Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Here comes another 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!

The central causeway at the ancient North American city of Cahokia apparently had a special significance for the city planners.  Early modern humans in the Indonesian islands apparently shifted from a marine-based to a land-based diet.  X-rays are making possible detailed analyses of metal technology used on the British Renaissance-era warship, the Mary Rose. And archaeology has some lessons for us all about the long-term silver lining of pandemics.

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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 May 3rd to the 9th, 2020.

We begin this week in the ancient North American city of Cahokia, where archaeologists seek to unlock more of the secrets of how these city builders oriented their lives and urban architecture to the cosmic alignment of the Milky Way.  

Recent work by Tim Pauketat, director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, promises to show that watching how water flows here when flooded will help identify these patterns.

Pauketat’s recent work includes use of lidar maps to identify how Cahokians, famous for building many mounds, might have put just as much emphasis on the locations of the borrow pits they took the soil from, forming artificial ponds.  The maps, created by a light detection and ranging sensor, help to find the subtle changes in elevation that are otherwise difficult to see.  

The team suspects the ponds held more meaning for the original city builders than previously assumed.  They’re also studying a causeway that cuts through the city.

The causeway, or street, is a line that extends from a main plaza, starting just south of Monk's Mound, the largest surviving mound, all the way to a pair of twin mounds marking the southern boundary of the plaza.  It’s straight as an arrow, and over half a mile long.

According to Pauketat, the line indicates that when the city was first built, the first buildings were put onto a grid.  The axis, marked by the causeway, is five degrees off true north.  Pauketat’s hypothesis is that this orientation references celestial events.

As reported by the science news site Phys.org, the people of Cahokia began to construct their city in about AD 1050.  They quickly removed all surrounding trees, using them to build homes, temples, stockades, and other structures.  This left open vistas in every direction.  The mounds, ponds and pathways were visible from most parts of the city, and their connection to the sun and stars were more obvious than they are now.

Within 200 years of the city's founding, decades of drought had parched the local landscape.  By AD 1350, after several generations of violent strife – evidenced by the remains of people who died of arrow wounds and scalping – Cahokia was abandoned.

The causeway, now rising out a brushy swamp, is as wide as a modern four-lane highway.  Pauketat thinks it linked the temples and homes of central and northern Cahokia to the burial mounds in southern Cahokia.

According to Pauketat, the watery world has long been important to Native Americans, from eastern North America down into Mesoamerica.  Water is the barrier between this world and the underworld.

The Milky Way is of similar importance.  Indigenous peoples recounted how when a person dies, the soul goes to the edge of the world and climbs the Milky Way into the sky.  

With this in mind, Pauketat used the lidar maps and Google Earth to replicate what Cahokians saw when standing on top of Monk's Mound.  He found that around the summer solstice, when the Milky Way is most vertical in the sky, right before sunrise the Milky Way rises out of the end of the causeway and arcs across the sky before tapping back into a line marked by the causeway.

In Southeast Asia, researchers are pushing to discover much more about how ancient humans lived, and changed, as they traveled into the Indonesian archipelago more than 45,000 years ago.  One thing they’ve learned is that the earliest humans who came here ate mostly fish.  But fairly quickly, they learned to love rats as well.

According to Griffith University Associate Professor Julien Louys, who leads the team, by about 20,000 years ago, the humans who settled into the region had transitioned to a mostly land-based diet.  This ecological flexibility, one of the defining traits of humanity, allowed people to move rapidly through these islands on their way to Australia, but also let them learn how to subsist on these islands once they became established.

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, it was previously discovered that ancient humans living on islands in the Indonesian archipelago, including Flores, Timor and Alor, hunted local game, including giant rats and a miniature species of the elephant-like stegodon.

Now the team led by Professor Louys, a paleontologist and paleoecologist, has used carbon-dating analysis, ecological research, and the nutritional evidence revealed by skeletal tooth chemistry to show what people were eating and when.  The chemicals in their tooth enamel show that the first people to come to the islands were using marine resources.  It was only later that they began to diversify into other resources available on the islands.

According to Professor Louys, the results of this study support the idea that a distinguishing characteristic of Homo sapiens is high ecological flexibility.  This differs from species like the Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbit," and Homo luzonensis, two small-body hominins found only on some of these islands.  They didn’t seem to get as far as modern humans did, and the data suggest that is because they couldn’t exploit marine resources like modern humans could.

The work being done by Professor Louys’ team, which also includes researchers from the Max Planck Institute and Indonesia’s Universitas Gadjah Mada, is part of a major push by paleontologists around the world to investigate the south-east Asia and Oceania regions, which are only now being explored extensively by scientists.

There’s still much to be discovered, with around 17,000 different islands, and archaeological records for only around 10 of them. The latest findings have been published in the journal, Nature Communications.

We go now to England, where conservation on metal artifacts from the Tudor warship, the Mary Rose, has led to advances in the use of X-rays to identify the composition of the metals. 

As reported by the website Ars Technica, the Mary Rose was one of King Henry the Eighth’s favorite warships, until she sank unexpectedly in 1545.  Centuries later, in 1982, the ship, along with thousands of artifacts, was raised from the bottom of the Solent, which separates the Isle of Wight from the southern coast of England.

The Mary Rose was commissioned in 1510 for the new young king Henry The Eighth, and served in a series of conflicts with the French.  In 1545, according to contemporary accounts, the ship suddenly keeled over to one side, perhaps from a change in the wind, and water rushed in through the open gunports.  When the ship sank, only 35 of the 500 men onboard survived. 

The over 26,000 artifacts from the shipwreck range from timbers to casks for food and drink, to storage chests, sundials, a backgammon set, navigation, surgical and woodworking tools, musical instruments, weapons, and the skeletons of all the lost crew members, including a dog named Hatch, who kept the ship’s rat population under control.

Although the artifacts were well preserved by silt on the ocean floor, additional preservation measures were necessary.  

Two of the chain-mail links studied were twisted loops of brass wire, and the other was three linked copper flat washers.  Each underwent different cleaning and anti-corrosion treatments.

According to co-author Eleanor Schofield, head of conservation at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, the study provides new information on how the metal has reacted to over 400 years of seawater corrosion.  

The British team used a beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, to examine the links.  Synchrotron radiation is a thin beam of high-intensity X-rays generated within a particle accelerator.  

The team found that the links were made from 73-percent copper and 27-percent zinc.  According to co-author Mark Dowsett, emeritus professor at the University of Warwick [WAR-ik], all three had the same compositional ratios, suggesting that Tudor England was fairly advanced in brass production and techniques like wire drawing.

Heavy traces of lead and gold found on the surface of the links could have come later, either from the dust produced by the lead balls in 16th century weaponry, or during World War II, when bombing deposited lead, mercury and cadmium into the Solent waters.

According to co-author Mieke Adriaens of Ghent University, using specially developed analytical methods on artifacts has led to insights that can extend to modern materials.  The study is published in the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation.

We end this week with an archaeological perspective on COVID-19, showing that even while the pandemic redefines much of what we think of as "normal," our knowledge of past human populations shows how we have survived and rebounded after outbreaks throughout history.

According to Dr. Ania Kotarba, an archaeologist and ancient historian at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, epidemics are just some of the extreme historical events that have threatened humans in the past, and archaeological evidence highlights not just typical reasons societies become vulnerable, but also the ways we respond.

Dr. Kotarba researches global connectivity in the past through studying ancient international trade routes and human adaptation to extreme change.

She points to three processes in the past that are implicated in outbreaks of infectious disease: urbanization, population growth and long-distance, large-scale movement, especially for trade.  

In the short run, ancient epidemics often devastated people who were clustered in cities and traveling and trading widely, and then moved into the countryside to fundamentally disrupt economies.  But over the long run, these impacts often led to a stronger economy and significant improvements in the lives of working people.

One example is the way that the Black Death, which killed a quarter or more of all people in Europe in the 1300s, forced landowners and the wealthy to raise pay for the remaining working class people, which also led to better living conditions for all over the following centuries.

While ancient epidemics began with the development of urban life, they intensified with the emergence of the ancient global economy.

As reported by the science website phys.org, the first archaeological evidence of infectious diseases comes from the Neolithic period, when small hunter-gatherer groups moved towards a more sedentary life. 

This allowed for the first large spreads of zoonotic [zo-oh-NOT-ic] diseases, or diseases that jump from animals to humans.  Evidence for the first zoonotic diseases has been found in skeletons from about 2.8 million years ago, in Australopithecus africanus.  But it took permanent large settlements with people living close to one another, their animals and their waste to create the conditions for infectious diseases to spread.

The situation got more complicated as far-distance trade flourished between fully urbanized cities, which developed in different parts of the world during the Bronze Age, from about 3000 to 1200 BC.

By this stage, populations of many ancient cities had already reached over 100,000 people, with ancient Rome said to have reached well over 1 million around AD 200.

Trade routes, often tied to the demand for exotic and luxurious goods such as spices, were responsible for widespread outbreaks of infectious diseases in the ancient world, and in the medieval and early modern periods.

Since the dawn of a global economy, caravans and ships connected disparate peoples, cultures and ecosystems in unprecedented ways, and therefore cultivated the spread of global diseases.

The ancient world had no passenger ships, so all travel had to be on board merchant vessels along the trade routes.  The word quarantine comes from seafaring jargon, referring to sailors being required to keep to their quarters instead of going on shore to spread whatever illness they’d brought.

Biomolecular archaeology and pathogen genetics are new techniques used to study how ancient diseases spread, as well as any biological changes that helped the survivors adapt. 

According to Dr. Kotarba, the small positive impacts of COVID-19-related lockdowns so far include easing the effects of climate change, people doing more gardening and striving to be closer to nature, and populist governments losing some followers as voters find more value in leaders who base their policies on evidence, and lead with empathy.

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!