Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Away we go again with 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 rare ancient Greek war helmet has turned up in a Croatian tomb.  A research team in a central Norway ice patch has recovered 68 arrowheads and lots more evidence of reindeer hunting.  A mummy in southwestern Texas has been diagnosed with Chagas Disease.  And a family weeding their garden in England chanced upon a trove of coins from the time of Henry the Eighth..

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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 Archaeological!  I’m Laura Pettigrew and these are the headlines in archaeological and historical news for the week of December 6th to the 12th, 2020.

This week we begin in Croatia, where archaeologists restoring a damaged Bronze Age burial mound found a warrior buried in his bronze war helmet.  

The team of archaeologists from Croatia’s Center for Prehistoric Research and the archaeology department at Zagreb University identified three burials exposed in the mound, including the warrior wearing the helmet and a woman buried in her bronze jewelry. 

The helmet is the open-faced design familiar from so many ancient depictions, covering the head and with cheek guards coming down the sides of the face, but without any central face protection.  The style originated in the Peloponnesian part of Greece, hundreds of miles to the southeast of the burial site, during the eighth and seventh centuries BC.  

The helmet type is known as the Illyrian style, after the region along the eastern Adriatic where the grave was found.  Although it was also used by Etruscans across the Adriatic in northern Italy, and Scythians then sweeping into the Balkans from the Eurasian steppes, it became known as the Illyrian style and was in widespread use by the time of this burial, during the fourth century BC.  The find marks only the fortieth discovery of an intact ancient helmet of this type.  

As reported by the news site Greek Reporter.com, other grave goods included additional weapons, including bronze spear points and knives, silver and bronze fibulae or pins, needles, tweezers, ornaments, and many glass beads. 

The hilltop burial mound was made of earth covering a stone chamber, measuring about 3 by 2 meters, or nearly 10 feet by 6 and a half feet.  The bones of the warrior were badly decomposed, but the excavators could see skull fragments still preserved within the soil now filling the helmet.   

According to Dr. Hrvoje Potrebica [HROH-ye Poh-tre-BEE-ca], the team leader, and a professor at Zagreb University,  the tomb is earlier than the nearby settlement at Korcula [KOR-chu-la], founded in the late 4th or early 3rd century BC.  Surveys so far in the area promise numerous additional discoveries, such as the potential for a shrine, as well as other graves and finds of ceramics. 

The excavation has been on hold since the COVID-19 pandemic, but teams are hoping to return in early 2021 to excavate the site further. 

In central Norway, archaeologists have been salvaging artifacts melting out from an ice patch that covers 60 acres, so far finding 68 arrows and arrow points.  This is the largest assemblage ever found at a frozen site. 

The trove of lost hunting weapons and associated tools includes arrowheads made of stone, bone, bronze, and iron, as well as wood, bone and metal shafts and occasionally even fiber, sinew and leather bindings. 

The archaeological work is part of an interdisciplinary team focusing on the Langfonne (LONG-fon-eh) ice patch, located in the Jotunheimen (yo-tune-HEI-men) mountains of central Norway.  The Langfonne Ice Patch has existed since well before humans arrived during the Stone Age, and is still home to native reindeer, who thrive in its year-round glacial conditions. 

Due to recent acceleration in global climate change and glacial melting, however, the ice patch is shrinking, to reveal artifacts that tell the story of Norway’s long prehistory.  

The recent study of the ice patch has revealed not only 68 arrows, but an additional 290 faunal finds, mostly reindeer bone and antler. 

As reported by the news site Norway Today, radiocarbon dates on 102 of the finds show a range from 4000 BC up through the end of the Viking age, in early medieval times.  The period producing the most arrows, AD 54 to 1160, also showed the most evidence for increased hunting.

However, determining the larger history around such finds is difficult, due to the enormous environmental factors that can play a role in hunting patterns, as well as glacial preservation and melting.  Wind, exposure, snowmelt, and temperature trends affect the preservation and provenience of artifacts. 

The findings provide us a glimpse into the hunting patterns of past peoples, and reveal their use of this ice-patch as a hunting ground for thousands of years. 

According to Lars Holger Pilø [Lars HOL-yer PEE-luh], the research team leader, and an archaeologist with the Department of Cultural Heritage of Innlandet County, understanding how cultural materials emerge from ice is crucial in an era of climate change.  His team is analyzing the details of the finds to understand more about this taphonomy. 

The new findings are published in the open access science journal, The Holocene.    

We go next to the prehistoric southwestern United States, where new research on three sets of mummified remains reveals new details about how hard communities worked to try to help severely ill members.  The mummies, from three different cultural traditions, were excavated and analyzed decades ago, and new techniques are revealing ever more new details.  

The new findings are from a team led by Dr. Karl Reinhard, of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and form part of a chapter in The Handbook of Mummy Studies.  

As reported by the science new site phys.org, the first case comes from the Rio Grande valley in Texas, where between 1,000 and 1,400 years ago, a person died of advanced Chagas disease, a parasite-caused infection that led to massive blockage and swelling of his colon.  The pain of the fatal constipation and abdominal swelling would have been intense.  Eating would have been difficult, and going out to forage impossible.  Reinhard’s microscopic analysis showed that the dead person, known as the Skiles Mummy, was instead eating grasshoppers - an unusual food for his community - and these were not just whole insects, but carefully prepared by removing the legs so the moisture-rich body could be eaten more easily.

Reinhard’s team found that even the phytoliths, microscopic plant parts that are a normal find in the colon, had been crushed by the immense pressure and pain on the victim’s gastrointestinal system. 

Another of his case studies examined a Hohokam child who died 500 to 1000 years ago and was buried in Arizona’s Ventana Cave.  Found in this mummy’s intestines were blooms of the saguaro cactus, so many hundreds of blooms that they represent the immense work the community was doing to gather them to try to keep the child nourished in the 5 to 6 weeks before death.   This species of cactus blooms was also sacred to the Hohokam, suggesting that they were invoking the help of divinity to try to save the child.  

Another mummy, from southern Utah and also a child, buried roughly 750 years ago, shows the same community-wide assistance in hospice care.  The child was eating nothing but seeds from Achnatherum hymenoides [high-men-OY-deez], or rice grass, a labor-intensive food that was eaten only during early summer when other foods were scarce.

Reinhard’s team emphasizes the importance of proper use of technologies and also of precise identification in their work.  According to Reinhard, only accurate methodology will allow valid conclusions about these long-ago lives, and deaths. 

We end this week in New Forest, England, where a family got into gardening during the pandemic and found a cache of 64 coins while weeding. 

The 63 gold coins and one silver coin date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD and appear to have been hidden around 1540. 

As reported by the British newspaper, The Guardian, this is just one of many finds made as people spent more time at home during coronavirus shut-downs.  

The New Forest find includes coins from the reign of Henry the Eighth with the initials K, A, and I, the first letters of the names in Latin of three of his wives, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour.  Since he divorced Catherine of Aragon in 1533 to marry Anne Boleyn, beheaded her after only three years of marriage, and lost his next wife, Jane Seymour, in childbirth in 1537, these coins show how frequently he had to change the coinage.  Jane was the last of his six wives to have her initial on his coins. 

The entire cache is equivalent in value to 14,000 pounds today and includes coins from the reign of Edward the Fourth through Henry the Eighth.  Most were a common coin of the time that showed archangel Michael killing a dragon. 

In 2020, more than 47,000 finds by the public have been recorded with the British finds authorities, many more than usual during this time of pandemic gardening. 

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!