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A lone female buried with four arrowheads in a cemetery where many men were interred 6500 years ago seems to show one way for a Neolithic woman in what is now Normandy to gain high status.  High-tech imaging in an Alabama cave has revealed the largest cave painting in the American Southeast.  Data from a Mesolithic site near Stonehenge shows that the environment was not a closed forest, but open woodland with meadows that would have supported large grazers like aurochs. And a study of shell mounds in North America and Australia demonstrates that Indigenous management of oyster beds allowed both intensive and sustainable harvesting, unlike historical practices.

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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 May 1st through the 7th, 2022. 

Our first story this week takes us to northern France, where the grave of a woman buried with four arrowheads 6,500 years ago suggests one way women attained elite status in the Neolithic.

As reported by livescience.com, researchers investigated nineteen long barrow graves in the Neolithic cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne [fluh-REE-syur-ORN] in Normandy, France, and carried out DNA analysis on fourteen of the individuals entombed.  Long barrows are large earthen mounds, sometimes hundreds of feet long, often surrounded by a wooden post retaining wall.  The wood posts have not survived, but the barrow mounds still produce surprising evidence from the Cerny culture of the Neolithic era.  

One surprise is finding that the occupant of one barrow was a woman, buried with four arrowheads, artifacts typically associated with elite males in the Cerny culture.  These symbolically mark the woman as holding something akin to male status, beyond or in addition to her biological identity. 

According to the study’s lead author Maïté Rivollat, an archaeologist and geneticist at the University of Bordeaux, the woman had to achieve the societal embodiment of the male sex in order to gain access to a burial in the cemetery.

Several other Cerny cemeteries have been found hundreds of miles away in the Paris Basin region to the southeast, but Fleury-sur-Orne is the largest found in Normandy so far.  The two regions shared the common Cerny culture, but with local differences in access to the high-status graves. 

While both men and women were buried in almost equal numbers in the Paris Basin, the cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne was almost exclusively male, so it was remarkable to find a woman in one of the barrows.  

According to Rivollat, isotopic analysis of the chemical elements in her bones may reveal details about her diet and geographical origins.

The Neolithic cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne appeared in aerial photographs taken in the 1960s.   The French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research has led a major excavation there since 2014, spanning more than 60 acres.  The Neolithic barrow graves and monuments include the longest barrow ever discovered in Europe, measuring 1,220 feet long. 

DNA analysis has shown that most of the barrow occupants were unrelated, except for a father and a son buried together. 

One possible explanation for this diversity is that many lineages shared the same burial ground, but only one or two representatives from each lineage were selected for burial in the elite cemetery.

Cerny cemeteries in the Paris Basin showed that those buried with arrows, quivers and bows were always men, with stress markings on their bones from many years of drawing bows. 

The new study hasn’t determined whether the woman buried at the Cerny cemetery at Fleury-sur-Orne was formally regarded as a hunter by her community.  However, her burial at the otherwise male-only cemetery — along with the four arrowheads — suggests that her gender was presented as masculine and that she had been given special funerary treatment after death.

Further investigations hope to uncover more about the social and political dynamics among the Cerny lineages.

The study appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   

Our next story brings us to the southeastern U.S., where Alabama archaeologists have discovered the largest known painting created by Indigenous Americans in the American Southeast.  The thousand-year-old image depicts a rattlesnake, measuring ten feet across the wall and ceiling of the cave.  

The painting made with colored mud may depict a spirit of the underworld.  

As reported by livescience.com, the cave has hundreds of paintings and is considered the richest place for early cave art in the American Southeast.  

To investigate the remarkable art, the team used photogrammetry, a technique that involves taking hundreds of digital images in order to build a virtual 3D model.  Using this method, researchers spotted five previously unknown giant cave paintings, known as glyphs. 

According to study author Jan Simek, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, the methodology allows researchers to create a virtual model of the space that can be manipulated.  

This method is particularly useful for studying the cave glyphs, as the ceiling of the cave is so close to the floor as to limit what a person can see from one position.  

Researchers had never seen the large images because they were unable to stand back far enough.  The virtual model lets them see each large glyph in full. 

The record-setting glyph shows a diamond pattern on the serpent, indicating that it may depict a diamondback rattlesnake, a creature considered sacred by southeastern Indigenous peoples.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, Indigenous people in the Southeast constructed large earthen mounds, used for a variety of purposes, including rituals to bring them closer to the spirits of the upper world.  Meanwhile, caves were viewed as the opposite — routes to the underworld.

According to Simek, the new find is the first large painting from this area, changing the understanding of what the cave holds and how these glyphs compare to other images found in North America.  

Indigenous peoples in the western U.S. made similarly large rock art images, though not all in caves.  

According to a 1999 study published in the journal Southeastern Archaeology, the cave was first discovered in 1998 and remains unnamed, going by the moniker, "19th Unnamed Cave," in order to protect the discoveries.   The cave contains over three miles of underground passages with most paintings discovered in one large chamber. 

The team hopes to further improve understanding of Indigenous American art by utilizing the photogrammetry techniques on the 19th Unnamed Cave. 

The study was published in the journal Antiquity.

Our third story this week takes us to England, where a new study suggests that hunter-gatherers frequented the future site of Stonehenge thousands of years before the monumental stones were erected. 

As reported by livescience.com, researchers have long debated whether the monumental archaeology of Stonehenge was created in a dense uninhabited forested landscape, or whether it was constructed in an already partially open area that was already significant to late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

Earlier research had indicated that before Stonehenge was built, the surrounding landscape included a closed-canopy forest.  However, the new research shows that the area was historically an open woodland where large herbivores such as aurochs, an extinct cattle species, would naturally maintain open meadows through grazing. 

The study suggests that given the site's high use over time, demographic continuity probably connected the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic monument builders.  This counters the idea that the builders of Stonehenge suddenly "discovered" the site for the first time.  Rather, it appears that people had known about the spot for centuries. 

According to English Heritage, the UK trust that manages the site, an early form of Stonehenge appeared about 5,000 years ago, while the famous stone circle that still stands today dates from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, around 2500 BC.  Salisbury Plain, the plateau where Stonehenge sits, was considered a sacred area by ancient people, and holds evidence of older structures dating back as far as 10,500 years ago.

The new study focused on Blick Mead, an early hunter-gatherer spot on the edge of the Stonehenge World Heritage Site.  Previous excavations confirmed that Mesolithic people settled there prior to 8000 BC, and the new research suggests that humans continued to use this area into the Neolithic period, which began around 4000 BC..

According to Samuel Hudson, a researcher at the University of Southampton, a new trench at the site let the team analyze ancient pollen, spores, DNA, and animal remains to learn more about how Mesolithic people used the land between 5200 and 4700 BC

. 

Their analysis revealed that the area used to have damp meadow conditions that sat next to an open grassland with a woodland close by.  Wild animals would have grazed in those open fields, and hunter-gatherer communities that lived there thousands of years prior to Stonehenge's construction would have hunted the grazers. 

The Stonehenge World Heritage Site is internationally recognized for its rich Neolithic and Bronze Age monumental landscape, but little is known of its significance to Mesolithic populations.  However, now it's clear that hunter-gatherers were already attracted to at least part of this landscape.

The study was published April 27 in the online journal PLOS One.

Our final story of the week brings us to communities in both North America and Australia, where a new study shows that ancient humans sustainably ate large quantities of oysters in a way that did not appear to cause oyster populations to collapse. 

As reported in sci-news.com, a new analysis of dozens of archaeological sites in the United States and Australia suggests that oysters were sustainably farmed or sourced on a massive scale by various Indigenous groups.  The mollusks were an abundant source of food despite being harvested intensively – with humans shucking billions of shells over thousands of years

Several significant studies have already shown that Indigenous fisheries systemically receive less attention from scholars and managers than the commercial fisheries that arose under colonialism, starting in the seventeenth century.  These large-scale enterprises decimated many coastal food species, including oysters. 

The new study, led by Dr. Leslie Reeder-Myers and colleagues from Temple University in Philadelphia, looked at historical oyster fisheries in eastern Australia, the Pacific Coast of North America, and the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coast of North America.

The researchers combined regional sea level histories and historical catch records with archaeological records on oyster abundance, geographical distribution of sites containing oysters, and ethnohistoric accounts of harvest, management and farming from Indigenous communities.

Archaeological shell middens, or waste piles, can contain billions of shells.  The largest count for a single site comes from Mound Key, an island in Estero Bay on Florida’s Gulf Coast, with the shells of approximately 18.6 billion oysters harvested by the region’s Calusa tribe.  About 200 miles to the north, in Cedar Key, Florida, a site known as Shell Mound features the remains of an estimated 2.1 billion oysters.

Oysters are important components and indicators of resilient coastal ecosystems, but they also carry cultural and economic significance for people worldwide.  Their ecological and cultural roles became well established when post-glacial sea level rise created and stabilized estuaries around the world.

Despite contributions from conservation, paleobiology and archaeology, oyster management strategies often rely primarily on knowledge and data gathered during the past 200 years or less. This is a period during which many oyster fisheries collapsed under the weight of over-harvest, pollution, competition with non-native species, and habitat loss.

Today, the decline of oyster fisheries is a global phenomenon.  As much as eighty-five percent of the oyster reef area has been lost in just the last 150 years.  In contrast, intensive management by Indigenous peoples were widespread and persisted for 5,000-10,000 years.  

This shows that the oysters were actively stewarded, continuing to play a central cultural and dietary role well into the colonial era.

According to Reeder-Myers, the study’s results contradict the notion that pre-colonial nearshore ecosystems were in ‘pristine’ or ‘wild’ condition.  Instead, the data suggest they were managed resources, successfully stewarded by Indigenous communities. 

The researchers conclude that modern resource management should involve Indigenous communities and Indigenous community members to develop inclusive, fair and successful strategies for harvest, restoration and supervision for the future management of oyster reefs. 

The study appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

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!