Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew, and here are 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!

A study of the Menga Neolithic dolmen in Spain, built 5700 years ago, shows how remarkable it is as an engineering accomplishment.  Analysis of genome data from 136 individuals reveals that the arrival of the Slavic peoples in the Balkans in the first millennium AD is a more complex story than we thought.  A defensive structure in remote Siberia surprises researchers, as it was built 8000 years ago by hunter-gatherers.  And archaeologists in Peru have excavated a first-of-its-kind, thousand-year-old, architectural complex built by the Wari Empire.

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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 for the week of December 3rd through December 9th, 2023.

We begin this week in southern Spain, where a team of archaeologists, geologists and historians have learned more about the origins of one of the greatest engineering feats of the Neolithic period: the Menga dolmen in Málaga's Antequera [ahn-tay-CARE-uh] province.  

The Iberian peninsula holds thousands of megalithic monuments, crafted from enormous stones, but the Menga dolmen would have been the largest built at the time, 3800 to 3600 BC.  The dolmen was listed as a UNESCO Heritage Site in 2016, and uses over 30 enormous stones.  Nearly all are vertically placed around the edges of an ancient burial mound, with a capstone laid over the top.  The capstone is the largest of all the stones, weighing nearly 150 tons.  

As reported on the science news site phys.org, researchers have yet to understand the engineering used to erect the dolmen, since only simple tools would have been available to remove these massive rocks from a quarry, drag them to the top of the hill, and position them.  

The team of researchers from several Spanish universities began with a careful study of the stones, including the quarries from which they came.  High-resolution geological mapping along  with petrographic and stratigraphic analysis confirmed that most of them are calcarenite, a type of sedimentary rock consolidated from sediment.  Calcarenite is what modern civil engineering refers to as a soft stone -- easier to cut and shape, but at the same time more likely to break during transport, unless very carefully handled.  

The calcarenites of the Menga dolmen were traced to a rocky outcrop about a kilometer from the building site.  The quarry site was higher in elevation than the Menga dolmen site, meaning that the builders planned how to ease the stones downhill into their new position.

The builders likely drew on new technologies for working this softer stone, as well as the wood frameworks needed to lift and move them.  Natural fractures in the native stone allowed them to select giant rocks that were already partly shaped.  Careful planning would then have allowed them to move the massive yet fragile stones along a level path, which they also had to shape.   Lifting and placing the 150-ton capstone would have required scaffolding and strong ropes.

The researchers established that the burial mound was built to align with nearby mountains and create complex light patterns inside the chamber.  The early engineers had devised a way to set interlocking stones at the edges of the burial chamber to channel away water seepage and prevent erosion. The new investigation of one of the largest known megalithic structures in Europe shows that even though its ancient builders had only simple tools, their planning was sophisticated and careful.  

The new study was published in Scientific Reports. 

Next we head to the Balkan Peninsula, where a new multidisciplinary study has shown that during the Roman Empire and after, a huge population shift took place, as Slavic immigrants moved into Roman territory in ever larger numbers. 

As reported by phys.org, this movement of people during the first millennium AD shaped the medieval and modern demographics of many Roman regions.  Slavic genetic lineages are high in Balkan countries such as Serbia, with 50 to 60 percent Slavic ancestry.  The proportion decreases toward the south, with Greece having 30 to 40 percent Slavic ancestry in the north, but only 20 percent in the Aegean islands.  

The change was complete by early medieval times, in a sweeping demographic shift comparable to the Anglo-Saxon migration into England.  

The new study comes from a large interdisciplinary collaboration of over 70 archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and geneticists.  The team was able to extract the complete genomes of 138 people, from an area now mainly in Serbia and Croatia.  More than a third of them lived along the Roman military frontier, at the massive archaeological site of Viminacium (vih-mih-NAW-key-um) in Serbia.  

The team compared the genomes of people who lived under Roman rule, and afterwards, from within the Balkan provinces and from nearby regions from the same millennium.  They then compared these to the genetic makeup of modern Balkan people.

By combining evidence from genetics, written records, and archaeological remains, the study provides detailed new information on an era, and an area, that saw profound demographic, cultural and linguistic changes.

The results show that the arrival of Slavic-speaking populations in the Balkans took place over several generations and involved entire family groups.  The Slavic peoples who immigrated into the Balkans during, and especially after, the end of the Roman Empire came from eastern Europe, northern Europe and the Asian steppes beyond the Black Sea. 

Interestingly, the analysis showed that even under stable Roman rule, from AD 1 to 250, people in the Balkan provinces did not come from Italy.  Instead, the Balkan provinces drew immigrants from the east, mainly the Anatolian area, which is now Turkey.  Others came from even farther, such as a man whose DNA analysis showed he grew up in sub-Saharan Africa, somewhere around present-day Sudan.  

Slavic peoples trickled in during the third century AD.  By the sixth century, however, Rome had lost control of the Balkans, and the DNA shows a large-scale arrival of people who were genetically similar to the modern Slavic-speaking populations of Eastern Europe.  Their genetic fingerprint accounts for half the ancestry of today's Balkan peoples, one of the largest permanent demographic shifts anywhere in Europe in the early medieval period.

According to co-author Carles Lalueza-Fox, principal investigator at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and director of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, this work shows how combining genomic data with archaeological and historic records can help move historians beyond contentious debates around identity and ancestry that have contributed to conflict in the past.  

The research was published in the open-access journal Cell.

For our third story we trek to Siberia, where the oldest fortified settlement in the world was recently uncovered in a sandy area alongside the Amnya River.  The find shows that hunter-gatherers constructed sophisticated defensive structures around their settlements 8,000 years ago, in contrast to the long-held belief that permanent settlements with complex social structures didn't appear until the arrival of agriculture.  

As reported on arkeonews.net, an international team co-led by archaeologists from Germany and Russia carried out the excavation of Amnya, the northernmost Stone Age fort in Eurasia.  Palaeobotanical and stratigraphical examinations showed the fort's inhabitants led a sophisticated lifestyle, drawing on the abundant resources of the taiga (TAI guh), or boreal forest.  They ate fish from the Amnya River, hunted elk and reindeer using bone- and stone-tipped spears, and crafted elaborately decorated pottery to store fish oil and meat for the long Siberian winters.

Large dwellings inside the fortress could accommodate dozens of people, and were sunk almost two meters deep for warmth, encircled by earthen walls several meters high, and topped with wooden palisades.  Another ten dwellings lie outside the fortified structure.

Construction features like central elevated fireplaces confirm that the structures were long-term dwellings, contradicting the belief that permanent settlements and defensive structures only emerged in farming societies.

Scorched layers show that pit houses and palisades were burned to the ground several times.  Archaeologists also found arrowheads in the structure's outer ditch, additional suggestions of violent conflict.  The palisades, large numbers of people and storage of resources all point to a competitive environment.  

According to the study, the Amnya settlement complex marks the beginning of a unique, long-term phenomenon of hunter-gatherer defensive sites in the north of Eurasia—a tradition that continued for almost eight millennia into the Early Modern period.  The discoveries underscore that hunter-gatherer societies could be settled, complex, and involved in conflicts.

The full report was published in the journal Antiquity. 

Finally, we head to western Peru, where the remains of the first Wari Empire development of its kind in a rural region have been uncovered in Orcona, some 280 miles southeast of Lima.  

As reported by the Miami Herald, a team of researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Almería were exploring a known settlement near Orcona, when they encountered the remains of an architectural complex from the tenth century AD.  

The site’s construction and contents reveal that it comes from the Wari culture.  The Wari State was a powerful empire that expanded throughout the Andean mountains and coastal regions around the seventh century AD.  Most Wari settlements are well-developed towns and cities, and the new ruins are the first to be found in a rural region.  

The site is also only a few kilometers east of Nazca, the location of the famous geoglyphs

The walls of the two-story building were constructed of large stones and covered with adobe, which was plastered in white and yellow.  The ground floor held evidence of food preparation and storage facilities.  The attached patio measured nearly 5,400 square feet, with storage rooms along it, shown by the remaining large stones of wall foundations.  

The researchers believe the building was likely owned by members of the imperial ruling class, who used it as a place for servants to carry out various artisanal, food preparation and maintenance activities along with agricultural work in the Aja [AH-hah] River valley.

The team’s work is part of the La Puntilla [poon-TEE-yah] Archaeological Research Project, which has been excavating sites along the Aja River, on the northern slope of the La Puntilla mountain range, since 2005.  Starting in 2012, the digs focused on El Trigal III [three], where a settlement was discovered from the period of the Cahuachi State, dating from the first centuries AD.

In 2021, digs began in what is known as the North Precinct, and in 2022 researchers confirmed that the newly discovered building was from the Wari State.  Researchers had previously identified a ceramic model in a tomb that showed the same configuration as the structure, possibly indicating that the building's construction was carefully planned.

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 growing subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, at heritagetac.org!

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