Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with the latest 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 new study summarizes the thousands of years that humans managed the Amazon rainforest.  Another study lays out the complex pattern of human migrations into the Caribbean islands.  It turns out that humans have been significantly affecting ecosystems for many thousands of years. And interest is growing in New Mexico and nationally about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

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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 the week from September 27th to October 3rd, 2020.

For centuries, scientists have searched for a hidden “Lost City” buried somewhere deep in the Amazon rainforest.  Typically, they have looked for the type of monumental stone buildings found in cities across Europe and the Middle East.  But they missed other forms of human activity expressed by the trees standing right in front of them.

Recent research published in the journal, Science, details the work of Dr. Michael Heckenberger and colleagues to document the gardens, orchards and managed forests left behind by previous generations of inhabitants.  Parts of the original article were reprinted in The New York Times.

The samaúma tree, commonly called a kapok, is one of the largest and tallest of these forests, sometimes growing to 73 meters in height.  Local peoples call it the “grandmother tree,” and researchers have found that ancient peoples buried their dead in urns among its roots. 

The catch is that these trees aren't native to the area so far away from the Amazon River. These trees typically grow in floodplains, nourished by minerals washed down from the Andes.

The Tapajós National Forest in northern Brazil is home to many such samaúmas, as well as piquiá trees.  These trees can take 10 to 15 years to produce its starchy fruit, rich in calories and used topically to treat infections, burns and inflammation.  Both types of trees can be found clumped together in stands throughout the forest, providing evidence of their cultivation.

Evidence suggests that humans have been living in the Amazon for roughly 13,000 continuous years.  Perhaps centuries ago, they tended to some samaúma groves, or created the right conditions for piquiá to grow here.  Native people living there now are very aware that their ancestors tended the forest.

While radiocarbon and tree-ring dating tell us how a tree grew, its genetic analysis can reveal signs of domestication, revealing which plants migrated along with ancient people.

These people shaped the environment, modifying soils to accommodate nutrient-demanding vegetation.  Indigenous peoples domesticated hundreds of plant species, including Brazil nut, acai palm, manioc, maize, hot peppers, rice, and cacao trees. 

On the eve of European contact in 1491, the Amazon region supported at least eight million people.  This rainforest would be very different without the presence of Indigenous peoples and centuries of agricultural development.

We normally think of recent human activity as destroying the Amazon, but it’s also true that some trees in the region might not have existed there without human effort.  Today, these trees are in danger from illegal deforestation, which can lead to wildfires, pollution and the loss of historically significant portions of the rainforest.

A new study on the first settlers of the Caribbean islands uses data collected over sixty years to determine how ancient people successfully navigated their way to distant lands.  

As reported in an article on the website, The Conversation, the Caribbean is the only region of the Americas where people settled an archipelago with islands not directly visible from other surrounding land areas.  The authors of the study are Matthew Napolitano, Jessica Stone, Robert DiNapoli, and Scott Fitzpatrick, all affiliated with the University of Oregon.

Despite more than a century of research, many questions still exist about the origins of the first Caribbean people, when exactly they migrated and what routes they eventually took.  

Previous evidence, such as stone tools and food remains, provided archaeologists with a general understanding of the timeline.  Currently most scholars agree that people originating from northern South America first spread throughout the Caribbean during a series of migrations beginning at least 7,000 years ago.

Indigenous Americans were remarkably adept at open-water travel, paddling between these islands in dugout canoes, bringing plants and animals from the mainland to help ensure their survival.

Trinidad was the first Caribbean island settled by humans.  However, Trinidad is so close to South America that only simple boats would have been needed to get there – or perhaps no boats at all.

After Trinidad, the next oldest recorded settlements occurred between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago, on the larger islands of the Greater Antilles [an-TILL-ees], including Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.  

Reaching these destinations would have required crossing passages of water where no other islands would be visible to the naked eye.

Navigators may have relied on cloud patterns and the stars, or followed migrating sea birds, to find land.  By around 2,500 years ago, people had spread out to settle other smaller islands in the northern Lesser Antilles, including Antigua and Barbuda.

Around 1,800 years ago, a new wave of people also moved from South America into the Lesser Antilles, colonizing many of the remaining uninhabited islands.  Eventually, about 1,000 years later, their descendants moved into the smaller islands of the Greater Antilles and Bahamian archipelago, as well as Jamaica, for the first time.

Once people settled islands, the evidence suggests that they frequently moved between them in search of food, water and other natural resources, such as clay for pottery.

The detailed review of the radiocarbon record allowed archaeologists to show with increased accuracy the likely ways in which the region was first colonized by these people, how they interacted, and how their societies developed following the initial colonization.

It’s widely understood that deforestation, tilling of land and other agricultural practices alter regional and global climates, releasing greenhouse gases from vegetation and soils, and altering the exchange of heat and moisture across the Earth.  These effects are only partially reversed when the land is abandoned and native vegetation recovers.  Early changes in agricultural land use, therefore, have major implications in understanding climate changes of the past, present and future.

Bringing together the collective knowledge of more than 250 archaeologists, the ArchaeoGLOBE project is the first global, crowdsourced database of archaeological expertise on land use over the past 10,000 years.  As reported in an essay published at Aeon.com, the new research reveals that human societies transformed most of Earth’s biosphere much earlier and more profoundly than was previously believed.  The researchers who authored this essay are Lucas Stephens, Erle Ellis and Dorian Fuller.

The essay addresses what’s sometimes called the Anthropocene paradigm.  The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch defined as the period of significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems, often considered to have begun in the mid-twentieth century.   The view of the essay’s authors expands the definition of the Anthropocene to include not only the Industrial Age of the late 19th and 20th centuries, but also asserts that human expansion and development has impacted almost every part of the planet for thousands of years.

Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils have revealed unforeseen agricultural origins – such as a forgotten cereal called browntop millet.  It was the first staple crop of south India, before it was replaced by crops such as sorghum.  

New discoveries in southwestern Amazonia show that people were cultivating squash and manioc more than 10,000 years ago, and maize only a few thousand years later.  They did so while living in an engineered landscape of thousands of artificial forested islands within a seasonally flooded savannah.

Some of the most stunning discoveries have come from the application of lidar around Maya cities, buried underneath the tropical canopy in Central America.  The time period for monumental construction in Mexico has now been pushed back to the dawn of Maya civilization, some 3,000 years ago.

Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species would have shaped their evolutionary courses.  Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene would have negatively affected animal populations, driving many megafauna and island species either to extinction or perilously close.  

Even so, evidence points to widespread social and ecological adaptations to these challenges: human management can increase biodiversity of landscapes, and can sustain those increases for generations.  Forest and land use practices which encourage growth using limited resources have long been passed on by people worldwide.

The bottom line of the essay is the clear implication that the Anthropocene actually began as much as 10,000 or more years ago.  Geologists now are debating the epoch’s official temporal boundaries.

Protests against systemic racism and the use of force by police officers in the United States have rocked cities nationwide during 2020, prompting scenes of political unrest, civil disobedience and property damage.

The red-painted graffiti found on the New Mexico History Museum in Albuquerque this May read only: “1680 Land Back.”  As reported by the New York Times, the phrase invokes another rebellious episode in the history of what is now the United States: The Pueblo Revolt.  

Though still largely unknown outside the Southwest, the 1680 uprising succeeded in dislodging a major European power from a large part of North America for a considerable stretch of time. This contrasts with other Native rebellions of the same time, such as King Philip’s War in New England, where successes tended to be of shorter duration.

According to historian Porter Swentzell, a member of the New Mexico tribal nation, the Santa Clara Pueblo, the Revolt was the most successful Indian revolution in what is now the United States, dealing the colonial Spanish a stinging defeat and reclaiming at least some regional sovereignty.

After conquering New Mexico, Spanish settlers and Franciscan friars imposed forced labor, evangelism and demands for tribute on Native peoples in the frontier province.  Pueblo Indians mounted one rebellion after another, but it took a visionary shaman named Popé to orchestrate the successful rebellion.

Popé, from the Tewa-speaking Ohkay Owingeh nation of northern New Mexico, did so by secretly piecing together an alliance among the various Pueblo peoples who spoke languages as varied as Hopi, Keres and Zuni.  The Spanish prohibited Native Americans in New Mexico from riding horses, so Popé sent long-distance runners hundreds of miles to Pueblos around the province.

When the Spanish found out about the conspiracy, it was too late.  On August 10, 1680, the Pueblos collectively launched the revolt, pillaging haciendas, torching churches, and seizing horses and weapons.  Twenty-one Franciscan priests and 401 settlers were killed, including entire families.  

After Pueblo warriors laid siege to Santa Fe, the Spanish survivors fled to El Paso.  But even after Spain violently reconquered New Mexico a decade later, the Pueblos had secured lasting concessions.

The Spanish generally allowed them to remain in their lands, ceding to some demands for autonomy and providing ways for tribal members to lodge legal complaints about mistreatment by colonial officials.

As we reflect on the current events of 2020, the legacy of The Pueblo Revolt is gaining renewed interest. This includes efforts by Representative Deb Haaland, Democrat of New Mexico, to promote national education of the event and to restore historically important Native American sites in the region. 

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!