Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to tell you about 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!

Pottery shards are demonstrating that Indigenous Australians three thousand years ago engaged in long-distance trade with Austronesian people far to the north.   Strong physical evidence shows that people of the Hopewell Culture in the Ohio River Valley experienced a cosmic catastrophe.  Human vertebrae threaded onto sticks in Peru appear to be a reaction by native people to the violation of their dead by Spanish Conquistadors.  And a computer simulation shows that people 170,000 years ago were pretty smart about where to locate the hearth in their cave.

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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 30th through February 5th, 2022.

Our first story this week comes from Australia, where artifacts from an island off the Queensland coast show that Indigenous Australian sea-voyagers regularly crossed long distances in a vast trade network, at least three thousand years earlier than previously thought.  

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, western science knew that traders from the islands of Indonesia were sailing south to Australia several hundred years ago.  However, researchers did not realize the extent of which Indigenous Australians were active in far-reaching trade.  

The archaeological record shows that people from mainland Australia were building outrigger canoes up to 20 meters long, loading them up with valuable goods, and sailing thousands of kilometers to trade in distant lands.  

This corrects a common misperception that Australia’s culture evolved in isolation until Europeans arrived.

According to Walmbaar [ WUHLM – bar] Aboriginal Corporation director, Kenneth McLean, a Dingaal [ DING – all ] Traditional Owner of Jiigurru [ JEE – gu – ru ], also called Lizard Island, artifacts discovered there demonstrate what Indigenous peoples have long known, that Indigenous Australians had established trade links with islands to the north, west and east.

The long voyages started 3500 years ago when the Lapita [ la – PEE -tah ] people, who colonized the western Pacific, came down from the Philippines or eastern Indonesia.  They moved south to the Bismarck Archipelago, located north of New Guinea, and migrated eastwards to the Solomon Islands, Fiji, New Caledonia  and Vanuatu [ vaa – noo – AA – too] .

According to archaeologist Sean Ulm, the deputy director at the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, the Lapita made distinctive pottery that shows this migration across Oceania.

However, the consensus was that Lapita migration moved only  eastwards across the Pacific.  It was not until 2008 that archaeologists uncovered the evidence that these seafaring people sailed west along the far southern New Guinea coastline as well. 

During a dig west of Port Moresby on the southern New Guinean coast, they found Lapita pottery that was radiocarbon dated at 2800 years old.  Other finds on islands in the Torres Strait, which separates New Guinea from northeastern Australia, showed the Lapita migration spread throughout the area. 

According to archaeologist Ian McNiven, from the Center of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, the first pottery finds on Lizard Island came from a meter down, relatively deep in archaeological terms.  

The pottery appears to have been traded across the Torres Strait from New Guinea 3000 years ago.  However, some was produced locally, as the minerals in the pottery are local to Lizard Island.  Lizard Island is 600 kilometers down the Queensland coast from the Torres Strait, yet the pottery is as old as artifacts from the Torres Strait Islands.  This suggests it was not just the pottery, but also the knowledge of how to make it, that was being passed on to locals.  

By the time of early European voyages, trade across communities in the region was extensive.  The complex network passed along bamboo smoking pipes, canoes, spears and necklaces, as well as language and cultural practices.  

According to Professor Ulm, this evidence for two-way trade, from New Guinea to Australia and vice-versa, overturns false stereotypes about Aboriginal peoples living in isolation, or at best being the passive recipients of trade goods from other lands.

Our next story takes us to the Ohio River Valley in North America, where archaeologists have found evidence that a massive comet burst while closely above the lands of the Hopewell people sometime between AD 252 and 383.  While the people and culture survived the cataclysm, it may have contributed to their cultural decline. 

As reported by the website Sci-News.com, the evidence includes meteorites, microscopic soot particles, iridium and platinum anomalies, and heavily burned surfaces at eleven archaeological sites of the Hopewell culture in three states stretching across the Ohio River Valley.  

According to lead researcher Professor Kenneth Tankersley, of the University of Cincinnati, world data are beginning to show that these natural catastrophes are more common than previously thought.  

One event occurred about 12,000 years ago at the beginning of the Holocene. Two recently discovered cosmic impacts occurred in Argentina 6,000 and 3,000 years ago, and another one in Jordan 3,700 years ago.

In early China, from AD 220 to 589, astronomers documented 69 near-Earth comets.

In the western hemisphere, Hopewell archaeological sites in the Ohio River Valley contain an unusually high concentration and diversity of meteorites when compared to all other cultural periods.  They include iron meteorites, stony meteorites and stony-iron meteorites.

In their new research, Professor Tankersley’s team used radiocarbon and typological dating to determine the timing of the catastrophic explosion.

Twenty-nine radiocarbon dates establish that the event occurred between AD 252 and 383, the same time period that the Chinese astronomers were recording over 60 near-Earth comets.

The meteorite fragments were identified from the telltale concentrations of iridium and platinum they contained.  A charcoal layer from the same time frame suggests that the area was exposed to fire and extreme heat.

The Hopewell people collected the meteorites and forged malleable metal from them into flat sheets used in jewelry and musical instruments.  They constructed a comet-shaped mound near the epicenter of the airburst at a Hopewell site called the Milford Earthworks.  Beyond the physical and cultural material evidence, the Hopewell and cultures that came after left clues behind in their oral histories as well. 

According to Professor Tankersley, who is Native American, various Algonquin and Iroquoian tribes, descendants of the Hopewell, spoke of a calamity that aligns with the findings.

The Miami people speak of a horned serpent that flew across the sky and dropped rocks onto the land before plummeting into the river.  A comet going through the air would look like a large snake.

The Shawnee people refer to a “sky panther” that had the power to tear down forests.

The Ottawa people speak of a day when the sun fell from the sky.  When a comet hits the thermosphere, it explodes like a nuclear bomb.

The Wyandot [ WAI - uhn - daat ] recounts a dark cloud that rolled across the sky and was destroyed by a fiery dart.

The findings were published this week in the journal, Scientific Reports. 

Our third story takes us to Peru, where archaeologists investigating tombs in the Chincha [ CHIN – chuh ] Valley have found hundreds of sticks threaded with human vertebrae. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the archaeologists believe this may have been a response to tomb destruction by Europeans who mounted campaigns to destroy Andean religious practices in the 16th century.  In this interpretation, the strings of vertebrae were an effort to reassemble ancestral skeletons.

Located near the coast of southwest Peru, the Chincha Valley was a fertile oasis where the Chincha Kingdom flourished from around AD 1000 to 1400.  The Chincha were a wealthy, structured society with merchants, seafarers, farmers, and a wealthy distinguished oracle. 

In the 15th century, they were incorporated into the Inca Empire.  However, due to their wealth, prominence and cordial relationships with Incan leaders, the Chincha retained much of their political and economic autonomy and their traditional leadership

According to the lead author of the new study, Jacob Bongers, a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia in England, he became intrigued by the bone arrangements while on a 2012 field expedition led by UCLA. 

Working in the less-studied part of the middle valley, they found hundreds of stone burial chambers known as Chullpas [ CHOOL – pahs ].  Inside some of these tombs, they discovered several reed posts oddly threaded with human vertebrae.

Over the next few years, researchers documented 192 examples of vertebrae on sticks and sometimes found alongside other bones and artifacts like textile bundles. 

The bones come from both adults and children and appear to have been taken from already decomposed remains.  The vertebrae don’t show evidence of cut marks and many of them are strung up out of order.  

According to Bongers, farmers in the region have long seen the bones on sticks and the arrangements were not the work of recent looters or vandals. 

Radiocarbon dates showed the vertebrae themselves are from AD 1520 to 1550.  The reeds or sticks they are threaded on, meanwhile, date from about 1550 to 1590, which coincides with the time period when the Spanish arrived in Chincha. 

To Bongers and his colleagues, this timeline points to a tentative explanation.  The local people collected vertebrae from previously buried, disjointed human remains and put them on reeds as a deliberate mortuary practice, developed perhaps in response to European destruction of the tombs.

The Spanish conquest devastated the Chinchas, who went from 30,000 heads of household in 1533 to only 979 within 50 years.  Harsh political and religious suppression, including the ransacking of graves, intensified famine and disease.  

The destruction also stemmed from a desire to end the very close relationship that Andean peoples had with their cemeteries and mummies.  Andean societies had a very tangible relationship with the dead.  

Mummification was a tradition that stretched back thousands of years, predating even the Egyptian mummification culture.   By the time of the Inca Empire, the preserved bodies of family members were venerated, given offerings and sometimes taken out of their chullpas to be paraded during festivals.  

According to Bongers, the wholeness of the dead body may have represented social order and memory.

The Europeans, however, viewed this veneration of the dead as offensive to their Christian practices.  In Peru, the Spanish led systematic campaigns to destroy objects of Indigenous worship.

This study appears in the current issue of Antiquity.

We end this week with a groundbreaking study that shows that humans had a good capacity for problem-solving as early as 170,000 years ago.  The study, carried out at Tel Aviv University, involves a software-based smoke dispersal simulation model that researchers developed and applied to a known prehistoric site.  

The results of the simulations show that the early humans who occupied a cave in southern France placed their hearth at the optimal location to allow the best use of the fire for their needs, while exposing them to the least amount of smoke.

According to Ph.D. student, Yafit Kedar, who is leading the study, multilayered hearths have turned up in many caves, indicating that fires had been lit at the same spot over many years. 

In a previous study, a software-based model of air circulation in caves and a simulator of smoke dispersal in a closed space indicated that the ideal location for minimal smoke exposure was at the back of the cave.  

In the new study the researchers applied their smoke dispersal model to an extensively studied prehistoric site, the Lazaret Cave in southeastern France, inhabited by early humans from 170 to 150 thousand years ago. 

The previous model suggested that placement of the hearth at the back of the cave would reduce smoke density and allow it to circulate out of the cave along the ceiling.  However, the archaeological hearth was located at the center of the cave.  

The new model sought to understand why the occupants had chosen this spot, and whether smoke dispersal was part of their thinking in how the cave was divided into activity areas.

To answer these questions, the researchers performed a range of smoke dispersal simulations for 16 hypothetical hearth locations inside the cave.  For each hypothetical hearth, they analyzed smoke density throughout the cave.

To understand the health implications of smoke exposure, they compared measurements with the average smoke exposure recommendations of the World Health Organization.  

They mapped four activity zones in the cave for each hearth: a red zone which is unusable due to high smoke density; a yellow area that can be occupied for several minutes; a green area usable for several hours or days; and a blue area which is essentially smoke-free.

According to the study co-authors, Professor Ran Barkai and Dr. Gil Kedar, of Tel Aviv University, the average smoke density was minimal when the hearth was at the back of the cave.  However, the area with low smoke density, most suitable for prolonged activity, is relatively distant from the hearth itself.

Early humans needed a balance: a hearth close enough to work, cook, eat, sleep, gather, and warm themselves, but one that also avoided dangerous smoke exposure.

The simulation identified a 25 square meter area in the cave which would be optimal for locating the hearth in order to utilize its benefits while avoiding too much smoke.  It turns out this is exactly where the early humans placed their hearth. 

The results suggest that those early human inhabitants had the ingenuity to figure out how to place the hearth for optimal warmth while avoiding the health damage caused by smoke exposure.  The study also adds a new tool for helping archaeologists working in new cave sites to look for hearths and activity areas at their optimal locations.

The paper appeared in Scientific Reports.

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!