Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Let’s get this week started with 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 giant Legoland theme park under development is threatening what may be South Korea’s most significant prehistoric site.  Volcanic debris and a climate downturn from an Alaska eruption might have been the tipping point for the Roman Republic after the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Poisonous water in two central reservoirs is a potential cause for the downfall of the ancient Maya city of Tikal. And aerial and satellite imagery have combined to reveal more than 14,000 ancient sites in Syria.

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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 28th through July 4th, 2020.

In Korea, local residents, including archaeology students, have launched a desperate effort to stop the construction of a gigantic amusement park on top of one of the country’s largest and oldest archaeological sites.  The construction project is a new Legoland theme park, billed as the largest in the world, which is to be built across most of Jungdo [JUNG-doh] Island.  Jungdo Island is a large river island in Chuncheon [CHUN-chon], the capital of Gangwon [GANG-wahn] Province, in the north-central part of the country.  

As reported by the Ancient Origins archaeological news website, archaeology advocates have been reaching out by email and an online petition to try to rouse public support for their cause.  

The Legoland theme parks feature entertainment and education based around the famous plastic building blocks.  When the Gangwon provincial government signed an agreement last year for the largest park yet  to be built, on a more than 1 million square meter archaeological site, it provoked heated debate in the provincial assembly.  

Prehistoric remains already mapped across the island from the 1960s to the 1980s include 270 religious, village and other sites.  The project was delayed briefly after 2014 for excavation of what turned out to be Korea ’s largest prehistoric site.  Finds included house foundations and several burial dolmens, a copper sword, and several fan-shaped bronze axes described as exceptionally rare and archaeologically significant.  More than 100 Bronze Age stone tombs, known as dolmens, and 900 house sites still remain unexcavated. 

Local residents opposing the destruction of the massive archaeological site for building another Legoland petitioned that the island should instead be made into “Dolmen Land,” where people can experience the prehistoric way of life in Korea.

Ironically, one of the senior directors of Merlin Entertainment PLC, the British-based operator of Legoland parks around the world, is Charles Gurassa, who also chairs a committee of English Heritage, the government agency responsible for cultural heritage sites in England.  

Construction of Korean Legoland is underway, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, the opening has been pushed back to 2022, 

The global petition to stop Legoland’s destruction of Jungdo Island prehistory is posted at http://www.maywespeak.com/dolmen.

New research on tephra [TEF-ra], the volcanic ash that is so chemically unique that it serves as a volcanic fingerprint, shows that an eruption in the Aleutian Islands, 6,000 miles away from Italy, could have helped change history all over the Mediterranean.  This story is reported by the New York Times.

A team, led by Joseph McConnell, a climate scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada,  probes through ice cores, typically drilled from glaciers, to find bits of volcanic material that filtered down onto the glaciers from long-ago eruptions and became preserved as the glacial layers froze.

Volcanic tephra particles are a key find, because they are geochemically tied to the specific volcano they erupted from.  Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, also pinpoints past eruptions.  Tiny sulfate aerosols ride the wind currents of the stratosphere before eventually falling to earth.

The year that the particles land can be calculated by counting the annual layers of the glacier, much like tree rings. 

When McConnell’s team analyzed six ice cores drilled in the Arctic, they found both sulphur and tephra in layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C.  This suddenly added new data for an old hypothesis that some kind of environmental change triggered the crop failures, famines and social unrest across the classical world at that time.   

Until now, a plausible candidate for the cause was not in evidence.  But another member of the international volcano detection team, Gill Plunkett, a paleoecologist at Queen’s University Belfast, started looking at the rock chemistry of volcanoes to figure out the origins of the ash that circled the world in the years after Julius Caesar’s assassination.

Okmok, a volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, turned out to be the source.  Okmok’s eruption was huge, and the sulfate aerosols it spewed out remained in the stratosphere for several years, reflecting sunlight.  This suggests the likelihood that they temporarily cooled Earth’s climate.

Rain patterns changed as well, with some regions getting four times their normal amount.  The cold, wet conditions almost certainly  would have decimated crops, as is reflected in Roman historical records from the time.  Food shortages and famines were so severe that Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, wrote about his army having to survive on wild fruit, roots, bark, and animals that people usually never ate.

With society already disrupted by the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, the crop failures would have exacerbated social unrest that led to the enormous political transition into the Roman Empire.

The new research appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New research reveals deadly waters in two of the largest reservoirs at Tikal, an ancient Maya city in what is now northern Guatemala.  

As reported in sci-news dot com, the two reservoirs contained high levels of mercury and phosphate, as well as blue-green algae that can give off deadly toxins. 

Tikal was one of the largest political, economic and military centers of the ancient Maya civilization.  This highland city-state was inhabited from the 6th century BC to the 10th century AD, housing a dense population of up to 90,000 people.

According to David Lentz, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, a toxic shift in Tikal’s central reservoirs certainly would have helped bring about its abandonment.

In the new study, Lentz’s team examined layers of sediment dating back to the 9th century, when Tikal was flourishing.  In samples from 10 of the city’s water reservoirs, they found toxic levels of mercury in two, known as the temple reservoir and the palace reservoir.

The team traced the pollution back to paint.  It turns out that mercury was part of a red pigment the Maya used on buildings, pottery and other goods.  The red paint used on plaster walls was produced from cinnabar, a red-colored mineral composed of mercury sulfide that the Maya mined nearby.  Rain washed the mercury particles from the paint, so that it leached into at least two reservoirs, where it settled in layers of sediment over the years.  Other reservoirs remained uncontaminated. 

But one of the last rulers of Tikal, a lord named Dark Sun, may have suffered from a metabolic syndrome related to chronic mercury poisoning.  Obesity is one of the side effects of the syndrome, and Dark Sun’s pronounced obesity is recorded in a carving of him on a temple lintel. 

The Temple and Palace reservoir sediments also showed evidence of two types of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae.  Drinking the water would have made people sick even if they boiled the water.

According to the study’s co-author, Dr. Kenneth Tankersley, of the University of Cincinnati, the water would have looked, smelled and tasted unpalatable.  But again, more distant reservoirs showed no evidence of this contamination. 

The lack of healthy drinking water in central city reservoirs, especially during the droughts that plagued the Maya uplands during later centuries, could have helped prompt people to leave the city and contribute to its abandonment. 

The study was published online this month in the journal, Scientific Reports. 

Over 14,000 settlement sites in Syria have been revealed, thanks to help from satellite technology from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.

The numerous but small village and household remains were hiding in the overgrown landscape of northeastern Syria and adjacent regions, but scientists say they hold vital clues to ancient civilizations that once inhabited this area.  Researchers found them by combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern satellite images and digital maps of Earth's surface.  

As reported by The Express, this new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human movement has now located sites spanning eight millennia across 23,000 square kilometers, or nearly 9,000 square miles.  

According to Jason Ur, an archaeologist at Harvard University and co-author of the study, this brings perspective back into settlement studies.  Traditional archaeology goes straight to the biggest places, the palaces and cities, often ignoring the tiny settlements that people came from.  To understand how these movements happened, we have to put these people back on the map.

The satellite-based method analyzed a distinctive reflective signature left in the soil by human activity, known as anthrosols.   Formed from organic waste and decayed mud-brick architecture, anthrosols contain higher levels of organic matter and have a finer texture and lighter appearance than undisturbed soil.

According to Dr. Ur, while it’s also possible to search for sites with the naked eye using Google Earth, this method takes the subjectivity out of it by defining spectral characteristics that bounce off archaeological sites.

The new findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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!