Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew, to introduce to you 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!

A new study of some really old mounds in Florida is expanding our knowledge of the ancient Timucua people.  Planning is afoot to conserve and relocate an 18th century building in Williamsburg, Virginia, that is probably the oldest school in the US for Black children.  A mystery surrounding 300 bodies located in a high Himalayan lake is the topic of new discussions and some possible new field research.   And a new study of early Medieval Celtic memorial stones in Britain indicates that they represent saints rather than warriors.

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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 21 through the 27th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from northeastern Florida, where 5,000-year-old mounds at Tomako State Park offer a clearer picture of the Timucua [tee-MOO-koowa] people who once inhabited the region.  

As reported by the Ormond Beach Observer, the twelve-mound complex has been a place of interest since the 1880s, despite its obscurity in the dense surrounding forestation.  Excavations since then, carried out by antiquities collectors, ultimately identified the complex as a group of ceremonial burial mounds.

These 5,000-year-old mounds are some of the largest found intact in Florida, and now hold a place on the National Register of Historic Places.  

The Tomaka Archaeology Project, initiated in 2013 by Dr. Jon Endonino, an associate professor of the Department of Anthropology at Eastern Kentucky University, has conducted further studies on these important mounds.  

These researchers have found that the oldest mounds, dating from 5,000 to 4,300 years ago, comprise mainly earth and shell, and show evidence of the turtles, shellfish, and freshwater fish in the Timucua diet.

Four of the twelve identified mounds date between 4,900 and 4,700 years old, and two more recent ones date from 3,200 to 1,600 years old, and half have been identified as burial mounds.  

The mounds were nearly lost in 1982, when a local couple began to build a home on the mounds.  They were stopped by the city manager, and after an ensuing legal battle, the mounds were finally preserved.

Timucua funeral rites used charnel houses to prepare bodies, especially prominent individuals, before conducting mound burials.  The dead were placed on wooden racks and allowed to dry out before interment.

Recent archaeological studies identified the mounds as the resting place of over a hundred native people.

Extensive overgrowth on and around the mounds made excavation difficult, and over sixty-five trees and two hundred yards of debris and brush were cleared to reveal the site.  

Only park staff and project members could see the mounds until 2020, when visitors were given the first tour of the site.

The ongoing archaeological study of the mounds continues to draw tourists to the park, and provides a deeper understanding of the daily life and burial rituals of the Timucua peoples of the region.  

Next we go to Williamsburg, Virginia, where researchers at Colonial Williamsburg and the College of William & Mary seek to relocate and reinterpret an 18th century religious school for enslaved and free Black children.  

The building, which currently resides on William & Mary’s campus, is now known as the Bray-Digges House, and according to William & Mary's news publication, it is likely the oldest building in the U.S. dedicated to the education of Black children.

The partnership between William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg is part of the Williamsburg Bray School Initiative, which has gathered funding to allow the restoration and relocation of the structure to Colonial Williamsburg, in order to preserve and restore the building's history.

It took decades of research to uncover the history of the building.  Some of the credit goes to dendrochronology - the process of tree-ring dating.  Using this technique on the timber frames confirmed the building was the same Bray School used to educate black children from 1760 to 1774.  The school would have taught reading, writing and Christian education, as well as needlework lessons for girls.  

William & Mary President Katherine Rowe says that much of our nation's history has gone unrecorded – that of African Americans, their oppression and their resistance.  By studying the legacy of the Bray School students, Rowe says we can find some of the biggest impacts of education in the story of America, and illuminate them.

The structure’s potential move to Colonial Williamsburg would be its third location, after being moved in 1930 to accommodate a new residence hall at William & Mary. 

Records of the Williamsburg Bray School indicate that the student body was about ninety percent enslaved, with the remainder being free children of color.  The students ranged from ages three to ten, equally divided among boys and girls, with an enrollment around thirty.

While most student lists from the school are lost, three have been identified, and help tie the school to larger Williamsburg history.  

Slave owners had varied motivations for enrolling enslaved children in the school, from increasing auction value to increasing usefulness.  

The building itself has gone through many additions and changes since its 18th century construction.  The 18th-century portion was a three-bay, story-and-a-half building with two rooms and a center hallway.  The poor construction of the building shows it was hastily put together.  

The initial objective of the school was to impart Christian education to Black children, and the strategy, common at the time, was to convince enslaved people that their situation was the will of God.

As conservation continues on the historic site, the building will require support before it can be relocated.  

Our third story takes us to the Himalayan Roopkund Lake in northern India.  The remote glacial lake, known since its discovery in 1942 as Skeleton lake, contains the bones of between three hundred and eight hundred people.  

As reported by the Livescience website, the lake itself is about a hundred and thirty feet or forty meters across, and holds the remains of men and women, mostly young adults who died over the span of several hundred years.  

A 2019 genetic analysis revealed that at least fourteen of the skeletons in the lake were much newer than the others, and matched those of the modern-day eastern Mediterranean, instead of South Asia.  This was the subject of a new article in The New Yorker by Douglas Preston and a follow-up webinar discussion by Preston and Princeton University anthropologist Agustín Fuentes that was presented by the School for Advanced Research in New Mexico.

While the older bones date to around AD 800, the bones with Mediterranean heritage date to around 1800.  The 2019 analysis also found that this group ate a diet with less millet than the other individuals, whose genetics suggested a South Asian origin.

Local oral histories provide some context for the mysterious occupants of the lake.  Skeleton Lake is on a pilgrimage trail for Nanda Devi, a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Parvati.  

According to local legend, a distant king once angered Nanda Devi, causing her to unleash drought upon his kingdom.  To appease the goddess, the king set off on a pilgrimage that took him and his entourage past the lake.  But the foolish king brought dancers and other luxuries on the trek, intensifying Nanda Devi's rage.  She conjured a terrible hailstorm and killed the entire party, the legend goes.

This tale may hold true, as many of the remains show skull fractures from blunt-force trauma.  Current research suggests most of the bodies were stranded during a storm on the remote ridge, and died either due to the storm, the steep terrain prone to avalanches, or hypothermia.  

Studying the lake is difficult, as it is along a popular trekking route, and hikers have moved, stacked and stolen bones from the lake for years.  Due to the remote location and tempestuous weather, formal examination of the site has been minimal.  

Researchers hope that with further exploration, undisturbed bodies might be found inside the lake, and perhaps even soft tissue and artifacts are preserved in the cold water.  If researchers can launch such an expedition, perhaps they could learn more about the lives of those who died at Skeleton Lake.

We end our week in early Medieval Britain, a time and place with few historical records, where new research suggests that Celtic memorial stones were erected to commemorate saints, rather than warriors as previously thought.  

This would mean hundreds of people in the first centuries after the departure of the Romans were designated saints after their death, and solidifies what may have been hinted at through legends and lore.  

The newfound saints were mainly aristocratic elites, meaning three to four percent of Britain’s early Medieval Celtic aristocratic class were awarded saintly status.

As reported by The Independent, the research analyzes hundreds of inscriptions, and suggests that the driving force behind this cult of saints was a rise in small monastic communities and larger monasteries in 5th and 6th century in western and northern Britain.

The study, conducted by archaeologist Professor Ken Dark of the University of Reading [RED-ing], has just completed a study of 240 inscribed early Medieval stone monuments across Wales, southern Scotland, Cornwall, and western England.  

Until now, the stones were thought to be ordinary grave markers for warrior heroes or other prominent secular individuals.  

According to Professor Dark, who published his new research in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, studying the inscribed stones in detail has made it possible to reach radical new conclusions about who the commemorated people were.

Dark’s research shows that they were almost certainly public monuments commemorating local saints, erected immediately after death.  Many of the individuals had aristocratic or royal status, many being monks or other clerical figures.

The research has increased the number of probable Celtic saints by nearly thirty percent. 

Before this study, most saints were only known through place names, legends and church dedications.  The study represents the first collated historical evidence of more common sainthood, and even shows children could be saints.  

Although most of the inscriptions are in Latin, about twenty percent are in a now-long-forgotten Irish-originating Celtic script called Ogham - an enigmatic and unusual script consisting of differently positioned groups of horizontal lines.  The script may have been designed for ease-of-reading when carved.

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!