Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Once again, our Audio News team has prepared 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!

An online platform offers virtual visits to Jewish sites that no longer exist.  A new genetic study from Lebanon shows surprisingly little change since the Bronze Age 4000 years ago.  An Australian mining company used explosives to destroy a 46,000 year old Aboriginal rockshelter site. And a study of tarter samples from 400-year-old teeth in Japan reveals what people there ate during the Edo Period.

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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 24th through the 30th, 2020.

A virtual platform developed by a Wellesley College professor and her students are helping Jewish heritage sites be visited from around the world in safety.   In 2008, Jason Guberman-Pfeffer, a recent Wellesley graduate, and Fran Malino, one of his professors, combined online technology and archival work to create Diarna, a website whose name means “our homes.”  

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the two were inspired by an acquaintance’s description of decaying synagogues and cemeteries in Morocco to make these ancient cultural treasures available to all regardless of their location. 

Visitors to Diarna’s interactive map can choose from over 2,000 sites.  Photography, satellite imaging, digital mapping, and 3-D modeling combine with archival materials and oral histories to offer the enrichment a visitor might hope for in person.   Where no professional or academic photo materials are available, the nonprofit Diarna site draws from social media to provide amateur video and photographs. 

“Diarna” comes from Judeo-Arabic and captures the nonprofit’s driving mission to overcome the political and economic instability, as well as intolerance, that threaten many of the places Diarna documents.  For example, the 500-year-old synagogue of Eliyahu Hanavi-Jobar remains preserved online as it looked in 2010, while in real life, the tragedy of the Syrian civil war reduced the synagogue to rubble in 2014.

Documenting historical sites can be dangerous for photographers.  Confiscations of equipment by police, war, looting, vandalism, and even poison gas attacks have hindered photographers and damaged the sites they seek to document.   Diarna’s goal is non-political -- to preserve and make accessible historical sites that are important to the cultural heritage of us all.   With the erasure of Jewish history in many parts of the Middle East, Diarna is working against time to keep these treasures alive. 

The eastern Mediterranean has seen almost countless rulers through history: the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Arabs, and Ottomans, among others.  Despite all this political change, a new study shows these invasions have had surprisingly little genetic impact on Lebanon’s population.  

Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University of Birmingham, and French Institute of the Near East in Lebanon studied the genomes of skeletal populations from four archaeological sites in Beirut, Lebanon.  They detected genetic changes in only three time periods—the start of the Iron Age, about 1,000 BC; the coming of Alexander the Great, in 330 BC; and the absorption of the region into the Ottoman Empire, after AD 1516.  Comparing modern Lebanese people and their Bronze Age ancestors from around 4,000 years ago revealed 90 per cent similarity in the genetic makeup.  Even politically momentous events, like the Crusader invasion from the 11th to 13th centuries AD, left few traces.

As reported by the science website phys.org, the four sites under study were discovered by builders and rescued by Lebanon’s Directorate General of Antiquities.  The age of the skeletons ranged from 8,000 BC to AD 200.  A laboratory in Estonia that specializes in ancient and damaged DNA carried out the genetic analysis on samples that the researchers extracted from cranial bones.  The results allowed scientists to sequence nineteen genomes and create a timeline with eight points across the millennia. 

Evidence of mixed ancestry was found.  For example, a mother and son found at a burial site revealed Egyptian ancestry for the mother, and mixed Egyptian-Lebanese ancestry for the son.  However, this seems to be the exception, rather than the rule. 

According to Dr. Joyce Nassar, an archaeologist from one of the lead organizations, the French Institute of the Near East, the findings go against expectations that cultural blending from various invasions would also lead to biological mixing.  Given the depth of influence from various conquerors, including changes in religion and language, the lack of pronounced genetic change leads to intriguing questions.

The researchers hope more DNA studies like this can complement historical records and shed more light on the life of ordinary people in history.  Such findings prove vital when historical records usually focus on the rich and elite.   The new results appear in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

On May 24th, the Australian mining company, Rio Tinto, used explosives to destroy a sacred Aboriginal site in Western Australia in order to expand an iron mine.  As reported by The Guardian, the site was of great archaeological importance, as it showed 46,000 years of occupation that link present-day Aboriginal people and their ancestors. 

The site is a cave in Juukan Gorge, about 60 km, or 37 miles, from Mt. Tom Price, and is the only inland site on the country showing continual human occupation dating back to the last Ice Age. 

Acting under a 1972 law designed to favor mining interests, the Australian government gave Rio Tinto permission in 2013 to damage or destroy the site.  Archaeologists were then sent to carry out salvage excavations in 2014 and discovered that the site was much older than originally thought, and held significant artifacts.  

In particular, a 4,000-year-old braid of human hair excited researchers’ interest.  Woven from the hair of different people, the braid’s DNA revealed direct evidence of ancestors of the modern Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples.

According to Michael Slack, who led the Juukan dig, the excavation found more than 7,000 artifacts and thousands of animal bones from middens showing how changing climate altered local fauna.  While most archaeological digs in the Pilbara region can go only 30 centimeters deep before hitting rock, the soil build-up in the cave went as deep as two meters, over 6 feet. 

The site was unique in its continued occupation.  Most other inland sites in Australia have a gap in the record between 23,000 and 19,000 years ago, when an Ice Age caused water sources to dry up, forcing humans away.  

According to Burchell Hayes, director of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura, or PKKP, Aboriginal Corporation, the site was important not just as a sacred place and a source of cultural pride, but also as a modern campsite for Aboriginal people as they travel. 

These findings did not affect the legality of the decision to destroy the site, and, despite the efforts of the PKKP, Rio Tinto continued the demolition.  According to a spokesperson for Rio Tinto, they modified its operations where practicable.

The Australian government has worked since 2012 to revise the laws governing commercial impacts on sites like this sacred cave, but has been opposed by the National Party.  Last month the coronavirus pandemic delayed new legislation on Aboriginal heritage laws drafted by Aboriginal affairs minister Ben Wyatt.

According to Wyatt, the new laws will allow for appeals against the destruction of sites like Juukan. 

We end the week in Japan, where tests on the dental calculus of skeletal remains have revealed what people ate during the Edo period, from AD 1603 to 1867. 

The research comes from genetic analysis of thirteen tartar samples taken from skeletons of commoners, buried in the Unko-in site in Tokyo.  The tartar produced genetic traces of rice and vegetables, as well as medicinal plants, such as gingko.   

The technique is a new approach called metabarcoding, which identifies short snippets of DNA that researchers can compare to a DNA barcode database.  The matchup compares genetic signatures of plants, animals and fungi, while excluding bacteria that do not contain these genetic snippets.  Metabarcoding has been used before by ecologists, to determine animal diets from DNA in animal scat, but is new to the field of archaeology. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the researchers found the genetic signature of rice, the traditional and modern staple food of Japan, on eight of the thirteen samples.  Other plant DNA included carrot, pumpkin, Japanese chestnut, Welsh onion, daikon radish, and shiso perilla [SHEE-so peh-RILL-ah].

However, the analysis failed to show meat as part of the diet.  This could be because Buddhism, the dominant religion in Japan during the Edo period, discouraged meat eating.  It could also, however, be caused by the test blocking animal DNA, because it is programmed to block out human DNA.   This anomalous finding will be explored further to establish more clarity.

The test results also affirmed the prevalence of trade at this time by detecting tobacco and a medicinal plant from the Dipterocarpaceae [DIP-ter-o-car-PAY-cee-aye].  Neither of these plants grow wild in Japan.  Dipterocarpaceae are a family of tropical trees found in southeast Asia, related to the hibiscus.  The DNA from this plant could come from a flavoring called borneol that Edo era people used for flavoring in the fine sand they used to clean and polish their teeth.

Researchers studying the findings have noted that different strata of society in the Edo period had different dietary cultures, which could have left different amounts and types of tartar.  According to Hiroki Ota, a paleogeneticist at the University of Tokyo, more research is needed to crosscheck the new results against coprolites and other diet-related data. 

The research team corroborated their findings with historical records, and have published their report in the open-access science journal PLOS One.

That wraps up the news for this week!

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www.archaeologica.org where all the news is history!

I’m Laura Pettigrew and I’ll see you next week!