Hello everyone and welcome to the AudioNews by Archaeologica. I’m Laura Kennedy. Rick Pettigrew is on assignment on our tour of megalithic sites in Ireland, so I’ll be telling you about four of the best stories posted online this past week by our partner Archaeologica.org.

 The headlines in archaeological and historical news for the week of September 4th through the 10th, 2022. 

We begin this week in Borneo, where an archaeological team excavating a cave found the burial of the world’s earliest known amputee. The discovery of a young adult who lived for years after a foot amputation pushes back the first documented limb surgery by 20,000 years. 

As Popular Science reported online, this young adult lived at the start of the last Ice Age, in what’s now Eastern Indonesia -- at the time the edge of a low continent called Sunda. The people living at the time there were probably part of a group of early seafarers who crossed to Australia. 

According to Tim Maloney, an archaeologist with Australia’s Griffith University, when the team found the burial they first thought the skeleton’s missing left foot to have resulted from poor preservation.  But the ends of the lower left leg, the tibia and fibula bones, had healed cleanly.  Upon closer examination, no fracture or crush marks on the bones, such as would result from animal attack, or from crushing by rock, were evident. The tibia and fibula had been severed with precision, thus as part of an intentional amputation.   

This young adult would have been 10 to 13 years of age when the amputation was performed.  Using dating techniques on the skeleton, the researchers determined that this youth lived thereafter to around 19 years of age. 

It’s unclear why the amputation was required.  It’s possible that an infection or a major injury to the foot or ankle led to the surgery.

To tend successfully to a critically injured person requires that their communities of care develop medical knowledge and dedicate resources to support such persons during their convalescent periods. Successful surgery demands even greater knowledge and skill.  Surviving amputation has only recently become typical, thanks especially to the advent of antiseptics.

These prehistoric people had to be able to control bleeding, e.g., via pressure bandages, tourniquets, or cauterization. They had to be able to make precise incisions, which the researchers believe required very sharp stone tools. 

Most difficult would have been to avert amputation wound infection, especially in their tropical environment. The youth’s skeleton showed no evidence of infection. 

According to Maloney, this ability of prehistoric people to recognize the need for amputation, to carry it out, to ameliorate the resulting shock and blood loss, and to manage healing post-op., without infection, is impressive given their era.

According to Maxime Aubert, a rock art dating specialist with Griffith University, and a coauthor for this study, this early culture is still not well understood. 

The oldest previously known surgical amputation dates to ~7,000 years ago, in Neolithic France, after the advent of settled farming. The new discovery shows that medical sophistication did not everywhere wait for the development of agriculture and of larger communities. Amputation treatments were already within the capability of at least some early foraging societies.

This research was published in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

Next we cross the globe to another seacoast, Florida’s eastern coast near Cape Canaveral, where rising sea levels threaten prehistoric mound sites.  

As reported by Miami news channel WLRN, hundreds of Indigenous cultural sites along Florida’s coast, including Turtle Mound and the nearby mound sites of Ross Hammock, Castle Windy, and Seminole Rest, are eroding faster than archaeologists can document them. Turtle Mound rises 37 feet, and can’t be moved.  If preservation measures fail, excavation is the only option to document what’s in it. 

According to Emily Jane Murray, public archaeology coordinator for the Florida Public Archaeology Network, or FPAN, such measures might soon become urgent.

So far, efforts to preserve Turtle Mound using living shorelines—stabilized coastal edges made of natural materials such as plants, sand, and rock— as well as other stabilization techniques, have reduced hurricane damage and the rate of erosion.

Turtle Mound is the tallest shell mound in the mainland United States, perhaps also tallest in North America. It was built between AD 800 and 1400 by Timucua culture people as they discarded clam and oyster shells. It may too have served as a navigational aid and lookout point.

The National Parks Service is working with FPAN to monitor changes and make the shore more resilient against sea level rise. Volunteers with FPAN’s Heritage Monitoring Scouts -- a citizen science program training volunteers to monitor archaeological and cultural heritage resources -- record data from Turtle Mound to monitor erosion there.  Aerial surveys augment this ongoing view of mound conditions. 

Turtle Mound benefits from its visibility as a tourist attraction within a national park. Other archaeological sites in Florida, however, are on privately owned land, are little-known, and may be damaged by landowner decisions, given a context of limited public oversight. 

Members of the Florida’s Seminole Tribe are living descendants of the Timucua, who built many of central Florida’s Indigenous mounds. They express mixed feelings about excavating their cultural sites. 

According to David Scheidecker, an archaeologist with the Tribe, the majority feel that if nature is taking something away, then that loss must therefore be for the best.

The Tribe prefers preservation to excavation. But the Tribe understands that not all coastal mounds sites can be preserved as sea levels rise. According to Scheidecker, it then becomes possible to excavate threatened sites in cooperation with the Tribe.

Our third story takes us to Norwich, England, where genetics, archaeology, and historical research show that 17 people whose remains were found in a medieval well were victims of an anti-Semitic massacre.

As reported by science news site Phys.org, the well containing the remains was first discovered in 2004, during excavations pending a construction project. The remains include six adults and eleven children, including three sisters.   

An array of techniques, including genomic analysis, were required to unravel the mystery of why these remains ended-up in that well.

The victims were arranged at strange angles. Some arrived head-first, showing no effort to break their fall. This suggests that the victims were killed elsewhere before being thrown into the well.   

According to Ian Barnes, a geneticist with London's Natural History Museum, one early hypothesis was that these victims died due to plague, epidemic, or famine. 

Radiocarbon dating narrowed their deaths timing to AD 1161 to 1216.  DNA analysis of six of the victims found evidence of genetic diseases.  The frequency of these diseases was about the same for the Norwich victims as for modern Ashkenazi Jews, indicating common ancestry. These were remains of medieval Jews, thus supplying the most ancient Jewish genomes ever analyzed.

According to Barnes, nobody had analyzed early Jewish DNA before, due to prohibitions against disturbance of Jewish graves. But, in this case, it was not until the genomics had already been assessed that the team realized they were working with the Jewish remains. The genetic data also bear upon a known population bottleneck, a sudden dwindling in the population of Ashkenazi Jews. Population bottlenecks are associated with increased genetic variation. 

Historical research pinpoints the date of the massacre, carried out in Norwich, as February 6, 1190.  Writing in 1200, Ralph de Diceto, a local chronicler, recounted planning for the Third Crusade. According to de Diceto, many of those headed to Jerusalem decided first to target local Jews before attacking Holy Land Muslims, precipitating the massacre. 

Medieval Norwich had domiciled a thriving community of Jews since 1137, many living near the well where the victims’ remains were found. They likely descended from Ashkenazi Jews in Normandy, invited to settle in England by William the Conqueror after 1066. The victims from the well were reburied in 2013 in a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Norwich.

The study appeared in the journal Current Biology.

We end this week’s archaeo news in Norway, where archaeologists are excavating Kirkhellaren, a famous cave on the island of Sanna.   

The cave is 32 meters high and 20 meters wide.  Archaeological evidence indicates it was used for at least 10,000 years. This makes it an important—and perhaps the most ancient—human meeting place along the Norwegian coast. 

According to project manager Erlend Kirkeng Jørgensen, a researcher with the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, many of the artifacts suggest migrations to and from Traena.  For example, potsherds from 3,000 years ago evidence a combination of clays, asbestos minerals used as thinning agents and binders, and know-how to convert these materials into useful objects. Clays around Træna would have been too salty for firing.  Instead, clays were brought to Sanna, probably from the mainland. 

The new dig found several pits filled with pottery and clay, showing that ceramics were produced in the Kirkhellaren cave.

Previous 1930s excavations recovered many well-preserved artifacts, including wooden and bone tools, bird, fish and mammal bones, and about 33 skeletons of men, women, and children, dating from the Paleolithic onwards.  This summer’s dig found large quantities of fish, seal and bird remains, shells, and burnt wood up to 9,000 years old. 

According to Mikael Fauvelle, an archaeologist with Lund University in Sweden, who studies hunter-gatherer mobility, few people lived along the coast at the time, but those who did were very mobile, somewhat like the later Inuit of Greenland, boating to range over large areas. These people followed seasonal resources, but traveled also to exchange goods, to acquire knowledge, and to find reproductive partners.

Kirkhellaren served as a key meeting place along the Norwegian coast. With its highly visible mountain, Sanna Island would have been easy to find. This plus the roomy cave would make it an excellent site for festivities and bartering, as attested by the disparate and distant places sourcing many of the artifacts.

Historically, the cave was a sheep pen, eventually housing a nearly meter-deep sheep dung layer protecting the prehistoric layers. With that protection lately removed, today’s biggest threats to site preservation arise from human visitors and sea damage.  

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!