Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with a new batch 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 rare edition of a Shakespeare play has surprisingly turned up in an old library in Spain.  The British city of Plymouth has opened up a museum exhibit inspired by the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s departure for the New World.  Mummified birds in Egypt, it now turns out, were hunted, not bred in captivity. And ongoing excavations in ancient Hadrianopolis, in northern Turkey, reveal unexpected age as well as remarkable mosaics and other finds.

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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 September 20th to the 26th, 2020.

We begin this week in Spain, where a rare edition of Shakespeare's last play has been found in the library of a Scottish Catholic college.

The play is The Two Noble Kinsmen, written by Shakespeare with John Fletcher, and its 1634 printing date could make it the oldest Shakespearean work in Spain.

Dr John Stone, of the University of Barcelona, made the discovery among old books in the library of the Real Colegio de Escoceses, or the Royal Scots College.   The RSC college is a seminary that once trained priests to serve the Catholic community in Scotland.   Although the RSC is now in Salamanca, during the 17th Century it was in Madrid and was an important source of English literature for Spanish intellectuals.

The Shakespeare play was part of a volume of several English plays printed from 1630 to 1635.

Shakespeare’s final known play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, is a tragicomedy in which the friendship of two knights turns into rivalry.

As reported by the BBC, the play is based on Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, and was probably written around 1613 to 1614 by Shakespeare along with John Fletcher, one of the house playwrights in the Bard's theater company, the King's Men.

The knights are captured in a battle and from the window of their prison they see a beautiful woman.  They each fall in love with her and turn from close friends to jealous rivals in a strange love story featuring absurd adventures and confusions.

According to Dr. Stone, who has worked in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, it’s likely these plays arrived as part of some student's personal library or at the request of the RSC rector, Hugh Semple, who was friends with the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega and had many plays in his personal library.  By the 1630s, English plays were increasingly considered elite culture, and the small community of Scots in Spain was an intellectual bridge between the Spanish and English-speaking worlds.

During this era, English books were rare in Spain due to church censorship, but the Scots college had special authorization to import whatever it wanted.

According to the current RSC rector, Father Tom Kilbride, the discovery says a lot about the kind of education the trainee priests were getting.  From the RSC’s foundation in Madrid in 1627, the student priests got a well-rounded education including study of the culture of the period.

Next we go to Devon, England, where the city of Plymouth marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s historic 1620 voyage with a major exhibition about both the history and the myths.  According to the exhibition’s curator, Jo Loosemore, the exhibition tries to fill in the gaps.

As reported by The Guardian, the English were late arrivals to North America.  Spanish, French and other Europeans had already colonized, tried to colonize, or traded with and taken Native Americans as slaves from the region.  The English themselves had previously failed at colonization on the continent over three decades earlier before establishing a colony that actually survived: Jamestown, Virginia.

The Pilgrims, who already had secured  religious freedom in the Dutch city of Leiden a decade earlier, set sail on the Mayflower from Plymouth to what they hoped would be the Hudson River, in search of economic opportunity.  Stormy weather blew the voyage off course, landing them initially on the tip of Cape Cod in what is now Massachusetts.  They established a colony on land belonging to the Wampanoag [WAHMP-a-NO-ag], whose name means “people of the first light” and who had inhabited the area for some twelve thousand years.

The Wampanoag helped the English survive, including through the controversial first Thanksgiving.  The Wampanoag had an estimated population of at least fifteen thousand in the early 1600s, and lived in villages on the Massachusetts coast and inland.  

By the time the Mayflower arrived, they were familiar with Europeans, including the terrible diseases they brought..  When the Pilgrims stepped ashore, the Wampanoag, weakened by an earlier plague that had wiped out seventy percent of their population, were willing to align with the English to keep their rivals, the Narragansett, at bay.

The years that followed included both good and violent relations between the English and Wampanoag, culminating in King Philip’s War of 1675.  That ended with the head of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader, displayed on a spike, and the survivors sold into slavery.  

According to Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Nation and an advisor to the exhibition, while the Pilgrims came for their religious freedom, they didn’t extend that liberty to those they moved in beside.  

One item in the exhibition is the first bible printed in North America.  Published in 1661, the Eliot Indian Bible is in the version of the Algonquian language that the Wampanoag spoke.  It is named after chief evangelist John Eliot, who worked to convert Native Americans to Christianity.

The myth of Native American and English feasting in Thanksgiving harmony became the ruling image remembered from this period.  This is due to several events occurring around the same time.  

A history of the Pilgrims’ experiences written by the colony’s leader, William Bradford, was rediscovered in 1855, in the collection of the bishop of London.  The find sparked Victorian interest in the Mayflower.  And in 1863, the US president Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving as a holiday in an attempt at national unity during the civil war.  

The existence of slavery in the early English colonies was ignored, and the national story became that of the hard-working, freedom-seeking Protestant Pilgrim fathers, aided by kind Native Americans.

In Egypt, the mummies of birds have long been a startling, but common, part of burials from the New Kingdom onward.  Millions of ibis, especially, and other birds of prey that were sacred to the Egyptian gods Horus, Ra and Thoth were carefully mummified and placed in tombs.  What wasn’t clear was whether these huge numbers of sacrificed animals were bred in captivity, or captured from the wild.  

To answer this question, a team of French researchers from several universities and museums in Lyons and Paris carried out geochemical analyses on bird mummies in the collection of the Confluence Museum in Lyon.  

According to their results, published last week in the journal, Scientific Reports, they were wild birds.

As reported by the online science website, Phys.org, collecting and preparing these animal mummies was both a religious display and a major industry.  For some tamed species, such as the cat, breeding was probably the most efficient way of supplying large numbers of animals for mummification.  But the bird mummies include all ages, from egg to adult, which may indicate they were taken from the wild.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers took tiny fragments of feathers, bones and embalming strips from twenty ibis and birds of prey mummies, dated them using carbon-14 analysis, and measured their isotopic tissue content of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and strontium.  

If these migratory birds had been captured and bred, their diet would have been homogeneous and of local origin.  This would be reflected by a uniform isotopic composition of the animal remains.  

However, far from being homogeneous, the isotopic composition showed a high variability and a signature that was quite different from those of human mummies from the same periods.  The birds must have been wild, migrating seasonally out of the Nile Valley and eating diets sourced far away.

These results, combined with that of a genetic study carried out by another team, support the depiction of mass hunting and capture of birds portrayed on some tomb frescoes.  The Egyptians probably exerted a significant ecological pressure on wild bird populations long before the decline in avifauna observed today.

We end this week in Turkey, where new discoveries show the ancient city of Hadrianopolis dates back to the Late Chalcolithic period, far earlier than previously thought.  Excavations of the city in Turkey’s Karabük province, in northern Anatolia, have revealed layers dating back 5,500 years.

The Hadrianopolis dig began in 2003 and is led by Kastamonu Museum and Professor Ersin Çelikbaş [CHEL-ik-bosh] from Karabük University’s Archaeology Department.  Finds include mosaics depicting horses, bulls, elephants, panthers, deer, and peacocks, earning Hadrianopolis the moniker "Zeugma of the Black Sea," after the city in southeastern Turkey where similar mosaics have been found. 

Other discoveries include ancient coins, bone hairpins, a tomb from the second century AD, and an unguentarium --or tear collecting bottle.  

The city, which covered twelve square kilometers or 4.6 square miles, still holds at least fourteen structures, including two baths, two churches, one defense structure, rock tombs, a theater, one arched and domed structure, one monumental cult niche, fortifications, villas, and other buildings and cult areas.  

Previous searches of the site revealed material from as early as the first century BC, or the Late Hellenistic period, and that was assumed to be the earliest period of occupation.  The new excavations provide evidence from 5,500 years ago, with pits and ceramics from the Late Chalcolithic period being found in the Southern Necropolis.  

As reported by the Turkish news site, Daily Sabah, the city’s location was key to its development.  Hadrianopolis lies in a fertile valley, with its buildings on flat terraces.  New settlements were continually built along the existing terraces.  There was even a structure from the early Roman period, found beneath the previously discovered, "Church C." 

An inscription suggests that Hadrianopolis was the most important market area of the region even as far back as the second century BC.  It was also a major pilgrimage center from early times through the Christian period.  An important resident of the city was a seventh-century Christian saint named Alypius the Stylite, an ascetic who is said to have founded monasteries for both men and women.  

The Southern Necropolis of Hadrianopolis features rock tombs that were used intensively during different periods: the second century AD, again in the fourth century, and finally in the sixth century.  Bodies were buried in graves from earlier periods in this necropolis, indicating a heavily populated city.  Hadrianopolis is estimated to have held over 50,000 people at its height.  

Ground-penetrating radar is helping uncover new sections each year, but the seventeen-year project has excavated only about five percent of the city to date.  

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!