Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  You’ve found the place 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 mysterious wood-lined Bronze age pool in northern Italy now has a more precise date, thanks to tree-ring dating.  Analysis of a substance from human waste sampled from the reservoir of an ancient Maya city in Guatemala shows that the local human population declined during distinct dry and wet periods.  Harvard’s Peabody Museum is returning a pipe tomahawk to the Native American Ponca tribe in Nebraska after an absence of 142 years.  And a wetland site in Finland has given up a wooden stick carved into a serpentine shape dating to the late Neolithic Period.

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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 27th through July 3rd, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from northern Italy, where research continues at a mysterious Bronze Age site believed to have been constructed over 3,000 years ago.  The central feature of the site is a huge pit enclosure built into a hilltop, and painstakingly lined with timbers of oak, elm and walnut, apparently to hold water.  The wood-lined tank measures roughly 12 meters long by 7 meters wide, with a depth of more than 3 meters.

As reported by Livescience.com, archaeologists first unearthed the swimming-pool-sized structure in 2004, near Parma, in the northern Po Valley region.

Analysis of artifacts found inside, including ceremonial pots and wooden figurines, suggested a date between 1600 and 1300 BC.  A more precise date could not be determined, however, and the function of the large sunken structure remains a mystery. 

Studies of the layers of sediment filling it determined that the structure once contained water, although no channels to distribute water were found leading away from it.

In a nod to its clear importance, researchers nicknamed it the Vasca Votiva [VOS-ca vo-TEE-va], or Sacred Tank, because its construction seems much too elaborate to have been simply a reservoir for drinking or irrigation.  A great deal of labor and resources would have been required to construct such a project.  In fact, excavations revealed it was actually the second such structure built upon the same hilltop site. 

When filled, the enclosure would have been an impressive feat of engineering and a cultural focal point, with its surface reflection connecting earth and sky to viewers.

Now, a new analysis of the timbers, published by the online  journal, PLOS One, aims to resolve some of the uncertainty.

According to the paper’s coauthor, Sturt Manning, an archaeologist at Cornell University in New York who specializes in dendrochronology, his team joined the project to apply the science of dating ancient wood to the mystery structure.

The team sampled the timbers used to line the structure, analyzing their growth rings and measuring levels of radioactive carbon-14 to calculate when the trees were harvested.  Next, they compared the patterns of carbon-14 absorption with the distinctive patterns from other trees found elsewhere in northern Europe.

This enabled them to narrow the date range for the structure to about 1450 BC. 

According to Manning, the decorative pots and ornate figurines found inside suggest the pool received offerings, made during rituals, ceremonies, or celebrations.

Next, we go to Guatemala, where a relatively new technique is measuring changes in human populations and the environment around the Maya city of Itzan [eet-ZAHN].

The Classic Mayan city of Itzan lies in the lowlands of present day Guatemala, and its population fluctuated across its nearly two millennia of occupation.  The environmental conditions fluctuated also, from droughts to wet periods, and now a new approach called stanol analysis is providing some insight on how these patterns interacted. 

As reported by the news site, EurekAlert.org, the work was carried out principally by Benjamin Keenan, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University in Montreal.  

One impetus for the study is that the tropical forest environment of the Maya lowlands preserves few organic remains from past inhabitants.  Surface visibility is poor and estimating the population of a city over time becomes unreliable.  People, like all mammals, however, produce lipid substances in their intestines that enter their feces and survive in the soils where the feces ended up.  These molecules, called stanols [STAN-ols] have been used in research on pollution as well as archaeological and environmental reconstruction.   

The Itzan stanol study analyzed samples from the sediment layers in Laguna Itzan [la-GOON-ah eet-ZAHN], the large lake next to the city.  The sediments showed shifts over hundreds of years of occupation of the city that indicate not just changes in population numbers, but also in land use and agricultural practices.

The team’s findings have now appeared in the journal, Quaternary Science Reviews.  The research compared the changes in stanol levels to other data from environmental and archaeological sources to draw a fuller picture of how the people of Itzan responded to regional climate changes.

The first surprise from the study was evidence that the area was settled some 650 years earlier than previously estimated.  The research also found that the Maya population in the area declined during three distinct periods of drought.  

Two of these droughts were already known, from AD 90 to 280 and from AD 730 to 900.  However, the third was an earlier, previously unsuspected drought, from 1350 to 950 BC. 

Surprisingly, the results also indicated a population decline during a very wet period, from 400 to 210 BC.

Declining population in response to both dry and wet periods shows that both extremes had effects on livability in the area, and corresponding decrease in the city’s population.

By linking together the evidence for climate and population changes, this study provides a better understanding of the relationships between precipitation levels in this area and the ability of its ancient urban centers here to sustain stable resident populations.

Our third story takes us to the United States, where the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University has agreed to repatriate a pipe tomahawk once belonging to Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, after 142 years away. 

According to Stacy Laravie, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer at the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, and also a descendant of Standing Bear, the exact timeline for return is unknown, as the tribe works to build an appropriate display case to hold the relic in its museum.  The museum is located near Standing Bear’s gravesite.

As reported by Native News Online, a joint agreement is being drawn up among the Peabody Museum, the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, and the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, a smaller group split off due to federal government displacement.  The Oklahoma tribe agreed that the tomahawk will go to Nebraska, because it has a better museum facility.  

In 1877, the Ponca people were forcibly removed from their homelands in northeast Nebraska and made to walk to their new Indian Territory in Oklahoma during the Ponca Trail of Tears.  When Chief Standing Bear returned home to Nebraska to bury his son, he was arrested for breaking a law requiring Native Americans to stay on their reservations.  

This led to the landmark U.S. district court decision of 1879, which for the first time in U.S. history, declared Native Americans to be “persons” under U.S. law and thus have civil rights.

Standing Bear gave his pipe tomahawk to his lawyer, a white man named John L. Webster, as a gesture of thanks.  The tomahawk ended up in the Peabody Museum after Webster's death, but according to Standing Bear’s great-great-greatgreat granddaughter Laravie, passing the tomahawk on to strangers that way wouldn’t have been Standing Bear’s intention.

The effort to repatriate the tomahawk was spurred by another of Standing Bear’s descendants, Brett Chapman, of the Pawnee tribe, who is an attorney in Tulsa, Oklahoma.   Chapman did not challenge the legal right of Harvard to possess the item, but rather challenged their moral right to possess an item of patrimony.  Cultural patrimony is the technical term used under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, to refer to items of human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and other significant cultural objects.  NAGPRA requires that cultural patrimony items are returned to the tribal nations they came from.

Chapman’s moral argument worked. 

According to Peabody Museum director, Jane Pickering, the museum recognizes how meaningful the pipe tomahawk is to the Ponca Tribal Nations and wants to return it. 

Last summer, the museum established a NAGPRA advisory committee to help guide its federal obligation, including bolstering its outreach to all 574 federally recognized tribal nations. 

Peabody’s online database catalogues the museum’s extensive collections, but the museum wants to do more to help increase awareness among tribal nations—and communities nationwide—of the items it holds.

We end this week in Finland with a story from Livescience.com, where a wooden stick carved into the shape of a snake and dating to about 4,400 years old has been excavated from a lakeside wetland in the southwestern part of the country.

Järvensuo, the site where the object was found, was first discovered in the 1950s, but very little excavation work was done until 2020.

The condition of the snake shaped stick is excellent, considering the acid wet soils surrounding it.  Radiocarbon dating placed it in the Late Neolithic period, between approximately 2471 and 2291 BC.

The figure measures 53 centimeters long by about 2 centimeters thick, and was crafted from a single piece of wood.

The serpentine shape suggests a snake in motion, and the snake’s mouth is slightly open.

In a paper published recently in the journal, Antiquity, co-authors Satu Koivisto and Antti Lahelma suggest that the intricate craftwork indicates a ceremonial or ritual purpose.

According to Lahelma, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, snakes are loaded with symbolic meaning in both the local Finno-Ugric and Sámi cosmology traditions.  Traditionally the Sámi peoples lived in northern Scandinavia and Russia, while Finno-Ugric languages were spoken in Scandinavia and eastern Europe. 

At least two examples of rock art turned up in Finland depicting a human shape holding aloft a snake-like image reminiscent of the find.

The snake staff could have been used by a priest or shaman, and the excavators hope to  expand the dig to look for any structures.

Research on the artifact is continuing to try to determine the type of wood. 

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!