Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  You’ve come to the right place for 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 ancient North American city of Cahokia apparently arose fairly soon after the introduction of maize cultivation.  The dispersion of evolved varieties of rice in east Asia seems to have followed a cooling period around 4000 years ago.  New archaeology in southern Africa shows how ancient societies responded to epidemics. And the collapse of farming in the Negev Desert of today’s Israel now has some secure dates..

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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 10th through the 16th, 2020.

In ancient Illinois, corn kernels have revealed new details about the rapid expansion of the Cahokia metropolis.

By 4000 BC, corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest, but how and when the crop made it to other regions of North America is still debated by archaeologists.

As reported by the Illinois News Bureau, a team of scientists determined the age of charred corn kernels found in homes, shrines and other locations in Cahokia, a pre-Columbian Native American city directly across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis.  The team also examined carbon isotopes in the teeth and bones of humans as well as dogs buried in the vicinity.  Ratios between these variations differ among food sources; with carbon-13 isotope ratios of corn being significantly higher than those of almost all other native plant species in the region.  By analyzing the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 in the teeth and bones, the team determined the proportion of various types of foods the people of Cahokia ate in different time periods.

The corn remnants and isotope analyses revealed that corn growing began in Cahokia sometime between AD 900 and 1000; just before the city grew into a major metropolis.

The research team was led by retired state archaeologist Thomas Emerson, and included Illinois State Archaeological Survey archaeobotanist Mary Simon along with several others.

According to Emerson, some thought that corn came to the central Mississippi River valley around AD 1, but the new finding shows that corn actually arrived much later.

Simon, who conducted an exhaustive analysis of corn kernels found at Cahokia and elsewhere in the Midwest, wrote that corn was unlikely to have fully adapted to more northerly climates by just AD 1.  Originally cultivated in Mesoamerica, corn needed more adaptive time to survive in a different environment before it could be grown in higher latitudes.  Artifacts uncovered from Cahokia include flint-clay figurines of women engaged in agricultural activities and vessels marked with symbols of water and fertility.  Some of the items depict crops such as sunflowers and squash, which predated the arrival of corn.

As reported by Emerson, in AD 1050 Cahokia grew from a little village of a few hundred people to a city with 5,000 to 10,000 people in an archaeological instant.  The population eventually expanded to at least 40,000.  But by AD 1350, after a period of drought and civil strife, most of the city’s population had dispersed.

An international research team reports that a major global cooling event 4,200 years ago may have spurred the evolution of new rice varieties and caused rice to spread into both northern and southern Asia.

As reported by NewsWise dot com, researchers reconstructed the historical movement of rice across Asia using whole-genome sequences of more than 1,400 varieties of rice—including varieties of japonica and indica, two main subspecies of Asian rice—coupled with geography, archaeology and historical climate data.

According to study author Rafal M. Gutaker, postdoctoral associate at the NYU Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, an abrupt climate change event, known as 4.2k, forced crops to adapt.  Genomic data, as well as paleoclimate modeling, show that the cooling event occurred alongside the rise of temperate japonica, which grows in milder regions.  This cooling event also may have led to the migration of rice agriculture and farmer communities into Southeast Asia.

Study leader Michael D. Purugganan, silver professor of biology at NYU, stated that the findings were backed up by data from archaeological rice remains excavated in Asia, which also showed that after the 4.2k event, tropical rice migrated south while rice also adapted to northern latitudes as temperate varieties.

Tropical japonica rice continued to diversify after the 4.2k event and reached islands in Southeast Asia about 2,500 years ago, likely due to trade and the movement of peoples in the region.

The spread of indica rice was more recent and more complicated; after originating in India’s lower Ganges Valley roughly 4,000 years ago, the researchers traced its migration from India into China approximately 2,000 years ago.

While the researchers had thought that rainfall and water would be the most limiting environmental factor in rice diversity, they found, in fact, that temperature was the key factor.  Analysis revealed that heat accumulation and temperature were more strongly associated with the genomic differences between tropical and temperate japonica rice varieties.

Understanding the spread of rice and the related environmental pressures could help scientists breed new rice varieties that meet future environmental challenges and looming food security issues, like those brought on by modern climate change and drought.

In the course of human history, some pandemics have dramatically impacted human societies.  Examples include the Black Death, from 1347 to 1351; the Spanish flu of 1918;and now the COVID-19 crisis.

According to the website The Conversation, archaeologists have long studied diseases in past populations.  To do this, they consider a wide array of evidence such as settlement layout, burials, funerary remains, and human skeletons.

Archaeological and historical insights also expose some of the strategies that societies adopted to deal with epidemics.  In addition to social distancing, these included burning settlements as a disinfectant and shifting settlements to new locations.  Findings in southern Zimbabwe also show that it was a taboo to touch or interfere with remains of the dead, to avoid disease transmission.  In the late 1960s, members of an archaeological dig excavating 13th century house floors in Phalaborwa, South Africa, refused to continue work after encountering burials they believed were sacred.  They worried that the burials were related to an outbreak. 

Research at the early urban settlement of K2, part of the Mapungubwe World Heritage site, has thrown significant light on ancient epidemics. 

Archaeological work at K2 revealed 94 burials, 76 of which belonged to children from birth to age 4. The settlement was abandoned abruptly around the same time as the burials.  That means an epidemic most likely prompted the community’s decision to shift to another settlement. 

Archaeological work at early urban settlements in central and southern Ghana identified the impact of epidemics at places such Akrokrowa and Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa in the central district of Ghana.  The settlements were bounded by intricate systems of trenches and banks of earth.  After two centuries of continuous and stable occupation, they were abruptly abandoned.  The period of abandonment appears to coincide with the devastation of the Black Death in Europe. 

The layout of settlements was also important.  In areas such as Zimbabwe and parts of Mozambique, settlements were dispersed to house one or two families in a space.  This allowed people to stay safely apart while still engaging in daily care, support, and cooperation.

These behaviors were augmented by diversified diets that included fruits, roots and other things that provided nutrients and strengthened the immune system.

Perhaps the most important long-term implication of epidemics in these communities was that people organized themselves in ways that made it easier to live with diseases, managing them while simultaneously sticking to the basics such as good hygiene, sanitation and environmental control.  Epidemic disease did not bring an end to living.  People found solutions that made it possible to manage and live with it. 

Most people think of the Negev Desert as inhospitable and a bad place for farming, but nearly 2,000 years ago, some parts of the desert were intensively farmed and then abandoned.

As reported by the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Israeli archaeologists Yotam Tepper and Guy Bar-Oz of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, along with Naomi Porat of the Geological Survey, now believe they have cracked the puzzle.

The team concluded that agriculture in the ancient Negev village of Shivta began in the Roman period, in the 1st or 2nd century AD, and that its collapse coincided with the end of the Byzantine rule.

The new research, supported by the European Research Council, relied in part on optically stimulated luminescence dating of the soil. For this project, the team concentrated on a large area near a pigeon tower.  The terraces, stone mounds, pigeon towers, and agricultural towers are all from the Byzantine era.  It appears that agriculture in Shivta collapsed in the 7th century at the start of the Islamic period.

But why would the site suddenly collapse?  One reason may be that Israel is riddled with crustal faults and there had been two powerful quakes in the 7th century: in September 634, and in early June 659.

Another reason could be the fact that the Black Death was around in the 6th century.  It began in Egypt around the year 541 and spread to Israel, Europe and western Asia, finally petering out two centuries later, in about 750.

Alternatively, it was a climatological factor, since the years 535 and 536 brought extreme cold to the northern hemisphere.  Some call it the Late Antique Little Ice Age.  Contemporaneous reports from Europe describe shrouded skies, crop failures and famine, and weird weather extremes from droughts to blizzards.  Scholars more or less agree that a violent eruption caused a volcanic winter, but to this day no consensus exists as to which volcano was the culprit.

According to the archaeologists, although Shivta is only one small place, its fate attests to the decline in human use of the Negev at the end of the early Christian period.  Some places, such as the village of Nessana, soldiered on.

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!