Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to hand off our weekly review of the latest batch of top news stories that appeared on Archaeologica!  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Archaeologists in the West Bank have found what they say is the oldest Hebrew text.  Data from a Greenland lake suggest that Norse farmers faced a serious drought shortly before they abandoned their settlements.  A new field study in Canada appears to show that a land route from Beringia down into lower North America was severely blocked by a wall of ice until late in the Ice Age.  And a study of burials and pigments at Çatalhöyük in south-central Anatolia shows interesting patterns of behavior.

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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 March 20th through the 26th, 2022. 

Our first story this week takes us to the West Bank, where a group of archaeologists claims to have discovered the earliest known example of writing created by the ancient Israelites.

As reported by The Times of Israel, the international team found the “curse tablet” bearing archaic proto-Canaanite script, with some letters coming from hieroglyphs, at Mount Ebal, an important Israelite archaeological site located near the Palestinian city of Nablus in the West Bank.

Based on scans and lead analysis of the artifact, the team dated the curse tablet to the late Bronze Age, before or around 1200 BC.  If this dating is verified, it would be the oldest Hebrew text ever found. 

The majority Hebrew-language text was written by Israelites as an internal legal document warning the person under contract what would happen if he did not fulfill his obligations.  The text warns that the reader will be “cursed, cursed, cursed…” and includes the Tetragrammaton, the 4 letter Hebrew word for god, Y-H-W-H.

If the Late Bronze Age date is correct, it would be the first known use of this Hebrew name of god and push back Israelite literacy by several centuries—showing that the Israelites were literate when they entered the Promised Land, and could have written the Bible as some of the events it documents took place.

This find is unusual in that it is being publicized prior to being published in any peer-reviewed journal.  The team also is not yet releasing clear images and scans of the inscription.

According to team member Gershon Galil of Haifa University, the team felt obligated to share news of the tablet’s existence and their initial findings because of its history-changing potential.

Also challenging the secure dating of the object is the fact that the tablet was not discovered in a carefully excavated stratified context.  Rather, it was found during a 2019 re-examination of earth from a dump pile formed during 1980s excavations at Mount Ebal.  The earth had been dry-sifted then, and in 2019 the team resifted it using a new wet-sifting technique.

An academic, peer-reviewed article is being written and is expected to be published later this year.

Our second story takes us to Greenland, where new research suggests drought may have been a significant factor in the end of Norse settlements.

During the Middle Ages, Norse settlers spread throughout northwestern Europe and at least as far west as Greenland.  According to Icelandic legend, an explorer named Erik the Red sailed west around AD 985 and established two settlements in southern Greenland.  At its peak, about 3000 Norse farmers raised cattle, sheep and goats on the island.

In this new study, Boyang Zhao, a paleo-climatologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his colleagues analyzed mud from the bottom of a lake in southern Greenland for clues about the climate Norse settlers experienced during their time there, between about 985 and 1450.  The lake lies within one of the two settlements near a cluster of stone ruins that were once Norse homes and cow sheds.

As reported by the journal Science, the team previously showed that the biochemistry of bacteria in the lake changes in response to temperature.  For the new study, they extracted the remains of long-dead microbes from the layers of mud on the lakebed, which they dated with radiocarbon.  By tracking changes in bacterial chemistry through time, they reconstructed past temperatures.

Although temperatures fluctuated during the period of Norse occupation, the researchers found no long-term cooling trend.

However, the data on water availability told a different story.  To examine this feature, the team looked at hydrogen isotopes in the remains of plants buried in the lake mud.  When plants lose water to evaporation in dry weather, their leaves become enriched by a heavy hydrogen isotope called deuterium (doo-TER-ee-um).  By measuring the deuterium content of leaf remains from layers in the lake mud, the researchers found that southern Greenland’s climate became progressively drier during the period of Norse habitation.  According to Zhao, the Norse peoples would have been unable to grow enough grass to keep their livestock from starving during periods of drought.

Modern farmers in Greenland also deal with water shortages.  Several severe droughts have struck Greenland in recent years, causing challenges for local farmers.

Medieval Norse and modern farming are quite different, however.  For instance, many modern farmers have drained and fertilized their land to improve productivity, but this leaves the land more vulnerable to the effects of drought.

Social factors may have played a role in the collapse of the Greenland settlements, too.  The Norse undertook long and dangerous voyages to the waters off northwest Greenland where they hunted walruses for ivory to sell on the European market.  Ivory was a source of wealth and power for local elites, but, by taking a chunk of the working population away from food production as conditions deteriorated, walrus hunting may have contributed to the eventual failure of the settlement.  

We should add that, by the late Middle Ages, African elephant ivory had replaced Arctic ivory in the international market, effectively removing ivory as a dependable source of income for the Greenlanders.

Our next story takes us farther west, to northwestern North America, where scientists have gathered new data about the availability of an ice-free land route to the Americas. 

As reported in LiveScience, researchers have two main hypotheses as to how people first migrated to North America.  One suggests that people made this journey when Beringia, the landmass that once connected Asia with North America, now divided by the Bering Strait, was relatively free of ice.  The other notion is that migrants made their way on watercraft along the Pacific coasts of Asia, Beringia and North America.

Previous research suggested that an ice-free corridor between the margins of the great ice sheets that covered North America may have enabled travel from Beringia down to the Great Plains.

Based on stone tools dating back as much as 13,400 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas.  Prior work regarding the age of the ice-free corridor suggested it might have served as the migration route for Clovis people.

However, scientists have more recently unearthed a great deal of evidence of a pre-Clovis presence in North America, with some evidence suggesting human occupation dating back to at least 26,500 years old. 

To address the question of a land route from Beringia into lower North America, researchers sought to pinpoint when the ice-free corridor opened.  They investigated 64 geological samples taken from six locations spanning 745 miles along the zone where the ice-free corridor was thought to have existed.

The scientists examined boulders that glaciers once carried far from their original sources, determining their movements and analyzing how long these rocks were exposed on the surface.   They determine how long the boulders sat on ice-free ground by looking at levels of radioactive elements generated when the rocks were bombarded by high-energy rays from space.

According to study author Jorie Clark of Oregon State University, the new findings suggest that the ice-free corridor did not fully open until about 13,800 years ago, meaning it was not available for the people to walk southward into central North America during the glacial maximum that took place beginning around 22,000 years ago.

After the first wave of migration and once the ice-free corridor opened toward the end of the last Ice Age, other migration waves probably took that more direct route.

The scientists detailed their findings this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Our last story this week takes us to Turkey, where a team from the University of Bern has analyzed artistic and funerary practices at a Neolithic site in south-central Anatolia.

Çatalhöyük (chaa-tal-HOY-yook) is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world, with human occupation dating to 9000 years ago.  This Neolithic settlement, featuring densely packed mudbrick buildings, is sometimes referred to as the world's oldest city, although it wasn’t actually a city as strictly defined.  The houses of Çatalhöyük contain traces of ritual activities including intramural burials with some skeletons bearing traces of colorants and wall paintings.

The association between the use of colorants and symbolic activities is documented among many past human societies.  In Eurasia, the use of pigments in architectural and funerary contexts becomes quite common beginning around the 9th and the 8th millennia BC.  Near-Eastern archaeological sites dating back to the Neolithic period have returned a large body of evidence of complex but poorly understood symbolic activities.  These include secondary funerary treatments, retrieval and circulation of bones, such as skulls, and the use of pigments in both architectural spaces and funerary rites.

As reported by ScienceDaily, a recent study published by an international research team—led by the University of Bern—provides the first analysis of the pigments used in funerary and architectural contexts from this site.

The study shows that red ochre was the most commonly used colorant at Çatalhöyük, present on some adults and children.  Red cinnabar and blue-green colorants were associated with males and females, respectively.  The number of burials in a building appears associated with the number of subsequent layers of architectural paintings.  According to senior author Marco Milella of the University of Bern, this means that when the people of Çatalhöyük buried someone, they also customarily painted the walls of the house. 

The study also discovered that, sometimes, individuals’ bones were retrieved and circulated for a period of time before being buried once again.  The second burial of these bones was also accompanied by wall paintings.

Only some individuals were buried with colorants, or had their bones circulated in the community.  According to Milella, the criteria guiding the selection of these individuals is unknown, but was not related to age or sex.  What is clear, however, is that visual expression, ritual performance and symbolic associations were elements of long-term socio-cultural practices in this Neolithic society.

The study was recently published in the journal 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!