Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.   And this is 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!

Archaeologists in Alexandria, Egypt, have identified the sunken wreck of a warship dating to the second century BC.  A study of precisely dated lake-bed deposits in Japan suggests that it was climate stability, not temperature, that led to the adoption of agriculture worldwide.  An Indigenous archaeologist in Canada is using ground-penetrating radar to locate the graves of lost Indigenous children.  And thanks to advances in technology, microscopic traces of food residues on potsherds are teaching researchers more and more about just what people ate and drank.

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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 25 through 31, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from Egypt, where the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery of the wreck of a warship from the Ptolemaic period.  Also announced was the find of a Greek funerary area dating back to the beginning of the fourth century BC

As reported by Middle East newspaper, Al-Monitor.com, the two new discoveries come from the sunken city of Heracleion in Alexandria's Abu Qir Bay. 

According to the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt, Mustafa Waziri, the ship was moored in the canal that flowed along the Temple of Amun.  It sank when the temple collapsed in a cataclysmic earthquake in the second century BC, and huge stone blocks fell from the temple and submerged the ship.  

The finds were made by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology, or IEASM, which has been working in the city of Heracleion for many years. 

The ship’s remains were under five meters of mud in the channel.  Measuring 25 meters long, it is only the second ship found from this era.  The ship’s construction shows a mix of Egyptian and Greek design, making it usable both along the Nile and in the open sea. 

Another find is the remains of a Greek funerary area, used by the Greek merchants who lived in Heracleion and ran the port. 

Heracleion was the largest port in Egypt, established on the Mediterranean coast during the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, which lasted from 665 to 525 BC.  That’s three hundred years before the founding of the city of Alexandria by Alexander the Great in 331 BC.

During the Ptolemaic Period, about 300 BC to 30 BC, several earthquakes followed by tidal waves caused land liquefaction, which led to submergence of 110 square kilometers of the Nile Delta, more than 68 square miles, beneath the sea.  Many cities were lost.  Two of them, Heracleion and Canopus, were rediscovered in 1999 and 2001 by the European mission in cooperation with underwater archaeologists from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. 

According to Hussein Abdel Baseer, director of the Antiquities Museum at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the discovery of the ship and other materials from the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, including coins, statues, pots and figurines of the kings, has helped open new perspectives on trade patterns prior to the establishment of the port of Alexandria.

Next we go to Japan, where a new and detailed reconstruction suggests that a long period of stable climate was what enabled the adoption of agriculture.  

As reported by Sciencedaily.com, the development of agriculture was a revolution in lifestyle that led to permanent settlements and the rise of civilizations.  What’s unclear is the role of the environment in this massive cultural change.  

Did a climatic cooling period, from about 11,000 to 9,000 BC, force humans to adopt agriculture to ensure adequate food?  Recent reassessment of radiocarbon dates associated with early agriculture suggests that the cooling period actually saw a decline in sedentary life.  So that doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Archaeological evidence shows that agriculture began independently in multiple regions within a few millennia after the end of the last ice age.  Thus, perhaps the increasing temperatures fostered the adoption of agriculture.  However, this explanation also fails to work, because humans didn’t start farming earlier in tropical regions, even though the temperature was high enough, even during the final ice age.

Japan’s new climate data suggests that the key was not temperature, but climatic stability.  The data come from research led by Takeshi Nakagawa, of Ritsumeikan University, whose team analyzed pollen fossils from about 16,000 to 8,000 BC, found in the annually layered sediments from Lake Suigetsu, Japan. 

The detailed data allowed them to reconstruct the annual climate through this period.  An accurate chronology of the sediments was established by counting annual layers and by radiocarbon dating of hundreds of leaf fossils.  The results show that the start of agriculture, and accompanying farming settlements, came during periods of climate that were warm and also stable.

Right after the end of the glacial age, the climate alternated between stable and unstable periods.  The oscillating changes meant that plant domestication couldn’t start just because the climate was warmer. 

Agriculture takes planning ahead, which requires a predictable and stable climate, with each year much like the next.  The period of unstable climate made agriculture too risky compared to hunting and gathering.  

Climatic stability has been hard to identify, partly because natural archives of annually detailed climate change are rare, and laborious to analyze.  That is why the sediments from Lake Suigetsu, Japan, which took over two decades to study, provide new insight into why agriculture developed.

Our third story takes us to Canada, where an indigenous archaeologist is using remote sensing techniques to help uncover recent history. 

As reported by The New York Times, Professor Kisha Supernant of the University of Alberta knew from a young age that she wanted to become an archaeologist and study ancient civilizations.

Her latest work, however, puts her at the center of current affairs, as she helps lead and train teams that use ground-penetrating radar to identify burials of children at residential boarding schools.  These children were taken from their parents and sent to the schools by the Canadian government, in an effort to assimilate them into the dominant Euro-American culture.  Many were never seen by their families again.

Supernant and others have identified well over 1,000 human remains, mostly of children, at former sites of the residential schools.  

These discoveries have shocked Canadians and opened a new conversation with Indigenous people about the history of the schools, which did not finally close until 1996.   

Professor Supernant specializes in the use of technology to map and analyze settlements, and is herself Indigenous, a member of the Metis [May-TEES] culture.  The Metis, one of the three indigenous groupings recognized by the Canadian government, are descended from both indigenous people and early French settlers, particularly fur trappers and traders.  

With her own family history including the forced separations of parents and children,  Professor Supernant has dedicated her career to redefining how the profession interacts with indigenous people.

Archaeological history in Canada, as elsewhere, has been rife with insensitive practices such as removal of human remains to distant museums, and research that bolstered racist claims. 

According to Professor Supernant, who directs the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology at the University of Alberta, it’s a transformative change to see indigenous communities turning to archaeologists to help them find their loved ones.  

Professor Supernant has written about the need for archaeologists to make indigenous people partners in the research, not just objects of study.  She also works to change the language of archaeology: instead of human remains, she talks about ancestors, while artifacts are belongings.

Oral histories from former residential school students suggest that many of the missing children — totaling 10,000 to 15,000, by current estimates — died at the schools and were buried in unmarked graves on school grounds.

In 2018, Supernant used the technology at the former Muskowekwan Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan and identified 35 likely human remains, mostly of children, in unmarked and unrecorded graves.  Another researcher using her techniques found the remains of more than 200 missing children at the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia.  

With more than 150 school sites, Professor Supernant is heading a group for the Canadian Archaeological Association to offer guidelines for the search.  Step one is for the community to gather all the information they can about probable grave sites, in order to focus the radar searches.  Ground-penetrating radar has long been used, but recent improvements in signal-processing technologies and antennas have increased its accuracy in identifying shallow and small objects, particularly graves.

Communities also need to put social and emotional support systems in place to deal with the trauma that follows the identification of burial grounds.

With tens of millions of dollars pledged by many provinces and the federal government for searches, many companies are offering their services to First Nations.  However, the equipment alone is not enough.  Researchers must have the skills to analyze the radar data, much as a radiologist must interpret MRI or x-ray results.  

Professor Supernant would like to train indigenous people to handle the scanning while she focuses on interpreting the data.

In our last story, we learn how scientists find the traces of ancient people’s cooking and culinary techniques.  

An examination of fatty molecules called lipids, for example, absorbed into the pores of three earthenware bottles excavated in Bavaria, suggested that mothers living between 1200 and 450 BC were weaning their kids on animal milk.  

Microbial and molecular analysis, along with a more inclusive recognition of the importance of everyday activities like food preparation, are leading to a clearer picture of what was on the prehistoric menu.

As reported in Knowable Magazine, the archaeology of cuisine and cooking has been neglected, partly because the men dominating anthropological research long considered such things boring.  

According to archaeologist Sarah Graff of Arizona State University, writing in the 2020 Annual Review of Anthropology, artifacts from the realm of food prep often belong to the domains of those who lack societal power: women, servants and slaves.  Previous archaeologists didn’t realize that domestic items also reveal connections with politics, economics, and even religion.

Researchers are now finding more of those connections by using powerful analytical techniques to learn about the foods people once prepared, from baby food to stews. fermented beverages, and cheese.

Scraps of earthenware pottery are invaluable in these studies.  According to biogeochemist Richard Evershed, Dunne’s colleague at Bristol and a pioneer of analyzing organic residues left on ancient vessels, boiling meat releases globules of melted fat that easily seep into the walls of pots.  

About 30 years ago, Evershed began identifying fats, or lipids, from foods in medieval English pottery.  One set of chemical fingerprints suggested the leaf wax of cabbage, which was likely stewed with meats.  Other pots dating from AD 950 to 1450 had signatures of dairy fat, probably from making cheese.  But others had no fat.  They came from a bakehouse, and were used for baking bread.  

Lipid residues couldn’t be analyzed until the 1950s, with the advent of gas chromatography.    Coupling that technique with mass spectrometry, which helps identify molecules based on their mass, allows researchers to detect and identify ages-old food remains.  

Proteins give an even higher level of resolution than lipids.  In 2014, researchers reported milk proteins preserved in the dental tartar of roughly 5,000-year-old teeth.  Another team led by Jessica Hendy, an archaeological scientist at the University of York in England, examined proteins preserved in similar mineral scale coating pottery from Çatalhöyük [CHAT-al- HOO-yook], a Neolithic site in Turkey.  The shards yielded traces of proteins found in barley, wheat and peas, along with several animal meats and milks. 

A third and very recent development is analysis of microbes, key to creating fermented fare such as beer, wine and cheese.

Microbiologist Ronen Hazan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studied pieces of pottery that might have been used for brewing, including Egyptian vessels from 3100 BC, Philistine ones from 850 BC and Persian ones from 500 BC.  The team isolated and grew six strains of yeast from 21 ancient vessels.

Using modern recipes, the team made beer using the strains they extracted.  Four out of six extracted yeasts were able to make alcoholic beverages and produce the aromatic compounds that make them taste good.  The yeasts’ DNA revealed how they were related to other known brewing microbes.  The team believes that the yeasts plucked from the vessels are descendants of the yeasts seeded thousands of years ago when the beer was brewed.

In 27 vessels from the same sites that were not used for ancient alcohol but rather for cooking, eating or as lamps, the team extracted three strains of yeast, including two known to live on olives, which could have provided oil for the lamp in which it was found.

By scouring the traces of meals consumed long ago, these scientists are finding out how  cooking and food culture evolved. 

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!