Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, and this is our weekly review of the 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!

A huge earthquake and tsunami along the northern Chilean coast four millennia ago apparently depopulated the area for centuries.  Massive stone jars in northeastern India might relate to an ancient funerary custom.  Mural fragments from a site in Guatemala show the earliest known evidence of the Maya calendar.  And a team of researchers in Greece is proposing a specific start date for the ancient Greek device known as the Antikythera Mechanism..

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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 April 10th through the 16th, 2022.

Our first story this week takes us to northern Chile, where a recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of the Atacama Desert around 3800 years ago. 

As reported by the website Ars Technica, from 5,700 to 4,000 years ago, people along the coast lived in small stone houses built upon the village's massive shell midden.  Houses opened onto inner patios.  The dead were buried beneath the house floors. 

In one such village, now called Zapatero, a team from the University of Chile excavated several ruined houses and found layers of sand and ripped-up ground left behind by an ancient tsunami, along with channels gouged out by the tsunami's strong, sudden current.  Dates on shells showed that many of the shells were actually older than the ones in undisturbed layers underneath, evidence that something had churned up the ground and ripped these older shells from their resting places to deposit them on the surface.

According to archaeologist Diego Salazar, the project leader, the same story is written in ruins and sediment at other archaeological sites along several hundred kilometers of the Atacama coastline.  Geological evidence of an earthquake and tsunami that struck the region is clear in layers of sandy, shell-laden seafloor sediment lifted several meters above sea level.  Radiocarbon dates on shells found in these uplifted chunks of ancient coastline and in the layers just above and below the tsunami deposits narrow down the date of the disaster to about 3,800 years ago.

The natural disaster was epic in scale: a rupture along 1,000 kilometers of the fault system where the Nazca Plate slowly slides under the South American Plate.  The estimated magnitude 9.5 earthquake would have shoved parts of the coastline upward and triggered a tsunami 19 to 20 meters high along a huge stretch of the Chilean coast.

People left the coast after the disaster.  In one 100-kilometer stretch of coastline near Taltal, an area of northern Chile rich in archaeological sites, a survey revealed 65 percent fewer settlements afterwards.

According to Salazar and his colleagues, the ancient disaster is important not just to our understanding of the past, but also our plans for the future.  Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that go back just a few centuries, but data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to risk planners.

Our second story takes us to northeastern India, where archaeologists have found hundreds of large ancient stone jars that may have been used in funeral ceremonies.  The jars are similar to some previously found in Laos.

As reported by LiveScience, both the jars in India and the jars in Laos are about 2,400 years old and are thought to have been used in human burials, although no human remains have yet been found in the vessels just discovered.

According to Tilok Thakuria of North Eastern Hill University in India's Meghalaya state, the prehistoric people who crafted the stone jars could have traveled between northern Laos and northeastern India, but no evidence shows that the same cultural group occupied both areas.

British archaeologists found the first of the jars in 1928.  However, the region is so remote that no further work was done there until 2014, when Thakuria and archaeologist Tiatoshi Jamir from Nagaland University started investigating.  They have now found 11 jar sites and more than 700 jars.

Some of the jar sites are heavily overgrown by forest, and some of the jars are almost completely buried. 

According to Thakuria, many of the jars are tall and cylindrical, like the 10-foot-tall stone jars in the Plain of Jars in Laos, but others are conical at the bottom or have the shape of two joined cones.  Each jar has been laboriously carved from local sandstone and is large enough to hold the bones from a human body or a body in a crouched position. 

Archaeologists think the jars were used for burying the dead, so that their bones could be found later, or to bury the bones of the dead after the flesh decayed away or after cremation.

If researchers do find jars containing human remains, they might be able to analyze their DNA to learn more about the people who made and used the jars.  While jar burials are not used in the region today, and none of the peoples who live there now claim the jars are relics of their ancestors, DNA analysis might identify descendants of the jar-makers.

The research was published online in the journal Asian Archaeology.

Our next story takes us to Guatemala, where archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of a Maya calendar on record, in the form of mural fragments. 

As reported by LiveScience, radiocarbon dating places the fragments between 300 and 200 BC.  

According to study author David Stuart, the Schele [SHEE-lee] Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, this calendar was used by many later Mesoamerican cultures, such as the Aztec, and is still used by modern Maya as a way of connecting to their ideas of fate and how people relate to the world around them.  

The mural fragments come from the archaeological site of San Bartolo, northeast of the ancient Maya city of Tikal.  Stuart was part of the team that discovered San Bartolo in 2001. 

The murals were in a massive complex known as Las Pinturas, which the Maya built over hundreds of years, altering and enlarging it every so often.

Organic material within the layer where the mural fragments were discovered allowed a radiocarbon date associated with the mural.

The team found about 7,000 fragments from various murals, and radiocarbon dated 11 of them, discovered between 2002 and 2012.  These included two pieces that formed a calendar notation known as "7 deer," because it includes an image of a deer under the Maya symbol for the number seven.

According to Stuart, the 7-deer notation is from the sacred divination calendar, or Tzolk’in, which was one of four Maya calendars.  The sacred divination calendar has 260 days, which don't make up a year, instead being more comparable to the days of a week.  Today the Tzolk'in calendar is used for soothsaying and ceremonial record keeping.

The other Maya calendars are the Haab', a solar calendar that lasts 365 days but doesn't account for a leap year; a lunar calendar; and the Long Count calendar, which tracks major time cycles.

Other calendrical notations have turned up that might be older than the new 7-deer mural fragment, but these are carved into stone, and thus cannot be directly dated.

The study was published online in the journal Science Advances.

We end the week in Greece with a different sort of calendar, the Antikythera Mechanism, often called the world's first computer.

Discovered by divers in a Roman-era shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, the elaborate ancient computer, which looks like a shoebox-size contraption with gears and dials that have numerous tiny inscriptions written on them, could predict eclipses and determine when various athletic games took place, among other functions.  

Over the years, researchers have painstakingly pieced together the many fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism to figure out how it was created and how it would have been used.  Now a team of scientists claims its calculations were all based on a starting date of December 22nd, 178 BC.

As reported by LiveScience, the researchers specify a number of reasons for this date, which is the earliest date on which all calculations made on the mechanism are based.

First, that was the date of a solar eclipse, and the following day, December 23, was the winter solstice, an important day for many ancient peoples.  The Isia festival, honoring the Egyptian goddess Isis, was celebrated in both Egypt and Greece at this time.  Additionally, the phases of the moon changed on December 22nd of that year. 

According to Aristeidis Voulgaris, the lead author of the paper and team leader of the Functional Reconstruction of Antikythera Mechanism (FRAME) Project, this combination of events created a very rare coincidence that would make for a memorable starting day.

The initiation date matters because all calculations using the mechanism would be based on that date.  The starting date has been one of the enduring mysteries surrounding the mechanical marvel.  Previous research has succeeded in deciphering many of the inscriptions and understanding what many of the gears and dials were used for.  Two papers published in 2014 proposed that the starting date was in 204 BC.  

The new proposal that the starting date was 178 BC has its critics.  According to Alexander Jones, a professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, this start date would put Kraneios, a season inscribed on the Antikythera Mechanism that is associated with wine, in the month of February, which contradicts other ancient evidence. 

The mystery may thus inevitably continue.  

The new research appears online on the preprint database arXiv. [ARR-kive].

That wraps up the news for this week!

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