Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Next up is your weekly batch 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!

The falling level of an Iraqi reservoir has exposed the remains of a once great Bronze Age city.  Excavators in Israel have exposed and identified a rare Roman military amphitheater.  Investigation of a Spanish cave shows a 65,000-year-long record of art on the cave walls, beginning with art applied by Neandertals. And a leaked draft of a report by Harvard University details the huge collection of human remains there historically associated with slavery and colonialism, for which the university last year offered an apology.

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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 29th through June 4th, 2022

We begin this week in northern Iraq, where a team of German and Kurdish archaeologists studied a 3400-year-old city of the Mitanni [mi-TAHN-nee] Empire, long buried under the waters of a reservoir.  The site came to light when Iraq began drawing down the Mosul Reservoir, on the Tigris River, during a drought that has been devastating the region.  As the water fell in December of 2021, the ancient city emerged.  The city was part of the Mitanni Empire, which ruled what is now northern Syria, southeastern Anatolia, and northern Mesopotamia for several centuries before the rise of Assyria.

The city’s extensive remains include a palace and several large buildings, leading archaeologists to believe it is the ancient Mitanni city called Zakhiku [ zah – KHI - koo ].   Zakhiku was an important trading center of the Mitanni Empire when it controlled this region from 1550 to 1350 BC. 

As reported by LiveScience.com, the Bronze Age city was submerged in the 1980s after construction of the Mosul Dam, before archaeologists had a chance to excavate it.  

Researchers can now investigate Zakhiku only during droughts.  This time, Kurdish and German archaeologists acted fast to begin new work.  

A joint German-Kurdish team led by Dr. Hasan Ahmed Qasim, chairman of the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization, Dr. Ivana Puljiz, a junior professor of ancient Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Freiburg, and Dr. Peter Pfälzner of the University of Tübingen began work in January 2022, in collaboration with the Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage in Duhok [ doo - HOHK ], the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.  

The team had no idea when the water in the reservoir would rise again, so they started by mapping the large city, including a palace that had already been investigated during a short dry spell in 2018, a massive fortification with a wall and towers, a monument, a multi-story storage building, and an industrial complex.  Several of the large buildings were then investigated in detail. 

According to co-leader Ivana Puljiz, the multi-story storage building is extremely significant as proof of the enormous quantities of goods the Mitanni Empire moved across the region and beyond.  The building’s size underscores the economic importance of this city, and of trade routes, in the rise of the Mitanni Empire.

According to Dr. Hasan Ahmed Qasim, despite being underwater for more than four decades, the walls were remarkably well-preserved, probably because the city was destroyed in an earthquake around 1350 BC, and the collapsed upper parts of the walls buried the buildings in rubble that has protected them from water damage and erosion.

Perhaps the most exciting discovery was five ceramic vessels holding an archive of over 100 cuneiform tablets dating to the period of the earthquake.  The team hopes they will provide important knowledge about the end of the Mitanni city and the transition to Assyrian rule over the region.  Some of the unfired clay tablets are still in their clay envelopes.  

As the water began rising again, the excavated buildings were covered with tight fitting plastic sheeting, weighed down with gravel, to alleviate further damage.  The city is now again submerged.

Next we go to northern Israel, where excavations near the ancient city of Megiddo 

[ muh – GEE – dow ] have revealed evidence of the first Roman military amphitheater found in the southern Levant.  The amphitheater was part of the huge base camp of the Sixth Roman Legion, which was stationed there from the first through third centuries AD to control the Roman provinces of Judea and Palestine.

As reported by The Jerusalem Post, the base of Legio Six [LAY-gee-oh six] in the Jezreel Valley was selected to give them control along multiple imperial roads, with direct access to the sea of Galilee and the inland valleys of northern Palestine. 

According to Dr. Yotam Tepper, an Israel Antiquities Authority consultant, remains of over 230 civilian amphitheaters are recorded throughout what was the territory of the Roman Empire, most of them for civilians.  This is one of the few amphitheaters catering to a military base, and  most that are known or have been excavated are in the western regions of the empire, in present-day Germany, France and Spain.

The newly discovered military camp amphitheater lies a few hundred meters outside the main military base.  Roman military amphitheaters served for training and entertaining the troops and were less lavish than amphitheaters for the civilian population. 

According to Tepper, who co-directs the excavations at Legio Six with Matthew J. Adams, director of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and Susan Cohen, archaeologist at Montana State University, the amphitheater has been investigated several times over the years, with the first dig in 1902, under the German archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher.  The find of two stone stairs, one stone seat and several other architectural elements led Schumacher to decide it had been a circular theater.

The current team, however, found the crater to be more elliptical in shape, suggesting that what lay underneath it was an amphitheater, where spectators sat on all sides of a flat-surfaced oval arena.

The new excavations revealed parts of the flattened arena, remains of ramps made from layers of dirt and rock that would have supported audience seating, and two sections of the outside supporting wall.  The arena floor was 50 to 70 meters long, and the seating area rose 8 to 9 meters high.

According to Tepper, reconstruction is difficult because the subsequent inhabitants of the region took the stones from the structure as building material.

As reported by co-director Matthew J. Adams, the main question researchers had was if the bowl shape in the ground was in fact an amphitheater.  Evidence supported this interpretation, as the arena floor of natural clay was found, along with monumental stones from the entrance gate. 

According to Adams, the amphitheater would have been built by the manual labor of the soldiers with picks and hoes.  The amphitheater served as both a training ground for soldiers as well as for entertainment for the troops in the form of gladiator battles and animal fights.

Israel has three known Roman amphitheaters.  Some believe that the one in Beit Guvrin [bayt guv- RIN  ] in southern Israel also had military purposes.  However, Tepper and Adams believe that its location well within a city shows it was used primarily by the civilian population of that city.

Our third story this week takes us to Málaga [MAH-la-ga] in southern Spain, where new research shows that Neanderthals entered the Cave of Ardales [ar-DAH-les] during the Middle Paleolithic over 65,000 years ago and painted on the cave walls.  Thereafter, the cave was repeatedly visited by modern humans all the way into the Late Neolithic period.

La Cueva de Ardales is an important Paleolithic site in the Málaga region, due to its abundant rock art.  The cave lies near the village of Ardales, in a mountain known as Cerro de la Calinoria [SARE-oh de la cah-li-NOR-ee-ah], about 50 km north of the Mediterranean coast.  It became known in 1821 after an earthquake exposed the cave entrance, which had previously been sealed by sediments.

As reported by sci-news.com, Cueva de Ardales contains over 1,000 paintings and engravings found on a variety of surfaces including walls, ceilings, rocks, and geological structures unique to caves, such as stalactites or stalagmites.  They are predominantly dated to the Upper Paleolithic, although the recent dating of carbonate crusts on abstract red illustrations revealed that some of them are of Neanderthal origin.

According to archaeologist José Ramos-Muñoz, of University of Cadiz, the recent results of the excavations in Cueva de Ardales show a long history of human use.

A combination of radiometric dating and analysis of remains and artifacts within the cave shows that the likely first occupants were Neanderthals, over 65,000 years ago.  Modern humans arrived later, around 35,000 years ago, and used the cave sporadically until as recently as the beginning of the Copper Age, around 6500 BC.

As reported by the online journal PLoS ONE, the oldest drawings in the cave are more abstract, with dots, fingertips, and hand-stencils created with red pigment, while later artwork includes figurative paintings, such as animals.

Human remains indicate the use of the cave as a burial place during the Holocene, but evidence of domestic activities is extremely poor, suggesting humans were not living in the cave.  These results indicate the importance of Cueva de Ardales as a site of high symbolic value.

According to researchers, the site provides a deep record of human activity in Spain, joining 30 other caves in the region with similar paintings to make the Iberian Peninsula a key region for investigating the history of humans in Europe.  

We end this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where an unreleased draft of a report reveals that Harvard University collections hold the human remains of 19 likely enslaved people and nearly 7,000 remains of Native Americans.  

As reported by Harvard's student newspaper, The Crimson, an unreleased draft, created by the university's Steering Committee on Human Remains in Harvard Museum Collection, outlined the history of the institution’s possession of the remains, and advised they be turned over to descendants. 

The unfinalized report suggests that a new commission should be created that would oversee the treatment of the remains and efforts to find descendants.

As the unreleased report bluntly states, the bodies were obtained under the violent and inhumane regimes of slavery and colonialism and represent Harvard University's engagement and complicity in these categorically immoral systems.

The report also acknowledges that the skeletal remains served to foster phony and racist ideas of physiological difference to validate existing racial and social hierarchies and structures.

According to Evelynn M. Hammonds, the committee's chair, publishing the leaked draft is irresponsible reporting, as the report has not been finalized and could change before it becomes official. 

According to Hammonds, The Crimson’s publication of the draft jeopardizes the thoughtful engagement of the Harvard community and does not reflect weeks of additional information and work done by the committee.

Most of the remains are housed at Harvard's Peabody [PEE-budd-ee] Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography.  In an April report on Harvard's past involvement with slavery, the university committed $100 million to redress its legacy.

Peabody Museum Director Jane Pickering made a formal apology on behalf of the museum last year for the practices that led to its large collection of Native American human remains and funerary objects.

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!