Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew and I’m excited to share with you 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 collection of cave burials in west-central Africa is striking, in that all of them are missing their upper front teeth.  The incised design on a deer bone from a German cave is rare evidence of artistic expression by Neanderthals. Archaeologists in Mississippi have come upon a trove of metal objects apparently left behind by the De Soto Expedition in 1540 when they were routed and expelled by the Chickasaws.  And a new expedition aims to find the ship abandoned in 1915 by Ernest Shackelton and his crew during their ill-fated attempt to reach the South Pole..

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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 July 4th through 10th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from Gabon, where the discovery of approximately 500-year-old burials shows that some people living in this west-central African region changed their looks by removing their front teeth.  

Archaeologists found the centuries-old altered skulls deep underground in a cave that could be reached only by rope, through a hole in the cavern's roof.   The cave held the burials of at least 24 adults and four children, deposited there on at least two occasions.  Hundreds of metal artifacts made of local iron and imported copper near the remains—including jewelry, weapons, and tools—show the wealth and status of the people who were buried there.

According to Richard Oslisly [oh-LIE-ly], an archaeologist with The French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, the Iroungou cave in Gabon's Ngounié province was found in 1992 but not investigated until 2018 due to the extreme difficulty of the access.  

As reported by LiveScience.com, the research team photographed and laser-scanned the cave interior and burial sites so that they could reconstruct the cave and its contents in 3D.  They collected samples from leg bones for radiocarbon dating, but left all of the human remains where they were found. 

The cave contained four levels, and all of them held bones dating to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD.  Though the bones were jumbled together, all the skeletons were complete. This suggests that cadavers, rather than dry bones, were either thrown from above or lowered into the cave.

According to lead researcher Sébastien Villotte, the burial cave was unusual both in the number of burials and the many objects accompanying them.   Burial objects included bracelets and rings; axes and knives; more than 100 marine shells; and dozens of pierced carnivore teeth.

The human remains, however, were all missing four teeth: specifically, the central and lateral permanent incisors.  Those are the four teeth in the very front of the mouth, on the top.  All of the intact skulls showed empty tooth sockets where the upper incisors had been, with signs of healing after the extractions, showing that the teeth were removed while their owners were still alive and the holes healed before the people died.

Dental modification is a custom seen worldwide, especially in Africa.  Different cultures had different reasons for modifying or removing teeth.  Sometimes, those reasons include changing the shape or appearance of the face.  

Because the Iroungou extractions were symmetrical and involved the same teeth in all of the skeletons, they were likely a cultural practice, although the reason remains unclear.  Removing these front teeth would have affected pronunciation, as well as changing the shape of the mouth and face in a way that was highly visible.  

The removal of the top four incisors is unusual and has been documented only in west-central Africa, suggesting a long history and possible continuity of body-modification customs in the area.

Next we go to Germany, where a 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx found in a cave in the Harz Mountains provides new evidence of Neanderthal creativity.  The find came from an apparently Middle Paleolithic context—a period spanning 300,000 to 30,000 years ago—and shows that the Neanderthals who made it had the cognitive capacity to compose multiple individual lines into a coherent design.

As reported by Sci-News.com, the find contributes to debates about the cognitive capacities of early hominins and Neanderthals, our evolutionary relatives.   According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Dirk Leder, from the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage, the ability to create art and symbolic expressions offers particular insight into the mental abilities of the cave’s inhabitants.  The team’s paper was published in the journal, Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Neanderthal sites have now produced considerable evidence for elaborate stone tool technology, manufacture of effective wooden weapons and bone tools, birch tar adhesives, and composite tools.  

The ancient engraved bone found in this case was discovered at the former cave entrance of Einhornhöhle, or Unicorn Cave, in northern Germany.

Einhornhöhle is a well-known Quaternary fossil site that has been frequented by treasure hunters since the Middle Ages aiming to extract what they believed to be unicorn fossils.  During the eighteenth century, geologists, paleontologists, and later archaeologists became interested in these fossil finds.

The incised bone was from the Irish elk, Megaloceros giganteus, also known as the giant deer.  This huge extinct species of deer lived during the Pleistocene epoch in Europe and Asia.

The ancient Neanderthal craftsman carefully disconnected the foot bone, cleaning the tissue from it, most likely by boiling it for some time.  The bone was then dried and carved.

The giant deer phalanx could have been collected from a previously dead and decomposing animal, but in the context of other giant deer bones and teeth at the site, active hunting is more likely.

The inscription is at least 51,000 years old, and features an inverted set of chevron shapes, or vees.  The bone is the oldest decorated object in Lower Saxony and one of the most important finds from the Neanderthal period in western Europe.

Our third story takes us to Mississippi, where archaeologists have unearthed a rare trove of more than 80 metal objects, thought to be from the sixteenth-century expedition of Hernando de Soto.

Many of the objects were repurposed by the resident Chickasaws as household tools and ornaments, an unusual practice at a time when European goods in North America were few and often held only by leaders.

As reported by HeritageDaily.com, the findings come from a site in an area of northeastern Mississippi known as Stark Farms.  The Spaniards probably left the objects behind when they fled a Chickasaw attack in 1541.  The victors took advantage of these items, including axe heads, blades, nails, and other items made of iron, lead, and copper alloy.  The Chickasaw craftspeople modified them for their own purposes, turning pieces of horseshoes into scrapers, barrel bands into cutting tools, and bits of copper into jingling pendants.

According to Charles Cobb—the Florida Museum of Natural History Lockwood Chair in Historical Archaeology and the study’s lead author—the sheer abundance of objects makes the find unique.  He and Brad Lieb, director of Chickasaw archaeology for the Chickasaw Nation’s Heritage Preservation Division, took on the project after being commissioned by The Chickasaw Nation to identify and preserve ancestral sites, while also providing Chickasaw university students the opportunity to reconnect with their heritage through an archaeology fieldwork program.

If the researchers are correct, Stark Farms is only the second place to yield convincing archaeological evidence of direct contact with de Soto’s expedition, after the historic site of the Apalachee capital of Anhaica in present-day Tallahassee.

Although the Spaniards began on a friendly footing with the Chickasaws—receiving shelter in the form of a small village—tensions rose as the months dragged on.  De Soto lived up to his reputation for bloodshed, executing two Chickasaws and cut off the hands of another accused of stealing pigs.  The Chickasaws, who farmed maize in the region’s rich prairie soil, likely also lost patience for providing food and shelter for the nearly 600-person encampment. 

When de Soto demanded that Chickasaw leader Chikasha Minko provide him with hundreds of Chickasaws to carry the Spaniards’ equipment to their next destination, the Chickasaws responded by launching a surprise attack, torching the Spanish camp and killing at least a dozen men and many animals.  The Spaniards retreated and set up another camp about a mile away, where they were assaulted a second time and forced out. 

Meanwhile, the Chickasaws collected from the battlefield dozens of prized metal objects, usually reserved by the Europeans for strategic trades or as gifts to smooth relationships with local leaders.

After the battle that these objects were secured from, De Soto failed to establish any permanent settlements in the Southeast and died from a fever on the banks of the Mississippi River in 1542. His remaining band of men made rafts and floated south to Mexico where they found passage back to Spain.

According to study co-author Brad Lieb, director of Chickasaw archaeology for the Chickasaw Nation’s Heritage Preservation Division, the findings show how Chickasaws secured their reputation as unconquered and unconquerable. 

One stunning object includes an iron version of a Native American stone celt, or axe head.

Others include artifacts created from links of chains that the Spanish brought with them to shackle Native Americans as captives.  This is evidence of some of the earliest European enslavement of people in what is now the United States.

The refashioned items from Stark Farms demonstrate a form of Native American experimentation and improvisation with foreign items that largely faded by the late 1700s and 1800s.  For example, according to Cobb, in the 1500s, a thimble might be turned into a bangle, but by the late 1700s, a thimble is a thimble.  

The objects from the Stark Farm dig will be repatriated to the Chickasaw Nation for permanent curation and exhibits.

We end this week out of the heat, in the chill waters of the Antarctic Ocean.  Here, a new expedition plans to seek the remains of Ernest Shackleton's long-lost ship, the Endurance.

Shackleton and his crew abandoned the ship in 1915 after it was crushed by ice.  The Endurance now lies somewhere at the bottom of the Weddell [WEH-del] Sea, a large bay in the western Antarctic.  Its exact location remains unknown, but a new expedition plans to find it.

The Endurance22 expedition, slated to begin in February 2022, will navigate the treacherous waters of the newly designated Southern Ocean, slamming through miles of pack ice in search of locations where state-of-the-art submarines can scan the ocean floor. 

If the expedition scientists find the lost ship, they plan to survey and film the wreck.  But because the ship and its artifacts are protected under the international Antarctic Treaty, they will not take anything.  

As reported by LiveScience.com, a previous attempt in 2019 was called off due to extreme weather and a lost submarine.  This time, Endurance22's director of exploration, Mensun Bound, says that the team is even more determined to find the remains of the legendary ship.

Because the Antarctic environment is so harsh, success is far from guaranteed.  Still, the team has the best possible technology and an expert team.  

Shackleton's herculean attempt to cross the South Pole is one of the legendary stories from the age of polar exploration.  Sailing from the island of South Georgia, the Endurance worked its way south through pack ice for weeks before becoming trapped just off the Caird Coast.  The men drifted for more than a year, first aboard the ship and then on top of the ice floe itself after the Endurance was crushed and sank.  As time wore on, they were forced to shoot and eat their expedition dogs for survival, as well as penguins and seals once they later made landfall at Elephant Island. 

From here, Shackleton launched his sturdiest lifeboat, the James Caird, and took five other men with him on a return trip to South Georgia Island through the vicious seas.  The men battled hurricane-force winds to reach South Georgia fifteen days later.  Shackleton returned to Elephant Island with a rescue ship and saved all 28 members of his crew.

The Endurance now lies below nearly 10,000 feet of dark water, likely well preserved thanks to the absence of light and low oxygen content.  The location where it sank, logged at the time by ship' captain Frank Worsley, is well known.  The true challenge for the Endurance22 team will be bulldozing through miles of thick ice in the Weddell Sea.

The scientists have icebreaker attachments fitted to their ship, the South African SA Agulhas II. Once close to the wreck location, they will lower a Saab Sabertooth autonomous submarine into the freezing water and use satellite radar imagery to navigate it to the ship.  The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust is funding the expedition.

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!