Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew.  Another batch of fascinating news stories 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!

A forgotten branch of the Nile apparently made possible the construction of Egypt’s Great Pyramid.  Deteriorating conditions at the 1500-year-old Hagia Sophia in Istanbul prompted Greek archaeologists to request that UNESCO step in.  Excavation results at Stone Town on Zanzibar Island show that the native Swahili people built the town long before the Omani’s showed up.  And dendrochronology on a previously unidentified shipwreck along the Argentine coast points to a lost 19th-century whaler from Rhode Island.

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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 28th through September 3rd, 2022.

Our first story this week takes us to Egypt, where a new study indicates that a lost branch of the Nile once cut through a long stretch of desert where it helped transport the heavy stone used in the ancient pyramids. 

For thousands of years, the pyramids at Giza have fascinated and perplexed the world.  In particular, people have puzzled over how the builders overcame the logistical difficulties of moving so many tons of material into place to create the massive structures. 

The Great Pyramid, built for Pharaoh Khufu, the second king of Egypt’s fourth dynasty, covered thirteen acres and stood more than 480 feet tall on completion around 2560 BC.  Each of its two million limestone and granite blocks weighed more than 2 tons and had to be transported several miles from the banks of the Nile to the pyramid’s site on the Giza Plateau.

For years, scientists believed that the process would have required the use of a river or channel.  

Now researchers have traced the environmental clues that show where such a channel lay. 

As reported by Arkeonews, the work draws on the discovery of the Wadi al-Jarf papyri in 2013 near the Red Sea.  Some of these date to Khufu’s reign and describe how boats carried stone blocks up the Nile to Giza to fit them onto the pyramid, then under construction. 

Scientists used clues preserved in the desert soil to trace this extinct Nile tributary during its 8,000 years of life.  The channel linking the Giza plateau to the Nile has been named the “Khufu Channel” after the pyramid.

According to Hader Sheisha, an environmental geographer at the European Center for Research and Teaching in Environmental Geoscience, and an author of the new study, it would have been impossible to build the pyramids where they stand without the Khufu Channel.

Examinations of sediment collected near the pyramid site, as well as samples of bones and teeth from mummies of the time period, revealed that the area had become much drier over time.  Pollen grains provided evidence of ancient plant life that could not have survived without water, further indication that a channel of water once flowed through what is now a desert. 

The findings suggest that the tributary dried up completely around 600 BC.  Today, the Nile runs more than 7 kilometers east of the Giza pyramids.   

The new research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Our next story takes us to Istanbul, Turkey, where archaeologists are calling on UNESCO to protect the Hagia Sophia [HIGH-ya so-FEE-ya], a religious and cultural site that’s nearly 1,500 years old. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, Hagia Sophia, one of Turkey’s most popular tourist sites, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.  However, in recent years, the sixth century structure has suffered increased vandalism and damage.  

In July 2020, a Turkish high court stripped the Hagia Sophia of its museum status, allowing it to be used as a functioning mosque.  

According to the archaeologists, in recent years, managers have allowed an unregulated flow of visitors to enter the building unchecked, without regard for impacts on the facility’s historical features.

The open letter to UNESCO’s director general, Audrey Azoulay, is a plea from members of the Association of Greek Archaeologists.  The archaeologists state that without intervention, the site is at extreme risk of continued damage and loss of many years of preservation work.  

As described in the letter, the wooden Ottoman doors of the Imperial Gate are now damaged, wall coatings were scraped and removed, fountains and doors are used for shoe storage, and marble floor slabs were destroyed in a cleaning incident. 

Built between AD 532 and 537 under the Byzantine emperor Justinian the First, the structure was the largest Christian cathedral in the world for more than 900 years.  In 1453, when the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople, the site became a mosque.  Later, in 1935, Turkish leader Mustafa [MOOS-ta-fah] Kemal Atatürk designated it as a museum.

Advocates began pushing to change the building’s status in 2005, and Turkey’s high administrative court ultimately agreed, transferring management from Turkey’s Ministry of Culture to the religious affairs department.

Any attempt to modify a World Heritage Site requires prior notification of UNESCO, as well as a review by the World Heritage Committee.  At the time of the decision, UNESCO issued a statement saying it deeply regretted the decision to change the Hagia Sophia’s status.  

According to the statement, the Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece and a unique testimony to interactions between Europe and Asia over the centuries.  Museum status reflects this universal heritage and makes it a powerful symbol for dialogue.

However, even before the 2020 ruling, conservationists were concerned for the fate of the Hagia Sophia, which struggled to get consistent funding for preservation work.  It’s also situated atop a fault line, so an earthquake or tremor could cause serious damage to the site. 

Our next story this week takes us to Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar, Tanzania, where archaeologists have discovered evidence of an eleventh century Swahili settlement, proving that the site was settled over seven centuries earlier than previously thought. 

During a recent dig, a team led by archaeologists from the United Arab Emirates unearthed traces of homes, cooking pits and significant amounts of pottery dated from the eleventh century.  They also found evidence of the settlement’s transition to stone buildings by the fourteenth century.  

As reported by The National News of the United Arab Emirates, the stone houses gave the trading center on the east African coast its distinctive appearance and ultimately, its name.

According to Professor Tim Power, of UAE University, Stone Town became the powerful capital of the Omani Arab Empire in the 1800s and many of the larger buildings were constructed at this time.  However, the excavations uncovered stone walls of houses showing that it was urbanized centuries before the Omanis arrived.

Stone Town’s Old Fort, built in 1699, was the focus of the 2022 excavations.  The fort became the center of Omani military and political power and functioned as a customs center for trade.

Two trenches dug in the fort’s courtyard found waste pits, cooking hearths, walls, floors, the remains of a Portuguese church, significant amounts of pottery and evidence of a mosque.  These varying structures and pockets of evidence show a steady intensification of human settlement and trade networks.

According to Nour Al Marzooqi, an archaeologist at Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism, the teams found large amounts of imported pottery, especially from China, similar to the imported pottery often found in the United Arab Emirates.  Archaeologists also found local-made Swahili ceramics from the eleventh century – the oldest findings to date. 

Stone Town started as a small fishing village that grew rapidly through its role in trade networks across the Indian Ocean.  It came under Portuguese, Omani and European influence but always retained its Swahili identity. 

As the capital of the Omani Arab empire in the nineteenth century, Stone Town made its wealth from trade in ivory, ebony wood, and enslaved people.  Omani Arabs also developed clove plantations and Zanzibar became the leading supplier of cloves in the world.

The project explores the multifaceted history of the town and how it fits into the intricate trade networks that existed across the Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf through the centuries.  Despite the many different ethnicities and differences, a shared culture and way of life also existed. 

The excavations of Stone Town will continue in January with another planned phase of work.  It is also hoped to create a museum at the site to present some of the finds from the excavations to the public.

We end this week on the coast of southern Argentina, where scientists have used tree rings on timbers from a shipwreck to confirm that it probably is the nineteenth-century Dolphin, a lost whaling ship from Warren, Rhode Island.   

According to lead author, Ignacio Mundo, of Argentina's Laboratory of Dendrochronology and Environmental History, while it can’t be a hundred percent certain, the tree ring analysis, along with existing archaeological and historical evidence, indicates that it is very likely the lost whaler. 

As reported by the science news site phys.org, Mundo and scientists at the Columbia Climate School's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory used a huge database of rings from old North American trees to show that the timbers were felled in New England and the southeastern United States just before the ship was built in 1850.  

Other evidence includes artifacts found near the wreck, and historical accounts from Argentina and Rhode Island.  This appears to be the first time dendrochronology has been applied to identify a South American shipwreck.

New England was a major participant in the global whaling trade from the mid-1770s until the 1850s.  Oil extracted from blubber was popular for lighting and lubrication, and whale bone was used in many small household items.  The industry faded in the 1860s after whale populations were decimated, and petroleum replaced blubber.

According to historian Walter Nebiker, the Dolphin was built between August and October 1850, of oak and other woods.   Measuring 111 feet long and weighing 325 tons, the Dolphin was launched on November 16, 1850, and sailed across the Atlantic and Indian oceans for nearly eight years, as well as to Australia.  The last voyage launched from Warren, Rhode Island, on Oct. 2, 1858, and wrecked off Patagonia a few months later.

In 2004, the partial remains of a wooden vessel were discovered in the intertidal flats off Puerto Madryn, Argentina.  In 2006 and 2007, marine archaeologists excavated the remains during low tides.  The remains were limited to lower ribs, and some hull and ceiling planking.  Evidence of iron cauldrons and the remains of bricks, a shipboard set-up for boiling down blubber, suggested it was a whaling ship. 

Writing in 2009, Cristian Murray, of Argentina's National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, concluded the ship was from the 1800s, and built mainly of oak and pine from the Northern Hemisphere.  However, it couldn’t be determined what species, and whether it was of European or North American origin. 

Historic records were traced showing that 42 crew members of the Dolphin were rescued along that coast in 1858, so in 2019, Murray published another paper suggesting the wreck could be the Dolphin.  Later that year Murray and colleagues re-excavated the wreck and invited Ignacio Mundo to examine it. 

After processing the samples in his lab, Mundo turned to Ed Cook, founder of the Lamont-Doherty Tree Ring Lab, a longtime collaborator with South American colleagues and a pioneer in dendroarchaeology. 

Cook used the North American Drought Atlas, a massive database whose creation he spearheaded in the early 2000s.  The Atlas collates ring samples from about 30,000 standing trees of many species across the continent going back more than 2,000 years.  Working from this database, the researchers figured out that the signatures pointed to a source somewhere in Alabama, Georgia or northern Florida.

The dendrochronologists established that the ribs were made of white oak.  The hull and ceiling planks were old growth yellow pine, forests of which once covered much of the U.S. Southeast.  Wooden nails holding things together were made of rot-resistant black locust, widespread across many eastern states.

The findings were first published in the journal Dendrochronologia.

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!