Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  We’re back again 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!

Removal of a Confederate monument in North Carolina has revealed a time capsule connected to Robert E. Lee.  Divers exploring underwater caves in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula have found some very ancient ocher mines.  A megalithic burial chamber in Israel has revealed a series of rare petroglyphs. And the study of an ephemeral lake in southern Ethiopia illustrates how climate change may have structured ancient human lifeways.

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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 Audio News July 5th through July 11th, 2020.

Officials removing a Confederate monument in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, have uncovered a 126-year-old time capsule.  Now, archaeologists and conservators working on the grounds of the North Carolina State Capitol have revealed its contents.

As reported by CNN, this isn't the first discovery of a time capsule beneath a Confederate monument.  Removal crews found a waterlogged capsule beneath a monument in St. Louis in 2017, and another capsule found in 2018 beneath a statue in New Orleans depicting the Confederacy's first general contained cash, flags, and medals.

However, rarely do these capsules contain relics from General Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Army of Northern Virginia from 1862 until its surrender in 1865.

The box contained a stone thought to be taken from Gettysburg, a pair of buttons, and a strand of hair.  According to a list published in the Charlotte Democrat on May 25, 1894, the contents buried in the capsule included buttons belonging to General Lee and hair from his horse.

The state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources said in a news release that the metal box was severely damaged by the elements, and had rusted through in several places.  The Department also said that work to preserve the items and the box itself were under way.

Other items listed to be in the box, which likely have already decomposed, included maps, Confederate money, and a Bible found at Appomattox Court House the day after Lee surrendered his 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the United States Civil War.

The monument was one of several that were ordered to be removed by North Carolina’s Governor during 2020 in the wake of nationwide protests over systemic racial inequity and the excessive use of force by police departments.

Archaeologists have long wondered about the presence of skeletal remains in the narrow, twisting labyrinth of sinkhole caves in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula—individuals who likely died thousands of years before these caves flooded.  

One of the oldest sets of human remains ever found in the Americas is of a young woman nicknamed "Naia," which was discovered here in 2007.  She likely died from injuries sustained from a 30 meter fall from the caves’ entry tunnel into a deeper chamber below.

Now a group of experts and cave divers have found a possible explanation for why these people may have risked their lives to enter the hazardous caves.  As reported by the German news website, DW, they could have been mining at some of the oldest ocher mines on the continent.

Ocher is an iron-rich mineral pigment which was prized by prehistoric peoples for ornamentation, as a sunscreen, for mortuary practices and for tanning animal hides.  In fact, some peoples in Australia and Africa still use it for these purposes today.

In an article published on Friday in the journal, Science Advances, researchers explain that more than 600 hours of dives have been carried out at the site, exploring some 7 kilometers of subterranean passages in three separate cave systems.  During this expedition, large numbers of mining artifacts came to light.  

According to study co-author Eduard Reinhardt, of McMaster University in Canada, the artifacts are in pristine condition, and even the percussion marks where they chipped at and broke the stone floor are visible.  

Tools were found lying beside the pits along with stone cairns and fire pits apparently used for navigation and for illuminating the cave system.  Smoke marks on the roof of the caves are still visible from the ancient efforts.

As reported by the German website, DW, operations to mine ocher at the site in what is now Quintana Roo [keen-TAW-na ROH] state began as human populations first spread through the region some 12,000 years ago, and went on for about 2,000 years.  

However, James Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, archaeologist, and paleontologist with Applied Paleoscience, a consulting firm in Bothell, Washington, noted that none of the pre-Maya human remains in the caves were found directly in the mining areas.

The mine has now been under water for some 8,000 years, submerged amid rising sea levels after the last Ice Age.

The researchers have taken tens of thousands of photos in the mines with the aim of constructing a 3D model of the site to virtually share their discoveries.

A rare example of megalithic rock art was recently identified in northern Israel’s Yehudiya Nature Reserve inside a 4,200-year-old stone burial chamber.

The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal, Asian Archaeology.

According to Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Uri Berger, this is the first time this kind of rock art has been noted within dolmens, the massive stone burial chambers found throughout the Middle East.  

The authors of this new study define dolmens as megalithic burial structures, often found in clusters, constructed from unhewn boulders with no cementation between them.

This burial chamber comprised five large basalt slabs that support three large boulders, forming a higher course.  The ceiling is formed from a single massive basalt capstone that is 2.6 meters long by 1.2 meters wide.

As reported by the Times of Israel, inside this particular ancient stone chamber were the figures of six different animals carved into rock.  In one panel, the viewer can clearly see animals in several different positions, or poses.  

The art sprawls across three walls of a dolmen that sits prominently on an overlooked ridge in northern Israel.  The drawings became apparent when Paula Foley, an inspector from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, caught a glimpse of horned animals, perhaps mountain goats, antelopes or wild cows, carved into the wall.

The rock art is still visible to the naked eye, but it's becoming faded.  Researchers used reflectance transformation imaging, or RTI photography, to further draw out the individual features.

The authors hypothesized that the artists used differences in the shape and angle of curvature of the animals’ horns to represent different species and sexes.  For example, two of the animals are facing each other, and may represent a mating pair.

Opposite the herd scene, a faded, single-horned animal is engraved in a similar artistic style.  On a third wall, the authors found a non-figurative motif of three crosses, enclosed by rectangles.  

While excavating the dolmen, the archaeologists found a small knife made of arsenic copper, a material corresponding to the Intermediate Bronze Age dating that is generally recognized for the structure.

Despite over 150 years of research, the authors report that rock art has rarely been evidenced at other known Levantine dolmens.

However, another unique collection of dolmen rock art discovered in 2012 featured etchings of trident-like carvings on a basalt ceiling estimated to weigh over 45,000 kilos.  Those tridents form a path moving northeast to southwest, and have spurred research to locate and document dolmen art throughout the region.

In our final story this week, researchers of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen reconstructed the 20,000-year-old history of Lake Chew Bahir in a remote valley in southern Ethiopia.  Their study was published in the journal, Frontiers in Earth Science. and it is reported by the website, Phys dot Org.

Humans often have established settlements in close proximity to clean drinking water, or found ways to create water sources.

Currently the lake is almost completely dried up.  But Markus Fischer, a lead study author and doctoral student at the University of Tübingen, explains that in the past the lake often held enormous volumes of water and would have covered an area five times the size of Europe’s Lake Constance.  

Based on hydrological models and the lake's existing sedimentary layers, the team was able to document rapidly changing shifts in lake levels over the course of the lake's history.

The modeling results and the lake sediments offer evidence that the East African landscape fluctuated repeatedly between desert-like conditions and a gigantic lake; and in many cases, the lake would dry out completely and refill with water within a few decades.  

Rainfall during the frequently recurring wet phases was estimated to be between 20 and 30 percent higher than today.  Fisher theorized that those who grew up at a lake and possibly learned to fish there may have been confronted with a dried-out lakebed later in their lifetimes.

It is mostly unknown how the past population would have reacted to the environmental changes.  However, Fisher and co-authors discuss the observation that settlement activities increased in the adjacent Ethiopian highlands during the archaeologically brief drought periods of a few decades to perhaps one hundred years.  

Annett Junginger, the research team leader, explained that this meant the people of that time could have migrated to the cooler, wetter mountain regions and may have been forced to quickly change their methods for procuring food.  Once the drought receded, they came back to the lower areas in the Rift Valley and its extensive lakes.

According to the study, it would have taken several centuries of climatic instability toward an increasingly drier climate to trigger radical cultural changes, causing a permanent transition from the predominantly hunter- and-gatherer culture to more sedentary animal husbandry.  

The study has also provided insight into the highly sensitive climatic future of southern Ethiopia.  These new results illustrate East Africa's extreme susceptibility to environmental changes and highlight the importance of the region’s lakes as amplifiers of climate change.  

Present-day deserts once were extensive lake systems, and the few lakes that still exist there today face the impacts of human activity on the environment.  

The study is embedded within the International Joint Program "Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project," which aims to reconstruct the climate history over the course of human development in Eastern Africa. 

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!