Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to hand off 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!

A buried treasure in Scotland now is thought to represent an effort by Christian monks to hide it from approaching Vikings.  The Mexican National Guard was deployed around Teotihuacan to protect it from illegal construction activities.  Fragmentary jades from the cenote at Chichen Itza now are being imaged digitally and pieced together by computer. And researchers in the UK are examining decapitated burials from a Roman Period site to understand the dynamics of a time of instability in the Roman Empire.

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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 for the week of May 30th through June 5th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from Scotland, where a buried hoard from the Middle Ages holds more than one secret.

As reported by the science news website, Livescience.com, the hoard dates to AD 900 and contains more than 100 items of value.  The buried treasure of silver brooches and bracelets, gold pins and rings, and an intricately decorated metal vessel, came to light  in 2014.

It was originally thought that Vikings had buried it.  Analysis of the hoard with X-rays, CT scans, as well as microscopy and molecular analysis have revealed another origin.  Although the hoard dates to the Viking Age, between AD 793 and 1066, it was probably Christian monks or priests who buried these riches. 

A metal detectorist discovered the trove, dubbed the Galloway Hoard, in the town of Balmaghie [bal-ma-GEE], in the Scottish council area of Dumfries and Galloway.  In 2017, after a fundraising campaign, National Museums Scotland acquired the hoard, calling it one of the most important U.K. archaeological finds of the century.

Perhaps the most important item is a metal-lidded vessel that was filled with artifacts and then wrapped in wool and other textiles before burial.  The small rounded pot is only the third silver-gilt decorated vessel known from a Viking Age hoard in the United Kingdom. 

Researchers couldn't unwrap the vessel without damaging the artifacts, so they used X-ray imagery to make virtual 3D models of the vessel and view its decorated surface. 

To their surprise, the decoration is entirely unlike that on the other two silver-gilt decorated vessels.  Rather than decoration from the Carolingian, or Holy Roman Empire, style of continental Europe, the art shows a much more distant origin.  

According to Martin Goldberg, principal curator of medieval archaeology and history at National Museums Scotland, the decoration shows leopards, tigers and Zoroastrian religious symbols, all of which suggest that it is a piece of Central Asian metalwork from halfway round the world. 

Radiocarbon analysis showed that the wool wrapping dates from AD 680 to 780 while the hoard itself dates to AD 900, meaning the textile significantly predates the burial. 

The National Museum of Scotland now displays much of the Galloway Hoard, and shows how the hoard was buried in four distinct layers. 

The top layer contained a package of silver bullion, or bulk silver pieces, as well as a rare Anglo-Saxon cross.  As reported by the UK newspaper, The Independent, researchers suspect this top layer was a decoy, meant to distract from the layers beneath.

The second layer had another silver bullion parcel, twice the size of the first, wrapped in leather.  The third layer was a cluster of silver ribbonstyle arm rings that were bound together and a small wooden box holding three gold items. 

The fourth held the lidded, silver-gilt vessel wrapped in its textiles.  Inside the vessel was a meticulously packed trove of silk-wrapped items, which may have been relics or heirlooms. These items include beads, pendants, brooches, bracelets, an elaborate belt set, and a rock-crystal jar.

The hoard gives archaeologists a rare look at treasures that Anglo-Saxon churches and monasteries likely owned and then buried to hide from the Vikings.  The invaders began arriving after AD 902, when the Irish drove the Vikings out of Dublin.  Soon they entered Scotland and seized control of Whithorn, an area with a church not far from the Galloway Hoard site.  

Archaeological excavations suggest there may also be another, still unknown, ecclesiastical site in the region.

Researchers involved with the project will do precise dating and 3D modeling on more objects from the hoard and work to pinpoint each artifact's place of origin, according to a statement from the University of Glasgow. 

Next we go to Mexico City, where 250 National Guard troops and 60 police officers have seized an area next to the pre-Hispanic ruins of Teotihuacán to protect it from unscrupulous developers.  

As reported by the Associated Press, National Museum authorities found that bulldozers for a private building project were destroying outlying parts of the archaeological site.

Archaeologists had been trying to halt the private construction project since March.  Now the National Guard has helped authorities put up seizure notices on the property just north of Mexico City.  The seizure allows prosecutors to take control of the plot while those responsible for the work are investigated for criminal charges of irreparably damaging the national heritage.

Mexico’s unwieldy legal system has made it hard to enforce building codes and zoning laws or stop illegal construction, even on protected historical sites.

The Culture Department said last week it had repeatedly issued stop-work orders since March but the building crews had ignored them.  The department estimated at least 25 ancient structures on the site were threatened.

According to the United Nations International Council on Monuments and Sites, bulldozers have affected as many as 15 acres, or 7 hectares, of the protected area.  Looting of artifacts has also occurred.

The destruction so close to the capital raised questions about Mexico’s ability to protect its ancient heritage sites. Teotihuacan is the country’s most visited archaeological site, with over 2.6 million visitors per year, and Mexico has hundreds of smaller, more remote and often unexplored sites.

Teotihuacan is best known for its twin temples of the Sun and Moon, but it was actually a large city that housed over 100,000 inhabitants and covered around 8 square miles. 

The still mysterious city was one of the largest in the world at its apex between 100 BC and AD 750.  It was abandoned before the rise of the Toltecs in the 10th century and the Aztecs in the 14th century.

The Pyramids of the Sun or Moon drew tens of thousands of visitors for the spring and fall equinoxes each year, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Our third story takes us into the world of archaeological fragments, the broken bits that archaeologists reconstruct in their never-ending quest to piece together the puzzle of the past. 

Tatiana Proskouriakoff [pross-KOOR-ee-a-koff], who died in 1985, was one of the great jigsaw puzzle experts of archaeology.  Based at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, then the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, she worked for decades to reconstruct thousands of shattered jade objects recovered from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza [chee-CHEN eet-ZAH], in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.  The Cenote, a large, deep, water-filled sinkhole, contained a vast array of jade, wooden objects, animal bones, tools, jewelry, gold, human remains, and textiles, and is one of the richest Maya archaeological sites in the Yucatan. 

The jades from the Cenote were recovered by archaeologist Edward H. Thomas between 1910 and 1917.  For the most part, the jade was highly fragmentary, likely due to temperature shock after heating with incense and cooling when entering the water.

Jade was traded widely in Mesoamerica and was one of the most important stones to the ancient Maya.  The trade routes are still not well understood, nor are the beginnings of its use and carving.  The jades that Proskouriakoff studied came from across the Maya world, because the Cenote at Chichen Itza was a popular pilgrimage site, so the offerings included many styles and colors of the sacred stone.

Proskouriakoff reconstructed more than 3,700 jade pieces from the collection of over 25,000 fragments, almost entirely through visual examination and patient matching.

Now other researchers are beginning to use three-dimensional modeling and what are called Markov Random Fields, to reconstruct archaeological fragments in ways that can be faster and equally accurate. 

As reported by the Worlds Revealed blog of the U.S. Library of Congress, and an article written by John Hessler of the Library of Congress, laser scanning and photogrammetry help model fragments in three dimensions and mathematically characterize them so that groups of fragments, found as assemblages in archaeological context, can be matched and rebuilt by computer.

New algorithms from computer vision, the same technology being pioneered for driverless cars, can shorten the time it takes to reconstruct damaged archaeological finds.  This also helps create dramatic visualizations of the complete forms of objects that have missing pieces.  The new kinds of geometric modeling and visualization will help archaeologists solve complex reconstruction puzzles such as Proskouriakoff worked on half a century ago

We end the week in England, where a cluster of decapitated bodies found in a Roman Period site were probably victims of Roman military executions.

The victims, all adults who lived during the third century AD, came from three cemeteries associated with farm settlement at Somersham, in Cambridgeshire, eastern England.  Knobb’s Farm, the settlement, is believed to have supplied the Roman military stationed at several nearby forts. 

Analysis of the cut marks on bones shows that several people were kneeling when they were struck from behind with a sword to decapitate them.  At least one of those executed, an older woman found face-down, appears to have been tortured immediately before death or mutilated afterwards.  The decapitated people’s heads were found placed at their feet or lower legs.

As reported by the BBC, the cemeteries were excavated between 2001 and 2010.  A total of 52 burials were discovered, most in a poor state of preservation, with some bones entirely disintegrated.  Of the 52 people buried, 17 were decapitated and 13 people were buried facing downward, in a prone position.  Three individuals were both decapitated and prone.  Decapitation burials and prone burials are relatively rare in Roman era English sites, so finding this many at Knobb’s Farm presented a valuable opportunity to identify patterns in these practices. 

According to site archaeologist, Dr. Isabel Lisboa, from the Cambridge University Archaeological Unit, these third-century burials illustrate a time of increasing instability for the Roman Empire, when legal punishments became harsher.  The number of capital crimes doubled in the third century and quadrupled in the fourth.  Because the supply farm was indirectly part of the Roman army, the severity of punishments and the enforcement of Roman law would have been at the harshest level.

The executed people were all adults, aged between 25 and 45.  Analysis of DNA and bone isotopes shows no genetic relationships among the bodies, suggesting they were either in army service or were slaves.  At least two of those found were born in Scotland or Ireland, and another in the Alps..

Analysis of finds has just been published by the Cambridge University Press in their online journal, Cambridge Core.

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!