Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  In just a minute you’ll be able to feast your ears on 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!

New excavations at a site often called Germany’s Stonehenge show that it was a residential area as well as a place of gruesome ritual sacrifices.  Researchers using Google Earth have found in northern India what appears to be the world’s largest geoglyph.  Excavators in northern Florida have found traces of a long-lost Native American town recorded by early French and Spanish accounts. And the world’s largest collection of pyramids, in northern Sudan, is threatened by erosion and other forces of degradation.

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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 13th through the 19th, 2021.

Our first story this week brings us to the Ringheiligtum Pömmelte in eastern Germany, often called the German Stonehenge, where the ancient site shows signs of brutal human sacrifices. 

As reported by Heritage Daily, the site is set up much like Stonehenge to follow the solstices.  According to evidence uncovered by archaeologists, it not only served as a place for human sacrifice but also as home to many people according to recently discovered evidence of 130 dwellings.

The henge was discovered originally in 1991. It’s located about 85 miles southwest of Berlin, and extends over 330 ft in diameter. 

The burials at this site are known to be more macabre than those found at the UK’s Stonehenge, including burials of teens, children and women brutally killed for sacrificial purposes.

However, the new evidence also shows that this site, where the monuments may date from around 2800 BC, became a residential area around the late Neolithic period, dating initially to approximately 2300 BC and remaining occupied until 2050 BC.  Excavations beginning May uncovered two additional houses, 20 ditches and two human burials.   Further explorations revealed evidence of more burials and 80 house plans.  This work is being done by the Saxony-Anhalt) State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology, and staffed by researchers and students from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg.

The henge site is still being excavated, and much remains to be learned about this place.  Digging there will continue until October 2021.  So far, researchers believe it was used for astronomical events, as a burial and ritual center in the region, and now—as a place people also called home. 

Our next story takes us to India, where Google Earth mapping technology has revealed the world's largest geoglyph, a sprawling design formed with earth or stone. 

As reported in Live Science, the large design originally came to light in 2014 when independent French researchers Carlo and Yohann Oetheimer, while exploring Google Earth images over Punjab state in northern India, noticed the geoglyph.  From this aerial view, they were able to see manmade lines within the sand and silts clearly displayed during dry seasons. 

They followed up on this survey and visited the sites in 2016, identifying this region near Boha as an outlier, with little evidence for recent creation due to farming.

Geoglyphs are not common in the region, but can be found in some other deserts. This glyph comprises several spirals and long lines covering 51 acres near the India-Pakistan border.  The entire linear distance of the lines totals 30 miles. 

The origin of these lines is unknown, but may be related to several rock cairns, or rock stacks, in the area.  Nine such stone structures stand in and around the lines, some as tall as 5 feet, with the stones often carved with images of the Hindu deities Krishna and Ganesha.  This leads researchers to suggest the geoglyph may have some religious or ceremonial meaning.  Based on the association with the images on the cairns, the researchers estimate that the geoglyph is only between 150 and 200 years old.

While the lines are large and apparent on the satellite images, they are subtle on the ground, as they are only about 4 inches deep and 8 to 20 inches wide.  No vantage point exists where the lines would have been visible from above, meaning they could not likely have been seen in their entirety by the people living in this area when they were created. 

The purpose of these glyphs remains a mystery for now, but researchers continue to investigate them to uncover more information.  The Oetheimers are preparing a paper about this for the upcoming September issue of the journal, Archaeological Research in Asia.

Our next story takes us to Florida, where archaeological evidence on a coastal island indicates that it may have been home to a long-lost Native American settlement. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, excavations at Big Talbot Island in northern Florida near Jacksonville have unearthed traces of Saraby, a Mocama indigenous community dating back between the 16th and 17th centuries.

Saraby is a Native American town that was recorded in early accounts written by French and Spanish explorers around the 1560s, but its whereabouts have remained unknown. 

The team, led by researchers at the University of North Florida directed by Keith Ashley, discovered a wide range of artifacts on the island, including fragments of Spanish pottery, animal bones, oyster shells, beads, and other artifacts.  In cross-checking these items with maps and cartographic evidence, they figured out that they had found a site that archaeologists have long looked for in the region. 

This excavation is part of the ongoing Mocama Archaeological project, designed to shed light on the indigenous people of northern Florida.  This group lived in northeastern and central Florida beginning as early as 3000 BC and may have reached a population of 200,000 to 300,000 people. 

The site is positioned next to the coast, and intra-coastal waterways likely made it a bustling trade and travel center before European colonization.  After colonization in 1562, the indigenous peoples remained in the region for just another 150 years or so. 

Researchers plan to continue their excavation of the site at Big Talbot Island to identify more dwellings, structures and artifacts to learn more about the society that lived there.

Our final story takes us to Sudan, where the world’s largest collection of pyramids risks being damaged and buried by shifting sand dunes.  This story comes from an article written by Ahmed Mutasim Abdalla Mahmoud, Ph.D .Researcher, at the University of Nottingham, and published online by The Conversation.

Ancient Nubian populations built the pyramids of Sudan beginning around 2500 BC.  They total over 200 individual structures across the three major archaeological sites of El Kurru, Jebel Barkal, and Meroe [MER-oh-AY].

The pyramids are smaller than those at Giza in Egypt, and are made of sandstone and granite. They contain chapels and burial chambers with hieroglyphs and other scripts celebrating Nubian rulers. 

These magnificent Nubian pyramids are highly culturally valuable, and offer a relatively crowd-free experience for intrepid tourists compared to their Egyptian counterparts.  Sadly, pyramids at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Meroe, north of the capital Khartoum, face degradation due to shifting sand dunes. 

The site continues to degrade due to a lack of preservation, severe weather conditions, negligence, and vandalism.  This recent degradation aligns with the activity of looters as well as poorly conducted 1800s excavations—such as that of Italian explorer Giuseppe Ferlini, who famously blew up several pyramids in the 1880s. 

Today, sandstorms and shifting dunes are the biggest threat to this site.  This is only exacerbated by global climate change, which has made sandstorms and more arid weather frequent in the region, sometimes engulfing homes in rural areas. 

While the moving sand may protect these sites from thieves, it is harmful to the excavated sites as they get reburied under the sand and erode in the process. 

One prevention method is to increase vegetation that helps suppress erosion.  Currently, a project called the Great Green Wall is offering some hope.  This project is a collaboration of 20 nations, and is designed to stop the spread of the Sahara’s sands.  Through restoring 100 million hectares of land from Senegal to Djibouti, the creation of this large barrier of trees and plants will help prevent further shifting of sand and erosion—protecting both ancient sites and the people currently living in this region.  

Beyond the Great Green Wall project, researchers continue to study the way these sands move, and are creating solutions for how to prevent them from causing more damage.  The hope is to save more UNESCO sites currently in danger from this phenomenon. 

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!