Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with the top news stories that appeared on Archaeologica this past week!  Send us feedback on The Archaeology Channel Facebook page or post a message on our social networking site, ArchaeoSeek!

Children’s remains from the early post-Conquest period in Mexico City show that Aztec people there were poor, but retained their burial traditions in the face of Spanish domination.  Continued uncovering of a mosaic floor in the Galilee area of Israel has revealed the earliest known depictions of two Biblical heroines. A new analysis of Stone Age bone jewelry from northwestern Russia reveals that many items were made from human bone.  And a remarkably well preserved and ornate wooden sculpture of an anthropomorphic figure has turned up in Peru from the ancient coastal city of Chan Chan, capital of the Chimu Empire.

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And now, here’s Laura Kennedy 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 Kennedy, and these are the headlines in archaeological and historical news for the week of July 3rd through 9th, 2022.  

Our first story this week comes from Mexico, where archaeologists have found the remains of four children buried near a house from the early Spanish colonial period.

As reported by Heritage Daily, the graves suggest harsh living conditions, and a continuation of Aztec cultural practices, during the early period of Spanish rule.

Investigators from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) discovered the remains in a neighborhood in the heart of Mexico City.  The area, known as La Lagunilla, was once part of Atzacoalco, one of four residential divisions in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.   

The graves date between AD 1521 and 1620.  The poverty of the inhabitants is suggested by the lack of burial goods, with only two of the four graves accompanied by offerings. The children range in age from an infant to six to eight years old.  

The remains suggest that life under Spanish rule was hard.  The children’s skulls show evidence of a condition called cribra orbitalia, caused by anemia, malnutrition and infections, including by parasites. 

The oldest child was buried with several small items, including small pots, spinning tools and a blue figurine of a woman holding a girl on her lap.  These suggest that the child was a girl.

One burial was of an unborn child, accompanied by tripod ceramic bowls and a globular pot, which the Aztecs believed would help return the child to the womb. 

Although Spanish outlawed many traditional Aztec practices, the burials show that the conquered Aztecs kept them up for some time. 

Our next story takes us to Israel, where a team of Archaeologists from the University of North Carolina has discovered the oldest known depictions in Hebrew art of two biblical women, Deborah and Jael [yah-EL].

The depictions are part of a mosaic floor from a fifth-century AD synagogue at Huqoq, a site in lower Galilee. 

The mosaic was laid out in three horizontal strips showing an episode from the book of Judges, Chapter 4, which recounts an Israelite victory over the Canaanites.  The Israelite forces were led by the prophetess and judge Deborah and the military commander Barak.  According to the story, when the Canaanite general Sisera fled the battle, he took refuge in the tent of a Kenite woman named Jael, who killed him by driving a tent stake through his temple as he slept.  

In the top register of the newly-found mosaic, Deborah stands under a palm tree, gazing at Barak, who is equipped with a shield.  The middle register is only partly preserved, and appears to show Sisera seated.  In the lowest register, Sisera lies dead on the ground, bleeding from the head, and Jael is seen hammering a tent stake through his temple.

The team found other mosaics at the site in 2012, showing multiple figures from Israelite history including Samson, Jonah and Noah. 

The mosaics have been removed from the site for conservation, and the excavated areas have been backfilled for protection.  Excavations are scheduled to continue in the summer of 2023.

Our third story features a study from researchers at the University of Helsinki, who have found that stone age people used human bone to make pendants and other accessories.

As reported by the science news site phys.org, the bones come from digs in northwestern Russia, carried out in the 1930s.  The bones used in jewelry, more than 8200 years old, initially were assumed to be animal bones, but many could not be clearly linked to any specific species.  

Now, after analysis using modern technology, Associate Professor Kristiina Mannermaa and her colleagues at the University of Helsinki have resolved the question, with a surprising new discovery.  

Professor Mannermaa and her team, working as part of a project called Animals Make Identities, sent the bone pendants to the BioArCh research facility at the University of York to be analyzed through mass spectrometry.  This technique can identify species based on the peptides, or amino acids, extracted from proteins contained in even very small samples of bone.

The results showed that 12 out of 37 bone pendants were human bone, while the others were made from the bones of elk and another bovine animal.  The human bone pendants are flakes of broken long bones of varying sizes, with one or two grooves cut into them.  They come from three graves, one of which contained two deceased individuals.  Out of a total of 177 graves excavated, many of them containing pendants, this shows that the use of human bone for jewelry making was infrequent.

The use of human bones as a raw material for objects is known historically from Asia and South America, but prehistoric evidence is limited.  Often, the use of human bone as a raw material is thought to be associated with cannibalism, as can be shown by scratches indicating meat removal on the bones.  However, the scarcity of solid evidence makes it difficult to verify cannibalism on the basis of archaeological finds.  

According to Mannermaa, cannibalism for ritual purposes may have been more common in the Stone Age than has been thought, but we do not know the underlying causes.  Analysis showed that the raw material for some of the pendants was used while in a fresh or semi-fresh state.

The researchers consider it particularly interesting that the same types of bone pendants were made of both animal and human bones and that they were found in the same contexts as the tooth pendants.

The microwear study showed that the production of the human bone artifacts did not involve any other reshaping than planing and scraping to smooth the pieces, then making grooves around the top to tie them.  The huge number of elk teeth ornaments in the burials suggest that these Mesolithic people particularly liked to tie them to garments and garment edges, as well as making them into necklaces and bracelets.

According to Mannermaa, using human bones in the same manner as animal bones may indicate the intertwining of animals and humans in the Stone Age worldview.  Such blurring of boundaries has been and is still part of the worldview of some indigenous peoples.

The new findings are published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

For our last story this week, we go to Peru, where archaeologists have unearthed a remarkably well preserved and ornate anthropomorphic wooden sculpture from the early Chimu period. 

The Chimu culture emerged around AD 900 and controlled a large coastal region, up until the early colonial period.  The Chimu Empire ended when it was conquered by the Inka in AD 1470.

As reported by Heritage Daily, the statue was found during an ongoing preservation project of the Huaca Takaynamo, a pyramidal structure in the remains of Chan Chan, a large city that was the center of the Chimu culture.

Chan Chan comprised nine large rectangular complexes, containing pyramidal temples, reservoirs, cemeteries, plazas, burial platforms, storerooms, and living quarters for the city elite and royalty.  The buildings were constructed from sun-dried bricks, or adobe.  Chan Chan was the largest city in the Americas built with earthen architecture, encompassing 20 square kilometers.  Its population is estimated to have been between 40 and 60 thousand inhabitants.

The sculpture found in the temple ruins is elaborately carved from wood.  It shows a flat oval face, painted red, with almond-shaped eyes, and was originally decorated with mother-of-pearl plates fixed with black resin.  The figure wears a triangle-shaped skirt decorated with small rectangular bands, and wears a trapezoidal cap.

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!

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