Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with the latest weekly batch of top news stories that appeared on Archaeologica.  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

The image of a cat has emerged from a new survey near Peru’s Nazca Lines.  As Alpine glaciers melt, recovery of perishable artifacts becomes more important.  A plan to recover the Titanic’s radio has ignited a dispute over human remains.  And work on a planned British Museum exhibit of circumpolar artifacts includes painstaking conservation efforts.

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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 October 18th to the 24th, 2020

We begin this week in Peru, where archaeologists have discovered a new giant geoglyph of a cat near the Nazca Lines.  The team was doing maintenance work. at the famous UNESCO World Heritage site. 

As reported by The New York Times, the image sprawls across 40 yards of a hillside at the desert site in southern Peru.  The ground-surface etching, or geoglyph, appears to show a cat lounging at ease, with pointy ears, oval eyes and a long striped tail.

According to Peru’s Ministry of Culture, the geoglyph dates between 200 and 100 BC and is one of several hundred carvings here of larger-than-life animals and plants. 

The discovery underscores the rich and varied cultural legacy of this site, but it also may be older than any of the previously discovered geoglyphs at the site. 

The Nazca Lines were first found in 1927 when an aerial survey crossed the desert, spotting a hummingbird, a monkey and an orca.  Under its official name, The Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa, it was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list in 1994.

The designs were created by scraping off a dark and rocky layer of earth, which contrasts with lighter colored sand underneath.  Many explanations for the lines have been offered, including proposals that the figures once served as travel markers.

According to Johnny Isla, Peru's chief archaeologist for the Nazca Lines, drone photography has added new discoveries in recent years.  A search in 2019 by researchers from Japan using satellite photography and three-dimensional imaging found more than 140 new geoglyphs.

Research and conservation work continued at the site during the coronavirus pandemic.  Archaeologists working on the Mirador Natural [mee-rah-DORE nah-too-RAWL], a lookout point in the protected site, found the faint cat design while cleaning the mound.

The figure was eroding because it lies on a steep slope.  All of the geoglyphs are quite fragile, though.  Visitors are allowed to view the lines and figures only from planes and lookout points.

Intentional disturbances include footprints near a hummingbird left in 2014 by Greenpeace activists placing a sign that promoted renewable energy, and a truck driver who drove across three lines of geoglyphs in 2018 and was arrested.

Next we go to the Swiss Alps, where archaeologists race to record and preserve artifacts exposed by retreating glaciers.  

Surging temperatures are driving the new field of glacial archaeology, as climate change portends the loss of nearly every glacier in the Alps.  

As reported by the website sciencealert.com, that’s a staggering total of nearly 4,000 glaciers expected to be gone by the end of this century.  The amount of information melting out of them is also staggering.

According to archaeologist Marcel Cornelissen, the often surprising finds open a window into an area of archaeology that we don't normally see.  Cornelissen headed a survey in September that found a rock quarry site near the Brunifirm Glacier in the eastern Swiss canton of Uri, at an altitude of 2,800 meters, or 9,100 feet.

Until the early 1990s, it was widely believed that people in prehistoric times avoided steep, high mountains.  But the rock quarrying site, dated to 9,500 years ago, shows that Mesolithic people came far up into the Alps to get high quality, fine-grained stone for tools. 

According to Christian auf der Maur, an archaeologist with Uri canton, such finds are truly exceptional. This and other finds from the melting ice show that mountain ranges like the Alps have seen regular human activity for thousands of years.

The first major ancient Alpine find to emerge from the melting ice was the 1991 discovery of "Oetzi," a man who died 5,300 years ago and whose body was preserved by an Alpine glacier in the Italian Tyrol region.

The new evidence shows numerous traces of ancient people crossing the high altitude mountain passes.

The Schnidejoch Pass, a lofty trail in the Bernese Alps 2,756 meters, or 9,000 feet above sea level, produced a birch bark quiver in 2003.  That arrow quiver dated to about 3,000 BC.  Further discoveries of leather trousers and shoes may have come from the owner of the quiver.  Hundreds of other objects found date as far back as 4,500 BC.

According to archaeologist Regula Gubler, leather, wood, birch bark, and textiles are rarely found in lower-altitude excavations where the higher temperatures lead to their decomposition.  In the glacial sites, however, the preservation is remarkable. 

Gubler led the team that found a knotted string of plant fibers thought to be over 6,000 years old.  A braided basket of similar age and fiber came to light last year.

Unfortunately, these products, made from organic materials, rapidly disintegrate once they melt out from the glaciers.  Since the archaeologists can’t monitor every glacier as it melts, they are enlisting hikers and other members of the public to become more aware of the importance of reporting any finds. 

We travel now to the icy waters of the North Atlantic, where a plan to retrieve the radio equipment from the wreck of the ill-fated Titanic has revived a debate over the human remains that may still lie in the ship. 

People have been diving to the Titanic's wreck for 35 years.  No one has found human remains, according to RMS Titanic, Inc., the company that owns the salvage rights.

As reported by the science news site phys.org, RMS Titanic wants to exhibit the ship's Marconi wireless telegraph machine, which broadcast the sinking ocean liner's distress calls.  These  helped lead to the rescue of about 700 people in lifeboats.

To get the equipment, an unmanned submersible would slip through a skylight or cut into a heavily corroded roof on the ship's deck.  A suction dredge would remove loose silt, while manipulator arms could cut electrical cords.

But a legal challenge filed by the U.S. government in June has raised the question of whether human remains are on the sunken ship in an ongoing court battle to block the planned expedition.  Some archaeologists say remains could still be there, and the company fails to consider that in its dive plan.

The Titanic was traveling from England to New York in 1912 when it struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic.  Robert Ballard located the wreck in 1985.

According to Paul Johnston, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, some human remains may lie deep inside where there are no currents.

The case is pending before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.

RMS Titanic Inc. is the court-recognized steward of Titanic artifacts, overseeing thousands of items including silverware, china and gold coins.  All of the artifacts the company has previously recovered come from the large debris field outside the wreck.

Company advisers contend that the extreme depth and currents would have led to decomposition of all remains.  But according to David Conlin, chief of the National Park Service's Submerged Resources Center, very deep, cold, low-oxygen water is highly preservative.  Wrecks older than the Titanic have contained remnants of crew or passengers, including the H.L. Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sank in 1864, and a first-century BC freighter wrecked near the Greek island of Antikythera.

According to Conlin, we would expect to find remains in the interior spaces that are more difficult to access, where the preservation will be both tragic and spectacular.

RMS Titanic argues that it is necessary to retrieve the telegraph before the corroding shipboard spaces collapse in and prevent recovery forever.  Federal attorneys contesting the decision argue that going into the ship for this single iconic item will open the way for any further hauls the company decides to make. 

We end this week in the UK, where British Museum scientists have been developing new conservation techniques to preserve unusual artifacts made by circumpolar peoples from materials as unusual as salmon skin and walrus guts.   

As reported by The Independent, the scientists bringing Arctic treasures back to life have grappled with a challenging operation in preparing the Arctic artifacts for the British Museum's first comprehensive exhibition on circumpolar cultures. 

The fragile items include two extraordinary bags made by Alaskans out of salmon skin in the 1880s along with other items of walrus intestines, duck feet, seal bladder, tree bark, reindeer muscle tendons, and 150-year-old grass.

To conserve and repair the two 130-year-old fish-skin bags, conservators had to temporarily recreate their original flexibility by enveloping them with water vapor for 24 hours inside a special polythene tent in their laboratory.

Research revealed that the 23 salmon skins used to make the two bags had first been scraped to remove all traces of fat and flesh.  They were then urine-tanned and treated with fish or seal oil.  

The bags were made by Yupiks in southwest Alaska, who used fishbone needles and caribou sinew to sew the salmon skins together.  Then they dyed the skins red and adorned them with strips of white seal-throat collagen and caribou chin hair.

The larger of the two bags was probably used to store and carry clothes.  The small one could have been used to collect berries and other food.

Another challenge to the museum's conservators was a 90-year-old hooded raincoat, made of walrus or seal intestines, from the Aleutian Islands.

To conserve it, and repair a number of tears, conservators had to use ultra-thin translucent nano-cellulose.  Usually this substance, made of highly processed plant material, is used to repair old parchment manuscripts.  This was the first time that it had been employed to rejuvenate animal intestines.  To complicate the task further, the raincoat was decorated with patches of salmon skin in square and triangular shapes.

Another object made of walrus or seal intestines is a sail, 110 years old, originally used on an open Arctic skin boat known as an umiak [OO-mee-uk].

To turn the animal's intestines into a sail or the equivalent of a waterproof jacket, the Arctic artisans had to use their mouths to blow them up like balloons.  Then they let them dry in the cold wind for several weeks, after which they cut them into long strips and sewed them together with seal or walrus sinew.

Other conservation challenges included a bag made from the skin of a duck's foot, a massive seal-shaped float made of sealskin, and a complete sealskin kayak.

The exhibition also includes a seal or walrus bladder float for a harpoon, a pair of socks made from woven Arctic tundra grass, and an ivory harpoon made of narwhal tusk.  Two of the finest objects in the exhibition are a pair of embroidered reindeer skin boots, acquired by Captain Cook, or one of his senior colleagues, during Cook's voyage to Alaska in 1778.

The exhibition shows the cultures of more than forty different circumpolar peoples, including native Alaskan, Inuit, Siberian, Sami, and others. 

According to conservation scientist Sophie Rowe, people who live in these harsh regions still use a dizzying range of locally available materials to craft an expert mode of survival in some of the planet’s harshest environments. 

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!