Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to deliver another 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!

A study from Spain demonstrates that gender-specific roles were well established by the end of the Bronze Age in the second millennium BC.  Another gender turnabout comes from Peru, where the 9000-year-old skeleton of a big-game hunter high in the Andes turns out to be a female teenager.  Ground-penetrating radar has enabled the location of the “Tilting Grounds” in London, the place where Henry the Eighth was seriously injured in a jousting match.  And ground-penetrating radar has also made possible the location of mass graves likely to be those of African-Americans killed during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

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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 November 1st to the 7th, 2020.

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For our first story, we go to Spain, where microscopic analysis of teeth from Bronze Age people shows that some women were craft specialists working with fibers. 

This supports other evidence for gender-specific divisions of labor as early as 4,000 years ago.  

The dental wear research comes from a study of over 100 burials from the Castellón [kast-ay-yon] Alto site near Granada, in southeastern Spain.  The people belonged to the culture of El Argar, which flourished from 2200 to 1550 BC.  Evidence from the site already shows that El Argar was a complex society, with social differentiation based on gender and age.  The differences in rank and occupation included craft specializations, with certain people becoming experts working in ceramics, textiles, and metals.

As reported on the science news site, Phys.org, the new insight comes from examination of microscopic wear on El Argar people’s teeth, showing that some women were specialist artisans who manufactured thread, a vital element in many other crafts.

The study was led by Marina Lozano, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and Rovira i Virgili University.  Her team used scanning electron microscope analysis to examine wear patterns that result from using the teeth as tools, rather than just to eat food.  

Macroscopic examination revealed that 5 of the 106 burials exhibited such wear, from using their teeth to manipulate materials other than food.  Microscopic examination of the dental wear found distinct and different patterns, including notches, chipped enamel, and grooves on the occlusal and interproximal surfaces.  These would have developed from repeated use over many years to smooth and trim fibers. 

The five individuals using their teeth this way were all women.  The wear shows that throughout their lives, they regularly used their gums, mouths and teeth to cut, soften, shape and twist plant and animal fibers.  High quality, strong thread was vital for making clothing, baskets and other textiles, as well as being used in assembling various types of tools.

The women were different ages at death, and the older the individual, the more pronounced the dental wear.  This suggests that these women began learning the craft as children, were already working hard at it in adolescence, and continued in this craft specialty throughout their adult lives.

According to Lozano, this shows that in this Bronze Age culture, thread-making was a specialist task for women, but not men.  The new dental evidence adds to our understanding about when task specialization began, what types of crafts or professions became the domain of specialists, and how certain specializations were divided by gender. 

The research appears in the September issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

We go now to Peru, where a 9,000-year-old burial in the Andes highlands produced a startling discovery: the skeleton of a young woman buried along with all the tools for big-game hunting.  This combination challenges one of the most widely held beliefs about ancient cultures, namely, that only the men hunted.

The belief that hunting and gathering are always male rather than female activities has taken some blows recently from evidence that in other animal species, including African lions, it isn’t only male individuals who are responsible for hunting.  New evidence from re-analysis of many recorded burials suggests that in early and small-scale societies, where bringing down big game was crucial to the group’s survival, both sexes joined together to hunt. 

As reported in the online Science Magazine, the new evidence starts with skeletal remains found at an altitude of almost 13,000 feet at the site of Wilamaya Patjxa [wil-a-MY-a PAHT-ha], in the Puno district of southern Peru.  A local Aymara colleague found the site in 2013, and in 2018 an international team excavated over 20,000 artifacts, as well as five burials that held the remains of at least six people.  One burial held over 24 stone artifacts, including 20 hunting tools, along with a fragmentary skeleton that turned out to be a young woman, about 17 to 19 years old when she died.  

She was one of only two people buried with hunting tools.  The other was a man, 25 to 35 years old, who was buried with two projectile points.  The teenage woman, by contrast, was buried with a pile, including four spear points, several cutting blades, a possible knife, and scrapers for processing animal hides and meat.  

The total of 20 stone tools, along with ochre, which can be used to tan hides, were neatly stacked next to the top of her thigh bone, as if they had been held in a leather pouch that had disintegrated.   The pits also held bone fragments of Andean deer and camelids, such as vicuña or guanaco.

The researchers verified the sex of the bones through a new forensics technique developed by team member Glendon Parker, of UC Davis.  The technique analyzes whether an individual’s tooth enamel carries a male or female version of a protein called amelogenin [a-MEL-oh JEN-in].  The youngster with the impressive toolkit was female; the older adult with two projectile points was male.   

Bone and tooth isotope chemistry showed the young woman ate a typical hunter’s diet of animal meat and plants.

According to lead author Randy Haas, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis, the results show that this young woman was a big game hunter, who participated with her people in the pursuit of the vicuña and deer that made up a significant portion of their diet.

Other archaeologists agree with this conclusion, but they aren’t all in agreement that this means women in this or other cultures regularly hunted.  One objection is that the few examples of female big-game hunters aren’t enough evidence to show that both men and women in early human societies were regular hunters.  Modern examples of hunting and gathering groups are few, but they all show a gender split between the two tasks.  If some, or all, early human societies had both male and female hunters, something must have changed.  

Another objection is what the burial tools mean.  Perhaps their inclusion was symbolic, such as to show the young woman’s family status or lineage, or as an offering from hunters to express their sorrow.  Support for these alternate explanations comes from burials of female infants that include stone spear points.  The inclusion of a particular tool type doesn’t mean that the buried person used it.

To explore this controversy, Haas and his team reviewed the literature on the 107 other sites in the Americas that are older than 8000 and produced burials.  They found that in these other sites, 10 women and 16 men were buried with hunting tools.  This suggests we must set aside stereotypes that lead to the assumption that the find of hunting tools in a man’s burial means he was a hunter, while the same find in a woman’s burial has some other meaning.  

The evidence instead suggests that both men and women were hunters in the Americas between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago.  Women have always been capable of hunting, of course, and examples of women buried with tools for hunting and, later, warfare, have been discovered all over the world.  It now seems more likely that in early human societies, particularly in difficult environments, all adults participated in hunting.  

According to human ecologist Eugenia Gayo of the University of Chile, the new research leads to better questions for further study, such as asking what were the types of environments where everybody got involved in the hunting.

The research from the Peruvian burial has been published in the journal, Science Advances.

Our third story takes us to England, where jousting on horseback was once a fashionable activity for knights and kings, and could have led to the serious injury that changed the course of history for Henry the Eighth, and several of his wives. 

Jousting or tilting, in which two mounted and heavily armored knights rode full tilt at each other, seeking to unhorse each other with their long lances, was not just practice for warfare, but a major public sport. 

Arenas known as tilting grounds were constructed to host the matches, with viewing areas where spectators could eat, drink and be merry while watching the potential mayhem unfold.  Violent collisions often sent debris flying as well as men and horses.

The speed, mass and metal could cause blunt force traumas and concussions.  One well-documented case comes from 1536, when King Henry the Eighth lay injured and unconscious for several hours after a jousting injury at Greenwich [GREN-itch] Palace.  When his horse accelerated unexpectedly, he was thrown, and the horse fell on top of him.  His life hung in the balance and his young wife, Anne Boleyn, pregnant with their second child at the time, suffered a miscarriage shortly after.  Her first child, the future Elizabeth the First, never got a sibling.  The child she miscarried was the long-hoped-for boy.  Within a year, Henry had Anne beheaded, and began his ever more lethal pursuit of new brides and a male heir.  

Medical researchers in recent years have suggested that this jousting collision and severe concussion was just one of many traumatic brain injuries Henry, like other nobles and knights of his age, incurred throughout a lifetime of military and athletic engagements.  The Greenwich Palace jousting accident, however, may be the one that turned Henry from an outgoing and intelligent young king into the tyrant he became, prone to fits of temper, headaches, amnesia, insomnia, and famously poor impulse control.   

Now the physical remains of Greenwich’s jousting grounds have been located using ground penetrating radar in the site of the former palace, which fell into disrepair in the 1600s and was demolished in the 1700s.  The evidence includes a very large tilting arena, about 200 by 76 meters, at a depth of approximately 1.7 meters, flanked by buildings.  

The most telling evidence is the outlines of two octagonal structures.   Painted imagery of the venue indicates that the site once included two brick viewing towers constructed in a distinct octagonal alignment. 

As reported by LiveScience.com, the grounds, on the outskirts of modern London, are now part of the National Maritime Museum.  Researchers wanted to locate the arena for the 500-year anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a royal summit held between leaders of England and France in 1520.  Now that the location of the yard has been definitively identified, archaeologists will excavate the site to further document its cultural use and construction techniques.

We end this week in the United States, where archaeologists may have found unmarked graves in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that hold the remains of Black victims of a massacre here.  

The 1921 Greenwood race massacre was part of a long history of white supremacists violently attacking African-Americans, in individual lynchings and killings as well as through organized mob violence.   

In Greenwood, Oklahoma, a part of the modern city of Tulsa, Black emigrants from southern states had helped build a thriving Black district with hundreds of successful businesses.   All of this was destroyed, along with much of Greenwood itself, when white mobs, claiming that an African-American man had assaulted a white woman, burned the entire district, killing many and driving others into hiding.  

The 1921 Tulsa event has been under-reported despite a statewide investigation and the creation of two separate commissions to document both victims and property loss.  The event was officially recognized by the state in 2001, although the reparations recommendations made by the first committee were dropped from subsequent legislation.

Descendants of survivors have continued to pressure state and local agencies to investigate areas thought to contain their relatives’ remains.

Historical evidence, including eyewitness testimonies and photographs, initially led research teams to the Sexton section of the Oaklawn Cemetery, and more recently to an adjacent area now referred to as Potters Field.  

As reported at LiveScience.com, the search used ground penetrating radar techniques and has now resulted in the discovery of at least 12 coffins containing unidentified human remains, in burials that were not marked on the surface.  While forensic scientists examine the remains, other researchers will continue to explore the surrounding area for additional evidence.

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!