Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Off we go now with a whole new 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 big Egyptian find to be announced is a 5000-year-old brewery.  A grinding stone in Australia has the first direct evidence of people eating insects.  A new worldwide study concludes that effective bureaucracy and equitable taxation are essential precursors to the rise of democracy.   And a high-tech study of stalagmites suggests that the Silk Road could not function well as a trade route until the end of a major drought.

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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 February 14th through the 20th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from Abydos [AB-uh-dose] in ancient Egypt, where American and Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed what could be the oldest known beer factory in the world.

According to Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, the brewery is located in the desert west of the Nile River, over 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, south of Cairo.  

As reported by The Times of Israel, the factory dates back to the reign of King Narmer, widely known for unifying Egypt at the beginning of the First Dynastic Period, 3150 to 2613 BC.  Abydos was a capital of Upper Egypt, or the southern area, and has long been known for the royal cemeteries of the First and Second dynasties.

The area, dated to 3000 BC, is part of a new joint mission to identify the foundations of the brewery.  Each unit is 20 meters long by 2 and a half meters and holds some 40 pottery vats in two rows.  Each vessel was held up by ceramic rings so that the contents could be heated from below.  

The heated mixture of grains and water produced fermentation that led to beer.  The facility allowed the production of 5,900 gallons at a time.

The joint mission is co-chaired by Dr. Matthew Adams of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Deborah Vischak, assistant professor of ancient Egyptian art history and archaeology at Princeton University.

According to Adams, the factory was built here to provide beer for royal rituals.  Archaeological evidence often shows the use of beer in ancient Egyptian sacrificial rites, particularly rites of the dead.  

British archaeologists discovered evidence of grain-drying at the site in the early 1900s, but it wasn’t until later that further archaeological knowledge connected this to beer making, and the location was re-discovered using magnetic survey technology in 2018.

With its vast cemeteries and temples, Abydos is particularly known for monuments honoring Osiris, ancient Egypt’s god of the underworld, who judges souls in the afterlife.

The Abydos necropolis was used from the prehistoric age up through Roman times.

Egypt has announced dozens of ancient discoveries in the past couple of years, in the hope of attracting more tourists.  The tourism industry has been reeling from the political turmoil following the 2011 popular uprising and the coronavirus pandemic. 

We go now to Australia for a different kind of food: moths.  Cloggs Cave in eastern Victoria's alpine region has long been known by the Gunaikurnai people.  A new partnership between Monash University and indigenous owners from the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Corporation, or GLaWAC [GLAY-wack] led to the first excavations in 50 years, and many new discoveries.  

One was a small portable grinding stone with organic remains, identified as Bogong moths using new biochemical staining techniques.  The artifact is believed to be up to 2000 years old. 

Never before have insect food remains been found on a stone tool, in Australia or anywhere.

According to Aboriginal elder Russell Mullett, the discovery provided a deeper understanding of Aboriginal food practices, which long have remained scientifically invisible in Australia.

As reported by the Australian news site, ABC.net, oral histories include reports about eating Bogong moths, and the new analytic technologies now connect these traditions with new details.

The moths migrate in their billions from southern Queensland each year into Victoria's hills and mountains to keep cool during the summer in caves.

Gunaikurnai people would travel to the high country to feast on the moths, taking advantage of their large numbers and high nutritional value. The high fat and protein content provided a rich food source when other animal food supplies were low.

The moths were often cooked in a fire or ground into cakes or paste, which could then be smoked and preserved for weeks.

Cloggs Cave helped preserve the remains because it stays cool and is carved from limestone, meaning its alkaline soils preserve organic materials longer than a typical acidic soil.

The grindstone was examined through a rarely used method called biochemical staining.  Residues on the stone were extracted, placed on a microscope slide, and stained with a special dye that turned fluorescent, helping to identify the collagen and proteins that had been trapped in pits in the rock.

The successful discovery has encouraged the team to use the staining method at other nearby excavation sites.

According to Bruno David, a co-leader of the team and a Monash University archaeology professor, the find helps show how 80 generations of people, for over 2,000 years, developed the kind of local food cultures for which other regions of the world are well known.

The cave was first excavated in 1972 without the input of traditional owners This approach was counterproductive to telling Indigenous stories.

GLaWAC initiated the new project to employ their unique knowledge of the land and ecology. Food is a particularly important expression of culture, and social gatherings or feasts depend on the intersection of foods, the yearly calendar, and the landscape.  

Bogong moth numbers have been dropping dramatically, from around 8.8 billion in alpine areas to just a few individuals in 2017.

Contributing factors include pollution, pesticides, and drought, as well as city lights that disorient the moths as they migrate by night. 

The historic information gathered at Cloggs Cave will help ecologists as they work to save the native insect.

In our third story, a deep dive into how governments have survived shows that paying taxes is an important, if unloved, part of the picture.  

As reported by the science news site, Phys.org, a team of anthropologists assembled data on 30 pre-modern societies for quantitative analysis on how good governance helped them survive.

Good governance traits include heeding the voice of the citizens, providing necessary goods and services, and limiting the concentration of wealth and power.  The research showed that greater population well-being correlated strongly with a broad, equitable, and well-managed tax system, and competent civil servants, or bureaucracies.  More than elections, these traits turn out to be essential to the rise of democracy. 

According to Richard Blanton, the study’s lead author and a professor emeritus at Purdue University in the United States, at the heart of every democracy is a fundamental tension between the greater good and individual self-interest.  This study worked to identify the factors that motivate both leaders and citizens to maintain more egalitarian systems.

Blanton and his co-authors assembled data on 30 pre-modern societies and gave them scores based on characteristics of good government.

The case studies covered thousands of years of human history and spanned the globe, including the Venetian Republic that existed from AD 1290 to 1600; the early-mid Ming Dynasty of the 15th century in China; and the Asante Kingdom in West Africa, which flourished from 1800 to 1873.  

Despite the diversity in societies, most good governments shared three traits: capable bureaucracies, available public gods, and limits on ruler terms. 

This unexpected finding shows that democracy depends on more than just elections.

According to research team member Gary Feinman, of Chicago’s Field Museum, the key elements of democracies are not elections themselves but rather features like the rule of law, checks and balances on official power, and tools to assess the will of the governed.

Economics is also key.  In authoritarian regimes where wealth is controlled by few individuals, equitability and democracy suffer. 

Democratic systems usually held broadly based tax revenues, responsibly managed by the government. 

The authors conclude that leaders, whether virtuous or selfish, are less important than the economic foundations of government, provisioning of public goods and services, and the bureaucratic institutions needed for both.  Even with voting, if there isn’t an equitable means of financing, systems will fail.

Increasing inequity of the tax base, devaluing of labor, and lack of infrastructure and public goods funding lead to decline in democracy.  

Above all, the authors of this article emphasize that politics and economics cannot be decoupled in understanding government quality.  Nor can we assess the matter by ideologies alone.  Rather, we must look at the practice of governance and how it affects people. 

According to Blanton, the study shows that functioning bureaucracy and broad-based, equitable taxation are key to good governance and a successful, peaceful society. 

The study is published in the journal, Current Anthropology. 

We end this week in arid Central Asia, where new dating studies show how region-wide droughts held back use of the famed Silk Road trade route.  

The Silk Road was the most elaborate network of trade routes in the ancient world, linking ancient populations in east Asia to those in southwest Asia. These trade routes fostered the spread of ideas, religions and technologies over the past 2,000 years and probably more.  However, the earliest history of this trade has been hard to trace.

Now, a team of paleoclimatologists provides evidence suggesting that the lack of evidence of the Silk Route before 3000 BC is due to an extended dry period that made travel difficult to impossible for 640 years.  The megadrought in arid Central Asia appears to have occurred from 3820 to 3180 BC, and was likely tied into a northward shift in the prevailing air masses.  

As reported on the science news site, Phys.org, this international research endeavor was led by Dr. Liangcheng Tan, a professor from The Belt & Road center of the Institute of Earth Environment, a part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  Dr. Tan’s team, which has now published its results in the journal, Science Bulletin, includes 15 scientific institutions and universities from China, the United States, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Archaeological evidence indicates that trans-Eurasian exchange began as early as the late 2000s BC, but didn’t really take off until after 1000 BC.  

The new research into the Silk Road drew its chronological evidence from stalagmites found in Talisman Cave in Kyrgyzstan. 

The cave is located in the southeastern Fergana Valley, near the crossroads of the historic Silk Road.  Stalagmites accumulate over thousands of years as water drips from the cave roof and calcium precipitates out of it.  These features trap in their cores a highly detailed climatic record, far more detailed and continuous than pollen records or paleo-lake shore studies.  

In the new research, scientists analyzed changes in oxygen and carbon isotopes, as well as trace elements, to track precipitation changes through time.  Radiometric uranium-thorium dating provided chronology for the stalagmites. 

The results trace the precipitation history of the past 7,800 years with only a 3-year uncertainty level, yielding a very high-resolution climate record.

The story shows frequent small shifts in precipitation for the region, with the exception of one prolonged period of aridity lasting 640 years.  This megadrought continued from 3820 to 3180 BC.  The scale of the megadrought is unlike any of the other environmental shifts that the team noted for the last 7,800 years and would have had significant consequences in the local environment, especially in the desert oases.  Even the large Lake Balkhash was at least 20 meters lower, or 60 feet below its typical surface water elevation.  Smaller oases would have dried up completely, hindering travel from one to the next and shutting down most trade across Eurasia.

Archaeological climate records from across Eurasia over the past 10,000 years reflect this as a shift in the timing of cultural trait dispersement across east and west Asia.  People living in arid Central Asia at the time had to abandon life around oases and relocate to mountainous areas, where run-off gave a more reliable supply of water.  

After 3100 BC, the megadrought ended, precipitation gradually increased, and the oases recovered.  This allowed for a demographic expansion and the beginning of cultural dispersal,  including new agricultural and herding techniques.  

The precipitation record identified in this study can contribute to a better understanding of smaller climate-caused fluctuations in the prehistory of arid Central Asia, as well as to predicting the future precipitation trends in this ecologically vulnerable region.

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!