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

New analysis appears to show that independent Copper Age settlements in Spain worked cooperatively with each other, not under outside control.  Fires made by Neanderthals in a Portuguese cave show that these groups were quite intelligent and had a fairly complex cuisine.  Direct carbon dating of cave art in Puerto Rico shows that indigenous people were there thousands of years before the European arrival.  And a young computer science student becomes the first to decipher a complete word from a carbonized Herculaneum scroll through the use of artificial intelligence.

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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 from Archaeologica for the week of October 15th through the 21st, 2023.

Our first story takes us to the Iberian Peninsula, where researchers have analyzed large stone tools from the Copper Age to deduce the economic patterns of different settlements in the area. 

As reported by phys.org, analysts at the Autonomous University of Barcelona examined more than 150 macrolithic artifacts, or large stone tools, dated from 3100 to 2200 BC, and excavated at eighteen different sites.  Large and heavy stone tools were essential in a wide variety of tasks during the Copper Age, including for grinding food, crushing minerals, making other stone tools, hardening ceramics to make them waterproof, dressing leather, forging and sharpening metal, cutting down trees, working wood, and butchering animals.

The analysis correlated these subsistence activities with habitation structures, and was supported by bioarchaeological data for the sites, including botanical, faunal and paleonutritional evidence.  

One important outcome is the confirmation that the large ditched enclosure of Valencia de la Concepción, near Seville, Spain, was a settlement area occupied by thousands of inhabitants, not just a place of worship. 

The distribution of tool types also showed that the Chalcolithic communities in the southern Iberian Peninsula had much the same economic organization across each settlement, and thus were organized independently, not under a centralized social hierarchy.  

According to the researchers, Marina Eguíluz, Selina Delgado-Raack and Roberto Risch, this economic equality would have been crucial to the social and architectural developments seen in these societies.  

The Copper Age communities of the Iberian Peninsula produced one of the most important archaeological records of late prehistory, with numerous large settlements, highly creative artifacts and architecture, and a distinctive, enormous circulation of goods.  These indicate great economic and social complexity, but the form of social organization has been debated. 

According to Delgado-Raack, the results show that neither of the two main types of settlements, known as the fortified settlements and the ditched settlements, dominated the other through accumulation of large amounts of surplus.  Instead, the researchers believe that the economy featured constant exchange of products, knowledge and people between communities that were fundamentally independent.

According to Risch, this material wealth without central domination challenges modern beliefs that production of wealth requires the presence of a ruling class or group.

The study appears in the Journal of World Prehistory.

Next we go to central Portugal, where archaeologists have found evidence showing how Neanderthals used fire in the Gruta de Oliveira Cave.  The cave is is one of the most important European archaeological sites for the Middle Paleolithic Period, with use from 100,000 to 70,000 years ago.  

As reported by phys.org, archaeologists found traces of hearths that were intentionally built and used in the cave.  

According to João Zilhão from the University of Lisbon, Diego Angelucci of University of Trento and Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute for Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, the nature of the hearth building and use shows that Neanderthals were as skilled with fire as the modern humans who lived thousands of years later. 

According to Angelucci, Neanderthals could create artistic objects, were capable of symbolic thought, and had an extremely varied diet.  The new research shows that the individuals using this cave habitually ate cooked food, determined what the diet was and even the cooking techniques.

An international group of archaeologists has carried out for over 30 years of excavation and analysis.  

Excavators found about a dozen hearths at various stratigraphic levels in an excavation area of about thirty square meters and six meters deep.  The unmistakable basin-like, circular structures were filled with ash and remains including burnt bones of cooked goat, deer, horse, aurochs, rhinos, and turtles.  Neanderthals probably placed them in the pits on hot stones to stew them whole in their skins.  Other Neanderthal cave sites in the Iberian peninsula confirm that mussels and other fish, nuts, and other plant foods were also on the menu.

Crucially, the rocks below the hearths were reddened by constant high heat.  According to Angelucci, this shows that fire was a fundamental element in their daily lives, making the cave comfortable and conducive to socialization.

Despite the excavations, the archaeologists were not able to determine how the Neanderthals started a fire.  It’s possible they used flints, striking them against each other to throw sparks on tinder, as known from later Neolithic times.  The excavators found no definitive evidence, however, to confirm how the fires were made.   

The new study appears in the journal PLOS One.

Our third story takes us to the karstic caves of Puerto Rico, where a new study has refined the dating of cave art to thousands of years prior to the European Invasion of Puerto Rico.  

As reported by phys.org, geophysicist Acosta-Colon at the University of Puerto Rico, along with his colleague Reniel Rodriguez, visited eleven different caves on La Isla [EES-lah]Grande.  They sampled sixty-one pigments of pictographic art among these caves. 

The researchers were careful to sample art motifs that are common, rather than unique.  Also, to destroy as little as possible, the samples were only one to two milligrams in size.

According to Acosta-Colon, the organic black materials used for these drawings are perfect for radiocarbon dating. 

The samples analyzed at the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia returned dates of 700 to 400 BC, during Puerto Rico’s Archaic Age. 

According to Acosta-Colon, this overturns the assumption of the Europeans who invaded Puerto Rico in the 1500s and who estimated that the pre-colonial population had inhabited the island for only four hundred to five hundred years prior to that time.  Instead, the pictograph dating shows that people were there thousands of years before the European invasion.

The new study also discovered more drawings, including simple depictions of human bodies, dated between AD 200 and 400, and more detailed human and animal drawings, from AD 700 to 800.  These types of drawings continued throughout the following centuries, extending beyond the European arrival around AD 1500  The most recent panels include images of horses, ships and other animals.  

Researchers were surprised to find a drawing that looks like a lion, which does not exist in Puerto Rico.  However, lions do inhabit Africa, and the Spaniards brought slaves captured there.  According to Acosta-Colon, this drawing dates to AD 1500, meaning this could be one of the first slave art caves in Puerto Rico. 

We end this week in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.  Early excavators here found eight hundred scrolls carbonized by the intense heat, in a villa that may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, a senior Roman statesman.  

As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, a twenty-one-year-old computer science student, Luke Farritor, has become the first winner of a longstanding prize meant to entice researchers worldwide to find a way to unlock the works of literature, history and more that are bound up in the scrolls. 

Farritor used AI, or artificial intelligence, to decipher a single word on an unopened scroll, the word “porphyras,” an ancient Greek name for purple. 

The papyrus scrolls were stored in a tightly wrapped bundle, and after carbonization by the volcanic heat.  The material is so fragile that it falls apart if researchers try to unroll it, as early investigators learned to their regret.  

Until now, reading even a single letter on the carbonized papyrus seemed impossible, let alone a word.  Unlocking the texts has been a constant mission for researchers worldwide, however, because 95 percent of written works from the classical world have been lost, and the burnt libraries of Herculaneum are likely to hold copies of many of the vanished works.  

Computer scientist Brent Seales, at the University of Kentucky, has been working for over twenty years on techniques to decipher the scrolls.  He first attempted to use CT scan technology to see inside the scrolls without unrolling them.  Unfortunately, the Herculaneum scrolls were written in carbon-based ink, with no metallic content, so the technology could not show anything.

Earlier this year, Seales’ team launched the Vesuvius challenge, offering prize money to anyone who could use artificial intelligence to help decipher the scans.  This opened up the search to people from all backgrounds, and in early August, Casey Handmer won ten thousand dollars for finding substantial evidence of ink within the scrolls.  Handmer’s work confirmed the presence of a “crackle pattern” on the inside surfaces of the scrolls that show where letters were inked.  

Handmer’s blog post on his methods and discovery inspired Farritor to create a machine-learning algorithm that put together the crackle shapes to identify multiple letters, including ten legible letters in a row: the first word from this ancient trove of knowledge.   Seales’ team awarded him forty thousand dollars.

Farritor’s discovery was confirmed by Youssef Nader, a biorobotics researcher, independently identifying the same word, “porphyras.” He won a second-place prize of ten thousand dollars.

The Vesuvius Challenge is still ongoing, with a grand prize of seven hundred thousand dollars, which will be awarded to the first contestant who can read four passages of at least 140 characters. 

According to Robert Fowler, a classicist at the University of Bristol in England, recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine.  The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance, which led to countless new advances and ideas in literature, poetry, drama, art, philosophy, theology, and history. 

That wraps up the news for this week!

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www.archaeologica.org where all the news is history!

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