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A new study has identified many more burial sites of kings and queens from the time of King Arthur in Britain.  Game dice have turned up at an early site in India.  A statistical study claims to call into question pre-Clovis sites in temperate North America, so here we go again!.  And an ancient Chinese text apparently contains the earliest recorded reference to the aurora borealis..

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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 from Archaeologica for the week of April 17th through the 23rd, 2022.

Our first story this week comes from England, where a new study of early medieval burial sites points to features that may identify many of them as royal tombs. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, this brings new clues to understanding a poorly documented early medieval period in Britain—beginning in AD 410, and ending with the Norman conquest of England in 1066.  The era is well known as the time of King Arthur. 

According to legend, King Arthur rose to power in the fifth or sixth century AD, calming the strife after the end of Roman rule to usher in a golden era known as Camelot.  In reality, Arthur was probably either a folkloric legend, or a composite of several historic kings.  But hundreds of real-life kings and queens did wield power in England and Wales during the early medieval era, and archaeologist Ken Dark of the University of Navarra in Spain says he’s identified the long-overlooked tombs of up to 65 of them.

Dark’s analysis points to 20 probable royal burial sites, each housing up to five graves, in western England and Wales.  Most appear to date to between the fifth and sixth centuries.

At that time, Great Britain was home to a patchwork collection of kingdoms of varying strength and size.  Indigenous Celtic rulers controlled the western and northern parts of the island, while the south and east had been taken over by Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon, invaders.

Previous research may have discounted the tombs because they are simply made and contain little or no grave goods.  They do stand out from other early medieval Celtic graves in one key way, however.  Most are in rectangular or square enclosures, and were probably once surrounded by fences and gates.

Dark proposes that this layout is the key to recognizing royal graves.  Some variation exists in size and the number of burials.  Only two other burial sites likely to have been used for royal graves are known, in Wales and near Cornwall, England.  These graves represent less than one percent of the thousands of early medieval graves known.  

The enclosed grave tradition was borrowed from late Roman burial practices.  According to Dark, Britain has enclosed graves, but not Ireland, because Britain was part of the Roman Empire, and Ireland wasn’t.

The proposed early medieval Celtic royal graves are strikingly different from Anglo-Saxon graves of the period such as the Sutton Hoo ship burial.  Anglo-Saxon rulers held both political and religious importance and were buried in elaborate tombs with great quantities of ornate jewelry and furnishings.  To the Christian Celts and the Irish, such ostentatious displays were considered unacceptably pagan.

The new study appears in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

Our next story this week brings us to the trading town of Vadnagar in the state of Gujarat in India, where archaeologists have found a group of playing dice used for various games and rituals.

As reported in The Times of India, a team from the Archaeological Survey of India was carrying out an excavation in the once-affluent trading city when they discovered the dice.  The dice were made from materials such as ivory, terracotta, bone, and stone and were primarily cube or cuboid shaped. 

The majority of the longer cuboids have circular markings on four sides, while the cubed dice exhibited markings on six sides.

Sixty-four dice were discovered, most of them were quite old, dating between the 4th and the 10th century.  Fewer of the dice were much newer, dating between the 17th and t 19th century. 

One thousand years ago, board games were a beloved pastime by people in the region—pointing to a time of relative financial and military stability that allowed time for recreation.  Researchers also point out that some of the dice may have been used for spiritual purposes, as offerings of such dice were common to appease various deities in temples and as part of religious ceremonies.

The majority of the dice are in excellent condition with limited wear, suggesting they may have been used on cloth, silk or sand.

The full study was published recently in Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology.

Our third story adds a new line of argument to a very old debate over when humans first migrated into the Western Hemisphere. 

As reported by Phys.org, a team of archaeologists and geoarchaeologists, led by Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming, deployed a new statistical technique they developed to assess the integrity of buried deposits in reported early sites in the Americas.  Their conclusion is likely to be controversial.  They suggest that many of the sites claimed to be evidence of arrival long before the end of the last Ice Age are actually very mixed, so that artifacts from later times were mixed into earlier deposits. 

Almost nobody questions that human groups were in North America by 13,000 years ago, also known as the Clovis period.  Debates range, however, over the exact date of arrival to the continent.  

The new study focused on the stratigraphic integrity of early North American sites.  In any site, artifacts excavated from lower stratigraphic, or rock, layers are typically thought to show earlier periods of occupation, but may actually be the result of mixing between the soil strata.  This weakens the claim that the artifacts are from an earlier date. 

To examine whether possible pre-Clovis sites have this kind of vertical mixing between layers, Surovell’s team began by modeling the stratigraphic mixing of key sites to create a signature of stratigraphic integrity.  The modeling showed what the result of different degrees of artifact mixing would look like. 

They next applied this new statistical analysis to sites dated to before and after 13,000 years ago, north and south of where the continental ice sheets were.  

Their results showed five sites with multiple components in the Beringian land bridge area, where early groups crossed from Siberia into northern North American, have excellent stratigraphic integrity.  These sites include pre-Clovis early components dating between 13,000 and 14,200 years ago.  

By contrast, in three sites south of the ice sheets, high levels of stratigraphic integrity do not appear until the Clovis period. 

These results provide support for a relatively late date of human arrival in the Americas.  

According to Surovell, if humans managed to breach the continental ice sheets significantly before 13,000 years ago, there should be clear evidence for it than the study and other evidence suggest.  

The team concluded that the supposed pre-Clovis layers in southern sites may simply be the result of stratigraphic mixing, not earlier occupation.  

The team’s research supports the hypothesis that the first human arrival to the New World occurred by at least 14,200 years ago in Beringia and by approximately 13,000 years ago in the temperate latitudes of North America, but does not support claims for human presence before those dates.

The study is sure to stimulate further discussion, to put it mildly, especially since the results are based on a limited number of sites, and it entirely ignores sites in South America as well as the Paisley Caves in Oregon, where human coprolites have been dated between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago.. It also makes no reference to the human footprints in New Mexico that have been dated to 23,000 years ago.

The study is published in the open-access journal PLOS One.

We end the week in China, where a 3,000 year old document may contain the world’s oldest description of the aurora borealis.

As reported by the science website IFLScience.com, the description comes from the Bamboo Annals, a text that recounts Chinese history up to 299 BC.   

If the interpretation of the text is correct, this would be the earliest account with a known date.  Such a discovery could have both scientific and historical value. 

The Bamboo Annals tell the story of China's development from early legends to 299 BC.  One passage describes an object of great interest in the north sky.

According to Marinus van der Sluijs, previously of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Dr. Hisashi Hayakawa of Nagoya University, the passage describes a sighting of the aurora borealis.  More importantly, they believe they can identify the place and two possible dates at which it was observed.

Van der Sluijs and Hayakawa claim the aurora occurred in either 977 or 957 BC, based on references to it being seen in either the nineteenth year or last year of the reign of King Zhāo.  If they're right, this is the oldest account of auroral activity by about 300 years.

The two scholars also believe they can identify the latitude and longitude of the observation, which is too far from the North Pole to be anything other than an aurora caused by an intense solar flare.  It would have been very rare, and thus thought worthy of recording.

Solar storms interacting with the atmosphere produce distinctive radioactive isotopes that can be identified in sediments.  Such studies indicate a major lull in solar activity between 810 and 720 BC, known as the Grand Minimum.  Descriptions of auroras start appearing not long after in Assyrian and Babylonian texts, as well as possibly in the Hebrew Bible.

If Van der Sluijs and Hayakawa are right, the Bamboo Annals provides the only datable occurrence from the time before the Grand Minimum period.

The account in the Bamboo Annals has been interpreted before as referring to a comet, not an aurora.  Identification has been confused because there are two versions of the Annals, one calling it a “fuzzy star” and the other a “five-colored light” in the northern sky.  Van der Sluijs and Hayakawa consider the latter reference more authentic, as it has similarities to the ways other writers described bright auroras in latitudes where they are rare.

Van der Sluijs previously published a paper on rock art images proposed to represent depictions of auroras.  However, while these almost certainly predate the Bamboo Annals, dating them precisely is difficult or impossible, even if the interpretation is correct.

The new study was published in Advances in Space Research.

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!