Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  We hope you can take the time now to listen to 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 17th century Ottoman merchant ship had a huge and surprisingly diverse cargo.  A new review of archaeological data from the Salish Sea area of Washington and British Columbia reveals evidence of a very large and very ancient human population.  Data from six sites in Denmark suggest that rising seas pushed hunter-gatherers toward marine resources. And yet another study shows that hunter-gatherers in the Baltic Sea basin had culturally distinct cuisines 7000 years ago.

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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 19th through the 25th, 2020.

For almost seventy years, archaeologists have searched the eastern Mediterranean without success for wrecks that sank along shipping lanes known to have been commonly used for millennia.

Now, The Guardian reports that a British-led team has revealed a fleet of Hellenistic, Roman, early Islamic, and Ottoman wrecks that were lost some two kilometers below the waves of the Levantine Basin between the 3rd century BC and the 19th century AD.

The Enigma Shipwrecks Project, or ESP, used remote robotic technology to record the finds.

One of the wrecks is a 17th-century Ottoman merchant ship, described as “an absolute colossus," which is believed to have sunk around 1630 while sailing between Egypt and Istanbul.  It is thought to be a time capsule that tells the story of the beginning of a globalized world.  According to Sean Kingsley, director of the Centre for East-West Maritime Exploration and an archaeologist for the ESP, the goods are remarkably cosmopolitan for pre-modern shipping.

Chinese porcelain, thought to be the earliest discovered in the Mediterranean, includes 360 decorated cups and dishes, and a bottle made in the kilns of Jingdezhen during the reign of Chongzhen, the last Ming emperor.  The bottles were designed for sipping tea, but the Ottomans adapted them for coffee drinking – a craze then spreading across the East.  Hidden deep in the hold were the earliest Ottoman clay tobacco pipes found on land or sea.  They probably were illicit because severe prohibitions then were in effect against tobacco smoking.

Kingsley reported that through tobacco smoking and coffee drinking in Ottoman cafes, the idea of recreation and polite society came to life.  Europe may think it invented notions of civility, but the wrecked coffee cups and pots prove the ‘barbarian Orient’ was a trailblazer rather than a backwater.  The first London coffeehouse opened its doors only in 1652, a century after the Levant.

According to Steven Vallery, co-director of Enigma, all the remains were carefully recorded using a suite of digital photography, HD video, photomosaics, and multibeam sonar mapping.

The research team carried out the last phase of Enigma’s fieldwork at the end of 2015, with the post-excavation process continuing for years afterward and remaining unpublicized until now.  The Enigma team hopes the collection will go on permanent exhibition in a major public museum.

As reported by The Province news from Toronto, the Salish Sea basin, including the waterways shielded from the huge Pacific Ocean waves by Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula, was one of the most densely populated pre-contact geographical areas before the first Europeans arrived in the 1700s, according to a study published in the Journal of Northwest Anthropology that was co-written by Richard M. Hutchings of the Institute for Critical Heritage and Tourism.

Hutchings and fellow researcher Scott Williams, of the Washington State Department of Transportation, examined 85 large Salish Sea islands.  Along the way, they discovered the earliest physical evidence of human seafaring and island occupation in the Americas at Ayer Pond on Orcas Island in Washington, dating back 13,900 years ago, which is 900 years older than the previously known oldest such site, in California.

Although the Salish Sea is an arm of the Pacific Ocean, the study compared its pre-contact waterways to that of the Mediterranean Sea, its inhabitants comparable to ancient Greek and Phoenician traders, or like that of Vikings trading into the heart of Europe via its rivers.

While the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island have been inhabited for more than 14,000 years, only a small number of island sites are more than 5,000 years old.  But the study shows that islands were occupied immediately after they were formed at the end of the last ice age.

According to the study, thousands of island sites are younger than 5,000 years old, which indicates the use and management of all island ecosystems-- many of the islands intensively.  That they have been found only in small numbers is understood to reflect not the lack of early human use and occupation, but rather landscape submergence and contemporary archaeological management and land use strategies.

Today, those sites — defined as being a place with material evidence of a human presence — are threatened. According to Hutchings, the threat of erosion by rising sea levels is enormous, and all the sites, containing the record of the Coast Salish people, are at risk of vanishing.

The introduction of agriculture triggered a major population increase across Europe.  However, for some reason, the Kongemose and the preceding Ertebølle cultures in southern Scandinavia chose marine resources over terrestrial resources, including over agriculturally-derived protein, for several hundred years before the sudden, possibly traumatic introduction of agriculture 5900 years ago.   This story comes to us from the journal, Nature.

Some archaeologists now argue that this growth was driven by long-term enhanced marine life production conditioned by the Holocene thermal maximum, a time of elevated temperature, sea level and salinity across coastal waters. 

To explore this phenomenon, an archaeological team combined regional climate, sea-level, archaeological, and environmental data from six coastal sites across Denmark.

According to the archaeologists, two periods of increased marine production appeared across trophic levels.  In particular, the second, larger event -- from 5900 to 6400 years ago -- shows a clear population increase at a time of major rise in marine production and coastal resources during the period of most intensive marine resource exploitation.  This population increase clearly started prior to the introduction of agriculture.

Data from 231 radiocarbon dates of oyster shells from Danish shell middens serve as a proxy for human coastal marine utilization, implying marine resource availability.  In Denmark, shell middens first appear around 7600 years ago and steadily increase in frequency and volume throughout the late Mesolithic and into the early Neolithic. 

Relatively non-nutritious shellfish are unlikely to have been staple foods, but may have been important to fill seasonal gaps in resources. 

The formation of the islands in Denmark might have resulted in a population packing problem, leading to the disappearance of the Maglemose culture and subsequent emergence of the Kongemose culture, which solved the terrestrial-protein stress challenge by utilizing marine resources. 

According to the study, sea level rise must have had a huge impact on available resources.  For example, increased pressure on elk and aurochs populations confined to the Danish islands likely led to their extinction from those islands, but the elk did not disappear from Jutland, which remained connected to the continent.

The study authors argue that the pre-agricultural Kongemose and Ertebølle cultures, whose diet was predominately marine-based, were forced into exploitation of marine resources by reduction in terrestrial resources, at least on the Danish islands.  

According to the authors,  continued excavation and study will help perhaps further to demonstrate multiple pathways to societal complexity.  The study also contributes to our understanding of important linkages between sea level, climate temperature, marine production, and resource availability in the past, that are of relevance for the present day and future. 

Ancient pottery fragments are telling researchers that groups of hunter gatherers in the Baltic Sea area had developed culturally distinct cuisines between 6,000 and 7,500 years ago.  Researchers analyzed hundreds of fragments from pottery vessels found at 61 different archaeological sites in the Baltic region for evidence of their purpose and contents.

Their conclusions -- published in the journal Royal Society Open Science and reported by Science News online -- are that different groups of prehistoric humans evolved unique culinary traditions, and cooked and combined foods in distinctive ways.

According to lead study author Harry Robson, from the University of York in Britain, hunter-gatherers used pottery to store, process and cook food, as carrying cumbersome ceramic vessels seems inconsistent with a nomadic lifestyle.  The study looked at how this pottery was used and found evidence of a rich variety of foods and culinary traditions in different hunter-gatherer groups.

Little evidence of ceramic vessel use for non-food purposes was evident, such as for making resin.  Instead the evidence pointed to a diversity of culinary practices, even among groups using similar resources.  Apparently, cultural practices, not variations in food availability, determined  how and what different groups cooked and ate.

In the words of co-author Blandine Courel, scientist at the British Museum, “Our study suggests that culinary practices were not influenced by environmental constraints but rather were likely embedded in some long-standing culinary traditions and cultural habits.”

Researchers found evidence that hunter-gatherers along the margins of the Baltic Sea consumed a wide variety of foods, including marine fish, seals, beavers, wild boar, bear, deer, freshwater fish, hazelnuts, and plants. 

Some groups also consumed milk products.  The presence of dairy fats in several hunter-gatherer vessels was an unexpected example of culinary cultural fusion, and it has implications for our understanding of the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to early farming.  The dairy must have been either exchanged or even stolen from nearby farmers.

Pottery usage and culinary traditions have already been linked to the spread of agriculture in Europe, but the latest research – stimulated by increasingly better molecular and isotopic analysis techniques – suggests that hunter-gatherers developed similar levels of culinary sophistication and diversity.

According to study co-author and archaeologist Oliver Craig, from the University of York, the results show that hunters and gatherers, just like farmers, had complex and culturally distinct cuisines.

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!