Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Get ready for 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 ancient Maya houses explores the connection between autocratic governance and wealth disparity among citizens.  Analysis of rockshelter murals along the Texas-Mexico border creates a bigger context for understanding the meanings of the images.  It comes out now that Native people tried to help the Donner Party, but were met with violence. And an attempt by Harvard University to repatriate the skeletons of Black people has triggered widespread reconsideration of the practices of museums and other institutions that still hold questionably obtained human remains.

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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 March 23 through the 27th, 2021.

In our first story, a recent study published in PLOS One by the University of New Mexico Anthropology department reports on new evidence of wealth inequality in the remains of houses in Maya cities and other Mesoamerican societies.  

According to the University's press release, Alumna Amy Thompson and Professor Keith Prufer found that wealth inequality appeared predominantly in societies where the power lay in the hands of a small group of people.  

According to Thompson, rather than being like the United States with one central government overseeing all the states, Classic Maya civilization was a series of cities that each had its own independent ruler.  Thus, political systems varied: some shared power more collectively, while others were more autocratic and concentrated power in a smaller group of individuals.

The researchers analyzed variations in house sizes in Maya cities to measure wealth inequity, focusing on the Classic Maya period from AD 250 to 900. 

The resulting data suggest that the more despotic or autocratic the government in a given society, the greater the wealth gap.  

According to Prufer, in order to infer whether a society was autocratic, the study looked for buildings like palaces, and for differences in burials—specifically, whether some of the dead got special treatment.

It's already known that inequality existed in Classic Maya society, but the new study found that in autocratic societies, wealth inequity was even more pronounced, and apparent even between close neighbors who archaeologists previously thought were equals.

Prufer pointed out a tight relation between how power is funded and how it is wielded, and the research aims not just to observe inequalities in the past, but also to provide a greater understanding of how inequality forms, how it is perpetuated, and how it manifests itself in today's societies.

Next we go to the Mexican-American border, where archaeologists are attempting to understand and learn from hundreds of ancient murals.  

According to the San Antonio Reporter, ancient rock shelter murals dot the rough landscape of the Texas and Mexico borderlands.  They were created forty-two hundred to fifteen hundred years ago, using paint in red, black, white, and yellow pigments.  

Shumla, a non-profit focused on preserving these murals, has created a digital archive, allowing researchers to observe, interpret and draw connections between the two-hundred-and-thirty-three identified sites.  

These sites, often inaccessible, extremely remote, or on private land, are understudied, and the improved and growing digital archive hopes to change that.  

The archive holds far more data than photographs.  The database includes 3-D models and panoramas, and there's so much of it that research has barely made a dent in the deluge of content.

Diana Rolón, an archaeologist from Mexico City studying the murals, made a connection between the murals and other images painted by indigenous cultures of Mexico and Latin America.  In her project, she began tracing these connections, specifically in feline imagery.  

Many of the murals contain big cats, which are also prevalent in the Inca empire and Huichol culture of northern Mexico.  Rolon noticed similarities in the direction the cats are facing and images of lines emanating from their mouths.

Symbolically, these cats are often associated with shamans [SHAY-mans] and natural phenomena like thunder, and their meanings vary depending on color, position and surroundings.  For example, two cats facing each other could be a creation story or two warring deities.

Studies like these can help to revive the stories left behind by early Texans, and create links to other tales throughout the indigenous world.

Our third story takes us to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Northern California, where research suggests that indigenous Washoe people attempted to help the infamous Donner Party, and were met with violence.  

The Donner Party story is one that has perplexed and disturbed people for decades.  The group of Midwesterners attempting to migrate to the west coast was trapped by snow in the mountains during the harsh winter of 1846 to 47, and resorted to murder and cannibalism to stay alive.  

Research reported by the California Sun suggests they were not alone in the mountains.  And while the Donner Party was not prepared for the October snowfall that trapped them, for the native Washoe tribe, the conditions were expected.  Oral histories report that the Washoe offered deer, fish and wild potatoes to the stranded Donner Party on multiple occasions.  Some of these oral histories are described in the 2011 book, “An Archaeology of Desperation,” edited by Kelly  Dixon, Julie Schablitsky and Shannon Novak

The tribe, inhabiting the Lake Tahoe region for thousands of years, gathered nuts, roots and dried meat in preparation for winter, lived in well prepared willow huts, and donned fur and snowshoes in winter. 

The Washoe were known to closely observe travelers passing through their territory on their way to the West Coast, sometimes offering assistance. 

In contrast, the journals and testimonies left behind by the Donner Party portray the interactions as minimal. 

The Donner stories include an encounter when a member of the Party shot a Washoe man dead for shooting their oxen.

Tribal testimonies and histories describe interactions with travelers as much more frequent.  The tribes tell of bringing food to travelers, but being met at times with hostility and violence, and even refusal or gunfire.  Three winters before the Donner Party came to the Sierra, frontiersman John Fremont recorded that his party was given pine nuts by the snowshoed Washoe while crossing the mountains.

When the Donner Party was seen cannibalizing their dead, the tribe was afraid, and claimed they were “not people,” and determined to avoid them.  

Julie Schablitsky, an archaeologist who performed excavations at the Donner site in the early 2000s, found that the site contained objects and bones believed to have been ceremonially burned and buried by the Washoe when the migrants had moved on.  

The fate of the Donner Party was grim.  Eighty pioneers traveled from Missouri in hopes of reaching California, but only half survived.  It is believed their distrust of native people was cultivated during their long journey, when they had endured shootings and robberies, before reaching Washoe country.  

The Washoe tribe was decimated just a few years later, when gold was found in the mountains, and miners destroyed their way of life.

We end this week at Harvard University, where museum collections hold the remains of fifteen African-Americans who were probably enslaved.  The school has announced in the last year an attempt to repatriate and memorialize these remains as they audit their collections.  

America has a long history of dehumanizing, defacing and collecting African-American bodies to be used as scientific specimens without consent.  The remains—skulls, for example—were often used to denigrate the intelligence and character of Black and Native people.  

As reported by TheConversation.com, Harvard University is not alone in holding remains of African-Americans.  Within museums and university collections across America, thousands of remains are still held.  

While human remains are helpful in studying the past, these remains are a part of a long perpetuated history of violence and dehumanization of Black bodies.  In recent years, scholars and activists alike have called for the recognition and confrontation of the role science has played in the systemic racism present in America.  

The remains of African-Americans are recorded being traded, circulated and collected since at least 1763, when corpses of enslaved people were used in anatomy lectures in the colonies.  

This work stemmed from the research of Samuel Morton, a physician who collected human remains to study on.  Today, Morton is considered the father of physical anthropology.  His collection of remains, which he often boasted about, was used to promote racist hierarchies, stereotypes and eugenics.  

His collection and experimentation on human remains led to the theft, transportation and accumulation of human remains as a common practice in anthropology.  

Institutions like museums and universities embraced these collections, both to heighten their own prestige, and for the pseudoscientific work of justifying racial hierarchies.

Ultimately, the remains of African-American people, freed or enslaved, are in these collections because their bodies were the foundation of museums of medicine, anthropology, archaeology, natural history, and more.  

In December 2020, the U.S.  Senate passed the African-American Burial Grounds Network Act which would establish a voluntary network to identify and protect African-American cemeteries.  However, the legislation would not apply to private property without the consent of landowners, or to the remains of Black people in museum collections.

The authors of The Conversation article argue that a better solution would be a piece of legislation like the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation act, which would protect and return remains taken without consent, in all contexts.  They argue that this work is appropriate because many of the remains of Black people, like those of Native Americans, were taken without the consent of family, used in ways that violated spiritual traditions, and treated with less respect than those of others in society.  The authors conclude that without more serious measures like these, institutions will be on their own in preventing further desecration of thousands of African American ancestors.

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!