Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  One constant you can count on is another weekly installment 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!

A wooden carving of Jesus in Italy turns out to be remarkably old.  A site in southern Norway has given up fishing gear and fish bones dating 5000 years ago.  A Viking longhouse in Iceland apparently dates earlier than the accepted date of Viking colonization. And a volunteer team of excavators laid off from their jobs in India by the coronavirus pandemic has uncovered an ancient Hindu temple.

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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 June 21st through the 27th, 2020.

We start this week in Tuscany, where new radiocarbon analysis on a revered Christian relic confirms it was created between the end of the seventh century AD and the middle of the ninth.  This makes it definitively the oldest wooden statue in Europe, although the mysterious Shigir Idol from Siberia holds the world record at 11,500 years old.  The Mesolithic Shigir Idol, previously reported on by the Audio News, survived thanks to burial in the anaerobic conditions of a bog.  

The Tuscan religious carving, however, has been on display in the Cathedral of San Martino in Lucca, Italy, since the middle ages.  

Known locally as the Volto Santo de Lucca, or Holy Face of Lucca, the eight foot tall wooden carving depicts a crucified Jesus and is noted for its lifelike features and downward gaze.  The Volto Santo has been compared to the Shroud of Turin in terms of its religious significance to devotees and pilgrims, and is even mentioned in Dante’s Inferno.

The creation story of the carving is a legend first recorded in a twelfth century manuscript.  This holds that the massive carving was originally sculpted by Nicodemus, the Pharisee who helped Joseph of Arimathea wrap the body of Jesus after the crucifixion.  Since Nicodemus was Jewish, he was prohibited from depicting a human visage, so angels carved the face of Christ instead.  Hence the name “Volto Santo,” or holy face.   The sculpture then remained hidden in the Holy Land for 800 years, according to the legend.  Then angels instructed a pilgrim from northern Italy to send it out to sea on a ship with no crew, guided only by his prayers.  It reached the Tuscan coast, where further angelic instruction brought it to Lucca during the reign of Pepin, the King of Italy, and son of Charlemagne, in 782.  In AD 1070, the statue was presented to the cathedral where it still resides.

The style of carving led art historians to think the present-day statue was a copy from the twelfth century of an original that had long vanished.  

Carbon-dating of the statue, however, has now overturned that hypothesis and confirmed that this ancient wooden monument really is from the period of the legend, between the last decades of the eight century and the ninth century AD.  

As reported by the New York Times, the new dating work was carried out by Annamaria Giusti, an art historian and consultant for the Cathedral at San Martino.

Technicians tested three samples of wood from the crucifix, one from each arm and one from the lower part of the gown, as well as a tiny sample of a layer of canvas that allowed paint to better affix to the sculpture.  The samples were carefully cleaned to remove any traces of later varnish or materials, and dated at an accelerator mass spectrometry lab in Florence. 

The results from all four samples correspond, with the canvas fragment date being the most telling, between AD 770 and 880.  The canvas must have been applied after the carving of the wood, to help the paint adhere.    

The dating, carried out for the 950th anniversary of the Cathedral’s founding, now adds to the reverence and pride in the statue, which is the centerpiece of two annual festivals. 

In Norway, a southern wetland find has led to further excavation, and evidence of an impressive skill set used by people who lived here 5000 years ago.

As reported by the website ScienceNorway.no, the artifacts originally turned up in a 1931 construction project for drainage canals.  Materials include bones from bluefin tuna and whales, along with small stone arrowheads, and large fishing hooks and harpoons made of bone.  Their preservation was excellent, considering their estimated origins in the late Stone Age, and they have been in the University Museum of Antiquities in Oslo ever since.   

Now a Ph. D. candidate, Svein Vatsvag Nielsen, has reexamined the artifacts using more modern analysis techniques, and found that the finds date from between roughly 3500 and 2700 BC.   

The results led to new excavations in 2018.

The layers of clay and mud, almost a meter deep, made excavation arduous, and after only a single arrowhead was discovered, the team was about to quit.  Then, 125 centimeters down, they found tightly packed bones of bluefin tuna and small whales, suggesting that the area was once a lagoon that trapped the sea animals after they followed prey inland and left them susceptible to human hunters using boats and stone harpoons. 

Animals that were injured but escaped would have died, leading to the layer of bones at the bottom of the lagoon.  Alternatively, the layer may be from cleaning the catches on the boats and dumping the bones overboard.

In Iceland, a new Viking longhouse find may be the oldest found to date, potentially setting the date for early settlement back by several more decades.

The find took place in 2007, but the dig waited until 2015.  Located near the town and fjord of Stoovarfjorour, a remote hamlet on the eastern seaboard about an hour’s flight from the Reykjavik, the longhouse lies beneath another early longhouse, itself a trove of ancient artifacts.

As reported by LiveScience.com, the work was carried out by a collaboration among Iceland’s Archaeological Fund, local government, residents, and businesses.  

The early longhouse is believed to have been used seasonally during the summer months for fishing and for trading the catch.  Following a traditional construction pattern, the newer, upper level was a more permanent residence added on at a later date.

The original longhouse is of impressive size relative to other known Viking encampments.  

Measuring 40 meters in length, the wooden building would have been roofed with thatch and turf, and provided communal shelter for the inhabitants and their livestock in the harsh environment.

Evidence revealed that a section of the structure was dedicated to metalsmithing, a feature that has not been found anywhere else in Iceland.

The scale of the site is similar to another Viking encampment found in what is now Newfoundland, Canada, dated to around AD 1000. 

Chemical analysis dates the original Icelandic longhouse to about AD 800, long before the recorded permanent settlement of Iceland.  Most accounts place that date at AD 874 when the original settlers fled the rule of Norwegian king Harald Fairhair.

The later addition yielded an incredible cache of coins, silver and ornamental beads, comparable to anything found to date in all of Scandinavia.  Of particular interest were Roman and Middle Eastern coins along with what is referred to as hacksilver, bent silver pieces used as a form of currency by ancient peoples.

The stunning array of glass beads, precious metals and stone tools found in the upper chamber indicate the inhabitants were of a high social status, perhaps as rulers or other important figures of their society at the time.

In our final story for this week, we go to India, where people thrown out of work by the global pandemic found a new way to do something meaningful - rescuing an ancient temple from the shifting sands of time.

As reported by the news site India.com, a group of approximately 35 young people, some returned home after layoffs from their mining jobs due to the pandemic, turned to removing over 200 years of sand and sediment that had been completely covering the Nageswara Swamy temple in the town of Perumallapadu, near Chejelara, within the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh.

The Nageswara Swamy temple, dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, lies in a coastal region with recorded human occupation from at least the fifth century BC.  

It is believed that heavy flooding from the river Penna over a century ago, during the 1850s, began the damage to the temple, followed by decades of sandstorms that left little trace of the brick structure.  In an area historically known for heavy seasonal rainfall, the temple eventually was buried almost entirely by sand.

The newly excavated temple, while still not completely re-exposed, has been popular among local residents.  According to local folklore the temple was consecrated by Parasurama, an avatar of the god Vishnu.  The site has also drawn visitors and devotees who wish to worship at the rediscovered holy site.

As of now, the excavation is on hold, awaiting decisions on how best to preserve the site and prevent unintentional damage, especially to the condition of a statue to Shiva located somewhere within the temple ruins.

Plans are underway by the state archaeological team to study and possibly restore the site.  

The eventual outcome of these restoration plans reportedly will include consultations with local residents and elders, as well as with Hindu priests.  

Archaeologists around the globe are racing to understand artifacts from human history before they are destroyed, often by human activities.  The recovery of the Nageswara Swamy temple by volunteers is a noteworthy exception to that trend.

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!