Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with another list of 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 team of archaeologists is excavating the first Black Christian church in the US, buried beneath a parking lot.  Underwater archaeologists have examined a 19th-century shipwreck that apparently carried a cargo of Maya slaves imprisoned during the Caste War of the Yucatan.  Fingerprints in Spanish cave paintings show that at least two people were involved in making them, and one of them likely was female. And a thorough study of Viking burials demonstrates that many Vikings did not have blonde hair and blue eyes.

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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 for the week of September 13th to the 19th, 2020.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, archaeologists are excavating the original site of the First Baptist Church, one of America’s first Black churches. 

The project, headed by Jack Gary of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, seeks to find out more about the original worshippers, who were both free and enslaved African-Americans. 

As reported by NBC News, the congregation started out illegally, because the era’s laws barred Black people from meeting in large groups.  However, a local white landowner, Jesse Cole, heard the worshippers meeting and offered them a building to meet in. 

The record of these first worshippers comes mainly through oral history, and archaeologists and advocates alike hope this excavation can give further insight into who was in this early congregation. 

The first church was simply a carriage house on Cole’s property, but they soon moved to Nassau Street in 1856, where the church remained for 100 years, until it moved to its current location on Scotland Street. 

This first site on Nassau Street was identified with historical documents, such as insurance maps and records from a 1950s excavation, as well as ground-penetrating radar units from the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation. 

According to Gary, the team hopes to find intact deposits, or layers of soil and areas around these foundations, that have not been disturbed.  Success during this exploratory phase, which is scheduled to take about seven weeks, would lead to further excavation. 

According to Cliff Fleet, president of Colonial Williamsburg, the site’s importance is obscured because the property currently is paved over by a parking lot. 

At its present location on Scotland Street, the First Baptist Church has hosted prominent figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson, and in 2016, President Barack Obama rang the church’s Freedom Bell at the dedication of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

Even if initial excavations reveal little, the project itself has significance.  Connie Harshaw, president of the First Baptist Church’s Let Freedom Ring Foundation, says just the excavation provides an acknowledgment and recognition of this first congregation. 

The project hopes to bring historical context to modern conversations around race, providing a physicality to the past, and creating a place to start conversations.

Archaeologists have identified a sunken ship 2 miles off the Yucatan port of Sisal that carried Mayas into slavery in the 1850s. 

This ship, identified as a Cuban-based paddle-wheel steamboat named La Unión is the first time such a ship has been identified.  The ship carried Maya people captured during the 1847 to 1901 “Caste War of the Yucatan,” and was bound for Cuba, where they would be forced to work in sugarcane fields. 

The ship sank due to a boiler explosion in 1861.  Researchers first found the ship’s location through local oral history, and a positive identification was made using the physical remains, which showed substantial fire and explosion damage in the boiler room.  Records report that the accident killed 100 people, half of the crew of 80 plus 60 passengers. 

As reported by AP News, slavery was illegal by this time in Mexico. but this didn’t stop the  transport of slaves to Cuba.  Accounts of such ships claim enslaved people as young as 7 were smuggled aboard, often being hidden as cargo to avoid authorities.  This leads to uncertainty about how many Maya were on the ship when it wrecked, and if they were included in the death toll. 

Indigenous Maya people often were transported as slaves after their revolt against the racial caste system in the country.  Once sent to Cuba, few ever returned. 

Their revolt in 1847 was one of North America’s last efforts to throw off the yoke of the European invaders, and took place in southern Yucatan.  The Maya and other indigenous people fought against the dominant white and mixed-race Mexicans who were of a higher class, socially and economically. 

Researchers now are working to connect these enslaved Maya with their modern descendants, using oral history and DNA in Cuban Maya communities.

We should mention that our Yucatan tour scheduled for December 2021 includes on its itinerary the Caste War Museum in Tihosuco.  This is one of the only museums of its kind, telling the story of 400 years of Maya resistance to foreign attacks on their culture, lands and beliefs.

In Spain, fingerprints from cave paintings at the site of Los Machos in Granada show that a man and a woman painted them together. 

As reported by The Guardian.UK, the fingerprints were analyzed by experts from the University of Granada, Durham University, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who showed that the paintings were made by a 36-year-old man and most likely a young woman, about 17. 

The ochre pigment drawings, painted in a small cave shelter more than 7,000 years ago, during the time of the first farmers in Spain, include circular, geometric and anthropomorphic designs.  Experts have long known about this rock art collection, but new research is revealing even more. 

This is the first study to suggest that both sexes were involved in rock art, and indicates it may have been a social activity, rather than the solitary act previously thought. 

The fingerprint identification was done by analyzing the distance between fingerprint ridges seen in the pigment and comparing them to modern samples.  

According to Francisco Martínez Sevilla, of the University of Granada, fingerprint ridges vary by age and sex, and don’t settle until adulthood.

Due to the fragmentation, experts are certain only that one painter is male, aged at least 36.  The other painter is either a woman under 20 or a juvenile male. 

While the relationship between these two individuals is impossible to know, their creation of art together has changed archaeological ideas around the role of rock art creation in past societies. 

New DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons from sites across Europe and Greenland reveal there was much more to them than Scandinavian pillagers.

The project is the largest DNA sequencing study in the world, and is led by Professor Eske Willerslev, who is a Fellow of St John's College at the University of Cambridge, and also the director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen. 

Willerslev’s team has discovered that many famous Viking burial sites in Scotland actually hold local people, who apparently took on Viking identities, at least to the extent of following Viking burial rites. 

As reported by the science website, phys.org, the DNA also shows that many Vikings actually had brown hair, rather than the stereotypical blonde, and their gene pool spreads far past Scandinavia into Asia and southern Europe even before the Viking Age. 

In the UK, up to six percent of the population still has Viking DNA. 

This genetic diversity contradicts the ideas of Vikings we see on TV and read about in books.  Those stereotyped portrayals show Vikings as a highly uniform population, genetically. 

Instead, researchers found not only a larger genetic variation across Europe, but also significant variation among Viking populations inside Scandinavian.  This local diversity suggests that local Viking populations were somewhat isolated, sharing less of their genes across the region than expected. 

The international team carrying out the research sequenced entire genomes of 442 Viking age men, women and children from teeth and bones found in Viking cemeteries. 

The sequencing and genetic spread show that Vikings from different parts of Scandinavia tended to travel to different regions.  Norwegian Vikings often traveled to Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland, while Danish Vikings traveled to England, and Swedish Vikings went to the Baltic countries. 

The DNA sequencing has also helped identify the make-up of raiding parties.  These expeditions mainly included men and close family members, as shown by genetic similarity between burials in individual sites. 

This new understanding of Viking DNA bears on ideas about Viking trade and the reach of the Scandinavian diaspora.  The project is also one of the largest groups of human genomes ever sequenced, providing important information for studying genetic traits and natural selection. 

This project has shown that Viking genetics are more diverse than previously thought, and our common perception of Vikings, from appearance to culture, needs to be updated. 

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!