Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, here to pass along 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!

Excavators in Norway came across a statuette of a medieval crowned monarch holding a falcon.  Horned helmets found long ago in a Danish bog, thought by some to be Viking, turn out to be from the much earlier Bronze Age.  A royal palace toilet from Iron Age Jerusalem among other treasures held the eggs of intestinal parasites.  And a list of Maya food plants includes many that are drought-tolerant, so drought seems less likely to have driven the collapse of many Classic Maya cities..

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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 January 2nd through 8th, 2022. 

We begin this week in Norway, where archaeologists excavating in Oslo found a finely carved figurine of a crowned monarch with a falcon perched on his or her arm.

As reported by Sci-News.com, the figurine is about three inches long and fashioned from either bone or antler.  The piece has a flattened oval cross-section and was probably used as a knife handle. 

The carving depicts a person wearing a long robe and a crown.  From under the crown, chin-length hair or head linen covers the sides and back of the head.  

The right arm, wearing a glove, is held across the front of the body, serving as a perch for the falcon.  The bird’s head is bending down toward the falconer’s raised left hand. 

According to Dr. Kjartan Hauglid, an art historian at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, it is difficult to tell if the person is a king or a queen.  Both men and women practiced falconry in the medieval period.

The clothing design is in the style of the mid-13th century, as is the hair or head linen.  Head linen was fashionable for married women at this time.

According to Hauglid, the carving is among Scandinavia’s earliest visual representations of falconry.  Only a few similar finds from northern Europe show falconers, including several depicting women.

According to archaeologist Ragnar Orten Lie, when a falcon sits on the falconer’s arm, it often wears a hood to keep it calm.  Such hoods were first introduced toward the middle of the 13th century.  The falconer could also keep the bird calm by feeding it or stroking it with a feather.

Only the wealthy kept falcons.  The cheapest price for an untrained Norwegian falcon in the 13th century was 240 silver longcross pennies, which is the price of four to six cows or several horses.

The figurine was excavated near Kongsgården, a royal residence used until the start of the 14th century.

The style, date and subject matter coincide with the reign of Haakon [HO-kon] the Fourth Haakonson, King of Norway from 1217 to 1263.  

King Haakon was considered a learned man and brought his court’s manners and habits in line with the model of European court culture.  As part of this, he made significant contributions to falconry.

This suggests a possibility that the dagger handle is meant to portray King Haakon.  

For our next story, we stay in Scandinavia, where new research has securely dated two horned helmets found in a Danish bog to the Bronze Age. 

As reported by LiveScience.com, the two bronze helmets decorated with curved, bull-like horns were found in 1942 and may have inspired the incorrect but popular notion that the Vikings wore bulls’ horns on their helmets. 

Instead, the new date suggests that the helmets were emblems of power for leaders in the Scandinavian Bronze Age, from 1750 to 500 BC, more than 1500 years before the Vikings. 

The helmets were found by a peat cutter near the town of Viksø in eastern Denmark, a few miles northwest of Copenhagen.  The helmets' design, including not just the curved horns, but also raised round eyes and a bird’s beak, suggested an origin in the Nordic Bronze Age, but until now no firm date had been determined.

According to Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, the style had always suggested to experts that the helmets were from the Bronze Age.  They were a symbol of religious and societal power, not war, tracing their style and meaning back to the ancient Mediterranean.

The new research by Vandkilde and her colleagues confirms that the helmets were deposited in the bog in about 900 BC, many centuries before the Vikings or Norse dominated the region.

One of Vandkilde's colleagues spotted a plug of birch tar in the end of one of the horns.  Since the tar is organic, the researchers were able to get a precise date on it.

This solid date allowed for new research by Vandkilde and colleagues comparing the Danish helmets to other Bronze Age horned helmets, which have been found in three other places:  the coast of southwestern Spain, the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, and the eastern Mediterranean.  

As well as their prominent horns, the helmets are adorned with symbols meant to look like the eyes and beak of a bird of prey.  The helmets also once had feathers stuck into the ends of the horns using birch tar for glue, and each helmet also may have had a mane of horsehair.  

The similarities in style across these four widely separated areas shows a connection.   

According to Vandkilde and her team, the symbology relates to sun worship, which may have reached Scandinavia along a sea route from the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic and along the coast of Europe up to the North Sea.  This route was used by the seafaring Phoenicians for trade after about 1000 BC.  

No evidence shows that the Viksø helmets were ever used for war, which in Bronze Age Scandinavia was waged with only rudimentary helmets or no helmets at all. 

Instead, leaders probably wore the helmets as symbols of authority at a time when the region was becoming more politicized and centralized. 

The new research is published in English in the open-access journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift [PRAY-his-TOR-ish-e TSITE-shrift]. 

Our third story takes us to Jerusalem, where a study found intestinal worm eggs under a royal toilet.  The study found four different kinds of intestinal worms that lived in people 2,700 years ago.

As reported by the online science website Phys.org, the study began when excavations by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority found the remains of a stone toilet in the grounds of a magnificent private estate.  

An analysis led by Dr. Dafna Langgut of Tel Aviv University chemically extracted the remains of parasite eggs from the cesspit samples. 

The 2,700-year-old intestinal worm eggs were from four different types of intestinal parasites: roundworm, tapeworm, whipworm, and pinworm.   

The egg remains were discovered as part of a salvage excavation by the Israel Antiquities Authority recently carried out at the Armon Hanatziv Promenade in Jerusalem.

Intestinal worms cause symptoms like abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, and itching.  Some of them are especially dangerous for children and can lead to malnutrition, developmental delays, nervous system damage, and, in extreme cases, even death.  These parasites still exist today, but modern medicine can diagnose and treat them.

In the ancient royal family that used the toilet, these intestinal infestations might have been due to poor sanitary conditions that caused contamination of food and drinking water.  Alternatively, they might have been due to a lack of awareness of what are today common hygienic practices, such as hand washing.  Other possible sources of infection were the use of human feces to fertilize field crops and the consumption of improperly cooked beef or pork.

In the absence of medicine, recovery from intestinal worms was difficult or impossible, and those infected could suffer from the parasites for the rest of their lives. 

According to Ya'akov Billig, the director of the excavation on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the royal estate where the toilet was found dates to the mid-seventh century BC, during the late Iron Age.

Adjacent to the mansion was a spectacular garden with a view of the City of David and the Temple Mount.  It was here that the cesspit was found along with the remains of fruit and ornamental trees.  The toilet was a square limestone slab cut with a hole.

For Dr. Langgut, this was an opportunity to apply a field of research she has been developing called archaeoparasitology: using microscopic remains of intestinal worm eggs to learn about the history of human health, hygiene, lifestyle, disease, epidemics, and sanitary conditions.

According to Langgut and Billig, toilet facilities were a rare luxury in this Iron Age society—a status symbol which only the rich and high-ranking could afford.  The Talmud comments that a wealthy man is one who has a bathroom.

Dr. Langgut is currently conducting additional analyses on the sediments collected from the cesspit in order to learn about the diet and medicinal herbs used in Jerusalem in the late Iron Age.  The research is published in The International Journal of Paleopathology.

For our last story this week, we cross to Mesoamerica, where a new study casts doubt on drought as the driver of the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization. 

A series of droughts undoubtedly wracked the Yucatan Peninsula and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, around the same time as some leading Maya cities were mysteriously depopulated.  Some scholars have suggested that the Maya were so dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans and squash that the droughts led to starvation and collapse.

However, a new analysis by UC Riverside archaeologist Scott Fedick and plant physiologist Louis Santiago shows the Maya had nearly 500 edible plants available to them, many of which are highly drought resistant.

According to Santiago, even in the most extreme drought situation, 59 of those species of edible plants still would have been available to eat.

Some of the toughest plants include cassava roots, hearts of palm and chaya, a shrub domesticated by the Maya and still eaten today, which has leaves high in protein, iron, potassium, and calcium.

The research began when Fedick was unable to find a master list of indigenous Maya food plants.  He decided to compile and publish one himself by drawing on decades of Maya plant knowledge.  The list comprises 497 plants.  

Reflecting on the speculation about drought as the chief cause for the Maya social collapse, Fedick and Santiago decided to examine all 497 plants on the list for drought tolerance. 

According to Fedick, this was challenging because they examined the dietary flora of an entire civilization — not just for one area or plant family but also including annuals and perennials, small herbs and trees, and domesticated and wild species.

The two researchers reached no answer about why ancient Maya society unraveled, but they concluded that agricultural collapse caused by drought is an overly simplistic explanation. 

Even given a series of droughts, maintaining a diversity of resilient crops should have enabled the Maya people to adapt and survive.

The results of this analysis appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

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!