Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with a peek at 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!

Illegal goal mining in Sudan has resulted in destruction of archaeological sites.  Mummy skeletons in an Egyptian Red Sea port show that the Roman Period saw Indian monkeys imported as pets.  A new survey of evidence lists musical instruments recovered over the past 10,000 years in southern Africa. And excavations ahead of port expansion in northern Chile have revealed a group of colorfully dressed mummies.

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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 Archaeologica from August 23rd through 29th, 2020.

Our first story this week comes from northern Sudan, where illegal, large-scale trenching by gold miners has destroyed a 2,000-year-old site.

According to archaeologist Habab Idriss Ahmed, who had carried out archaeological digs at the ancient site of Jabal Maragha in 1999, the diggers were caught in the act.

As reported by the English-language El Araby news site, the archaeological site was in the baking-hot desert of Bayouda, some 270 kilometers, or 170 miles, north of the capital, Khartoum.  Archaeologists set out to inspect it in response to reports of destruction.  

On arriving, they found that two mechanical diggers and five men had dug a deep trench, 17 meters, or over 55 feet deep, and 20 meters or 66 feet long.  The rust-colored sand was scarred with tire tracks, some cut deep into the ground, from the trucks that transported the equipment.

The prehistoric settlement that had been here dated from the Meroitic period, between 350 BC and AD 350.  As a result of the digging, hardly any trace remains.

According to Hatem al-Nour, Sudan's director of antiquities and museums, the ground here comprises layers of sandstone and pyrite.  The looters were using metal detectors to seek out metallic deposits, and thought they had found real gold.

A police escort accompanied the archaeologists, and they took the metal-hunters into a police station but then freed them within hours.

According to Mahmoud Al-Tayeb, a former expert from Sudan's antiquities department who is now a professor of archaeology at the University of Warsaw, the laws should have required that the men be jailed, and their machines confiscated.  Instead, the men left without charge and their machinery was released, too.

According to Tayeb, the employer behind the operation probably pulled some strings to circumvent justice.  Sudan is Africa's third largest producer of gold, after South Africa and Ghana, with commercial mining bringing in $1.22 billion to the government last year.

In the past, people panned for gold at the city of Omdurman, across the river from Khartoum, where the waters of the White and Blue Niles meet.

Widespread looting of ancient sites has increased in Sudan recently.  At Sai, a river island in the Nile, hundreds of graves have been ransacked and destroyed by looters.  Some of them date back to the times of the pharaohs.  Sudan's ancient civilizations built more pyramids than the Egyptians, but many are still unexplored.

Now, in hundreds of remote places ranging from cemeteries to temples, desperate diggers are hunting for anything to improve their lives.

Next, we travel north into ancient Egypt, where excavations in the town of Berenice (bear-eh-NEYE-see), on Egypt’s southern Red Sea coast, found that the ancient Roman and Egyptian inhabitants kept imported monkeys from India as household pets. 

As reported by The First News.com, a Polish news site, archaeologists from Warsaw University made the discovery while analyzing bones from the animal cemetery.  

The skeletons turned out to come from rhesus macaques (REE-sus muh-KAKS), a species from India, showing that they were imported into this Red Sea port as pets.  

Archaeologists from the Warsaw University’s Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology found them over the period of years, during excavations in the port city’s vast animal cemetery.

They had assumed they belonged to guenon monkey species, which are common in sub-Saharan Africa and once may have lived in this area.  It was only after using 3D scanners while making a comparative analysis that they realized the bones were from rhesus macaques.

According to Professor Marta Osypińska, a zooarchaeologist from the Polish Academy of Sciences, the influential Romans who lived in Berenice, a faraway outpost, in the first and second centuries AD, enjoyed keeping various animals as pets.  When they died, the pets were carefully buried in an animal necropolis and arranged like sleeping children.

One of the burials was covered with a woolen fabric.  Another had two large shells by its head, one of them from the Indian Ocean or southeastern shores of Africa.  Amphora fragments were included in at least one burial.  Another burial contained not just a monkey, but also a young piglet, and three kittens.

This is the first find of Indian monkeys in an Egyptian archaeological site.  Even ancient written sources don’t mention monkeys being traded from such a distance.

The port of Berenice began during the time of the pharaohs.  By the third century BC, it was a military outpost, and saw trade in African elephants used in battle.

After the Romans annexed Egypt into the Roman Empire, the port reached its zenith as a center for transoceanic trade connecting Egypt, the Middle East and India.

Transporting monkeys from India would have required adequate food and water during the few weeks it took to sail across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea.  The monkeys found in the cemetery all died young, suggesting they were not fed properly once they arrived.

Archaeologists from the Warsaw University’s Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, together with Americans from the University of Delaware, have been working in Berenice with cooperation from the Polish Academy of Sciences’ researchers.  Their excavations have found the remains of defensive walls and towers, an enormous underground complex, and temples as well as the animal cemetery.

This week we learned new details about early African musical instruments. 

Archaeologists know that Africa has a rich musical heritage, yet scant evidence of related artifacts comes from southern Africa, because the instruments were made mostly from organic materials that have failed to survive in the record. 

Now, Ph.D. candidate Joshua Kumbani, at the University of the Witwatersrand [vit-VAH-ters-rand] in South Africa, has been carrying out original research and a literature survey to compile the known evidence of these ancient instruments.  

As reported on the website The Conversation.com, Southern Africa’s music archaeology begins with evidence from around 10,000 years ago, from the Later Stone Age, and continues up to into the Iron Age just before contact with Europeans. 

Later Stone Age bone implements found in the Klasies [KLAY-sees] River Mouth and Matjes [MAHT-chyez] River sites in South Africa include a spinning disk and a bullroarer – a carved, thin slat of wood attached to a long cord that makes noise when whirled in the air.  These artifacts could have been used as signaling implements, as toys, in ritual settings or in musical contexts.  

Bone tubes, mainly from bird bone, have been recovered from Later Stone Age contexts in the Cape region of South Africa, as well as from historical contexts.  Their form suggests they could have been flutes or whistles.  If they were flutes, they were single tone flutes, since none have finger holes that would allow more tones.  

Some of the bone tubes bear chevron and cross hatching patterns, but it is unknown whether the decorations were symbolic, or merely aesthetic.

Clay whistles have come from the sites of K2 and Mapungubwe from Early Iron Age contexts.  Similar clay whistles are rare, but the Basotho herders in Lesotho have been said to use similar whistles.  

An ivory trumpet was recovered from the Sofala site in Mozambique, with a blow hole and some decorations. 

Thumb piano, lamellophone or mbira [em-BIR-ah] keys have been recovered from the Later Iron Age contexts in Zimbabwe and in Zambia.  This idiophone became popular with the introduction of iron technology and it is still used today, and the mbira is closely associated with spirituality.  

Double and single musical bells have been found in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia from Later Iron Age contexts.  Ethnographically, musical bells are known to have originated in West and Central Africa.

Overall, debates continue as to the use of these instruments.  Some may have been used, not for music per se, but rather to produce sounds that conveyed messages, or were part of sacred rituals. 

We end this week in northern Chile, where mining operations discovered the remains of four mummified humans dressed in bright colors and buried in formal graves.  

The discovery came during work to expand the Quebrada Blanca copper mine in the north of Chile.  According to the mining company, the mummies have been perfectly preserved because of the region’s dry climate.

As reported by Reuters, the remains were found last year when the Canadian-owned mining company, Teck Resources, was excavating for a new port.  Early analysis suggests the remains date back to the period between 1,100 and 400 BC.  It’s not clear yet how the new finds relate to the earlier coastal Chinchorro culture, or the subsequent cultural traditions of the Altiplano and Andes.

The mummies' garments include complicated turbans and well made sandals. 

The saline conditions of the soil, the lack of rainfall and the relatively low humidity in the region has left this clothing, as well as the mummies themselves and their grave goods, all very well preserved.  

The find includes not just the mummies, but areas from daily life, including cooking and living rooms, along with items such as ornaments, baskets, mats, and hunting tools.  The implements buried with each mummy may help indicate details of their lives.

The mining company reported the find to the Chilean government, which will determine how best to conserve and study the artifacts and bodies.  According to Chilean archaeologist Mauricio Uribe, this is one of the most remarkable finds of recent years in the Norte Grande region.

Teck said it would preserve the area and maintain archaeological monitoring during the remainder of the project.  The port excavation is expected to extend the mine’s useful life by almost 30 years.

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!