Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew with a preview of our four featured 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!

Archaeologists in France who conducted the first complete excavation of a European abbey are now digging through a huge mass of new data.  An obsidian blade found by a collector in the Texas Panhandle has one researcher convinced it was dropped there by Coronado on his way to the fabled Seven Cities of Gold.  A new DNA study appears to show that the last hunter-gatherers in western France avoided inbreeding by taking unrelated mates, but did not mix with the immigrant Neolithic farmers.   And excavated data from the city made famous by Goliath in Israel reveals a whole lot about the plants used in Philistine rituals.

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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 February 25th through March 2nd.

 This week’s first story comes from the Loire Valley in France, where researchers have excavated the medieval Beaumont Abbey and discovered more than 1,000 burials.  This is the first full excavation of a European abbey in such detail, and researchers hope to learn more about the buried skeletons and the evolution of a Catholic convent.  

As reported by LiveScience, Beaumont Abbey was founded in AD 1002 outside Tours, in the Loire Valley of France, roughly 110 miles southwest of Paris.  The abbey was built on the site of a village called Belmons, which had been occupied since 845.  For nearly 800 years, the abbey of nuns thrived, until the government of the French Revolution seized the lands in 1789 and expelled the nuns.  By the early nineteenth century, both the church and outbuildings were torn down.  

The new excavation, led by Philippe Blanchard of the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, has revealed much about the structure.  

According to Blanchard, the remains were so complete that the dig uncovered as many elements of the abbey as possible, including the church, cloister and many other associated buildings.  

The excavation revealed that the abbey underwent at least two major structural changes.  Its original church was small, a semicircular structure with a semi-domed roof.  The first renovation came quickly, during the eleventh or twelfth century, and doubled the size of the structure.  The second renovation, around a century later, added an ambulatory, or aisles along the nave, the central part of the church.  

Simultaneously the convent housing and associated buildings underwent nearly constant small structural changes as well, adding rooms, as well as useful features such as toilets.  Tiles were added and changed to improve walls and floors.  Tombs were also built for the many nuns and abbey servants who died here over the centuries. 

The abbey cemetery excavations uncovered over 1,000 burials, including likely plague victims.  Three nuns died in a single day during the fourteenth-century Black Death.  

Blanchard hopes to analyze the skeletons to discover their diet, area of origin and state of health.  

The tombs may also hold high-ranking church members.  One tomb probably held Madame de Bourbon-Condé, a rich abbess who was the granddaughter of Louis XIV.  

Her vault, however, contained only a few bones and ceramics, with the tombstone found elsewhere at the site.  According to Blanchard, this probably reflects a disturbance during the  French Revolution and its ensuing wars, when soldiers opened burial vaults to turn the lead coffins into bullets.  

The excavation also uncovered the remains of the village of Belmons, almost 1,200 years old.  The many artifacts and detailed excavations of structures will allow the research team to reconstruct the history of both the village and the abbey, the first medieval religious complex to reveal itself in such detail.

The excavation has now been filled in completely, with research continuing in the laboratory.  

Next we go to the Texas panhandle, where obsidian spectrometer analysis suggests connections to the Spanish expedition of Coronado that traveled through the southwest in search of a legendary lost city.  

As reported by the science news site Phys.org, researchers examined an obsidian blade found by local collector Lloyd Erwin somewhere near his ranch outside McLean, Texas.  

The blade is a flaked-stone tool about five centimeters long.  Researchers believe the blade was dropped by a member of the Coronado expedition on its journey from modern-day Mexico to Kansas through parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma. 

According to anthropologist Matthew Boulanger, director of the Archeology Research Collections in Southern Methodist University’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, the blade fits all the requirements for convincing evidence of a Coronado presence in the Texas panhandle.  No evidence suggests that the blade is a hoax.  

The Coronado expedition was led by Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado from 1540 to 1542.  The expedition was looking for Cibola, the fabled Seven Cities of Gold.  It ended up traveling to the ancestral Wichita province of Quivira, near modern-day Salina, Kansas. 

The legend of Cibola may come from a Portuguese myth about seven cities on a mysterious rectangular island in the Atlantic Ocean.  It may also hail from survivors of the shipwrecked Narváez [nar-VAH-ez] expedition to Florida in AD 1527. 

The expedition included both Spanish explorers and Indigenous Mexicans.   

When researchers carried out a spectrometer analysis of the blade’s chemical composition, it showed the obsidian came from the Sierra de Pachuca mountain range in Central Mexico.  This area was a major obsidian source before the Spanish Conquest.  

If one discounts the possibility of pre-Conquest trade networks between the Texas panhandle and central Mexico, the results of the analysis suggest the blade may have been carried by a member of the Coronado expedition, perhaps one of the expedition’s many indigenous Mexican servants. However, obsidian from the  Sierra de Pachuca source is known from prehistoric sites in Kansas, so an earlier trade route along Coronado’s path, which ultimately became the Santa Fe Trail, seems likely to us.

Researchers hope to survey the area where the blade was discovered to confirm that the artifact is connected to the Coronado expedition, and to search for other clues to the expedition’s trail.  

Our third story takes us to France, where new genetic results show that Stone Age hunter-gatherer populations married outside their groups, possibly to reduce the deleterious effects of inbreeding.  

As reported by phys.org, around 7,500 years ago in Western Europe, Mesolithic hunter-gatherer populations thrived, and genetic analysis shows they comprised genetically distinct groups.  

Once the Neolithic farming culture arrived, however, these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers either became, or were replaced by, sedentary farmers.  Previous studies have hinted that the hunter-gatherer men married Neolithic farming women.  

In a new study, conducted by researchers from Uppsala University, the University of Rennes in Brittany and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, genetic evidence now suggests that the hunter-gatherers married other hunter-gatherers. 

Researchers examined human skeletons from historic burial sites in France, including Téviec and Hoedic [EH-dick] in southern Brittany and Champigny [SHAHMP- in-yee] near Paris.  The remains date to the period around 6,700 years ago, in the transition from the Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to the Neolithic farmers.  Téviec and Hoedic are burial sites noted for their many group burials, which were previously assumed to be genetically related individuals.  

The researchers obtained biomolecular data from 10 human skeletons, including through the process of deep-coverage complete genome sequencing.  When the genetic results were integrated with previously published dietary data and new high-resolution chronological analysis, researchers were able to look at genetic relationships.

The results show that the group burials are of genetically distinct families..  The individuals in Brittany are largely unrelated, and familial relationships that did occur were not first-degree.  Despite their small size, hunter-gatherer groups had low intra-group biological relatedness.  That is, the data show an absence of inbreeding.  

The data suggest that the groups were affiliated through larger networks that maintained exogamic practices, or marrying outside one’s specific group.  

According to anthropologist Luciana F. Simões from Uppsala University, the data suggest a systematic pattern, which was probably part of a strategy to avoid inbreeding. 

The individuals at Téviec and Hoedic lived at the same time as the earliest farmers, but their genes show no Neolithic farmer ancestry.  This supports the hypothesis that the exogamic network did not include Neolithic farmers, but only hunter-gatherers that interbred with other hunter-gatherers.  

The genetic data indicate that while hunter-gatherers did not assimilate farmers, Neolithic farmers did assimilate hunter gatherers to some extent.  

According to study leader Professor Mattias Jakobsson from Uppsala University, this gives a new picture of the last Stone Age hunter-gatherer populations in Western Europe.  

Our final story takes us to Israel, where an excavation of an Iron Age Philistine city has revealed new information about the use of plants in rituals.  

As reported by the Jerusalem Post, a team from Bari-ilan University in Ramat Gan has led a systematic excavation project of the temple area in the city of Gath, also known as Tell es-Safi.  Gath is recognized in the Bible as the home of Goliath, and was a city of the Philistines, who flourished during the Iron Age from 1200 to 604 BC.  The Philistine culture spread widely and had an enormous influence on the agronomy, diet and cultural history of the Southern Levant.  

The new study was able to reconstruct the plants used in Philistine rituals.  Many aspects of Philistine culture have been studied, but information about Philistine religious practices, gods and rituals is still relatively unknown.  

Two of the excavated temples revealed fragments of numerous plants, yielding a new understanding of the plants used for food and decoration in temples.  Knowing the seasonality of the plants also reveals new information about the schedule of Philistine ceremonies.  

The importance of plants in ancient religions of southwestern Asia is seen in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the tale of Aqhat, and in the worship of deities like Tammuz, Ishtar and Baal.  There, the cycle of death and rebirth of a plant, and the freshwater and agriculture aspects of a plant, are seen as transformative and magical.   

Meticulous documentation of the assemblages from the two temples included quantitative and qualitative analysis of the types of plants used, resulting in new evidence for the time of their harvest, modes of offering, and potential symbolic significance. 

Cultural connections between specific cultic traditions and certain plants stood out from the presence of plants such as the lilac chaste tree, crown daisy and silvery scabiosa.  This temple study shows some of their earliest known ritual uses.  The use of these three plants also connects Philistine cultic rituals with early Greek cultic rituals and mythology, such as those of Hera, Artemis, Demeter and Asclepios.  

Other identified plants have psychoactive and medicinal properties, suggesting their use in cultic activities.  

The importance of the seasons emerges through an analysis of the seeds and fruits that were found.  These suggest that most temple rites were performed in early spring, with little to no use of the temples in late summer or early fall.  

This examination of ritual plants provides insights into how the Philistines interacted and perceived the world around them.  They called on the power of nature to symbolize, and perhaps influence, human life.  

According to archaeobotany professor Ehud Weiss, this study has clarified some previous assumptions about Philistine rituals, and provides new evidence of connections between Philistine culture and other Mediterranean cultural and religious traditions.  

For example, researchers discovered loom weights used for fabric production within Philistine temples.  This suggests commonalities with Aegean cults of the goddess Hera, which also commonly involved weaving, as shown by similar finds of loom weights.  

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!