Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with the latest 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 at the oldest colonial fort in Maryland have come across an English coin minted in the early 1600s.  A new study of islands concludes that humans regularly caused significant extinctions on islands they colonized.  An art historian believes she has solved the mystery about which of Henry the Eighth’s young wives is depicted in a miniature portrait. And a child grave in Kenya is now the oldest known intentional burial in Africa.

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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 for the week of May 2nd through the 8th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from North America, where archaeologists working in Maryland recently announced the discovery of a rare coin found in excavations at an historic fort.  It’s likely that the coin came over with one of the original English settlers of the thirteen colonies established under British rule in the 1600s.

As reported by SputnikNews.com, the silver shilling was unearthed in November 2020 during a dig within historic St. Mary’s Fort.  According to Travis Parno, who serves as the chief project archaeologist, the discovery has helped to date the site more accurately. 

The silver shilling bears the image of King Charles the First on one side, with the coat of arms and the Latin motto “Christo Auspice [au- SPICHAY] Regno'' embedded on the reverse side.  That Latin means, “I reign under the auspices of Christ.” 

The coin bears a maker's mark showing that it was minted at the Tower of London between 1633 and 1634.   The discovery of any marked coinage is quite rare.  

St. Mary’s Fort was the first major foothold of European settlement in Maryland, and the fourth English colony in the country after Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay. 

Founded in March of 1634, the colony began with approximately 150 colonists, who disembarked in southern Maryland in an area that was home to the Yaocomaco, a tribe loosely allied with the Piscataway paramount chiefdom. 

What little was known previously about the period came from English colonial records.  The new archaeological research at St. Mary’s Fort has the potential to unearth new information about Maryland’s pre-colonial and early colonial past.

In March, the excavation team announced that they had successfully uncovered the outlines of the defensive outpost built by the first English settlers in 1634.

Artifacts also included, besides the silver shilling, a medal depicting five Catholic saints, and a copper decoration believed to have been used by the colonists as a form of trade with the local Indigenous communities.

The study of St. Mary’s Fort is part of a larger initiative titled People to People: Exploring Native-Colonial Interactions in Early Maryland, a collaboration between Historic St. Mary’s City and Piscataway tribal participants.

The project will include archaeological excavations at St. Mary’s Fort and indigenous sites near the fort, and public programming about life in the region in the years prior to and during the early seventeenth century.

In our next story, a study of the end of megafauna on islands around the world concludes that early humans were often the culprits. 

As reported by Live Science.com, the international team of researchers dug into the archaeological and fossil record to investigate whether extinctions of island megafauna coincided with the arrival of hominins or modern humans, our ancestors and our close evolutionary cousins. 

The team focused on a group of thirty-two islands that had evidence of a hominin presence, including Britain, Taiwan, Okinawa, and Tasmania.  

They focused on islands specifically because islands, with their limited area, are particularly prone to species extinctions.

Correlating the arrival of hominins and megafaunal extinctions wasn't always straightforward, however.

According to co-author Ross MacPhee, senior curator of vertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, it was often difficult to disentangle whether an animal went extinct largely because of humans or due to other factors such as climate change. 

Islands tend to have animals that are smaller in size and in population numbers, and have animals with lower genetic diversities in part because of inbreeding.  Islands are also more susceptible to random events and provide less opportunity for recolonization.

The team accounted for the fact that some extinctions happen naturally throughout evolution.  Moreover, the study cites evidence that, while early hominins hunted land animals, they didn't hunt their prey creatures into oblivion.

By contrast, the researchers found that within 5,000 years of modern humans arriving on the California Channel Islands about 13,000 years ago, the Columbian mammoth, the pygmy mammoth, and a member of the vole family all had become extinct. 

In Ireland, a giant deer and a species of lemming went extinct soon after modern humans arrived around 13,000 years ago.  In the southeast Asian country of Timor, a crane genus disappeared after modern humans arrived some 46,000 years ago. 

Researchers surmised that early hominins had little control over their environments, and that overall their hunting methods were technologically unsophisticated.  As people developed more advanced hunting behavior over time, they became more destructive of their environments, and as a result some native habitats became altered or permanently destroyed. 

The study demonstrates that while early human relatives have lived on islands since the early Pleistocene epoch some 2.6 million years ago, widespread extinction on islands can largely be traced back to human activity over the past 11,700 years.  During this time period, modern humans wiped out existing populations through a combination of overhunting, habitat reduction and the introduction of invasive species.

The research appears in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hans Holbein was the court painter to Henry the Eighth, and is considered one of the greatest portraitists of all time.  Now, an art historian, Franny Moyle, has gathered evidence that helps identify a portrait mounted on a playing card that Holbein created.

As reported in The Guardian, Moyle’s research appears in a new book titled The King’s Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein, to be released later this month.

The miniature in question, created in 1540, is a prized treasure in England’s collection of royal portraits, but the identity of the sitter was unclear.  The artifact has long been catalogued as “Portrait of a Lady, perhaps Catherine Howard,” the fifth queen of Henry the Eighth. 

Part of the problem with the identification is that there is no authentic contemporary likeness of Catherine, who was condemned and beheaded for adultery.  Her portraits would have been quickly disposed of, if they ever existed.

According to Moyle, the miniature is actually Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.  Holbein’s first painting of Anne is from 1539 when she was a potential new bride for Henry. 

Holbein may have painted Anne a second time shortly afterwards because she wanted to be seen anew, with the more modern and fashionable attire seen in this portrait.

Moyle believes that Holbein left a tantalizing clue in mounting the watercolor-on-vellum miniature on a four of diamonds, which could signify the fourth queen.  Holbein often layered his work with symbols and imagery, and was likely to have chosen a card that perhaps signified some additional meaning.

Other examples of Holbein’s style support Moyle’s assertion that the card’s choice holds deeper context.  For example, he put an ace of spades on the back of the miniature of Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry‘s principal military advisors. 

Additionally, Holbein’s portrait of the Lord Chancellor’s new bride, Elizabeth Audley, is mounted on an ace of hearts. 

Moyle also observed that Anne was in her mid-to-late 20s at her marriage, while Catherine was a teenager.  This portrait appears to bear more resemblance to a young adult than a child bride. 

Crucially, Moyle was struck by the sitter’s uncanny likeness to Holbein’s 1539 portrait of Anne, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, with both featuring distinctive heavy eyelids and thick eyebrows.

For Moyle, the striking resemblance and sleepy gaze portrayed in these two works, combined with the artist’s penchant for embedding hidden meaning in his work, provide the evidence that the sitter here is actually Anne, rather than Catherine.

We end this week in Africa, where the remains of a toddler, between two and a half and three years old, were buried some 78,000 years ago, in a grave now recognized as the oldest known deliberate human burial in Africa. 

The burial was in the Panga ya Saidi [sah-EEDEE] Cave, in Kenya’s tropical uplands along the coast.  The cave has been a key site, where excavations began in 2013.

At a depth of about ten feet, the team identified a circular pit containing human bones, still positioned as they were when buried, but quite deteriorated.  Given this fragility, archaeologists encased the entire excavation pit in plaster to preserve it for further study.

As reported by The Smithsonian Magazine, the team has been analyzing the site, including the burial.  Their results were just published in the journal, Nature. 

According to co-author María Martinón-Torres, director of the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, the condition of the bones made analysis more difficult. 

The team used microtomography and other X-ray technologies to peer inside and analyze the bones and soils contained within the block. 

The bones were fragile and powdery, and their low density made them very difficult to distinguish from the surrounding sediments. 

To solve this challenge, those cross-section X-ray scans were paired with computer imaging software.  Eventually these reconstructed 3-D images of the bones in the block revealed the image of a child, seemingly positioned at peaceful rest.

Extensive forensic and microscopic analysis of the remains and grave site suggest that the child was buried soon after death, likely wrapped tightly in a shroud and laid in a fetal position with some type of pillow.  

The child lay in stark contrast to various animal bones of the same age found nearby, which had been broken, battered and scattered as a result of being left out in the open.  The care taken in burying the remains, now dubbed Mtoto for the Swahili word for child, suggests the meaning attached to the event. 

Soils in the cave around the same age as the grave held numerous stone tools.  The range of implements suggests that modern Homo sapiens may have performed this burial during a time when they were gradually developing and using more advanced tool technologies.

This find offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that the Stone Age hunter gatherers who lived here some 78,000 years ago also coped with death, processed their emotions and possibly developed ideas about an afterlife.

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!