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Two new studies of chicken domestication reveal that the bird came from Thailand more recently than expected, and at first wasn’t even a food item.  A Medieval site in Oslo, Norway, has yielded an array of very interesting and very well preserved artifacts. A famous English 17th-century sailing ship, which once carried the man who would become King James the Second, has been discovered off the country’s east coast.  And a pair of pit toilets dug by the Maya in Guatemala 1200 years ago have revealed early evidence of a revolutionary method of corn preparation.

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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 June 5th through the 11th, 2022. 

Our first story this week brings us to Thailand, where the domestication and spread of chickens emerged in southeast Asia’s rice fields and spread to nearly every Old World culture.   

As reported by ScienceNews.org, two recent research studies have illuminated the surprisingly recent origin of domesticated chickens, only 3,500 years ago.  

In the first study, published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, an international team led by zooarchaeologist Joris Peters, of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, assessed data on chicken remains from over 600 sites in 89 countries.  It showed that far from being ancient in origin, fully domesticated chickens evolved only between 1250 and 1650 BC, in central Thailand.  

These earliest chickens coincide with the domestication of rice and millet.  According to the researchers, the chickens may have been drawn to these grains, and thus the intensification of agriculture may have made it easy to domesticate chickens at the same time.  

The breeding and keeping of chickens spread northward and westward, but not as food at first.  Rather, they were traded into new regions as exotic or culturally revered creatures.  Lag times of 700 to 800 years between sites in many regions show this delay between the introduction of chickens and their wider cultural acceptance as food.

According to Peters, the ancestral wild species is the red junglefowl, which still exists in southeast Asia.

The second research study results come from archaeologist Julia Best of Cardiff University in Wales and her colleagues, writing in the journal Antiquity.

Best’s team focused on the arrival of domesticated chickens in Europe and Africa.  They found chickens entered Mediterranean Europe no earlier than around 2,800 years ago, and northwest Africa much later, between 1,100 and 800 years ago.

For over five decades, researchers have debated different claims about where and when chickens originated, with hypotheses including India, northern China, and Southeast Asia and spanning around 4,000 to 10,500 years ago. 

The new, comprehensive, study by Peters and his colleagues noted some of the many problems in studying chicken origins, making remains seem older than they are.  It can also be difficult to determine when a bone is definitively that of a modern chicken because crosses with other fowl still occur.

The new insights from both research groups identified many sites where these problems have muddied the record.   Using radiocarbon dating, Best’s group determined that 23 chicken bones from 16 sites in Eurasia and Africa were younger, in some cases by several thousand years, than previously thought, because they had settled into lower sediment layers over time, and been identified as part of these earlier cultures.

Next we go to Oslo, Norway, where excavators at Oslo’s new Medieval Park recently showed off some of the most interesting artifacts selected from more than a thousand finds. 

According to excavation manager Mark Oldham, an archaeologist from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, or NIKU, this particular area of medieval Oslo had not been studied for about a hundred years. 

As reported by Science Norway, the reason for the work is the construction of new underground commuter train lines.  The first phase of excavations in connection with the new Medieval Park is now completed, and the second phase is due to start in the summer.

Archaeological gems so far include a leather knife sheath with copper alloy pins reinforcing the edge.  Sheaths are usually dated by the context in which they are found, and this particular sheath was found near a house dated to AD 1100.

Seven rare items with runic inscriptions have turned up so far, including three inscribed bones, a hair pin, two ownership tags, and a rune stick.

According to Oldham, the rune stick is the most significant of the runic finds, because its inscription spells out words in both Norse and Latin.  This tells us that people here were multilingual. 

The inscription also includes personal content, a story of someone’s personal faith. The female name Bryngjerd is also inscribed.  On one side, two Latin words appear, manus and Domine.  Manus means hand, and Dominus means lord, or God.  Both words are found in a well-known Latin prayer: ‘In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum,’ meaning ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’

Another object, a bone, was carved into a figurine of a king and a falcon.  The object fits perfectly in the palm of one’s hand and might have been the handle to a tool or knife dating back to around 1250.  Håkon Håkonsson was king in 1250, so it is possible that this is a depiction of him. 

Another handle is made of antler, carved to look like a human leg with a high boot.  The object is more complicated than the typical ordinary knife or tool handle, and has scraps of metal left in the handle that might reveal more information after x-rays.

Another carved piece of wood has images of mythical creatures on both sides.  Its function is unknown, and the decorations are unlike anything found before.  This mysterious piece of ornamental wood is dated to the 1100s.

Another sheath of leather, this one clearly for a sword due to its size, bears stamped fleur-de-lis on both sides of the sheath.  This is believed to have possibly belonged to one of the city guards on patrol. 

The Oslo medieval dig has also produced thousands of bits of shoes and ceramics. Whereas clothes, mostly made of wool, would have decomposed and become part of the soil, leather shoes had excellent conditions for preservation. 

While most shoes bore a great deal of damage, one complete and almost undamaged shoe is also fashionably decorated, with an intact pointy sole.  The thin leather of the upper was perforated with dozens of identically-shaped small holes to create patterns of lines, chevrons and diamonds.  Whoever owned it probably wore colored socks that showed through the holes to highlight the patterns.  According to the archaeologists, only three or four similar shoes have been ever found before, and none in such good condition. 

Other artifacts include many combs, several gaming boards, and a cheese form used to stamp patterns into cheese or butter. 

Our third story takes us to the choppy waters off England’s east coast, where the wreck of one of the most famous ships of the seventeenth century, the Gloucester [GLAU-ster], has been located.  

As reported by the University of East Anglia press office, the Gloucester ran aground on May 6, 1682, with the future King James II onboard. 

Since then, the shipwreck lay lost until brothers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell discovered it in June 2007, after a four-year search covering 5000 nautical miles.  In 2012 one of the rescued finds – the ship’s bell – was used to conclusively confirm the wreck was the Gloucester. 

The discovery has great historical significance thanks to the age and prestige of the ship, condition of the wreck, artifacts already recovered, and the important era it dates back to.

The Gloucester's shipwreck nearly killed the Catholic heir to the Protestant throne, who would become James the Second just three years later, only to rule for only a little over three years himself before being ousted and sent into exile. 

According to Professor Claire Jowitt of the University of East Anglia, the Gloucester was commissioned in 1652, built at Limehouse in London, and launched in 1654.  

In 1682 it was selected to carry the heir apparent James Stuart  – who later became King of England and King of Ireland as James II, and King of Scotland as James VII –  to Edinburgh to collect his heavily pregnant wife and their households. The aim was to bring them back to King Charles II’s court in London in time for the birth of what was hoped to be a legitimate male heir.

At 5:30 am on May 6th, the Gloucester ran aground some 45 km off Great Yarmouth following a dispute about navigating the treacherous Norfolk sandbanks.  The vessel sank within an hour.  

As well as James Stuart, the Gloucester was also carrying a number of other prominent English and Scottish courtiers.

Due to the time taken to confirm the identity of the ship and steps needed to protect the site, the discovery has been made public only recently.

Public sentiments turned incredibly hostile to James after the wreck.  Political and religious tensions were already high due to James’ Catholicism, and when it was revealed that James had influenced the ship’s course and yet accepted no responsibility for the disaster.  James also did not abandon the sinking ship until the very last minute, which cost the lives of many others who could not abandon the ship before royalty.  

James was later ousted from the throne during the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 after ruling for less than four years.  He was replaced by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, both Protestants.  The outcome of the shipwreck definitively changed the course of British history, as the royal succession may have been much different had James not survived.  

Artifacts rescued and conserved include clothes and shoes, navigational and other professional naval equipment, personal possessions, and many wine bottles, including one owned by passenger George Legge, son of Elizabeth Washington, bearing the Washington crest and remarkably linking the ship to the family of the first US President George Washington. 

A major exhibition is planned for Spring 2023, the result of a partnership among the Barnwell brothers, Norfolk Museums Service, and the University of East Anglia.  

Our final story this week takes us to Guatemala, where two ancient Maya toilets have revealed clues about the everyday life of bygone civilizations. 

As reported by the press office at Boston University, the new insights come from two small circular pits dug into the corner of a home in the Peten [puh-TENN] around AD 800 to 900.  The pits come from the Classic period remains of the city of San Bartolo [BAR-toe-low], a period marked by the construction of the biggest Maya cities and the monuments.  

The pit fill dirt contained many maize starch spherulites, a microscopic byproduct of the process called nixtamalization [NISH-ta-mahl-i-ZA-shun].  Nixtamalization, still used today, is a process that makes corn kernels more edible by soaking them in an alkaline solution made from water and the mineral lime.  

Finding this byproduct in the pit toilets suggests that the corn preparation wastewater was being dumped into the pits.  The lime solution is highly alkaline and thus somewhat caustic, and needed to be discarded where it could not burn people’s skin or contaminate their drinking water.  It also may have reduced smell or repelled insects. 

Researchers from Boston University, Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin joined together to study the finds, which are both the earliest evidence for toilets in the Maya world, and the earliest evidence for nixtamalization. 

According to John M. Marston, an associate professor of archaeology and anthropology at Boston University, nixtamalization is a culinary process that fundamentally changed Mesoamerican diets.  The practice arose in multiple different societies who based their agriculture on maize, both in Central America and in North America.  

In North America, nixtamalization was used to make hominy—soaked maize kernels that swell and are used whole in a soup, or ground into flour for cornbread.  Central Americans used the process mainly to create better dough for tortillas and tamales.  

Early Spanish historical records, as well as some pre-conquest Maya pictures, show the process.  The problem was figuring out how to find archaeological evidence of the process, its origins, and especially how widespread it was.  

The spherulites, or the microscopic results of the chemical changes on starch molecule structures in the corn, came out of fill from pits called chultunes [chul-TOON-ehs] in Maya.  A chultun is any pit cut into the rock, which is easy to do in areas like the Yucatan Peninsula, which has very soft limestone bedrock.

Chultunes of all sizes are common features in Maya sites.  Many were cisterns used to store rainwater for use in the dry season.  Some were clearly used in a ritual way, probably representing access to the underworld, which is an important part of Maya cosmology.  Yet others were storage or trash pits.  

In the new find, microscopic tapeworm eggs, typically contained in human feces, suggested the use as latrines.  

The new research appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

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!