Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, and here are the top news stories that appeared this past week on Archaeologica!  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

An English farmer has found a remarkable Roman mosaic, part of an elaborate villa.  Artifacts from a Bronze Age Cyprus tomb display distant trade connections in every direction.  Footprints made 3.7 million years ago in Tanzania, once thought to be from a bear, now appear more likely to be hominin.  And a new analysis of the ancient human diet around Lake Titicaca surprisingly shows that the staples were not maize and fish.

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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 November 28th through December 4th, 2021.

Our first story of the week brings us to the English city of Rutland, located in the East Midlands, where a farmer’s son stumbled upon an expansive Roman villa complex with one of the most significant mosaic floors ever found in Britain.

As reported by the University of Leicester [LESS-ter] Archaeological Services News, Jim Irvine was taking a walk on his father’s farm with his young family when he noticed bits of pottery, oyster shells, and pieces of orange clay. 

Irvine checked Google Earth to see the area from above, and saw a distinct crop mark in that location.  He contacted the Historic Environment team at Leicestershire County Council, and a site visit by Lead Planning Archaeologist Richard Clark and former County Archaeologist Peter Liddle confirmed that it was a Roman villa site.  

As soon as digging started, they found a well-preserved mosaic featuring a scene with mythological characters, horses and chariots.  The find is a rare one, not just for Roman Britain, but Europe as a whole. 

The mosaic has a series of scenes telling part of a story, shown in panels like a modern graphic novel.  The scene depicts chapters from the end of The Iliad, Homer’s epic tale of the Trojan War, focusing on the duel between the Greek warrior Achilles, and Prince Hector of Troy.  This is the first British mosaic found that depicts this. 

Skilled craft work is apparent in the highly detailed and colorful layout.  It’s possible the floor was sourced from an illustrated manuscript, perhaps even one owned by the villa’s builder.

Layers of sediment and debris covered the mosaic.  Staining indicated that a series of fires were later lit on the floor, burning and damaging the mosaic.  The layering of the rubble infill suggests the building either gradually collapsed or was deliberately demolished.  In the upper layers, two human skeletons showed a later burial within the fill.  Analysis to provide dates for the rubble fill and the burials is still ongoing.

Additional survey showed that the villa complex extended far beyond the building containing the mosaic and included a range of buildings surrounded by an angular, multi-ditched enclosure. 

Evidence so far seems to reflect a later Roman date for the settlement, sometime in the 3rd to 4th century AD. 

There is still much to learn about this site, but its discovery is a highly significant addition to the history of Roman Britain. 

Our next story brings us to the island nation of Cyprus, where archaeologists have uncovered more artifacts from two tombs belonging to an ancient ruling family. 

As reported by the University of Gothenburg, the tombs were originally discovered in 2018 as part of the New Swedish Cyprus Expedition.  The tombs comprised underground chambers containing hundreds of human bones and 500 surrounding artifacts. 

The skeletal material was extremely fragile after 3,000 years in saline soil.

Analysis identified the remains of 155 separate individuals.  The burials and their accompanying funeral objects were in many layers, suggesting that these tombs were used for several generations. 

The many rare and well-crafted burial objects around the bones suggest that these were family tombs for some of the ruling elite in the city.  The burial objects come from a wide array of cultures, with some originating from as far away as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and areas that are today India, Afghanistan, and the Baltic Sea.

The artifacts are of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and gemstones, including jewelry and decorated metal vessels.  Comparison of the jewelry to similar finds in Egypt suggests a date during the time of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, around 1350 BC. 

A cylinder seal made from the mineral hematite, an iron oxide crystal, has a cuneiform inscription from Mesopotamia that mentions three names, Amurru, a god worshipped in Mesopotamia, and two kings, father and son, who ruled around the 18th century BC.  

The variety of finds suggests that this elite family was interconnected with much of the ancient world through an expansive trading network. 

The next stage of research will include DNA analysis on the skeletons to determine familial relations and whether immigrants from other cultures are present in the tomb as well. 

Our third story this week takes us to Laetoli, Tanzania, where a team of archaeologists has re-excavated a set of footprints that may be among the oldest known evidence of upright walking in humans. 

As reported by the Dartmouth University news site, the footprints in question were originally excavated in 1976 at a location called Site A.  At that time, however, they were thought to have been imprinted by a bear, because they were so different in size from footprints at other sites. 

Now, a team of Dartmouth archaeologists have reconsidered that interpretation.  In 2019, the team co-led by Charles Musiba, an associate professor of anthropology at University of Colorado Denver, went to Laetoli to re-excavate and fully clean the five consecutive footprints.

Thanks to modern methods, the team was able to conduct much more thorough analysis than what was possible 50 years ago.  The footprints were measured, photographed and 3D-scanned, as well as compared to the footprints of black bears, chimpanzees, and humans.  

Researchers also partnered with experts from the Kilham Bear Center, a rescue and rehabilitation center for black bears in New Hampshire, to compare similar-sized footprints from bears with the Site A footprints. 

The team concluded that the fossil footprints were made by a hominin, with a large impression for the heel and the big toe.  The Site A footprints also show the mark of a second toe, and the researchers found a size difference between the two digits that is similar to humans and chimpanzees, but not black bears.

Additional evidence comes from the heel shapes and the overall gait shown by the prints.   Bear heels taper, while early human feet are squared off and have a prominent big toe.  

Interestingly, the Site A footprints also record the individual crossing one leg over the other as it walked—a gait called “cross-stepping.  This suggests the individual in question may have been walking in an area with an unlevel surface and were re-establishing his or her balance. 

The Site A prints are different from those of the Australopithecus afarensis species at the nearby sites G and S, suggesting that multiple species of hominin that walked differently, on different shaped feet, were living in the same area at the same time. 

Some other researchers are still skeptical that the evidence definitely disproves the bear theory, but the evidence that these prints came from hominins is now stronger.  The findings show that new analysis of old evidence can lead in new directions. 

Our final story this week takes us high into the Andes, where a team of Berkeley archaeologists have reconstructed the diet of ancient indigenous people living around Lake Titicaca. 

As reported by Phys.org, it has long been assumed that the ancient Andean people, living around Lake Titicaca at the border of what is today Peru and Bolivia, subsisted primarily on corn and fish, as both of these resources appear often in the archaeological record. 

However, new work by the Berkeley team used a cutting-edge scientific process known as compound-specific stable isotope analysis of amino acids to challenge and extend that hypothesis.  The work by research associate and lead author Melanie Miller studied the teeth from burials ranging from 1400 BC to AD 1100.  The burials clearly showed these ancient people survived and thrived here for over 2,500 years. 

The new analysis found that the predominant staple foods were actually roots and tubers, meat from camelids like llama and alpaca, and the nutrient-rich seeds of the quinoa plant.  This trifecta of extremely healthy foods helped these people thrive in a relatively harsh environment where growing crops is extremely difficult. 

The research also contradicts the previous beliefs that fish from the lake were the primary source of protein, or that corn played an everyday role in these people’s diet.  Instead, the team’s findings show that corn was most likely consumed as an alcoholic beverage known as chicha, and reserved for special occasions. 

Lake Titicaca was sacred to both the Tiwanaku and the Inca people.  Quinoa also bore specific significance to these peoples.  The grain is able to grow at high elevations and in arid, salty soil.  Often called a “superfood” today, quinoa contains many nutrients, including essential amino acids, vitamins E and B2, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, and others.

The team thinks a diet high in quinoa helped these people to be resilient and prosper over millennia and in an extreme environment with multiple climatic changes. 

Those findings suggest some lessons for today’s humans, too, in a world facing the strain of climate change and its impacts on agriculture. 

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!