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

A rare site in England gives a glimpse of hunter-gatherer life around 500,000 years ago.  An Indonesian island promises to reveal patterns of early human migrations on the path to Australia.  Black cemeteries in the US are increasingly becoming a focus of archaeological and historical research. And massive stone structures unique to the Arabia Peninsula harken back to a time when the region was much greener..

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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 16th through August 22nd, 2020.

In our first story this week, we visit the iconic stone age site of Boxgrove in Sussex, England, to learn about human activity dating back 500,000 years.  The site has revealed evidence from the activities of Homo heidelbergensis, one of the oldest human ancestors ever found in Britain.

The site sprawls across 26 square kilometers, or over 6000 acres, and has been remarkably well preserved over time, letting researchers develop understanding not just of its artifacts, but how its inhabitants worked and lived together.

As reported in I-News.com.uk, the research is directed by Matt Pope,  principal research associate with University College London’s Institute of Archaeology.  

Dr. Pope has studied Boxgrove’s flint and bone artifacts since 1994, and details about his team’s extensive work have now been compiled into a book, The Horse Butchery Site.

The book’s title refers to a small area within the larger boundary of Boxgrove that produced a collection of stone tools and other artifacts in 1988, along with the remains of a butchered female horse.  

The original excavation took place before the advent of laser surveys and digital cameras, and relied instead on hand-drawn diagrams and survey notes.

The array of tools and the estimated size of the animal suggested that as many as 30 individuals, perhaps from an extended family or tribe, may have been involved in preparing for and then processing the carcass.

Much of Dr. Pope’s work centered on “refitting,” a technique that painstakingly matches individual flakes up into the three-dimensional blocks from which they once were chipped.  Each flake has unique angles and dimensions, revealing details about the tools that were produced.

Researchers were able to document the manufacture of 8 large biface cutting tools, and evidence of other tools transported there and modified.  The bones of the horse itself were raw material for tool production, and the waste flakes of stone tools were then relocated and used to scrape off the meat.

This level of sophistication and group effort suggests that collective social activity played an important role in the lives of Boxgrove’s people.

Based on these findings, scientists estimate the entire event might have taken place in as little as 24 hours.

Tidal waters then flooded the worksite, and eventually everything was covered in layers of fine sand.  The tightly packed intertidal sand and silt kept the site intact over the centuries, preserving the evidence and preventing dispersal of the artifacts.

We go next to some islands in eastern Indonesia, where prehistoric stone tools and shell beads on this Indonesian archipelago help track the route of early humans through the region.

As reported by The Conversation.com, a nonprofit news source, recent research published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE details the latest finds.  These multi-disciplinary studies document the skills, on land and by sea, of the people migrating across many islands as early as 50 to 65 thousand years ago.

The study was supported in part by the Australian Research Council, and in particular by its Centre for Excellence in Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, which analyzed data to identify the most successful potential travel routes .

The researchers began by using models based on historical oceanic, atmospheric and climate conditions to narrow their search to a set of small islands within the area known as Wallacea, off the coasts of Australia and New Guinea.  Of particular interest was the island of Obi, a 50 by 100 km stretch of inhabited land mostly covered with rainforest.

Two possible cave shelters were located near the village of Kelo, on the island’s northern coast, and preliminary excavations revealed artifacts at both sites.

The tools found include edge-ground axes made by repeatedly grinding a piece of stone against another rough material to develop an edge. These tools were used primarily to hollow out tree trunks into traditional dugout canoes, and have been found previously on other islands in the chain. 

Some shell tools also used for this purpose also came from the excavation, along with axes made from local volcanic stone, likely used to clear trees and other jungle growth.

The earliest cultural layer found so far dates to about 18,000 years ago, but the researchers clearly hope to find earlier materials in the next field season, when they plan to explore some coastal caves.

Around 12,000 years ago, as temperatures and sea levels rose, the rainforest would have become denser over time, requiring the inhabitants to make alterations to the landscape for hunting or travel.  This is when the first edge-ground stone axe heads appear, possibly used to make dugout canoes for inter-island travel.

Animal bones included a local possum-like creature called the Rothchild’s cuscus.  Obsidian, a material not found on Obi, shows that people imported this valued tool-making material from elsewhere, bringing or trading it from faraway islands.

The use of the Kelo sites appears to have ceased approximately 8,000 years ago, with a gap until 1,000 years ago, when Obi was part of new trade routes for spices and other goods.

The researchers believe that Obi represent one step along an early migratory path that likely would have taken centuries or millennia to complete, taking the island hopping voyagers east, towards modern day New Guinea, long before the earliest known dates from Obi.  

In the midst of the global pandemic, the United States is also addressing issues of systemic racial bias and a legacy of physical monuments that testify to past injustice.

As reported by National Geographic, historic African-American graveyards and cemeteries that are decaying over time are now seeing increased efforts by local community leaders and proposed federal legislation to document and preserve them.

Black cemeteries, the final resting places for many Americans of color, were typically located well outside a city’s limits.  While white residents were interred in park-like settings with manicured gardens, Black citizens were segregated into remote, often untended sets of plots, many of which remain today throughout the southeastern states, often in deteriorating condition.

Some historic Black cemeteries have been altered or damaged by development, and property laws in many places favor current landowners, often making preservation efforts more difficult.  

Because of these challenges, learning the history and working to preserve these sites often fall to local communities.  For some, the fight to maintain the sites is intensely personal, and even spiritual in nature.

Volunteers at the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum created a burial map that now identifies at least 87 of that city’s known Black cemeteries, all of them already disturbed by construction.

At the East End Cemetery outside of Richmond, Virginia, an estimated 17,000 people were interred on a 16-acre parcel that has been maintained by volunteers since 2013.  Some volunteers are direct descendants of people buried there, and consider it a sacred ancestral site. Their grassroots work over decades led to a 2018 law providing funding for, and investment in, Virginia’s historic Black cemeteries.

That law has become the basis for proposed 2020 federal legislation known as the African Americans Burial Ground Network Act, establishing  new protections and funding under the direction of the National Park Service.  The Act remains in committee, awaiting further Congressional action.

In our final story for this week, we’re reporting on massive structures known as mustatils, flat stone promenades unique to the Arabian Peninsula.  Radiocarbon dating evidence places their construction as far back as 7,000 years ago, some 2,000 years before the Egyptian pyramids, yet signature features exist here which are not found anywhere else. 

As reported by Sci-Alert.com, hundreds of these rectangular formations exist in the Nefud Desert in the northern part of Saudi Arabia.  They primarily comprise two platforms connected by low parallel walls.  Some of the most recently found examples extend more than 60 meters in length, with many identified using conventional satellite photography.

The design of their connecting walls is unique in known architecture, displaying continuous construction, and showing no signs of being used for water storage or holding livestock.  Very little other evidence, such as stone tools or artifacts, has been recovered.

These anomalies led the research team to hypothesize that the mustatils, so named for the Arabic term for “rectangle,” were used instead  for group gatherings and religious rituals over many decades of human occupation throughout the region.

Lead researcher Dr. Huw Grocott, head of the Max Plank Institute’s Extreme Events Research Group, carried out recent research on the mustatils with an international team from the Institute’s Green Arabia Project.  Their efforts were supported in part by the Saudi Ministry of Tourism, along with other local government agencies, businesses and institutions.

The team’s work combined field study with extensive review of existing telemetry and satellite imagery from the Khaybar area, which is located within the Nefud Desert between the cities of Ha’il and Tayma.  

Using these techniques the scientists were able to discover hundreds of new sites in the now arid desert landscape.

At the time of their construction, the region was more moist, and what is now desert was a fertile land of grasses and lakes.  Pastoral peoples who inhabited the region would have thrived most years, though with periodic episodes of drought.

Researchers believe that some of the sites were used for seasonal feasts, and potentially for animal sacrifice, but they were ultimately unable to make a definitive conclusion based on the existing evidence. 

Many of the sites sit directly beside one another, suggesting they may have been built at the same time, or even linked together.

Other examples are built on top of older ones, perhaps indicating some spiritual reverence for a particular location with repeated reconstruction in the same site.

That wraps up the news headlines for this week!

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