Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to tell you about 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!

Evidence from a Maya site in Chiapas, Mexico, reveals that human remains were mixed into the rubber used to make the balls for the Mesoamerican ball game.  The world’s oldest octopus lures have been identified in the Mariana Islands of the western Pacific. The butchered remains of mammoths in New Mexico may push back the date of the earliest New World humans to 39,000 years ago.  And a French researcher proposes a solution to the decipherment of the mysterious Linear Elamite script of ancient Iran..

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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 August 7th through the 13th, 2022. 

Our first story this week comes from Mexico, where a crypt holding cremations of elite Maya also reveals that their ashes were used in making balls for the ritual ball game.

As reported by Heritage Daily.com, a team of archaeologists from the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History uncovered the crypt in 2020 in the Maya city of Toniná [ toh-nee-NAH ].  The name Toniná means “house of stone” in the Tzeltal Maya language, but it was originally called Po’p, Po or Popo in Classic Maya texts.  The city lies in the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico, east of the town of Ocosingo.

The site contains groups of temple pyramids set on terraces rising some 71 meters, or more than 250 feet, above a central plaza, as well as two ballcourts, and over 100 carved monuments that date from the AD 500s to 800s, placing the city in the Classic Period of Maya culture. 

The crypt was first identified during a study of one of the larger temple pyramids.  Excavation revealed a labyrinth containing a series of small vaults and rooms connected by stairways.  These lead to an antechamber and the crypt, 8 meters below the surface of the pyramid.  Construction of the crypt took place across many decades during the 7th and 8th centuries.

The antechamber and crypt have small niches, which held more than 400 vessels filled with human ashes, charcoal, rubber, and roots.  These were likely the remains of high-ranking people in the city, including its rulers.  But why were the remains mixed with rubber and charcoal? 

Now, microscopic analysis of the organic material suggests an answer to the mystery -- that the human ashes were used in the vulcanization process for hardening rubber to make balls used in Maya ritual ball games played in the ballcourts at Toniná.

The Maya ball game, which originated more than 3,000 years ago, was not just an athletic event.  It represented the regeneration that was integral to the continued existence of the Maya, by showing their devotion to their gods by playing the game and submitting to the ritual killings that sometimes followed.

According to archaeologist Juan Yadeun Angulo, from the National Institute, the discovery provides a more accurate idea of how complex the Maya religion was, and how enmeshed it was in every aspect of life, and also death. 

Next we go to the Pacific, where an archaeological study has determined that cowrie-shell artifacts found throughout the Mariana Islands are the world’s oldest example of lures used for hunting octopuses.

As reported by the website Eurekalert.org, the study used carbon dating of archaeological layers to confirm that lures found on the Northern Mariana Islands of Tinian and Saipan were from about 1500 BC, or 3,500 years ago.  

According to Michael T. Carson, an archaeologist with the Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam, the date goes back to the time when people were first living in the Mariana Islands.  

The fishing devices were made with cowrie shells, a type of sea snail and a favorite food of octopuses, that were connected by a fiber cord to a stone sinker and a hook.

They have been found in seven sites in the Mariana Islands. According to Carson, it took some time to test the different hypotheses about what the artifacts could be.  The original idea was that these must be for scraping breadfruit or other plants, like taro. 

However, the shells don’t have the serrated edge of other known food-scraping tools.  They exhibit holes and grooves for a fiber cord to be attached, as well as stone sinker components, therefore appearing close to octopus lures found in Tonga from about 3,000 years ago, or 1000 BC.

Researchers are now working to determine whether the ancient Chamorro people invented this adaptation to their environment during the time when they first lived in the islands, or whether they brought the tradition from a former homeland.  However, no artifacts of this kind have yet been discovered in the potential homeland of the first Marianas settlers, which was likely the Philippines, or in Taiwan, the place where Austronesian peoples ancestral to the Chamorro are thought to have originated.

If the Chamorro people did invent the first octopus lures, it provides new insight into their ingenuity and ability to problem solve — having to create novel and specialized ways to live in a new environment and take advantage of an available food source.

The new research is published in the journal World Archaeology. 

For more information about the Chamorro people of Guam and the Marianas, we invite you to watch our film, “Guam: The Ocean Oasis,” available on Heritage Broadcasting Service at heritagetac.org.

Our third story takes us to New Mexico, where archaeologists have been studying the remains of a mother mammoth and her calf, who met their end at the hands of human beings about 37,000 years ago.  

A recent study led by scientists with The University of Texas at Austin finds that the site offers some of the most conclusive evidence for humans settling in North America much earlier than conventionally thought.

As reported by the website Phys.org, the dig revealed fossils with blunt-force fractures, bone flake knives with worn edges, and signs of controlled fire. Carbon dating analysis on collagen extracted from the mammoth bones dated the site up to 38,900 years old, making it among the oldest known sites left behind by ancient humans in North America.

According to lead author Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist and a professor in the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences, the site tells a powerful story. 

The professor got involved only when ancient bones literally began to appear in his backyard.  A neighbor found a tusk weathering from a hillslope on Rowe's New Mexico property in 2013. When Rowe went to investigate, he found a bashed-in mammoth skull and other bones that looked deliberately broken. 

Due to the state of the bones, the findings appear to be a butchering site.  Although the mammoth site lacks clearly associated stone tools, Rowe and his co-authors discovered an array of supporting evidence by putting samples from the site through scientific analyses in the lab.

CT scans taken by the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility revealed bone flakes with microscopic fracture networks akin to those in freshly knapped cow bones and well-placed puncture wounds that would have helped in draining grease from ribs and vertebral bones.

In addition, chemical analysis of the sediment surrounding the bones showed that fire particles came from a sustained and controlled burn. The material also contained pulverized bone and the burned remains of small animals—mostly fish (even though the site is over 200 feet above the nearest river), but also birds, rodents and lizards.

Currently, most archaeologists believe that the human presence in the Americas dates back at least to about 15,000 years ago.  However, human footprints found at White Sands National Park, also in New Mexico, have been dated to 23,000 years ago, and even earlier traces of the human presence have been proposed.

However, Dr. Rowe and his colleagues suggest that the latest New Mexico site, with its age and bone tools instead of elaborate stone technology, constitutes evidence that the people who left these remains may have been among the earliest humans in the Western Hemisphere.  The study adds to a growing body of evidence for pre-Clovis societies while providing a toolkit that can help others find evidence that may have been otherwise overlooked.  However, the conclusions of the site analysis certainly will be questioned by other archaeologists, so stay tuned.

The findings were published in the journal, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Our final story this week takes us to France, where archaeologists have potentially deciphered an ancient script called Linear Elamite [EE-la-might], an obscure system used in what is now Iran.  The findings could expand our understanding of a little-known society that flourished between ancient Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley at the dawn of civilization.  

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the new findings could even change how we understand the history of writing and orthographic systems. 

French archaeologist Francois Desset led a team which used inscriptions from a set of ancient silver beakers to propose a method for reading the symbols that make up Linear Elamite.

The Elamites lived more than 5,000 years ago, in the thriving city of Susa in what is now southeastern Iran.  The ancient society of Elam [EE-lam] was among the world’s first cultures to use written symbols to help manage an increasingly complex society.  

Early Elamites created the foundation for later Persian kingdoms, including the Achaemenid [a- KEEM-e-nid] dynasty that eventually ruled over much of the ancient Middle East.

The Sumerians are credited with creating the first known writing system around 3100 BC, known as cuneiform.  The system uses both syllables and images and was adapted first for the Sumerian language and, later, for Elamite, Persian, Akkadian, and Hittite.  Previously, 19th-century scholars deciphered cuneiform script based on the Behistun inscription panel in western Iran commissioned by the Persian king Darius [da-RYE-us] the First, revealing details on the economy, religion, and government of that region.

Meanwhile, French archaeologists digging in Susa at the turn of the 20th century uncovered evidence of a writing system that seemed nearly as old as cuneiform but used a different set of symbols.  The system apparently fell out of use, as scribes in Susa instead turned to cuneiform to write their language.  

This earlier system is known as Proto-Elamite, while a later iteration is known as Linear Elamite— both being presumed to have recorded the little understood Elamite language.

Over the past century, archaeologists have uncovered more than 1,600 Proto-Elamite inscriptions, but only about 43 in Linear Elamite scattered widely across Iran.  The latter was used sporadically between 2300 and 1850 BC and fell out of use as urban areas collapsed across the Middle East around 1800 BC.  Mesopotamian cuneiform and, later, the Greek alphabet and other scripts then came into play.

In 2015, Desset and his team gained access to a private London collection of extraordinary silver vessels with a host of inscriptions in both cuneiform and Linear Elamite. They were excavated in the 1920s and sold to Western dealers, so their origin and authenticity had been questioned.  Metallurgical analysis of the vessels, however, determined they were ancient rather than modern forgeries.

As for their origin, Desset suspected they came from a royal cemetery hundreds of miles southeast of Susa, dating to about 2000 BC.  This was exactly the time Linear Elamite was in use. 

The vessels’ juxtaposition of scripts made it extremely helpful for deciphering Linear Elamite.  Some proper names that were written in cuneiform could now be compared with symbols in Linear Elamite—including the names of known Elamite kings. By tracking repeated symbols that were likely proper names, Desset was able to make sense of the script, which comes in an array of geometric shapes. He also translated verbs such as “gave” and “made.”

Still, Desset and his co-authors claimed they could read 72 Linear Elamite symbols, or more than 96 percent of those known. 

Part of the challenge is that the Elamite language—which may have been spoken in the region for more than 3,000 years—has no known relatives, making it difficult to know what sounds the symbols might represent. 

Some of Desset’s other assertions have proven more controversial.  Writing systems employ a number of methods to express a spoken language.  English, for example, uses Latin letters to express particular sounds, while Chinese is based on pictures, or logograms, with specific meanings.

Cuneiform and hieroglyphics use symbols denoting both sounds and logograms.  However, Desset argues that Linear Elamite takes an approach more like the modern alphabet.  He concludes that the script draws solely on syllables, making it the oldest known writing system to do so. 

Desset also says his data strongly suggest that Proto-Elamite, which is still undeciphered, is a predecessor of Linear Elamite.  Other scholars, however, disagree, given the 800-year gap between the two writing systems.

The team hopes that further excavations in Iran can help fill the gaps between the demise of Proto-Elamite and the appearance of Linear Elamite. In the meantime, they have taken on the task of deciphering Linear Elamite texts based on the researchers’ new method. 

We should note that our upcoming tour of Iran includes the site of Susa as well as the Behistun inscription.

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 Kennedy and I’ll see you next week!