Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with another batch of fascinating 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!

A giant statue of Hercules has turned up beneath the streets of a northern Greek village.  Ancient copper smelting in the Negev Desert of today’s Israel apparently resulted in the area’s desertification.  Viking Age beads from Ribe on Denmark's west coast now appear to have been made from pieces of much earlier Roman mosaics. And excavations along the Alabama coast now confirm that a ditch there is actually a 1400-year-old canal constructed for transportation.

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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  October 2nd through the 8th, 2022.

Our first story this week comes from northeastern Greece, where excavators in the ancient town of Philippi [PHIL - ip -EYE] have found a larger-than-life statue of Hercules. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the statue was made in the second century AD, when the city had become part of the Roman Empire.

According to the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, researchers with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki [THESS-a-loh-NEE-kee] discovered the statue during excavations in modern Filippoi, along the northeastern Greek coast between Thessaloniki and Byzantium, now Istanbul.  

Although the marble sculpture is in pieces, the figure shows a well-muscled young man who originally held a club, a wreath and a lion skin¬—all of which have traditionally been associated with Hercules.

The team unearthed the statue while exploring the intersection of two streets, which may have been widened into a square that contained a highly decorative building and, likely, a fountain.

The building is from the late Byzantine period of the eighth or ninth century AD, while the buried or fallen statue dates much earlier, to the time when Roman gods were still widely worshiped.

Hercules was the Roman equivalent to the Greek hero Heracles.  According to myth, Heracles was born to Zeus and one of his many lovers, Alcmene [alk - ME- nee]. He was a demigod and displayed his courage and strength from infancy.  

As punishment for Zeus’ infidelity, his jealous wife Hera sent Heracles into a temporary fit of madness in which he killed his wife and children, and was forced to atone through a series of nearly impossible tasks known to Romans as the Twelve Labors of Hercules.  

Artists made many statues celebrating Hercules as a champion of the weak, and a symbol of overcoming one’s weaknesses.  In June of this year, divers exploring the 2,000-year-old Antikythera shipwreck recovered what may be the missing head of a marble Hercules statue housed in Athens’ National Archaeological Museum.  Late last year, archaeologists working in Spain, also claimed to have located what appear to be the ruins of the fabled Temple of Hercules Gaditanus, a religious pilgrimage site for ancient Greeks and Romans that featured large bronze carvings depicting the Twelve Labors.

Archaeologists consider Philippi, the site of the statue find, to be one of the most promising archaeological regions in all of Greece.  Colonists from the island of Thasos first settled the site in 360 BC.  Shortly after, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, took the town and renamed it Philippi after himself.  Philippi was later an important city along the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that linked Europe to Asia, carrying both troops and trade goods.  The town declined after the Ottoman conquest of the region in the fourteenth century AD.

Researchers continue to excavate the remnants of the city, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.

Next we go to the Negev Desert in southern Israel, where archaeologists excavating some of the world’s earliest copper mines think they’ve figured out how the area went from a thriving center of metal work to an abandoned desert.  

The Negev mines, which might be the origin of the legend of King Solomon's mines, needed large quantities of charcoal to smelt the ore.  As trees were cut down for burning, the miners eventually ran out of even the less desirable wood. 

As reported by LiveScience.com, the new evidence comes from a site known as Slaves Hill in the Timna Valley, near Eilat, which was a major center for copper production from the eleventh to the ninth century BC.

The researchers studied fragments of charcoal from ancient furnaces in the Timna Valley and found that the quality of the wood used to make charcoal deteriorated over the roughly 250 years when the mines and smelters operated.  Eventually, by about 850 BC, the area’s copper industry had been completely abandoned, and the wasted desert that remained wouldn't be exploited again for a millennium.

The Timna Valley was one of the first places in the ancient world where copper was smelted.  Some of the earliest evidence for smelting copper ore in the Timna Valley dates to about 7,500 years ago, during the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, that followed the Neolithic.  

Cavanagh and his colleagues studied fragments of charcoal from the local Iron Age, about 3,000 years ago, when the copper industry at Timna was at its peak.

To make charcoal, the ancient metal miners burned wood in underground pits with only a small amount of air.  Charcoal burns much hotter than raw wood, and for longer, so it is ideal for smelting.

To determine which types of wood were used to make the charcoal, the researchers used an electron microscope to examine slag left over from the smelting during different periods.  Their analysis revealed the cell structures of the woods used, showing that white broom and acacia were used extensively in the early phases of the copper industry at Timna, but that much lower-quality wood was used later on. 

Eventually, the mines were abandoned, possibly in part because it had become so hard to find suitable wood nearby.  The copper industry at Timna wouldn't be restarted for about 1,000 years, when the Nabateans and then the Romans began importing better wood for making charcoal.

According to Cavanagh, depletion of wood to make charcoal in the Timna Valley contributed to the desert conditions of today.  Cutting down the trees put into motion a snowball effect.  Fewer trees meant fewer animals and less water in an already dry environment, and some of the species that disappeared have never returned.

The early copper industry coincided with the time when Israelite kings David and his son Solomon are thought to have ruled in Jerusalem.

According to Cavanagh, copper from the ancient industry at Timna might have given rise to the reputed wealth on display at Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem that was later interpreted by ancient writers as gold.  That apparently was the origin of the story of “King Solomon’s Mines.”

The new research appears in the journal Scientific Reports. 

Our third story takes us to Denmark, where detailed geochemical analysis has revealed how early medieval craftsmen recycled Roman glass into new and colorful beads for sale. 

As reported by the science news site Eurekalert, the new research comes from a Viking Age trading town called Ribe, [REE-buh], which developed in the eighth century as a trading center on the north side of the river Ribe, in southwestern Denmark.  Here traders and craftsmen came from far and wide to manufacture and sell goods such as brooches [BRO-chez], buckles, combs, and glass beads.

Glass, however, had become a scarce commodity in Early Medieval times, so craftsmen began upcycling Roman and Byzantine glass from cities to the south and transporting them to northern Europe as raw materials.  The colored glass was often in the form of cubes – called tesserae [TESS-uh-ray] – torn out of mosaics in abandoned Roman and Byzantine temples, palaces and baths.  At trading centers such as Ribe, beadmakers melted them down and shaped them into beads.

The interdisciplinary team included Søren Sindbæk, professor of archaeology at the Danish National Research Foundation's Center for Urban Network Development at Aarhus University.  Sindbaek teamed with museum curator Claus Feveile at the Museum of Southwest Jutland specializing in the Viking Age and Ribe's earliest history, along with Gry Barfod.

The team studied the chemical composition of white Viking beads from one of the earliest workshops, to determine how clear whitish, gold-covered tesserae were made into opaque white glass beads.  The results show that the Ribe glassmakers found a way to do it that also saved time and wood for their furnaces.  They crushed the gold-gilded, transparent glass cubes, remelted them at low temperature, stirred to trap air in the form of bubbles, and then wrapped the glass around an iron mandrel to form beads.  The many tiny bubbles made the white beads opaque, and the process used limited resources.  

Tiny drops of gold in the white beads, the many air holes and the absence of chemical color tracers show that it was in fact the gold from mosaic stones that provided the raw material for the beads.

Such traces of gold were found not only in the white but also in the blue beads at the same artisan’s workshop.  Here, the chemistry shows that the glassmaker's recipe involved a mixture of the blue and golden mosaic stones.  Mixing them was necessary because the Roman blue mosaic stones contained high concentrations of chemical substances which made them opaque.  By diluting the chemical substances, craftsmen could produce the deep blue, transparent glass beads used widely in the Viking Age.

According to the team, these Ribe workmen were connoisseurs, who chose their material carefully to produce outstanding results.

The finds from the excavations are currently displayed inside reconstructed replicas of the beadmakers’ workshops in a new special exhibition at the Ribe Viking Museum, which is one of the destinations in our tour of Danish Viking sites, now in the planning stage.

The glass study appears in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

Our last story this week comes from southern Alabama, where an old ditch in the beachside resort town of Gulf Shores has turned out to be a Native American construction. 

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the remnants of this large trench measure about 30 feet wide and 3 feet deep.  

In 2017 a team of volunteer archaeologists, led by now-retired anthropologist at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Gregory Waselkov, confirmed that this long-overlooked trench is a rare archaeological find: a canal, nearly a mile long, built for canoe travel 1,400 years ago by the Native Americans who navigated the region’s waterways.  

Though archaeologists know that what was essentially a highway system of natural waterways and footpaths stretched across the Southeast, few Indigenous canals are known in the region.  

The original inhabitants of the Gulf Coast were able to engineer the landscapes to allow them to flourish.  

Although much of the canal has been lost to development today, in its heyday it would have stretched a little less than a mile across most of Fort Morgan Peninsula, from Oyster Bay in the north to Little Lagoon in the south. 

Both bodies of water are at sea level, meaning anyone digging a trench across the peninsula risked draining the water table into those sea-level outlets.  The solution in this case may have been two dams at each end of the passageway that canoe travelers would have had to carry their boats around.  

Dugout canoes would have needed only a few inches of water to pass through the three-foot-deep canal, and in seasons when it was dry it may still have been used as a footpath through a heavily forested area.

The team dug two cross-sections of the canal.  Through radiocarbon dating, they were able to place the construction between 576 and 650 C.E., at the end of the Middle Woodland period. This period is also famous for long-distance traffic, when stones, shells and other goods were traded throughout the eastern half of North America.

Evidence shows a small Middle Woodland village, Plash Island, stood about 1.5 miles north of one end of the canal and was likely responsible for the waterway’s construction.    The Native Americans living in this area at the time did not use agriculture, so access to subsistence resources like fish and foraged plants was important.

Scholars previously assumed a culture would need strong hierarchies to harness the type of labor needed for large-scale engineering projects.  Researchers typically look for disparities in graves and housing to find evidence of social hierarchies. 

Waselkov says little archaeological work has been done on Woodland sites of the Mobile area, but of the known remains, an elite class that would have directed big construction projects is not in evidence.  Some archaeologists have been coming around to the idea that a rigidly hierarchical, agrarian society was not a prerequisite for complexity or even city-building. 

Regardless, still more is likely to be found in this region to give more context about the societal structures of the early peoples who lived here.

That wraps up the news for this week!

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