Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to hand off 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!

Objects found on the sea bottom off Israel’s northern coast now appear to be ancient offerings made over a span of 400 years.  A natural record of hurricanes suggests that big storms may have hastened the end of Classic Maya culture.  A new analysis of data from Easter Island leads researchers to a new model to explain the apparent collapse of complex society there. And face-down burials in medieval Europe seem to have a connection with epidemic disease.

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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 August 31st to September 6th, 2020.

Our first story this week offers a new take on why thousands of Phoenician artifacts were found submerged off the coast of Israel in 1972.

According to the New York Times, hundreds of clay figurines and thousands of clay vessels were found at a site called Shavei Zion, on the northern coast of Israel, part of ancient Phoenicia.  At the time researchers assumed they were deposited by shipwreck some two thousand five hundred years ago.  The finds were then stored, forgotten for decades without any further analysis.  

New research led by archaeologist Meir Edrey, of the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, now indicates that the items were actually deposited into the sea as ritual offerings by a local cult between the seventh and third centuries BC.

The ancient Phoenicians developed a merchant seafaring culture that stretched across the Mediterranean.  Their first city states arose nearly five thousand years ago, and the culture reached its height around 146 BC, before Rome defeated Carthage. Knowledge of Phoenician religion is limited however, as most of the papyrus records from this period have not survived.

Dr. Edrey’s team examined thousands of the found pottery shards from Shavei Zion and found they differed markedly in style.  Such variation usually means that the individual items were produced at different time periods, hinting that the collection was not the result of a single deposit event. 

Furthermore, the loose array of amphorae found contrasted with that of shipwrecks found off the Maltese coast, which typically display artefacts laid out in an orderly fashion after the ships’ wooden remains had disintegrated.

Many of the 300 figurines examined carried symbols associated with the known Phoenician pantheon including Tanit, the mother goddess represented by dolphin imagery. Others displayed a pregnant woman holding a child, and some of the figurines have their right hands upright, and their left sitting below the mouth.  This could indicate a vow, perhaps in exchange for a divine favor such as safe passage or a successful pregnancy. 

Dr.  Edrey speculates that the figurines might represent common inhabitants, and that ancient Phoenicians may have cast them into the sea in lieu of real people.  In similar ways that some figurines are used elsewhere in land-based burials, these could be part of a ritual offering, assisting or preparing devotees for their journey to the afterlife.

Analysis of sediment cores taken from a Caribbean sinkhole reveals that a series of extreme storms hit the region after AD 900 and may have irreparably damaged an already stressed Maya population.

The Classic Maya civilization, which once occupied most of the Yucatán Peninsula, began to wane starting in the late 800s AD.  Over the next century, great Maya cities like Copán and Tikal were abandoned completely.

The leading hypothesis for this societal collapse is that the region suffered severe water shortages and sustained droughts.  New research recently published in Scientific Reports suggests another contributing factor: severe tropical storms.

As reported by the website EOS.org, analysis of sediments recovered from the Great Blue Hole hint at evidence of extreme storms patterns during the late Classic period in Maya history.  Researchers recovered and studied an 8.5-meter-long sediment core from the popular Caribbean scuba diving destination off the coast of Belize.

Written and instrumental records of tropical storms go back little more than two centuries.  To peer back further in time, scientists look for signatures in the sands and mud deposited by ancient storms.

Blue holes are unique marine sinkholes into which sediments are continually deposited, providing a near-perfect long-term record of ancient storm activity.  

When a large storm passed nearby, it would have stirred up sand and coarse particles, dropping them into the natural depression and protecting them from the currents above.

Core analysis revealed that storm activity was weak and seasonally consistent up to about AD 900.  At that point, storms became more intense and less predictable. 

Dominik Schmitt of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues reconstructed past storm activity in the region, going back over two thousand years.  

The sample core displayed five exceptionally thick layers—fifteen to thirty centimeters—deposited between 700 and 1150, suggesting extremely intense storms.  By comparison, the sediment layer left by Hurricane Hattie, a Category 5 hurricane that passed over the same area in 1961, was around four centimeters thick.

Two of the noted cyclones struck during known periods of regional drought, and the others struck just before and then after severe droughts.  The storms would likely have damaged existing buildings, caused coastal flooding and destroyed crops.

Researchers note that while these findings are not necessarily conclusive evidence of the specific reasons for the collapse of Maya civilization, their work still provides evidence that climate already has had a direct impact on human history.

Rapa Nui—also known as Easter Island—is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world.  Surrounded by myths and legends, it is the home to the monumental stone statues called moai, carved between the years AD 1250 and 1500.  

Now, as reported by Phys.org, an interdisciplinary group with scientists from Chile, Spain and Norway has countered some of the popular narratives surrounding Rapa Nui and its population.

Nobody knows exactly when the first humans settled on Rapa Nui, but most agree that the island was populated by AD 1200.  Once thickly forested, Rapa Nui eventually developed a grassy landscape due to land clearing and the introduction of the Polynesian rat.

Some legends hold that the peoples here lived in an almost idyllic equilibrium with the land until some sudden, dramatic event caused a societal collapse.

Traditionally, two competing hypotheses have tried to explain the island and its inhabitants’ decline.

The ecocide hypothesis holds that the population suffered a collapse because it over-exploited available natural resources, upending the existing ecosystem.  

A second common hypothesis was that the collapse occurred shortly after Europeans arrived between 1772 and 1774, perhaps due to diseases brought with them.

However, Maurico Lima, from the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, says the research doesn't back up either of these ideas.

Lima and colleagues compiled data from previous studies into a scientific model that had previously been used to analyze populations of animals.  

Their report describes how a small and fluctuating population struggled for survival on the remote island, where the environment constantly changed.  It would have been very difficult to live in harmony with nature under these conditions.

The island is exposed to La Niñas, cold phases in winds and sea surface temperatures, which sweep moisture towards the sea and cause rainfall to decline on land.  At the same time as droughts became more pronounced, the population grew.  

Lima believes the islanders adapted by gradually changing from a complex society that once raised the marvelous moai statues into a simpler society featuring smaller families and new strategies for agricultural production.

Similar patterns have happened on other islands in Polynesia, but the implications of the study don't end here.

Researchers noted that a small, remote island with finite resources could represent an analogy for Earth, a remote planet with finite resources.  Considered in this light, rising global populations should perhaps be included in our estimates of the impacts of climate changes.

Swiss anthropologist Amelie Alterauge was just a few days into her new job at Bern University’s Institute of Forensic Medicine in 2014 when she was called to investigate an odd find.  In a neglected corner of a centuries-old cemetery that was being excavated ahead of construction, one of the hundreds of burials stood out.

Buried face-down were the remains of a middle-aged man, clutching an iron knife and coin purse tucked under one arm.  As reported by National Geographic, excavators found the purse still full of coins, dating the body between 1630 and 1650.

Alterauge’s team has now published an analysis of nearly one hundred prone burials, interred over the course of nine hundred years in Europe.  The data suggest a major shift in burial practices that the researchers link to deaths from plagues and resulting belief among survivors that the victims might come back to life and haunt the living.

The researchers argue that burying people face-down was a way to prevent the dead from rising.  The analysis of the gravesites shows a spike in people buried face-down as plagues ravaged Europe. 

The few bodies found buried face-down in regional graveyards from AD 950 to 1300 were placed in prominent plots, or even inside churches themselves, indicating a person of high stature. 

But by the early 1300s these face-down burials became much less ceremonious, often placed on the outskirts of Christian burial grounds.  This change coincided with devastating plagues that killed millions across Europe beginning in 1347.

Medieval Europeans seized upon tales of the undead not long after these first plague outbreaks. Prior to this time, folk stories in German-speaking Europe typically described ghosts as helpful, returning to warn the living and help their loved ones.  

But in an age of epidemics, the ghosts took on darker shapes. Nachzehrers, or “corpse devourers,” were corpses that devoured themselves, draining the life force from their surviving relatives in the process.  The transmission of disease among close family members may have reinforced this narrative.

Equally feared were wiedergänger, or “those who walk again,” corpses capable of emerging from the grave to stalk their communities.  Burying the bodies face-down could have resulted from attempts to prevent corpses from re-emerging.

Of course, other explanations are also possible.  In a world ravaged by deadly pandemics, burying the community’s first victim face-down might have been a symbolic act, perhaps a desperate attempt to ward off further calamity.

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!