saint Benedict forbade the consumption of meat from four-legged animals during fasting periods such as Lent.  By the tenth and eleventh centuries, these rules were widely adopted, and chickens and eggs became popular foods on fasting days.

Rabbits were reintroduced to Britain as an elite food during the thirteenth century AD, and grew increasingly common in the nineteenth-century landscape.  This likely contributed to their replacement of the hare as a sacred animal when spring festival traditions reignited during the Victorian period and Peter Cottontail began hopping down the bunny trail.

We end this week in another cold mountain pass, but this time in North America.  Howard Pass is a rock-stubbled tundra plateau in the western Brooks Range, and one of the lowest points in the mountains that arc across northern Alaska.  This makes it a broad gateway between the great drainages of the Colville and Noatak [NOH-uh-tak] rivers.

Howard Pass features some of Alaska’s most extreme weather, and the region has no available firewood.  Despite this, the pass features an abundance of archaeological sites.  

As reported by the Anchorage Daily News, Jeff Rasic, an archaeologist for the National Park Service, has been working near Howard Pass to help find out what drew activity to the area.  

According to Rasic, people came to take advantage of the caribou, fish, muskox, berries, waterfowl — and in the earliest period, probably bison.  Caribou from the Western Arctic herd still crowd through the pass during their seasonal migrations.  

Anthropologist Ernest Burch relates that the wind chill can be so severe that caribou caught there can freeze to death, so after every bad blow the Inuit used to go into the pass to look for nicely frozen caribou carcasses.

In addition, the fish in area lakes were reliable.  Winds keep clouds of mosquitoes away, and in the winter the snow becomes hard, crusty, and easy to travel on.

Archaeological remains there include hundreds of house remnants, tent rings, food-storage pits, scattered stone chips from tool makers, and piles of stones made to resemble humans to help drive caribou into traps.  Some of the sites are winter dwellings, with half the living area underground.  These feature entrances that were dug deeper than the house floor level to create cold-traps.

In 2011, National Park Service scientists installed a rugged weather station at Howard Pass.  The results have included a February 2013 wind-chill temperature of minus 96.9 degrees Fahrenheit, with winds at a sustained 54 miles per hour.  When an atmospheric-pressure difference occurs between Alaska’s North Slope and the rest of the state, cold air from the north rips southward through the pass.

In Inupiaq [in-YOU-pee-ack], the language of the north Alaskan native peoples, the pass is called Akutuq [AH-ku-tuck] – the word for a dessert-like treat made of whipped animal fat, sugar and berries.  Natives were reminded of the way Akutuq looks by the wind-blasted snow patterns in the pass.

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!