Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Audio News from Archaeologica!  I’m Laura Pettigrew.  Rick Pettigrew is on assignment on our tour of megalithic sites in Britain, so I’ll be telling you about four of the best stories posted online this past week by our partner, Archaeologica.org!  These are the headlines in archaeological and historical news for the week of September 13th through the 19th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from the United Kingdom, where a log coffin containing remains of a high-status Bronze Age man are nearing conservation completion after their 2019 discovery in a golf course pond. 

As reported by science website livescience.com, staff at Tetney Golf Club in Lincolnshire found the coffin by chance, during maintenance work on the pond in summer 2019.

The coffin, hewn from a single oak log, contained remains of a man believed to have lived about four thousand years ago, during Britain’s Bronze Age.  The man stood tall for his time -- five feet nine inches -- and was buried with an axe that archaeologists believe was a high status ceremonial symbol.

The man died in his 30s or 40s, causes unknown.   His bones showed signs of osteoarthritis due to strenuous hard work.  For his coffin, people felled an oak tree and laboriously hewed out a section of trunk for the coffin.  

After placing the remains of the man and his axe in the coffin, they covered it up with a gravel mound, an honor reserved for high status individuals.   

According to Tim Allen, a project archaeologist, the well-preserved axe, with a polished stone head fitted to a wooden handle, is one of only twelve known, making this find quite rare. 

The oak coffin measured about 10 feet by 3 feet.  Part of the coffin cover survives, thanks to silt washed in over the centuries, covering up the mound.

Conserving the oak coffin was especially challenging because it was discovered during a hot spell.  Archaeologists had to work fast so that the delicate coffin and its contents didn't crumble from exposure to air and sun. 

Fortunately, golf course staff notified authorities immediately.  Luckily, a team of archaeologists from Sheffield University was already in the field, working on a site nearby, and was able to re-deploy that weekend for the delicate field conservation and removal process. 

According to Allen, Bronze Age log coffins are rare, and their survival after discovery is even rarer.  Only about 65 similar sites have been found in Britain.

Thanks to the coffin’s under-pond anaerobic preservation, and the rapidity of archaeologists getting it to the conservation lab, another rare and valuable surviving part of the find is coffin-contained organic debris.

According to project leader Hugh Wilmott, of the University of Sheffield, a mat of organic materials was preserved inside the damp, anaerobic tree-trunk coffin under the dead man’s body.  Some of it has already been identified as yew or juniper needles.  Further analysis is expected to reveal not only what plants were chosen to cushion this leader’s remains, but also his burial’s time of year.  

Archaeologists at the York Archaeological Trust are working to preserve the discovery, and to prepare it for exhibition.  Once that work is complete, the coffin and remains will be exhibited at the Collection Museum in Lincolnshire.  

Next we go to Tibet, where researchers have announced discoveries of ancient hand and foot impressions that may constitute the oldest art yet known.

As reported by the online science website Sci-news.com, the non-overlapping impressions come from five hands and feet.  According to the study’s co-author, Classics professor Thomas Urban of Cornell University in the United States, the placement shows deliberate creation, a result of art, not of accident.   Other prehistoric footprints clearly result from everyday activity.  Here, however, the close but non-overlapping placement of both handprints and footprints shows that the impressions were made intentionally, and all at one time. 

The prints were made in mud between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago in a village called Quesang, which lies about 80 miles northwest of Lhasa, Tibet’s “Autonomous Region” capital. 

The prints’ sizes suggest that they were created by children of around 7 and 12 years of age.  One child made the handprints, the other made the footprints. 

Although the scientists are confident the impressions were created intentionally by these children, the species of these would-be ancient artists is debated.  Researchers are unsure whether the prints were created by Homo sapiens or by some other hominin species.  The time range for the prints’ creation is similar to that of remains recently discovered on the Tibetan Plateau, believed to be by Denisovans.

Whether deliberate making of handprints and footprints in mud qualifies as art is also a debated matter.  But if it does, then these handprints predate, by 120,000 years, the previous oldest-known art, a find of Indonesian cave drawings. 

Details of the discovery were published last week in Science Bulletin.

Our third story takes us to Arizona, where paleoanthropologists at Arizona State University have published a study detailing more than 60 bone tools from the middle Pleistocene, found in Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, in 2011.  These tools, which appear to have been used to process animal furs into clothing, constitute some of the earliest evidence on how human ancestors in Pleistocene Africa developed the more complex culture and technology that came with evolution into modern human forms.

Contrebandiers Cave lies only a few hundred meters from the Atlantic coast of Morocco.  Original excavations date from the 1950s and 1970s.  They resumed in 2007, by a joint Moroccan-American research team, co-led by Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean.  The cave holds middle Pleistocene cultural deposits from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago.  

As reported by the online science website phys.org, the new study documents about 60 of roughly 12,000 bone fragments examined from finely controlled new excavations.  These 60 bone fragments were modified for use as tools.  

Corresponding to the use marks on these bone tools, were cut marks on many of them, indicating that some animals were skinned for their fur, not butchered for meat.   

The match between bone tools for skinning and the bones of skinned animals, mainly those of carnivores offering fur pelts, shows that these early human ancestors were using the furs, probably for clothing. 

The assemblage of bone fragments also turned up the tip of a tooth from a whale or dolphin.  This tooth bears marks suggesting it was used as a flaking tool, for shaping and sharpening stone tools.  This is the earliest documented use of a marine mammal tooth by humans, and the only verified marine mammal remains from the North African Pleistocene.

According to Emily Hallett, an Arizona State University doctoral student, who co-authored the study, this bone tool set demonstrates that humans used specialized tools for specific tasks as far back as 120,000 years ago, even before they expanded into Eurasia.

Another significant finding is that these complex technologies were associated with aquatic adaptations, along the coast, suggesting that the rich coastal environment was crucial in this cultural development.

Contrabandiers Cave now replaces Blombos Cave, near South Africa’s western coast, as the earliest bone tool assemblage industry so far discovered.  Notably, both sites are near a seacoast.

The researchers hope to expand their work by collaborating with others, to learn more about the prevalence and development of the animal skinning techniques suggested by this study.  The current study was published this week in the open-access online journal iScience.

We end this week in the Southern United States, where researchers at Texas A&M University are working to find, map, and preserve unrecorded graves of African Americans.

As reported in The Guardian, Assistant Professor Andrea Roberts, and PhD candidate Jennifer Blanks, both of Texas A&M University, use crowdsourced data and field research to identify and map burial sites of African Americans in the American South.  They then provide this data to organizations like the Texas Department of Transportation, to aid in planning.  Blanks also keeps a record of black cemeteries and burial sites on social media, using the pseudonym The Cemetery Sista.

Burial sites of American Americans have often gone unrecorded and unmaintained.  Many are found only when disturbed by construction, renovation, or natural disaster.  Extreme weather affecting the Southern United States has given new urgency to work to catalog these forgotten resting places. 

Storms and flooding pose major risks to cemeteries.  In 2016, flooding from one storm in Louisiana damaged more than 800 graves from 74 cemeteries.  About half of the damaged graves were previously unrecorded by the state government.  This event prompted the creation of a Cemetery Response Task Force, which has since addressed many further such events.  During 2020, more than 2600 graves were damaged by hurricanes in Louisiana.  Roberts and Blanks published an article in 2021 showing that African American cemeteries are typically located in areas more at risk from flooding and other hazards. 

In addition to their own research catalog of Afro-American cemeteries, Roberts and Blanks have created a crowdsourced cemetery registry to allow people to catalog cemeteries in their own locales. 

This work is reframing the public perception of cemeteries, which can be rich cultural resources.  For Blanks, the responsibility to safeguard her ancestors’ legacies is a serious one.  Each headstone and grave is evidence of a person, possibly leading to further information on that person’s life and times. 

That basic information can be difficult to access for many African Americans.  The graves of historically enslaved people are known to be scattered across the country, but many are unmarked, and have been left out of state and federal records.  In the past decade alone, the remains of thousands of African American people in the US have been discovered, many tracing back centuries.

Legislation will likely be introduced, this year, in the U.S. Congress, calling for the National Park Service to create a national database of Afro-American cemeteries.  Until then, the work of preserving Afro-American cemeteries, and linking them to the communities they commemorate, is being led mainly by activists and researchers like Roberts and Blanks.

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!