Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Hang on for just a minute to hear 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 hoard of silver coins from a farmer’s field in Poland is possibly part of a ransom paid to Vikings besieging Paris in AD 845 by a grandson of Charlemagne.  A study of soil cores appears to show that Indigenous peoples actively and sustainably managed the Amazon rainforest for thousands of years.  A Native American tribe in Maine has bought back an important piece of their ancestral lands. And the COVID-19 pandemic has created an opening for looters to steal and sell antiquities from sites in Italy.

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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 June 6th through June 12th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from Poland, where a cache of rare coins from about twelve hundred years ago turned up near the northeastern town of Biskupiec.

As reported by Live Science.com, the 118 silver coins from the Carolingian period were unearthed in a farmer's field in November 2020.

According to Luke Szczepanski, an archaeologist with the nearby Museum of Ostróda, his team had not yet found any trace of a nearby settlement.  

As first reported by the website, Science in Poland, the coins are in a distinctive style used by the successors of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, characterized by Latin inscriptions around a central crucifix and an emblem of a temple.  

Only three coins of this type have ever been found before in Poland.

The Carolingian period began in the late eighth century AD when Charlemagne conquered most of western Europe.  In AD 800 he was crowned Emperor of the Romans, or the first Holy Roman Emperor, by the pope.  He was succeeded by a series of his direct heirs, including a son, Louis the Pious, and a grandson, Charles the Bald.

According to Mateusz Bogucki, an archaeologist and coin expert at the University of Warsaw, the distinctiveness of the coins raises intriguing questions about their origin.

The coins are likely to be linked to the Scandinavian trading emporium at Truso, located near the Baltic coast about one hundred kilometers to the west of the discovery.  

Truso was established by Norse peoples by the eighth century, and was a regional hub for trade in amber, furs and slaves.

Slavic tribes in the region, however, mainly used Arabian silver coins called dirhams to exchange for goods and slaves brought to Truso by traders from the Muslim caliphate, then based in Baghdad.

One explanation is that the coins were originally part of a hefty ransom paid by a Carolingian king to Vikings threatening his capital city. 

A large fleet of Viking ships sailed up the Seine in 845 and laid siege to Paris.  King Charles the Bald reportedly paid these invaders 7,000 livres, or more than 5 tons of silver and gold, to spare the city.

While these coins have no marks showing exactly where and when they were minted, researchers can learn more about their origins by studying unique characteristics such as the shapes of the Latin lettering used for their inscriptions.  We have no word on when that study might be done, but it could lead to an interesting conclusion to this story.

Next we go to South America, where researchers analyzed a series of soil cores from three sites in a remote northeastern corner of Peru to better understand the extent and scale of Indigenous peoples’ modification of the Amazon.

The three sites were located away from any rivers or floodplains, in areas referred to as interfluvial zones.  Such areas comprise more than ninety percent of the Amazon Basin’s total land area.

The study’s lead author is Smithsonian Institution senior scientist Dolores Piperno, who works with the National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. 

Piperno and her co-authors used the analysis of soil cores to create timelines of plant life and fire history at each location, going back some 5,000 years. 

To do this, the team extracted a total of ten approximately one-meter-long core samples.  

As reported by Smithsonian E-news, each sample contained long-lasting microfossil particles of dead plants, called phytoliths, and most contained historical evidence of fires, such as charcoal or soot. 

In a landscape that receives nearly three meters of annual rainfall, fires are almost always caused by human activity.   Fires would have been set in order to clear land for agriculture or settlements.

The team identified which plant type each phytolith belonged to by comparing them with a reference library of modern plants.  

The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine how long ago the plants lived, and to estimate the age of any charcoal or debris found.

The researchers then conducted surveys of the modern forests found around each core, revealing the existence of at least 550 tree species and 1,300 other species of plants.

All the analyses pointed in the same direction, ultimately showing no evidence of widespread food crop plants or slash-and-burn agriculture techniques in the core samples. 

The simplest explanation for the pattern may be that the soils in these interfluvial zones have so few nutrients that food production here is impractical. 

Evidence of extensive plant manipulation or forest farming may lie in more fertile areas along waterways. 

The results of the study imply that Indigenous forest management occurred in the region, but was not intensive in these large interfluvial areas.  This counters arguments that have been made previously, that prehistoric Amazonians acted intensively on the forest, and even changed its composition.  According to Piperno’s team, the tree and plant species record shows instead that Indigenous people’s forest management practices sustained the diversity and stability of the Amazon rainforest over thousands of years. 

The research is to be published in the June 2021 edition of The Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. 

Our third story takes us to the United States, where a tribe of Native Americans in Maine has successfully purchased an ancestral heritage site located on an island off the coast.

As reported by The Guardian, the Passamaquoddy tribe currently comprises about 3,700 individuals.  Their tribe and their ancestors have lived here for at least 10,000 years, but have not set foot on what is currently known as Pine Island for at least 160 years.

The island is known to the tribe as Kuwesuwi Monihq, and is a spiritually important place for the tribe.   It contains the ancestral grave sites of members who died as a result of devastating outbreaks of smallpox, cholera and measles carried by European settlers from the 1500s to the 1800s.

The island was officially granted to the tribe as recognition for their members’ service during the Revolutionary War by the State of Massachusetts in 1794. 

However, in 1820, when Maine became its own state, the new state government changed its name and voided the existing treaty. 

The 1851 census found only 20 Passamaquoddy living on the island, and by the following census of 1861, there were none.

According to tribal Chief William Nicholas, he spotted an advertisement listing the island for sale on July 4th, 2020.  They began raising money to buy their land back and in March 2021, secured the sale for $355,000, with funding provided by grants from conservation groups.

The bid was organized by First Light, a collective of ecological groups founded in Maine four years ago that is dedicated to returning tribal lands. 

The reclaiming of Kuwesuwi Monihq is the latest successful attempt by indigenous groups in the United States in a series of actions known as “land back” efforts.   

These efforts aim to restore the loss of over one billion acres of tribal lands since the nation’s founding in 1776. 

Similar efforts are being led by established conservation groups, such as The Nature Conservancy, which have received donations of culturally important lands.

Several ownership transfers have recently been completed in California, and others are being actively pursued in states such as Nebraska, Alaska and Oregon.

Nationwide the loss of ancestral settlements has resulted in extended periods of poverty, violence and cultural apartheid for many tribal members.  For the Passamaquoddy, who lost members to Covid-19, reacquiring Pine Island during a pandemic is significant.  When travel restrictions are lifted, some members plan to return to Kuwesuwi Monihq to sing in celebration, and to offer renewed tribute to their ancestors.

We end the news this week in Italy, where looting and trafficking of stolen antiquities has gone up during the Covid 19 outbreak, partly because security lapses have provided increased opportunities.

Police and other government workers’ schedules have been disrupted by reassignments, travel restrictions and social distancing requirements.  Criminals have taken advantage of this by stealing and selling items from sites at a higher rate.

While the looting and resale of Italy’s antiquities on the black market is nothing new, the scope has increased, as has the demand.

As reported by CNN.com, people familiar with the field believe that as much as fifty percent of the ancient Roman artifacts being sold today are either stolen or fake. 

The looters are known by the Italian term “tombaroli,” which translates as “Tomb Raiders.”  

Some of the pilfered pieces come from well known but unprotected sites, including places that would normally be crowded with visitors, thereby preventing such thefts.

An example is the central Largo di Torre Argentina Square in Rome.   A taxi stand butts up against one side of a graffiti-covered fence which surrounds sunken ruins, and the city’s light-rail system rumbles past on the other side.  Just three meters below street level are ancient columns scattered around at the place where Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BC.   These ruins witness frequent arrests, because people can easily jump down without detection, but then are nabbed when they are found in the ruins.  This is believed to be one of Rome's most pilfered sites, even though many of the most important objects were taken years ago.

The Carabinieri Art Squad, a special branch of Italian law enforcement dedicated to the protection of cultural heritage sites like this, has amassed an impressive collection of intercepted artifacts and items seized for lacking legal ownership or documentation of provenience.

The force now uses digital technology, including satellite imagery and drone technology.  

Officers also scour the Internet and dark Web, looking for illicit auctions where traffickers are marketing the stolen goods.

Looting removes an individual object from further academic study and potential display.  It also disrupts the surrounding site, making contextual reference and future archaeological study more difficult.

With national and city governments unable to allocate sufficient funds to continue excavations, or make them safer for the public, it has now fallen to private firms to pay for safeguards and invest in the preservation of the country’s cultural treasures.

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!