Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  It’s our privilege to deliver you 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!

Fluted points found in Oman and Yemen offer clear evidence of independent invention of a distinctive flint-knapping technique.  Divers in Lake Titicaca come up with a box of intact Inca offerings.  An Australian mining company apologizes for blasting a very ancient and highly significant Aboriginal site. And remote sensing of a well known ceremonial monument in northern Ireland reveals that it may contain complex but hidden temple structures.

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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 for August 2nd through the 8th, 2020.

In our first story, the recovery of distinctive fluted stone points from both America and now southern Arabia provides one of the best examples to date of independent human inventions.

Fluting is a specific technique that involves the removal of a long, blade-like flake along the face of a projectile point, leaving a distinctive groove, or flute, that extends towards its base.  

Fluted stone tools, including spearheads and dart points, represent a unique step in the evolution of human stone tool manufacturing.  Evidence of this technology has been discovered across the North American continent, where it originated 13,000 years ago in connection with the Clovis cultural horizon.  

As reported on the website of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, this tradition was developed by early human cultures that eventually spread across the Americas.  Lead author Dr. Rémy Crassard of the French National Center for Scientific research, or CNRS, notes that until the early 2000s those fluted points were the only ones known.  

But that has now changed, as newly discovered examples of fluting date to the Neolithic period, about 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, roughly 2000 to 6000 years later than the American examples.  

A paper published in PLOS ONE examines the first examples of fluted tools found in Yemen and Oman, providing an opportunity to compare the tools’ composition and markings.  Research by archaeologists from the CNRS, the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research, the Ohio State University and the Max Planck Institute revealed similarities as well as contrasts between the technologies of the two regions.  

Because of the large difference in the dating estimates and vastly distant locations between the Americas and the Arabian Peninsula, the authors do not believe that the technology would have been borrowed or shared between cultures in these places so far apart.

The authors emphasize that the most notable differences in the fluting techniques appear to be closely related to the end goals of the tools themselves, rather than to  manufacturing differences or the actual fluting.  It appears that the function of the fluting on the North American points was to facilitate hafting, or attaching them to a shaft, such as an arrow, bolt or spear.  The Arabian fluted points do not appear to feature hafting as a functional aim, and may have been used either ornamentally or as a display of flint-knapping skills.

The similarities, on the other hand, demonstrate some unique evidence regarding independent human development of technologies across the divides of centuries and continents.  That is, this appears to be a clear case of independent invention rather than cultural contact.

National Geographic in its website  reported a new discovery that offers insights into the cultural practices of the ancient Inca who controlled territory from modern-day Colombia to Chile at its height of power during the early 16th century.  

Straddling what are now known as Bolivia and Peru, Lake Titicaca was considered a sacred space to the Andean empire of the Inca. According to their legend, this lake was where their sun god was born and their ancestors emerged, and they constructed over 80 known structures here.  The site has long attracted researchers and looters in search of items of value in its waters.

Coauthors Christophe Delaere, the scientific director of the Free University of Brussels underwater archaeology projects at Lake Titicaca, and José M. Capriles, a Penn State archaeologist, explained that the Incan ceremonial offerings were likely a mix of political acts regarding their occupation of the region as well as symbolic or religious offerings. 

During a recent underwater survey of the lake, an international team of archaeologists and divers recovered a box made of a local volcanic stone called andesite.  The box included a cavity sealed by a round stone plug, but unlike previous discoveries, the offerings inside were found intact.

Two of the outer edges of this box have openings that could accommodate ropes, allowing it to be lowered into the water from a boat.  

According to a monograph written by the 17th-century Spanish cleric Alonso Ramos Gavilán, an animal or a child would sometimes be sacrificed, and victim’s blood poured into the offering cavity.  As the box was then lowered into the lake, water would seep in, mix with the blood, and billow into the lake, turning the water red.  

Items contained inside the newly recovered box included a tiny rolled cylinder of gold sheeting and a carved figurine of a llama or alpaca.  The cylinder may represent a chipana, a type of bracelet that Inca noblemen wore on the right forearm.  

The miniature animal replica is made from the coral-hued shell of Spondylus, a type of spiny oyster that would have been rare and valuable, and the archaeologists believe the gold foil cylinder may originally have adorned it.

National Geographic Explorer and archaeologist Johan Reinhard believes these offerings were influenced by the traditions of peoples who lived in the area before the Inca, including those of the pre-Hispanic Tiwanaku civilization, who are believed to have lived in parts of Bolivia, Peru and Chile from 200 BC to AD 1,000.  

The Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, reported that the country's second-largest mining operation has formally apologized for not adequately communicating with traditional landowners prior to destroying a 46,000-year-old site in Western Australia.  This is a follow-up to a story we shared with you nearly three months ago.

The company, Rio Tinto, has faced condemnation after destroying two ancient Aboriginal rock shelters in Western Australia's Juukan Gorge in May 2020.  The blast occurred just days before the country’s annual National Reconciliation Week, honoring the inclusion of native peoples and addressing ignorance towards the significance of existing heritage sites.

Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques said that the destruction of the Juukan rock shelters should never have occurred, and that he and his company have apologized to the traditional landowners – the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people, also known as the PKKP.

Excavations in 2014 had revealed that the shelters were of much greater archaeological importance than had been understood initially.  Rio Tinto, in collaboration with local PKKP representatives, eventually retrieved thousands of artifacts from the site. 

Under subsequent agreements with the PKKP, Rio Tinto had three options to expand its existing Brockman 4 iron mine to access higher-grade ore, all three of which avoided the immediate area of the shelters.  

But Rio Tinto did not inform the PKKP of a fourth option, the one the company eventually chose, when it used explosives and destroyed much of the existing record.

In a submission to a federal Senate inquiry, the company noted that it had legal approval to blast the site, and said it believed it also had the consent of the PKKP.

However, PKKP representatives have rejected all claims that the company had not been made aware of their wishes for the Juukan Gorge site to remain undisturbed prior to May 2020, when the explosives were put into place and unable to be safely removed before detonation.

According to Rio Tinto’s own Senate submission, during a key conversation in October 2019, PKKP cultural heritage manager Heather Builth asked if a cave was going to be impacted by the expansion, noting that the site was in the top five locations in the Pilbara region in terms of cultural significance.

Artifacts previously found at Juukan Gorge have placed it among the continents’ most significant archaeological research sites.  These finds include pounding and grinding stones, a marsupial bone tool, and a belt made from plaited human hair containing DNA matching current PKKP people and dating to some 4,000 years ago.

In our final story for this week, we’re highlighting a new study which suggests that Northern Ireland's Navan Fort may contain hidden temples or other undiscovered medieval buildings.  

Medieval texts describe the Navan Fort, which sits just outside the city of Armagh, as the capital of the ancient province of Ulster during pre-Christian Ireland.  Archaeologists have recognized for decades that the site was a cultural or religious complex used from the late Bronze Age into the Iron Age, or about 1000 BC to AD 400.  

More recently, historians have debated its role in later prehistoric and medieval Ireland.  

According to reporting from LiveScience.com, newly discovered evidence of Iron Age temples and other medieval structures at the site adds support to an interpretation that it was not only an important ceremonial site but also the home to a developing royal lineage.  

Researchers revealed the previously hidden landscape with a combination of techniques including light detection and ranging, or LIDAR, along with magnetic gradiometry, photogrammetry, and soil resistivity, allowing them to detect subterranean anomalies including architectural features created by humans.

Co-researcher Patrick Gleeson, a senior lecturer of archaeology at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, noted that the presence of these temples implies that it was an important religious center, perhaps even a place of paramount sacral and cultural authority.

Excavations at the fort in the 1960s and then the 1990s led to several discoveries: two “figure-of-eight” buildings – so named for their co-joined circular shapes resembling a common numeric representation, as well as the largest prehistoric building ever discovered in Ireland, now commonly known as the 40-meter Structure.  

The structure was built with timbers dating to 95 BC.  At one point, ancient people filled it with stones and then burned it to the ground, creating a huge earthen mound still visible today.

Scholars continue to debate the purpose of these buildings.  Medieval sources note that the ancient Kings of Ulster, who ruled from the fifth to 13th centuries AD, used them as a personal residence.

Gleeson, along with his colleagues at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the German Archaeological Institute, Frankfurt, have now announced that these structures were just a small part of a much larger array.

The existing figures-of-eight are huge, but each one actually sits inside an even larger circular enclosure, roughly 140 meters in diameter.  These enclosures intersect, forming another figure-of-eight.

Gleeson suggests that the repetition of this motif may have had astronomical or religious significance to the people who created them.

That wraps up the news for this week!

For more stories and daily news updates, please visit Archaeologica on the World Wide Web at www.archaeologica.org, where all the news is history!

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