Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  We’re happy you joined  us for 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!

Underwater excavation of the pirate Blackbeard’s ship supports the idea that it was intentionally grounded.  Viking Age burials in northern Europe have revealed an early version of the smallpox virus.  A new analysis of data from many North American sites proposes an arrival date older than 30,000 years for the first humans on the continent. And a recently discovered site in Jerusalem dates from the time of the biblical kings of Judah..

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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 19th through July 25th, 2020.

Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, was one of the most ferocious pirates in the Americas, sailing the eastern coast of North America and the Caribbean in the early 1700s.  He came to an end not long after he ran one of his largest ships aground near the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  Now, evidence from the shipwreck suggests that the grounding was no accident. 

As reported by the website Livescience dot com, the Queen Anne's Revenge was part of Blackbeard's intimidating reputation.

Now, the Queen Anne's Revenge Project, a research collaboration by historians, archaeologists and conservators to preserve and recover the sunken ship, has released a new, detailed report on the lead artifacts from the ship.

According to lead author Jeremy Borrelli, a staff archaeologist for the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina University, much of the lead turns out to be sheathing used to protect the hull.   

According to Borelli, the seams on the hull were one of the most common sites for leaks, of which the evidence suggests the ship had many.  Before Blackbeard captured and renamed the Queen Anne's Revenge in 1717, it was the slaving ship Concorde, and records list a number of times that the Concorde was badly damaged and required extensive repairs.  After it became a pirate ship, even more damage accrued.

Based on the new evidence showing the extent of the ship’s leaks, two new hypotheses were advanced for Blackbeard intentionally ditching the ship.  First, he may have simply decided that as he sailed away from a successful blockade of Charleston, with no pursuers, it was a good time to consolidate the ransom on another ship and leave the leaky Queen Anne's Revenge behind.  

Another motive might have been to cut the size of his crew and leave a larger share of the booty for himself.  After the grounding, Blackbeard put part of the Queen Anne's Revenge crew ashore and sailed north.

In later testimony, captured crew members said that Blackbeard had not split the ransom with the entire crew.  Their suspicion at the time was that Blackbeard intentionally grounded the Revenge and left part of its crew behind, so he could divide the booty among fewer people and take a larger share for himself.

The wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge likely holds many more intriguing secrets about the vessel and its outlaw captain and crew.  To date, only about 60 percent of the site has been excavated, and plenty of unexplored artifacts remain scattered on the nearby sea bottom.

Borrelli’s report appears in The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

DNA from Viking Age burials has produced an extinct version of the smallpox virus, dating to 1,400 years ago.  The genetic differences between this older strain and the virulent modern strain that was finally exterminated only 40 years ago lends new support to hypotheses about how viruses can become more lethal over time.

Until now, the earliest confirmed case of smallpox had been found in the mummified remains of a Lithuanian child from the 17th century.  Now an international team of researchers has pushed that date back 1,000 years. 

As reported in The New York Times, the international team of researchers recovered variola, or smallpox, DNA from the remains of eleven people who lived in northern Europe between AD 600 and 1050.  

The virus genome they found is now extinct, and has not been found in other, more recent skeletal remains.  It is not an ancestor of the modern smallpox virus, but an evolutionary dead end.  Even more interesting, the Viking era virus strain has more genes than the modern one.  In viruses, fewer genes tend to mean a more deadly virus.  

If this means that smallpox became more deadly as it evolved, this would be the opposite of most viruses, which become less deadly over time.

According to co-author Terry C. Jones, who studies the evolution of disease-causing organisms at the University of Cambridge, the early date of the new virus find is significant but not surprising.  Like other pox viruses, smallpox almost certainly dates even farther back in time, as early as 1500 BC.

Both modern smallpox and the newly discovered variant descended from a common ancestor, but diverged at least 1,700 years ago. 

According to Barbara Mühlemann, also a virologist at Cambridge and the first author on the paper, pox viruses with fewer genes directed at deceiving the immune system of a host are actually more deadly, probably because a very strong immune reaction is often what kills the victim.

The Viking virus had more active genes than the modern virus.  But Muhlemann also noted that the research provides no direct evidence that the Viking version of the virus was less deadly.

Losing those genes might help the virus replicate faster and therefore improve its chances of transmission to another person, but also provoke an out of control immune reaction, which is what kills the host. 

The new research appears in the journal Science.

A study in a cave site in northwestern Mexico produced human-made stone tools with dates as far back as 31,500 years ago.  This would mean that the first North Americans may have arrived before the Last Glacial Maximum, between about 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, when ice sheets covered much of what is now the northern U.S. and Canada. 

In 2010, researchers found ancient stone tools in Chiquihuite [CHEE-kee-WEET-ay] Cave.  Two seasons of excavations, in 2016 and 2017, produced bone, charcoal and sediment samples.  Researchers used two techniques to date the roughly 1,900 stone tools, radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL.   OSL assesses when quartz grains in the sediment had last been exposed to sunlight, so samples have to be extracted in complete darkness to avoid biasing the results. 

As reported on the website LiveScience, the results suggested two main layers of occupation.  The younger layer, dating to between 16,600 to 12,200 years ago, held about 88 percent of the stone tools.  The older layer, with only 12 percent of the tools, is about 16,600 to 33,000 years old.

Excavators also found evidence of sulfur, potassium and zinc, elements that could be signs of human activities, such as butchering animals or urination, although it's also possible that these elements were left by carnivores using the cave.

Chiquihuite Cave represents a significant discovery that leads to questions about which physical routes of dispersal brought people this far south at such an early date, particularly during the maximal extent of the ice sheets.

A second study reported this week addresses this question by using data from previously reported sites to model how humans could have dispersed to reach them. 

According to lead researcher Lorena Becerra Valdivia, an archaeological scientist at the University of Oxford in England and the University of New South Wales in Australia, the team analyzed data from 42 archaeological sites across North America.  

They found that populations expanded significantly across the continent only after a long residence in the continent, during a period of abrupt global climate warming at the end of the Ice Age, beginning at around 14,700 years ago. 

This hypothesis is supported by the fact that three major stone tool traditions — the Clovis, Western Stemmed and Beringian — all began at about the same time, as well as genetic evidence that points to a population spike.  

The researchers are now calling for similar analysis using South American data to see the entire picture and understand the full migration pattern.

And we have no doubt that this proposal of such great age for the first Americans will see some strong challenges.

In the neighborhood of Arnona, in southern Jerusalem, the new US Embassy site has stimulated housing construction.  As required by Israeli law, extensive archeological survey was carried out first by the Israel Antiquities Authority, or IAA.  

According to IAA archaeologist Benyamin Storchan, the two years of digs have completely changed what was known about this quiet area, which previously had only one known site, a very old pile of ancient stone that created an artificial hill.  Surrounding this, the excavators found a monumental concentric structure.   Both its size and its location, which dominates the valley, along with the artifacts uncovered, show that the site was a substantial administrative center in the eighth and seventh centuries BC.

Artifacts include about 120 stamped seal impressions on jar handles written in ancient Hebrew script, which translate as “belonging to the king.  These stamped jars usually relate to tax collection.  Tiny, ancient Hebrew letters are still visible on the pottery, accompanied by different symbols, such as a flying eagle or a sun disk.  Following that comes the name of one of four cities in ancient Judah, either Hebron, Ziph, Socho, or Memshat.  The first three are well identified, but the identity of Memshat is still unclear.

As reported in the Jerusalem Post, one hypothesis is that Memshat is a site just across the valley, where the second largest collection of these stamped jars was found.  That site, Ramat Rachel, is known to have been an important administrative center.

According to Storchan, research must now determine whether the site just discovered was a satellite of the Ramat Rachel tax collection center, an independent one, or even a royal estate or an administrative office. 

While the stamped seals do not mention the name of the king, the pottery was instrumental in allowing the researchers to date the site, by comparing it to artifacts uncovered in different places.

Other jars uncovered bore the names of private individuals, also known from other sites from the Kingdom of Judah.  This suggests that these were senior officials in charge of specific economic areas, or perhaps wealthy individuals at that time.

Statuettes depicting animals and human figures – and especially women – also came from the dig, probably associated with some form of idolatry, which was common at the time.

The site appears to show abandonment at the time of the Babylonian conquest and destruction in 586 BC, but it was resettled shortly after.

The excavation is still ongoing, conducted by the IAA and funded by the Israel Land Authority and administered by the Moriah Jerusalem Development Corporation.

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!