Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  As usual, we present 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!

The latest discovery in Egypt includes a funerary temple, shaft burials, and a 17-foot-long fragment of the Book of the Dead.  A new analysis of caches in Europe shows that some Early Bronze Age objects were so standardized that they could have functioned as an early kind of money.  Several impressive Hopewell Culture earthworks complexes now are nominated together as a UNESCO World Heritage site.  And the Max Planck Institute has embarked on a systematic study of ancient knowledge in order to identify its applications for the modern world.

The Audio News Team would like to thank our friends for helping us continue this show without a break since we started nearly 20 years ago.  If you’re not already a supporting member, please go to archaeologychannel.org and click on the Donate button.  Especially now, we can use all the help we can get!

For the intrepid travelers out there, we welcome you to register now for one of our upcoming 2021 tours!  Please contact us soon about that, and see about all our upcoming tours at archaeologychannel.org/tours.  You won’t have to stay home forever!

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 17th through the 23rd, 2021

We begin this week in Egypt, where archaeologists have announced finds of a new temple and multiple shaft burials with a well preserved array of artifacts.

As reported by Livescience.com, the discoveries come from the ancient burial ground at Saqqara.  First is a funerary temple from the Old Kingdom, belonging to Queen Nearit. 

Her temple lies next to the pyramid of her husband, Pharaoh Teti, who ruled Egypt from around 2323 to 2291 BC.  Made of stone, the temple has three mud-brick warehouses on its southeastern side that held offerings made to the queen and her husband. 

Near the pyramid, the team from the Egyptian antiquities ministry and the Zahi Hawass Center of Egyptology at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina found a series of burial shafts.  The shafts date to the New Kingdom and contain the remains of people who lived during the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, from 1550 to 1186 BC.   Surprisingly, the burials appear to have been part of a cult worshipping Teti, which remained active for more than a millennium after his death.  People who venerated Pharaoh Teti chose to be buried near his pyramid.  

So far, the team has uncovered more than fifty wooden coffins in these shafts, along with a wide array of objects.  One of the most fascinating is a papyrus scroll, over thirteen feet long, or four meters, that contains Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, the famous manuscript that ancient Egyptians used to help guide the deceased through the afterlife.  The name of the papyrus's owner, Pwkhaef, is written on it. 

The archaeologists previously had found that name on one of the wooden coffins and on four shabti figurines meant to serve the deceased in the afterlife. 

Scientists are now analyzing the newly found text copy, to compare it to other known copies.  Chapter 17 as known contains a series of questions and answers — an FAQ of sorts, helping people trying to navigate the afterlife.  Whether the newly found copy of Chapter 17 has the same question-and-answer format remains to be seen. 

Inside the burial shafts, the archaeological team discovered an engraved stela, or stone slab, that belonged to a man named Khaptah, identified as the overseer of the pharaoh's military chariot, and Khaptah's wife, Mwtemwia.  The top part of the stela shows the couple paying homage to Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld, while the lower part shows the couple seated on chairs with six of their children in front of them.  Their three daughters are shown seated and smelling lotus flowers, while their three sons are shown standing. 

The evidence doesn’t indicate with certainty which pharaoh or pharaohs Khaptah served.   It's possible that he served Ramesses II, who reigned from 1279 to 1213 BC, and was known for his military campaigns that expanded Egypt's empire as far north as Syria.  An inscription on the stela says that two of Khaptah's children are named after family members of Ramesses the Second.  One of Khaptah's daughters is named Nefertari, the same name as Ramesses the Second's principal wife, and one of his sons is named Khaemweset, the same name as one of Ramesses’ sons. 

Other discoveries in the burial shafts near the pyramid included a bronze ax, board games, statues of Osiris, and several mummies, including the mummy of a woman who appears to have suffered from familial Mediterranean fever, a genetic disorder that causes recurring fever and inflammation of the abdomen, joints and lungs. 

A shrine dedicated to Anubis — the god of the cemetery — was also found near the burial shafts, as were statues of the god.

We go next to Europe, where careful analysis shows that bronze objects may have been standardized in shape and weight so that they could be used as Bronze Age currency.  If true, this means that Bronze Age Europeans were carrying out more sophisticated trade than previously thought.  

As reported by the science website Phys.org, the new hypothesis comes from research by Maikel Kuijpers and Catlin Popa of Leiden University, in the Netherlands.  

The bronze objects studied come in three shape -- rings, ribs and axe blades. 

The analysts studied more than five thousand such objects from over one hundred Bronze Age hoards, buried between about 2150 and 1700 BC.  They statistically compared the objects' weights using a psychology principle known as the Weber fraction, which quantifies the smallest difference in weight that humans can perceive by simply balancing the objects in their hands.   

It turned out that around seventy percent of the rings were similar enough to have been indistinguishable by hand, as were many of the ribs and axe blades.

According to Kuijpers and Popa, this consistent similarity in shape and weight, along with the fact that these objects often occurred in hoards, may show their use as an early form of standardized currency. 

Money is an important feature of modern human society.  But in order to use metal objects as money, they must be standardized.  This can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record, since ancient peoples had inexact forms of measurement compared with those of today. 

It's known that people had developed a system of weighing by the Middle Bronze Age, as evidenced by the presence of scales and an increase in scrap bronze. 

But the new research suggests how this may have began to develop during the Early Bronze Age, with people using these three standard kinds of bronze objects as an early form of money, with standardized weights and shapes.

The study appears in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Our third story takes us to the United States, where several Hopewell Culture mound complexes in Ohio may be placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. 

The American Indian Hopewell Culture is best known for the array of monumental earthworks they built in the valleys of central and southern Ohio from AD 1 to 400.  These architectural masterpieces included earthworks built in precise geometric shapes, such as Newark’s Great Circle and Octagon Earthworks, as well as hilltop enclosures with shapes defined by the contours of the hills on which they lay.

The Fort Ancient Earthworks in Warren County, southern Ohio, are the largest and best preserved of the Hopewell hilltop enclosures.  Two other complexes are nearby, Newark’s Great Circle and Octagon Earthworks and the earthworks in Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. 

Now the three sites are being considered for nomination together to the UNESCO World Heritage List, as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

As reported by the Newark Advocate newspaper, in Newark, Ohio, Fort Ancient consists of more than three miles, or about five kilometers, of earthen walls up to twenty-three feet, or seven meters high around the top of a large bluff over the Little Miami River.  The site has two main parts, the so-called North and South forts, and a narrow set of walls connecting the two, known as the Middle Fort.

Despite its name, Fort Ancient was not a fort.  The earthworks have more than sixty openings, or gateways, in the walls, which would have made it difficult to defend, and a ditch to contain water inside the wall, rather than outside, where a moat would be placed.

Fort Ancient was instead a place of ceremony, though with very few burial mounds at the site, it didn’t feature mortuary ceremonies as much as at other geometric earthworks.

One side of The North Fort area contains four small stone-covered mounds arranged in a perfect square with sides of five hundred and twelve feet each.  The westernmost mound provides a view of the summer solstice sunrise, and the maximum and minimum moonrises, through three consecutive gateways in the eastern enclosure wall.  It thus appears that Fort Ancient, like Newark’s Octagon Earthworks, was linked to the rhythms of the cosmos.

Recent excavations revealed the remains of a “woodhenge” in the North Fort that consisted of three concentric rings of large posts.  The outermost circle was about two hundred feet in diameter.  At its center was a central basin with a low mound of red clay – perhaps as an altar.  

According to Dr. Robert Riordan, the archaeologist who has been studying the site for the last sixteen years, this was the ceremonial heart of Fort Ancient.  After the last ceremony here, the Hopewell decommissioned the site by removing the wooden posts and burying it under layers of gravel hauled up from the bed of the Little Miami River.

Six hundred or so years later, a different group of American Indians established a large village and cemetery in the South Fort.  Early archaeologists wrongly assumed that the latter group built Fort Ancient, and so named it the Fort Ancient culture.  So not only is the Fort Ancient Earthworks not a fort, but the Fort Ancient culture didn’t build it.

The area’s Hopewell Culture earthworks have significant differences as well as similarities.  By combining Fort Ancient with Newark’s Great Circle and Octagon Earthworks and the earthworks of Hopewell Culture National Park into a single World Heritage nomination, the story of this culture becomes more complete.

In our final story, we consider how knowledge from the past can help address current challenges such as biodiversity conservation, food security and climate change.

Unlike popular stereotypes of archaeologists raiding tombs, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History are using the science of archaeology to understand how it can help address the considerable challenges of the modern Anthropocene Epoch.

As reported by the website of the Max Planck Institute, the new research, published in the online journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution, aims at addressing current issues through understanding how they arose in the past, and were solved -- or sometimes not. 

According to co-author Nicole Boivin, Director of the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, archaeology contributes to addressing the challenges ahead by revealing the wide diversity of past cultural knowledge.  

By analyzing what worked and didn’t work in the past – effectively offering long-term experiments in human society – archaeologists gain insight into the factors that support sustainability and resilience, and the factors that work against them. They also highlight ancient solutions to modern problems.

For example, people in the past enriched soils, prevented destructive fires, created greener cities, and transported water without fossil fuels.  

People also continue to use, and adapt, ancient technologies and infrastructure, including terrace and irrigation systems that are in some cases centuries or even millennia old.  

According to the study’s other coauthor, Alison Crowther, from the University of Queensland and Max Planck, this knowledge brings together the best of the past, present and future to steer a responsible and constructive course for humanity.

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!