Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to hand off 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 new drone survey has revealed 29 previously unrecorded geoglyphs in southern Peru, including a large number of feline figures.  A large study of Viking teeth shows that sophisticated dental care was quite common, along with cavities.  Another dental study, this one on ancient Native American and Asian teeth, shows a clear connection between Native Americans and Asians.  And DNA from a skeleton in Roman Britain identifies the man as a Sarmatian, a member of an Iranian group in southern Russia.

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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 Audio News December 17th through the 23rd, 2023.

 This week’s first story comes from Peru, where a drone recorded geoglyphs of huge felines and human-like figures on geoglyphs in the Nazca province dating from 300 BC to AD 100.

Twenty-nine geoglyphs were found in Ica, south of Lima on the coast of Peru.  Archaeologist Omar Bendezu De la Cruz of the San Luis Gonzaga National University (UNICA) and a team of 20 students made the discovery during a four-month research project approved by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture in the Ica region of Nazca Province, in the south of the country..

The impressive figures reflect the influence of astronomy and religion on ancient Peruvian culture.  The last discovery of this size was in 1994, when UNESCO declared  the famous “Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palca” as  part of the Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

According to team leader De la Cruz, and teacher at the Unica school of Archaeology, the figures are situated on the hillsides in the population center of San Francisco in El Ingenico district and the San Juan sector of the Changuillo district.  

As reported by Arkeonews, ten of the geoglyphs in the El Ingenico district depict feline figures measuring up to 55 feet long and 12 feet tall.  In the Changuillo district, the team found eight geoglyphs with feline figures measuring up to 121 feet long and 42 feet tall.

Eleven more geoglyphs show anthropomorphic figures, ten in the El Ingenio District and one in the Changuillo District.  Specialized software was used to analyze the drone images and help determine the shapes of the figures.

Cats were a common presence in the Paracas culture, and feline figures were frequently included in local craftmanship.  It’s believed the cats was a sign of fertility and considered a water deity.  The Paracas people were known for their sophisticated advancements in textile arts, especially weaving, which employed intricate designs and vibrant colors. 

The Paracas Culture thrived on the southern coast of Peru from approximately 800 to 100 BC.  At its height, its influence extended through other trade networks and connected it with other ancient cultures like the Chavín and Nazca civilizations.  Around 200 BC, it began to decline.  While the exact reasons aren't known, environmental changes or infighting may have been contributing factors.

Our second story takes us to Varnhem, Sweden, where researchers examined 3,293 well preserved Viking teeth from the 10th to the 12th century AD, believed to have come from 171 individuals.  The teeth came from a 2005 excavation of a church cemetery containing thousands of Viking graves. The site is known for extensive excavations of Viking and medieval features, including tombs where skeletons and teeth have been preserved well in favorable soil conditions.

In this study, Carolina Bertilsson and colleagues performed clinical and radiographical examinations of teeth from this site.  They were examined using modern dental techniques and tools, including the X-ray examinations using the kind of bite plates used in a dentist’s office today.  

The study, conducted by the University of Gothenburg, revealed much about the importance of teeth and dental care to the Viking population.  

Bertilsson and her team found that dental caries, also known as cavities or tooth decay, were not uncommon in the adult teeth they studied.  Forty-nine percent of the individuals examined had at least one or more caries lesions.  

The difference between the health of children’s teeth and that of adults’ teeth was notable.  Cavities were less common in children’s teeth.  In fact, they didn’t find any caries in the teeth of children with either milk teeth or a combination of milk and adult teeth. 

Adults were found to have as much as 13% of their teeth affected by caries or decay, often around the root of the tooth.  It appears that this increasing health risk led to tooth loss. Not surprisingly, the risk of tooth loss increased with age.  The study offers evidence that the average Viking adult would have lost 6% of his or her teeth during their lifetime.  

The study attempts to look after teeth in various ways, such as by looking for evidence of using toothpicks; filing front teeth, possibly as a male identity marker; and even dental work that included filed holes created to relieve tooth pain by reducing pressure and infection.

According to Bertilsson, the study provides new insights into oral health in Varnhem’s Viking culture, and suggests that dentistry in the Viking Age was more sophisticated than previously thought. 

Our third story takes us to Burgos, Spain, the home of the National Research Center on Human Evolution.  The Center is home to an international team of dental anthropologists who are using teeth to get a clearer picture of migration patterns and understand how people populated the Earth. 

As reported by Phys.org, the team includes researchers from Tied2Teeth, a groundbreaking European initiative dedicated to creating a comprehensive dental variation database.  Among these researchers are Leslea Hlusko, the team leader, from Spain’s National Center for Research on Human Evolution, and Richard Scott from the University of Nevada and the lead author of the published paper.

Because teeth often outlast other human remains, they are more commonly found at archaeological sites.  Dental anthropologists look at the differences in size and shape of teeth to gain a better understanding of ancient populations, including similarities between groups. 

Using a program designed for forensic analyses to identify the population ancestry of unidentified human victims, the team looked at differences and similarities in teeth from 1,418 ancient people found in different regions in Asia and North and South America.  Next, they classified the ancestry of each person based on those similarities.  

The analysis found an affinity between Native Americans and East Asians so significant that in 10% to 15% of cases, the similarity of their dental remains led them to classify teeth found in Native America as East Asian.   

Their findings suggest that all Native Americans came from the same population that was living in Beringia, the area between current Russia and Canada, for some 5,000 to 10,000 years prior to the migration into North and South America south of the ice sheet.  They also suggest these people migrated to the Americas during the last ice age.   

The study also suggests that today’s Indigenous people of Arctic North America came in a later migration, as teeth shaped like theirs are progressively less common in samples from areas farther south.

The database being created by Tied2Teeth will enable broader and even more varied analyses than the ones conducted in this study.

This study appears in the journal American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

We end the week in Britain with a young man dubbed Offord Cluny 203645, buried in a ditch in Cambridgeshire between AD 126 and 228.  His name is a combination of the town near the find location and his specimen number.

As reported by BBC News, Cluny's body was discovered during the process of making improvements to the A14 road between Cambridge and Huntingdon. 

The study of his remains is a fascinating example of how new technology is transforming our understanding of the past.  Using cutting-edge forensic science, researchers were able to uncover the details behind the bones to create a human story far beyond what documents and non-forensic archaeological evidence alone could provide. 

They learned that Cluny had traveled a long way to end up in that ditch.  DNA analysis revealed that he was a member of an Iranian nomadic group, the Sarmatians, and was born near what is now southern Russia—among the farthest parts of the Roman Empire that included Britain at the time.  He would likely have spoken an Iranian language and lived a nomadic lifestyle with great horse-riding skills. 

According to Dr. Marina Silva from the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, the team was able to find enough intact DNA to be decoded in a tiny bone in Offord’s inner ear.   

To learn how he ended up so far from home, a team from the archaeology department of Durham University used another exciting analysis technique to examine his fossilized teeth, which contained chemical traces of what he ate.

Like tree rings, teeth create layers that reveal the chemicals that surround an individual at a given moment in time.  Offord ate sorghum and millet as a six-year-old in the Sarmatian region.  His diet then shifted to wheat as he migrated west across Europe.  

Combined with historical information, researchers were able to determine that Offord was likely connected to a Sarmatian cavalry unit of the Roman army posted to Britain at that time. 

DNA and chemical analysis techniques are allowing researchers to ask new questions about how societies formed, their makeup, and how they evolved in the Roman period.  These results point to much greater population movement, not just in the cities but also the countryside.

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!