Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to deliver a payload of 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!

Excavators near Pompeii have unearthed an elaborate ceremonial carriage of a kind never seen before.  Sediment cores recovered from Alaska may push back the arrival of humans in North America by another fifteen millennia.  The use of a dental x-ray scanner has allowed researchers to read an unopened letter from the European Renaissance Era.   And a new survey of scientists shows that most now suspect that the demise of the Neanderthals came about from demographics rather than outright conflict.

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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 28th through March 6th, 2021.

In our first story this week, archaeologists in Italy have uncovered a ceremonial chariot in excellent condition near the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.  

As reported by Reuters, the four-wheeled carriage was discovered back in 2018 during excavations in a double-level portico connected to stables at an ancient villa in the suburb located north of the city’s walls, Civita Giuliana.  

Pompeii, twenty-three kilometers or fourteen miles southeast of Naples, was home to about thirteen thousand people when it was buried in AD 79 under ash, pumice and dust as it endured the force of an eruption a hundred times stronger than an atomic bomb.  The eruption preserved the remains of many of the city’s residents and buildings.

The ceremonial chariot was described as having iron components and beautiful bronze and tin decorations, as well as ropes and floral decorations that were extremely well preserved.  Such ornate decorations have led experts to believe the carriage was likely used in festivities, parades and special ceremonies. 

The operation to uncover the carriage was carried out in collaboration with a local prosecutor's office amid criminal efforts to steal artifacts from the site.  Archaeologists said efforts to safely free the chariot took weeks after it was uncovered during excavation, and they used plaster molding to help extract it without damage.

The Minister of Culture in Italy noted that the find was unlike any other in the country.

Massimo Osanna, the outgoing director of the Pompeii archaeological site, said the carriage was the first of its kind discovered in the area, which had so far yielded functional vehicles used for transport and work, but none yet for ceremonies.

He added that ancient sources allude to the use of the chariot—or Piletum—by priestesses and ladies, and one cannot rule out the possibility that it was used for marriage ceremonies, such as taking the bride to her new household.

Dario Franceschini [frawn-chess-SKI-nee], Italy's Culture Minister, said Pompeii continues to amaze with its discoveries, and will continue to do so as its remaining twenty hectares, or almost fifty acres, are also uncovered in the future. 

Our next story brings us to Alaska, where a group of Brown University researchers is tracking evidence that supports a controversial new hypothesis about when and how humans first arrived on the American continent. 

According to NationalParksTraveler.org, geochemist and Brown University professor Yongsong Huang and his team of researchers believe they have found traces of human fire activity and fecal matter in northern Alaska dating back more than thirty thousand years.  That's thousands of years before the archaeological record indicates humans were in Alaska. 

For the last several decades, a common belief has been that humans first arrived in North America from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge, much of it now covered by the Bering Sea, approximately fifteen thousand years ago toward the end of the last Ice Age.  These people then spread out over time to become the many indigenous groups across both North and South America. 

At the same time, our concept of the Ice Age landscape has evolved.  According to the Beringian Standstill Hypothesis, the Bering Land Bridge was more than a bridge—it was part of a landscape long inhabited by humans.  This concept holds that humans populated Beringia, ranging from northeastern Siberia to northwestern Canada, for thousands of years before moving south through the Americas.

The Brown project was funded by the Shared Beringian Heritage program in 2018 following climate-focused research on Alaska’s North Slope that uncovered evidence of fire in the area dating back to the Last Glacial Maximum around thirty-thousand years ago.  Researchers hypothesize these fire samples are a result of human activity. 

Using organic geochemistry, researchers retrieved samples from the Seward Peninsula, in northwestern Alaska, in search of chemical evidence of human fecal matter and fire during and preceding the last Ice Age. 

They found that sediment cores from Lake E5, about 100 miles north of Wiseman, Alaska, contained biomarkers linked to human feces all the way back to its oldest layer around thirty-two-thousand years ago.  Similar sedimentary records taken at Burial Lake, in the Noatak National Preserve, found similar evidence of fire and human feces. 

These findings support the hypothesis that humans were present and burned fires in Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum.  Now, researchers are sampling sediment from the second-to-last glacial maximum more than 150,000 years ago, when there were almost certainly no humans in the area.  A lack of similar evidence of fire from that period would tend to link the more recent findings of fire to human activity and further support the hypothesis.  Even so, it would not necessarily show whether those humans comprised a permanent population, or one that was simply passing through.

Though final results will not be published for several months, this research will certainly help us better understand ancient Beringia’s climate and contribute to the debate about humans' arrival in North America.

In our next story, a large and multidisciplinary international team of researchers has read a letter from Renaissance Europe without even opening it.March 8, 2021

As reported by Queen Mary University of London News, an X-ray scanner used in dental research allowed the interdisciplinary research team to virtually open and unfold a three-hundred-year-old sealed letter. 

According to Professor Graham Davis and Dr. David Mills of Queen Mary University of London, the highly sensitive X-ray microtomography scanner was developed in dental research labs at their university and is typically used to produce 3D images of the inside of objects.  The scanner, designed to have unprecedented sensitivity for mapping the mineral content of teeth, could also detect particular inks in paper and parchment.  Because of this, the machine was utilized to scan a batch of unopened letters from a 17th-century postal trunk full of undelivered mail.  

The letters were sealed by ‘letterlocking’ - a cryptographic process quite common before the use of modern envelopes in which the sender folds and secures a sheet of paper in such a way that it becomes its own envelope.  Until now, letter packets could only be studied by cutting them open, often leading to irreparable damage to the documents.

The use of the machine allowed researchers to read a letter dated back to July 31, 1697.  In it, Jacques Sennacques requests that his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant in The Hague, send him a certified copy of a death notice of a man called Daniel Le Pers.  The full letter sheds light on the day-to-day concerns of a person in a turbulent period of European history. 

The team has learned that letters can be more revealing when left unopened.  In addition to the contents themselves, analyzing how the letters were folded can also teach us about the cryptographic processes of the time.

This research is published in a recent edition of the journal, Nature Communications.

Our final story brings us to southern Spain, where a recent survey has shown a major shift in scientific consensus from the previously held hypothesis that Neanderthals died out as a result of competition with modern humans.  

The survey is published in Scientific Reports and was reported by Phys.org.

Despite stereotypes that this species was stupid, Neanderthals actually appear to have possessed a similar level of intelligence as modern Homo sapiens.  They fashioned tools and weapons, and were even linked to cave paintings in Spain just last month.  In fact, archaeological differences between the two groups are considered to be almost zero. 

Though the reason for the extinction of the Neanderthal is still not entirely clear, most scientists now believe that demographic explanations may hold the key.  For example, Neanderthals lived in smaller groups than modern Homo sapiens. This led to inbreeding that may have fueled a lack of genetic variation.  Additionally, genetic evidence indicates that Neanderthals blended with modern humans.  There's still a bit of Neanderthal in each of us.

Unfortunately, a lack of remains leaves much to be desired in understanding why the Neanderthals vanished.  Palaeolithic archaeologist Gerrit Dusseldorp, co-author of the article in question, asks that people stop viewing the competition theory as the standard, adding that he has too often read about how Neanderthals were more intelligent than previously thought, despite it being old news for most experts today.

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!