Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Get ready now for your weekly dose of 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!

New radiocarbon dates are helping to correct the story of European contact in North America.  At one of the most important Neolithic settlements in Anatolia, people were buried inside their own homes.  An ostrich egg vessel is just one of many fascinating artifacts emerging from a Roman burial mound in Bulgaria. And a sixteenth century mass grave at a Mexico City hospital includes three Africans who may provide information on diseases introduced to the New World from Africa.

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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 26th through May 2nd, 2020.

We begin the week in North America, where radiocarbon dating is finally telling the true story of early contact between Europeans and the Iroquois nations, in what are now Ontario and New York state.  Previous accounts used dates based on trade goods brought by explorers and fur traders, such as Cartier and Champlain.  Sites with trade goods were assumed to be from those first decades of contact, because they were eagerly accepted and then spread from village to village - or so it was thought.   

Now a team led by Sturt Manning, director of Cornell University’s tree ring lab, has been taking direct dates from the materials themselves, and it turns out that some of those chronological assumptions are massively wrong.  

As reported by Dr. Manning on the site TheConversation.com, his team carried out radiocarbon dating on organic materials from indigenous sites, along with dendrochronological dating on house posts.  The results confirm the dating at some sites, but change many others, and tells a new story, no longer through the lens of Eurocentric assumptions.  

It starts with the trade goods traditionally used as indicators of the dates of contact period sites.  Finding glass beads brought by the first commercial fur trading missions meant the site was from Glass Bead Period I, dated at 1580 to 1600.   Glass Bead Period 2 ran from 1600-1630, with new types of glass beads and metal goods, and more frequent trade.

The logic of dating, based on which goods were present, in what amounts, makes sense if all communities had equal access to such items, and equal desire for them.  But these were unproven assumptions, which Manning’s team have now overturned.

The team of researchers from Cornell, the New York State Museum, and the University of Georgia developed new tree ring and radiocarbon dates directly measured on organic materials from both older and more recently excavated Iroquois sites in Ontario, Canada, and New York’s Mohawk Valley.

Two well-known sites in Ontario, Ball and Warminster, both had large amounts of early trade goods and known direct contact.  Samuel de Champlain likely stayed at Warminster in 1615 and 1616.   The new dates agree with the previous estimates, placing Ball’s occupation between 1565 and 1590, and Warminster at 1590 to 1620. 

The dates changed the picture at other Iroquois sites with less European contact. The Mantle site, northeast of Toronto, the most complex Iroquois site to be excavated in Ontario, was thought to be from 1500 to 1530 because it lacks most trade goods and had just three European metal objects.  However, direct dating now places it 50 to 100 years later, most likely from 1599 to 1614.   Other sites with scant trade goods also turned out to be up to 100 years later than previously thought. 

What explains this, and what does the change mean?   

According to Manning, closer examination of both the data and the historical knowledge shows a variety of reasons.  

First, in the Wendat area in particular, in Ontario, the tribe traditionally assigned the rights to a trade route, and its goods, to the lineage that discovered or developed it.  This meant that trade goods did not circulate freely to all villages, but instead were restricted to those with the necessary personal ties.   

Second was the impact of bad experiences.  For example, Jesuits described an entire village no longer using European metal objects after the spread of devastating disease introduced along with them. 

Additional reasons include the distance of a village from trade routes; the local politics and preferences; and even whether trade goods were used within the village, or only as burial goods in cemeteries. 

The upshot, according to Manning, is that we not only have a new chronology to consider, but a lesson in no longer seeing things only through colonialist assumptions.  The rise of several large, complex villages a hundred years later than thought will spark new research into the impacts of the invasion, as well as the changes that might already have started from climate change during the Little Ice Age, before the fur traders came.   

We go next to Çatalhöyük [CHAT-al-hoo-yook], a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Turkey, where a new dig suggests that residents were buried inside their own homes.

According to Dr. Katarzyna Harabasz, assistant professor at the University of Szczecin, her team reviewed the placement of bones within the site.  It was known that those who had passed away were buried inside house structures; what researchers were unsure of is whether the structures were intended as burial houses, or were used as a home as well.

One of the deceased was a woman who showed signs of carbonosis, which is caused by poor ventilation.  Since Çatalhöyük, from above, looks like a massive honeycomb, the easiest path of communication between houses would have been via the rooftops.  This architectural habit leads researchers to think that there might not have been much ventilation.

As reported by Heritage Daily, the researchers found burials primarily in houses where the smokehole above the hearth might have been the only source of ventilation.

According to Harabasz, remains were placed in a shallow cavity and plastered over, often with repeated funerary activity, which would sometimes result in the relocation of other remains.

The remains of many of the women suggest they were not as mobile as the men in the area and spent most of their time weaving and spinning, as evidenced by wear on the teeth and fewer instances of joint injuries.

We travel now to Bulgaria, where intriguing artifacts have turned up in a salvage excavation of a Roman era burial mound near Bulgaria’s Lyaskovets.   An ostrich egg converted into a vessel, and a gold-plated silver fibula, or garment pin, depicting a Thracian horseman deity, tell the story of a wealthy outpost of Roman life during the middle of the third century AD.

After conquest by the Roman empire in AD 46, the cities in Thrace, just south of the Danube, were quickly integrated into Roman life.

As reported by the website, Archaeology in Bulgaria, the team working on the mound has uncovered 19 graves.  The deceased appear to have been cremated and then placed within the burial with a number of funerary objects.

According to the team’s lead archaeologists, including Kalin Charakov, the Veliko Tarnovo Museum director, Ivan Tsarov, and museum restorer Mihaela Tomanova, the ostrich egg cup and the gold-plated fibula were found in a central grave.  The horseman fibula is the only artifact of its kind to be found in Bulgaria.  Other artifacts from the same grave include a jug depicting a human face, a warrior’s belt, gold earrings, pottery vessels, lacrimaria, or tiny vessels to collect tears in, and 30 coins. 

Presumably, the coins were placed there so the deceased could  pay the ferryman to cross the rivers Styx and Acheron into the underworld.

The main grave is thought to be that of a warrior who completed his military career with the Romans and returned home. 

The main salvage excavation was in November and December of 2019, but they hope to continue work in 2020, now that the significance of this site has been established.

We finish this week in Mexico City, where a mass grave has turned up evidence of the first Africans brought to the Americas as slaves.  The grave at San Jose de los Naturales Royal Hospital in Mexico City is from the 1500s, soon after the conquest of Mexico by Spanish invaders.  

As reported by The New York Times, detailed examination showed that three of the skulls were not those of native people, but of African descent.  Their teeth were filed decoratively, as is typical of some regions of West Africa at the time, and genetic testing confirms that the individuals were indeed of African descent.

The archaeologists studied the whole skeletons of these individuals to understand what happened to them prior to crossing the Atlantic and becoming part of the slave population in colonial Mexico. 

According to Rodrigo Barquera, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the travails marked in their bones show how they lived, as well as new insight into how infectious diseases spread through the trans-Atlantic slave trade into the New World.

The Spanish established San Jose de los Naturales Royal Hospital in 1530 to serve exclusively to indigenous patients, but the three African people also were treated there.   European diseases were already ravaging the native landscape, nearly wiping out the indigenous population, and for this and religious reasons, the Spaniards shifted to enslaved laborers from Africa to work their new possessions in the Americas.

According to Barquera, these early enslaved men could have been the victims of the same epidemics, however, and were brought to the hospital to die and be buried along with hundreds of indigenous victims.

The men’s remains were excavated in 1992, and their teeth were the first clue that something was different.  Further examination revealed that one of them had buckshot from an old wound in his chest cavity.  All three, who died at ages under 40, showed signs of hard labor. 

According to Dr. Johannes Kruse, co-author of the report on the find, just published in the journal, Current Biology, it may have been the slave trade that brought the majority of diseases over to the New World instead of just the Europeans who explored and colonized the area.

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!