Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to hand off the latest batch of 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!

Chinese archaeologists have found 20 more terracotta warriors.  A new study pushes back the date of the first arrival of modern humans in western Europe by at least 10,000 years.  A massive new collection of inscribed pottery shards has come to light in Egypt.  And recent excavations in Peru appear to show that the leaders of the pre-Inca Wari society took advantage of a psychoactive substance to maintain control over their people.

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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 February 6th through 12th, 2022.

Our first story this week comes from livescience.com takes us to northwestern China, where archaeologists excavating near the city of Xi'an [shee – AHN ] unearthed more than 20 life-size terracotta warrior figures, created to protect the first emperor of China in the afterlife.  

The necropolis complex of Emperor Qin Shi Huang  [chin - shi - WHUANG ] is populated by an army of terracotta statues thought to contain over 8,000 sculpted warriors, most located in three pits about a mile northeast of the central mausoleum.  Archaeologists have excavated about 2,000 of these soldiers so far, which were buried with weapons such as crossbows, spears and swords. 

Qin Shi Huang became king of Qin [chin] in 247 BC.  Qin was one of several warring states competing for land and power in ancient China.  Over a period of decades, Qin gradually seized large territories ruled by other states.  In 221 BC, the last rival state was defeated, and Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the first emperor of China. 

According to archaeologists, the army was created to serve Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife, as well as to further elevate the emperor’s status after his death in 210 BC.  

China Global Television Network reported that archaeologists uncovered the newly discovered warriors in what is called Pit One, which contains primarily infantry and chariots.

China Global Television Network also published a picture of the newly excavated soldiers that shows mostly infantry, but at least one of the newly found warriors is a general,  identified from his more elaborate headgear.  The warriors look to be in pieces and will require restoration at the Emperor Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum Site Museum.  According to the Museum, the warriors commonly are found in pieces and reassembled. 

Our next story takes us to southern France, where a new study provides evidence for longer interaction between Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens.

Until now, archaeological evidence had indicated that Neanderthals faded from most of the European continent by about 40,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of modern humans barely 5,000 years earlier.

New research, led by Ludovic Slimak of Toulouse University, outlines the remarkable discovery that the two species of hominin cousins alternated inhabitation of Mandrin [MON-drahn] Cave in the Rhone region of France.

The Mandrin Cave site, first excavated in 1990, includes layers of archaeological remains dating back over 80,000 years.  The cave receives a natural flow of sandy sediment from a steady wind that has helped preserve artifacts for thousands of years. 

As reported by Science Alert.com, Slimak’s team uncovered a layer, known as the "E layer," containing at least 1,500 finely cut flint points.  The E layer is sandwiched between layers where less intricate points and blades have turned up 

Slimak, a specialist in Neanderthal societies, discovered that the E layer points were very small in size, some of them less than a centimeter in length, and were standardized to the nearest millimeter, a pattern not found in Neanderthal tool culture. 

In 2016, Slimak and his team compared their discoveries with a collection of modern human fossils and flint tools from the Ksar Akil [ksahr ah – KILL] site in Lebanon.

The similarity between the crafting techniques found at Ksar Akil and those of the Mandrin cave site convinced Slimak that the E layer tools were the first traces of modern humans found in western Europe.

A comparison between dental remains of a child from the Ksar Akil site and a milk tooth found in the E layer confirmed Slimak’s conclusion when it was determined that the milk tooth belonged to a modern human child. 

After analysis, the researchers determined that, of the nine teeth recovered from the Mandrin cave site, the milk tooth from the E layer was the only modern human tooth found.

Professor Chris Stringer, co-author of the study and a specialist in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, concluded that the fossil molar from a modern human child now provides the earliest known evidence of modern humans in western Europe.

According to Slimak, the modern human population likely came from the east and traveled up the Rhone River Valley from the Mediterranean coast.  After modern humans first moved into the shelter, they and Neanderthals took turns for another 10,000 years.

This suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in the cave or at least within the local region.

Our third story this week takes us to Egypt, where archaeologists discovered a massive collection of inked Egyptian pottery shards used as notepads in the ancient city of Athribis [ahth – RYE -bis]. 

As reported in sciencealert.com, researchers have catalogued more than 18,000 inscribed pieces of pottery known as ostraca [AWS – trah - cah]. 

In ancient Egypt, people used ostraca to detail shopping lists, record trades, copy literature, and teach students how to write and draw.  Remnants of broken jars and other vessels were cheaper to use and more accessible than papyrus.

According to Egyptologist Christian Leitz from the University of Tübingen in Germany, many of the ostraca found at the Athribis archaeological site appear to be remnants from an ancient school.  

The finds include lists of months, numbers, arithmetic problems, and grammar exercises.  More than a hundred of the ostraca found at Athribis are covered in repetitive writing exercises, with the same characters written repeatedly on the front and the back.

Most of the notes uncovered are written in Demotic, a centuries-old administrative script still in use during the reign of Ptolemy the Twelfth, who ruled between 81 and 51 BC.  Even though Demotic was the more popular script of this time, a simplified form of hieroglyphics was being taught to children.

During this time, the city of Athribis was the leading city of an Egyptian district located along the Nile River north of Cairo.  

The diverse languages seen on the ostraca at Athribis include hieroglyphics, Greek, Arabic, and Coptic, a hint at the city's turbulent and cosmopolitan history.

The Coptic alphabet, for example, is a mix of Greek and Egyptian scripts. It is often associated with the rise of Christianity and Roman influence in Egypt.  The ostraca show that references to ancient Egyptian gods began to decline as Christianity grew in influence. 

Other signs of Roman influence can be gathered from the inked shards of pottery.  After the Ptolemaic dynasty fell in the first century BC, the scripts begin to reference a series of Roman emperors, including Nero, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, and Hadrian.

In the early 1900s, archaeologists uncovered numerous shards of writing at the ancient village of Deir el-Medina, slightly farther down the Nile River.  However, those ancient texts were mostly notes about local medicine and medical practices. 

The ostraca of Athribis, on the other hand, can tell us more about what daily life was like at this time in ancient Egypt.

Our last story this week takes us to the Quilcapampa [ quil- KAH –  pam – PAH ] site, in southern Peru, where archeologists believe Wari [WAHR – ee] leaders 1,200 years ago may have used their access to a psychoactive substance, vilca, to help keep their people loyal. 

According to a study published in the journal Antiquity and reported by livescience.com, recent excavations at the center of Quilcapampa, revealed 16 vilca seeds alongside the remains of a drink made from fermented fruit that researchers refer to as chicha de molle.  Archaeologists found remains of the seeds and fermented drink in an area of the site that contains buildings likely used for feasts and celebrations. 

The people who lived at Quilcapampa were part of the Wari culture that thrived between AD 500 and 1000.  They did not use a writing system, and no known written records describe them.  While images depicting vilca have turned up at other Wari sites, this is the first time actual vilca seeds have been found at a Wari site. 

According to researchers, vilca is a psychoactive substance that can induce hallucinations.  When it is served with chicha de molle, vilca can be even more potent than on its own, as compounds in the fermented drink heighten the vilca’s psychotropic effects.

Study co-author Justin Jennings, a curator of New World Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum, concluded that by mixing vilca and the drink, the Wari people would have experienced hallucinations that they might have considered a spiritual experience.  He noted that, at other Wari sites, drawings depicting vilca are associated with the gods.

Researchers from the study remarked that getting the vilca seeds would have been challenging for those living at Quilcapampa.  Long distance trade networks would have been required to bring them to the site from their native tropical woodlands near the eastern edges of the Andes mountains. 

According to study co-author Matthew Biwer of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, the leaders of the community were able to access vilca and likely used this ability to help earn the loyalty of members of the community. 

Wari leaders hosted  large feasts for the locals, where they would ingest the mixture and then become indebted to the hosts for the experience.  Sharing a psychotropic experience was an important part of creating social bonds between Wari hosts and guests.  This practice also ensured that the privileged position of Wari leaders within the social hierarchy remained intact as the providers of the hallucinogen.

The next step in the research is to conduct stable isotope analysis to determine the precise source of the vilca, allowing researchers to better understand the trade routes used to bring it to the site.  The analysis measures the ratio of different isotopes in the seeds.  If they can find locations that have plants with similar isotope ratios, they can determine where they likely originated. 

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!