Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew, to hand off 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!

A new virtual reality app allows visitors to travel back in time 1000 years at Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, where a new push has begun to make the place a national park.  A huge area of giant stone monoliths in southern Ethiopia just got 1000 years older.  A Roman cemetery in England gave up the remains of a clearly crucified man.  And a study of archaeology and DNA in Tibet appears to show that ancient Denisovans were there first and gave modern humans a gene enabling them to adapt to high altitude..

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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 December 5th through the 11th, 2021.

Our first story this week comes from Illinois, where curators of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site have developed a new way to see this prehistoric site as it looked to the Mississippian culture long ago.

Visitors to Cahokia Mounds can now utilize augmented reality, or AR, to see the Grand Plaza, Palisade and the temple that once stood upon Monk’s Mound as they appeared 1,000 years ago.

As reported by the Capitol News from Illinois, Cahokia Mounds is the remains of the central hub and largest city built by the Mississippian culture of Native Americans.  The site has been recognized as a National Historic Landmark, an Illinois State Historic Site and a World Heritage Site by the United Nations.

Built near the Mississippi River, Cahokia was a trade hub and an agriculture production site.  At its height, Cahokia stretched over six square miles and was home for 10,000 to 20,000 people.  The site holds 120 mounds, all built between AD 900 and 1400.

Visitors can experience the site in augmented reality by downloading the app for their Apple devices at a cost of four ninety-nine, or they can rent an iPad for fifteen dollars at the site.  The app, funded by two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, took five years to develop.

According to Cahokia Mounds site superintendent Lori Belknap, visitors can scan Waypoints, unique images mounted on concrete blocks, to launch the app and begin the experience in the parking lot by Monk’s Mound, the largest mound of the site.

The new augmented reality tour is part of push to place the site into the National Park System.

Illinois’ two U.S. senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, on Tuesday asked President Joe Biden to make Cahokia Mounds a national park.  A 2016 study showed that Cahokia Mounds meets all four criteria required for such a change: significance, suitability, feasibility, and need for National Park Service management.

According to Duckworth and Durbin, the move would protect and share this important archaeological and cultural resource representing the people and landscapes that made up one of America’s first cities.

Next we travel to Ethiopia, where new radiocarbon dating has pushed back the date on a vast area of ancient stone monoliths by 1,000 years.

As reported by Science Daily.com, the new study comes from a Washington State University research team working to learn more about the more than 10,000 monoliths, or stelae (STEE-lay), at the Sakaro Sodo archaeological site in southern Ethiopia's Gedeo zone.  

The new analysis suggests they were likely created during the first century AD.  Previous work estimated the age of the monuments much later, around 1100 AD, but studied only those in the northern part of the zone. 

Under consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Sakaro Sodo and other archaeological sites in the Gedeo zone hold over 10,000 monoliths, making this the highest concentration of megalithic stelae sites in Africa.

The standing stones range widely in size, with the largest over 6 meters tall.  At least 12 of the Gedeo zone sites have 50 or more stelae, and the monuments are often arranged in a line.  Many are undecorated, but some bear intricately wrought faces and other anthropomorphic designs.  Some are geometric, and the greatest number are phallic.

Despite the impressive nature of the archaeological site, little is known about why or how the monoliths were built.  Many are broken or fallen over.

According to Ahenafi Zena, lead author of the study and a former WSU doctoral researcher now at the State Historical Society of North Dakota, this is one of the most understudied megalith sites in the world.  In addition to pushing back the date of the earliest monoliths' construction, the research also used petrographic and electron microprobe analysis to identify where the stelae were quarried.  The megaliths are all volcanic tuff that was probably cut and carved at nearby quarries before being hauled into location and erected.

The research also identified the sources of obsidian artifacts that were recovered from the Gedeo zone stelae sites.  Surprisingly, most of the obsidian the researchers identified at Sakaro Sodo originated some 300 kilometers away in northern Kenya, suggesting long-distance exchange or trade.

Little is known about the people who populated the Sakaro Sodo region of southern Ethiopia two thousand years ago.  They could have been pastoralists or early agriculturalists.

Existing archaeological, ethnographic and living megalithic stelae traditions in the region suggest that the Sakaro Sodo stelae may have been created for one of two purposes: to mark the transfer of power from one generation to the next or to record and commemorate group achievement.

According to Andrew Duff, professor of anthropology at Washington State University, Ethiopian stelae, which are found in many parts of the country, have a wide diversity of functions.  Some of the more recently constructed stelae in the Gedeo zone are burial markers.  The linear placement pattern of the earliest stones at Sakaro Sodo, however, suggests they recorded each generation of leadership.

Our third story takes us to England, where archaeologists investigating a previously unknown Roman settlement in Cambridgeshire [sher] have discovered the remains of a man with a nail through his heel.

According to University of Cambridge osteoarchaeologist Dr Corinne Duhig, this may be the best preserved example of a Roman-era crucifixion ever found.

As reported by the University of Cambridge, the skeleton came to light during the 2017 excavation of five small Roman cemeteries containing 40 adults and five children.  The graves are mainly from the fourth century AD, and the contents have now been fully analyzed.  

Most of the remains show signs of poor health including dental disease, malaria and physical injuries such as fractures.  One male skeleton was found with a 5-centimeter-long iron nail driven through his right heel bone.

Dental analysis suggests that the man died between 25 and 35 years old and was of average height for the time, around 5 foot 7 inches.  Radiocarbon dating techniques indicate he died between AD 130 and 360.

The man was buried surrounded by twelve other iron nails and alongside a wooden board on which his body may have been laid once removed from the cross.

His remains show signs of trauma.  Evidence of infection or inflammation on his legs, including thinning of the shin bones, indicates he was bound or shackled.

The nail penetrating his heel was discovered in the lab only when the bones were washed. 

Although crucifixion was common in the Roman world, osteological evidence for the practice is extremely rare.  According to Duhig, this is partly because nails were not always used.  The victim was often just tied to a crossbar.

Crucifixion was banned for Roman citizens by the emperor Constantine in AD 337.  Slaves could still be crucified, and exceptions were made for certain crimes such as treason.

Artifacts uncovered along with the human remains include enameled brooches, large numbers of coins, decorated pottery and significant quantities of animal bones.

These, along with a large building and formal yard or road surfaces, indicate the presence of a Roman settlement that might have grown up to serve travelers along a major road. 

Full results of the analysis will be published next year.  The first details of the finds are reported in the magazine British Archaeology.

We end the week on the Tibetan Plateau, where new research suggests the early hominids known as Denisovans passed on genes that help modern Tibetans survive high altitudes.

As reported by Science Daily, the new work by archaeologists at the University of California suggests that some of Homo sapiens’ extinct cousins, the Denisovans, reached Tibet about 160,000 years ago.  Published online this month in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, the new study looks at archaeological and genetic evidence to reconstruct the history of the people of the region.

The finds suggest that Denisovans, archaic hominins once dispersed throughout Asia, not only interbred multiple times with early modern humans in the region, but may also have contributed genes that helped modern humans settle and survive at high altitudes.

According to Peiqi Zhang, a UC Davis doctoral student who has participated in excavations in Tibet, and Xinjun Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA who studies Denisovan and other human DNA, the research began with a review of evidence of human dispersal and settlement in the Tibetan Plateau, integrating existing archaeological and genetic discoveries. 

This comprehensive review by the two researchers, who are not related, is a first for the area, especially in its equal emphasis on both archaeological and genetic data. 

The results suggest four major periods of occupation, beginning with Denisovans about 160,000 years ago and followed by three waves of modern humans who arrived around 40,000 years ago, 16,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago.

Denisovans were first identified in 2010 based on DNA extracted from a girl's finger bone found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia.  Her DNA carried the haplotype highly similar to the EPAS1 [E-pass one] gene, which in living populations is known to improve oxygen transport in the blood.  Most modern Tibetans carry a high frequency of the EPAS1 gene.

Genetic studies show that Asians and Oceanians inherited different amounts of Denisovan DNA, meaning that the interbreeding could have happened somewhere in the Asian lowlands and happened more than once.

Zhang and Zhang propose two models of human occupation of the Tibetan Plateau as a framework to test against future discoveries: either intermittent visits before settling there year-round about the end of the ice age, about 9,000 years ago, or continuous occupation beginning 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

In either model, Denisovans could have passed the EPAS1 haplotype to modern humans about 46,000 to 48,000 years ago.

It's unclear when Denisovans went extinct, but some studies suggest it may have been as recent as 20,000 years ago. 

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!  Also, be sure to check out our new subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, at heritagetac.org!

I’m Laura Pettigrew and I’ll see you next week!