Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  It’s my pleasure to introduce you to 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 temple dedicated to Aphrodite has turned up in a surface survey in Turkey.  Facial reconstruction of an Iron Age couple buried in a Siberian mound shows what they looked like.  Workers in a Mexican citrus grove came upon a rare statue of a female figure.  And the image of a warty pig on an Indonesian island is now the oldest example of cave art anywhere.

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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 the week of January 10th through the 16th, 2021

We begin this week in Turkey, where archaeological surveyors found remains of a temple to Aphrodite right on the ground surface, in a busy tourist area.

According to press releases from Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency, the 2,500-year-old temple honoring Aphrodite,  the ancient Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, passion, and procreation, is on the Urla-Çeşme [UR-lah CHEZ-may] peninsula.

The peninsula, on the coast of the province of Izmir [IZZ-meer] juts out into the Aegean Sea across from the Greek island of Chios [KEE-ohss].  Izmir has been a densely populated district since ancient times and is still a major tourist destination, with many smaller towns like Urla and Çeşme hosting thousands of visitors a year.  

Thus, the survey team was surprised to identify the new temple so easily, without excavation.

As reported by the website, Live Science, the clues include a statue fragment and a terracotta female head.  The building and materials date to the fifth century BC. 

According to team leader Elif Koparal, an archaeologist at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Turkey, they even found an inscription reading, "This is the sacred area," identifying the temple precinct.

Koparal and her team believe the temple was to Aphrodite, a very widely worshipped goddess in this region during that time. 

As the early Greek poet Hesiod wrote, Aphrodite was said to have been born from the white foam on the waves, left by the severed genitals of Uranus, after his son Cronus threw them into the sea.

Although she was also worshipped as a goddess of the sea and even war, Aphrodite was primarily associated with love and fertility.  Prostitutes considered Aphrodite their patron, and her cult was popular throughout antiquity.  

The peninsula where the temple was found is known for its ancient settlements, and archaeological surveys have been ongoing since 2006.  But it's not common to find a temple during a surface survey, which involves simply walking over the ground while recording, mapping and collecting artifacts encountered.

So far, the team has found thirty-five prehistoric human settlements, including sixteen dating to the Neolithic age.  They first recorded the temple remains in 2016.

According to Koparal, local groups are cooperating in the work to help protect the temple and the rest of the historical sites from damage by looting as well as urban development.  

In Russia, researchers have reconstructed the faces of a Siberian nomad and his female companion who were buried 2600 years ago in a grave compared to that of Tutankhamun.

These Scythian nomads, as the Greeks called them, lived between 700 and 300 BC in  the Eurasian steppes.

According to the archaeology website, AncientPages.com, the Scythians roamed the grasslands from the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe to what is now southeastern Russia.  One of many Iranian peoples originating in central Asia, they were among the first to use the saddle and stirrup.  Archaeologists have long debated what their original homeland might be, and even hypothesized that they might be the source of the ancient myth of the Amazons. 

Equally interesting are the archaeological discoveries of these highranking Scythians, dubbed by some the Siberian Tutankhamun, and his queen.

The couple's remains were excavated between 2000 and 2003  from a 262-foot wide mound, dubbed Arzhan-2, in Tuva, a part of south Siberia bordering Mongolia.   In the center of the mound was the chamber built from wood, holding their bodies.  A total of 9,300 decorative gold pieces, weighing 44 pounds, were buried on the bodies of the couple.  Adorning the king's clothes were thousands of small golden panther figures, and the woman's clothes had turquoise beads, golden badges and pins, a miniature golden cauldron, a golden bracelet, and a bag with cosmetics.  The complex belongs to a culture dating around 600 BC.

As reported by the Daily Mail, scientists have now used the decomposing skulls of the royal couple to build 3D models using laser scanning and photogrammetry.  Their faces as reconstructed appear distinctly Caucasian, consistent with DNA studies showing close genetic links across the Eurasian steppe from eastern Europe to Mongolia and possibly reflecting an eastward movement of people during the Bronze Age, between about 2000 and 1000 BC.

The re-creations show the pair dressed in royal clothes adorned with gold pendants and fur, just as in the grave.

According to the Siberian Times, though the woman has been called a queen, it is more likely she was the king's favorite concubine and was sacrificed to accompany him to the afterlife.

In the study, published in the Journal of Archaeology, Anthropology and Ethnography, Moscow-based anthropologists Elizabeta Veselovskaya (VEH-si-lohv-SKY-a) and Ravil Galeev [ra-VEEL gah-LAY-ev] wrote that only half of the man’s skull was preserved.  This made the long, arduous task of restoring it much more complicated, especially on the face.  The team extrapolated the missing facial parts based on surrounding bone structure. 

Once the team completed the faces of the couple, they created busts with clay and hard polyurethane foam.

Elsewhere in the large burial  mound, archaeologists also uncovered thirty-three other adults, five children, and fourteen decorated stallions, who may also have been sacrificed at the time of the king's death.

We now turn to Mexico's Gulf coast, where farmers digging in a citrus grove on New Year's Day found the six-foot tall statue of a female figure.  She may represent an elite woman, a goddess, or perhaps a blend of the two.  

According to the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History, it is the first such statue found in a region called the Huasteca [waz-TECK-ah].  The carved woman has elaborate hair and marks of status, and may date between AD 1450 and 1521.  

While the site where it was found is nearer to the pre-Hispanic ruin site of El Tajín (tah-HEEN), the statue shows some Aztec influence.

The citrus grove was not previously known to be an archaeological site, and the limestone statue may have been brought in from elsewhere.

According to Institute archaeologist María Eugenia Maldonado Vite, the posture and attire suggest that the woman could be a ruler, as opposed to a goddess.

The style shows a fusion between characteristics used to depict Aztec goddesses of fertility, and symbols denoting women of high political or social status in the Huasteca. 

Though the woman is shown resting in a peaceful position, her open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression is more like a scream than a smile.  Maldonado notes that the statue probably used to have obsidian inlays in its now-hollow eye sockets.

According to Susan Gillespie, an anthropology professor at the University of Florida, quite a few pre-Hispanic depictions of elite women and female rulers are found in other places, both among the Classic Maya and in Classic Zapotec bas-reliefs and Postclassic Mixtec [Mish -tek] codices.

If the newly found statue does turn out to portray an elite woman, and not a goddess, she will join the ranks of several other female rulers depicted in pre-Hispanic artifacts.

For our last story this week, we go to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, where a cave wall has produced the oldest-known animal drawing in the world, a 45,500-year-old depiction of a hairy, warty pig.

The painting, drawn with red mineral paint, shows the profile of what is likely a Sulawesi warty pig, a wild stubby-legged beast with facial warts that can weigh up to nearly 190 pounds, or 85 kilograms.  The pigs are still there today, though in shrinking numbers, according to study co-lead researcher Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution.

As reported by the website, Live Science.com, the find provides more evidence that ancient Indonesia was a hot spot for rock art, and that the first rock art traditions may not have arisen in ice age Europe, as was long assumed.  

In December 2017, Brumm and his colleagues found at least three warty pig drawings in Leang Tedongnge [TAY-dong NG-gay] Cave, on Sulawesi, an Indonesian island that's slightly larger than Florida.  This cave rests in a small valley now inhabited by farmers.  

The pig drawings suggest that Indonesia was a hot spot for rock art during the Pleistocene epoch.

The oldest pig is also the most well preserved pig.  It measures about two feet by four and a half feet, or 136 by 54 centimeters.  The outlines of two human hands are painted above its rear, which still shows a tiny tail on the rump.  The big pig faces two or three other pigs, which are less well preserved and appear to be having some kind of social interaction with the big pig.

In a nearby cave, called Leang Balangajia 1, the team spotted an even larger painted pig on the ceiling, measuring about four by six feet, or 187 by 110 centimeters, with four stenciled hands on it.

Why were pigs popular subjects for the artists?  According to Brumm, Sulawesi warty pigs are unique to that island, evolving in isolation hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Archaeological evidence suggests that humans hunted and even domesticated these pigs, and that they were of high economic importance.  

Previously, the oldest-known rock art depicting an animal was another Sulawesi warty pig found in another cave on the same island, dated to at least 43,900 years ago, which was also discovered by Brumm’s team.  

For comparison, the oldest known drawing of any kind by a human is a 73,000-year-old criss-cross design painted on a rock flake from South Africa.

To date the newfound rock art, the team sampled a few calcite minerals that had developed over the pigs after they were painted.  Then they used uranium-series dating, a method that measures uranium's radioactive decay.  When rainwater seeps through a limestone cave, it dissolves tiny amounts of uranium, which decays over time into the element thorium.  By measuring the ratio of uranium to thorium in each mineral sample, the scientists determined when the minerals started growing over the paintings.

In addition to being the oldest-known rock art painting of an animal, the Leang Tedongnge pig is possibly the earliest evidence of modern humans on Sulawesi, if one assumes that the pigs were painted by humans, and not a closely related human relative, like the Denisovans.

The report on the find, analyzed by an international team from Australia and Indonesia, was published online in the journal, Science Advances.  

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!