Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew to bring you 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!

A survey of records for the Bahamas has generated a list of 14 wrecks of slave-carrying ships that could shed new light on the slave trade.  A Spanish cave contains burials from recent millennia as well as possible evidence of earlier Neanderthal use.  Stone tools in Ukraine now are dated as the oldest in Europe, at 1.4 million years old.   And a thousand-years-old astronomical instrument from Moorish Spain with a series of later inscriptions on it came to light in an Italian museum.

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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 March 3rd through the 9th, 2024.

Our first story this week comes from the Bahamas, where archaeologists have identified the locations of several sailing ships that sank while serving in the slave trade between Africa and the Americas.

As reported by livescience.com, the wrecks include the Peter Mowell, an American schooner that sank off Lynyard Cay near Great Abaco Island in 1860 with about 400 enslaved Africans on board.  It and other ships carried enslaved people to plantations growing sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco in North America and around the Caribbean.

According to Carl Allen, CEO and founder of the underwater archaeological group Allen Exploration, the team has documented fourteen wrecks of slaver ships from 18th- and 19th-century records, most of which remain unexplored.

The team has physically located the underwater sites of three of the wrecks.

The wrecks are historically important in investigating what life was like on slaver ships, a topic that is poorly understood archaeologically.  They also serve as physical witnesses to the truth behind the horrific trade.

The slave ships were identified during Allen Exploration's Bahamas Lost Ships Project, which is compiling an inventory of every shipwreck around the islands.  So far, the team has identified altogether 596 wrecks in the waters around the northern Abaco islands, the earliest dating from 1657.

Allen Exploration is collaborating on the project with the Bahamas Maritime Museum in Freeport on Grand Bahama.

According to Michael Pateman, director of the Museum and co-author of the recent report, the history of the Bahamas was profoundly influenced by several slaving events, starting with the first slaving vessels that arrived from Africa in 1721.  Today, more than 90% of Bahamians are of African descent. 

The locations of the wrecks show that the Bahamas served as a major crossroads linking Africa, the American Southeast, Cuba, and the Gulf of Mexico.

According to James Jenney, director of research for the Bahamas Lost Ships Project and co-author of the report, the Bahamas were the safest route to these destinations despite having their share of bad weather.

Many of the wrecks in the northern Bahamas occurred when the ships were en route from American ports toward Cuba, whose sugar plantations were an especially dire destination for enslaved Africans. According to underwater archaeologist Sean Kingsley, director of Wreckwatch International and co-author of the report, enslaved African workers in Cuba lived in miserable housing, wore iron slave collars, and worked seven days a week, with just four hours a day of rest in cane-cutting season.  Each year, about ten percent of enslaved Africans died on the plantations.

The next steps in the investigation include diving to some of the wrecks to see what remains, in some cases more than 200 years after the ships sank.

Report co-author James Sinclair, director of archaeology for Allen Exploration, said many of the vessels lay in shallow, warm waters, where high energy from waves and storms has badly damaged the sites.  The first goal is to record what’s left, then determine how best to preserve any rare remains.

Next we go to northeastern Spain, where archaeologists have excavated a cave that was used as a burial site starting about 7,000 years ago.

As reported by livescience.com, the burials were situated deep in the cave, creating a necropolis containing over 7,000 bones.

The dig in the Cova dels Xaragalls, a Catalan name meaning Cave of the Ravines, was a joint project between the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and the Merida Institute of Archaeology.

According to archaeologist Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo, a researcher at the Catalan Institute, people were buried in communal graves within the cave through the late Neolithic, through most of the Chalcolithic or Copper Age, and throughout the Bronze Age, which ended in Spain about 3,000 years ago.

Analysis of the grave goods buried with the dead, including ceramics, stone tools and necklaces, showed that during the late Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, high-status individuals were buried separately.  Communal burials were still used for people of lower social rank.

Grave goods were especially abundant during the Bronze Age, when some individuals were buried with rich collections of weapons and other items.

One of the Bronze Age skulls has a hole in the cranium made by a trepanation, a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull. This individual seems to have suffered from several illnesses, and the trepanning may have been an attempt at a cure.  The lack of bone regrowth, however, shows that the person did not survive the operation.

Trepanation scars have been found on more than a hundred other prehistoric skulls from Spain.  

The Cova dels Xaragalls, about 56 miles west of Barcelona, was excavated several times during the 20th century, as well as in 2008 and in December 2023.

The most tantalizing finds are the bones of wild goats and charcoal found in part of the cave, dating to 45,000 years ago.  At that time, the region was inhabited by Neanderthals.  Paleoanthropologists think anatomically modern humans had replaced Neanderthals throughout Europe by about 40,000 years ago.

According to Rodriguez-Hidalgo, the age of the bones and charcoal raises the possibility that Neanderthals could have used the cave before modern humans arrived.  The team will seek further evidence.

It isn’t clear whether the cave in recent millennia was used for burials continuously, or by different groups during separate periods.  The team plans to carry out more radiocarbon dating to try to clarify the chronology of use, as well as analyze DNA, ceramics and the composition and origin of metals to sort out the cultures represented here.

The archaeological team plans to return to Cova dels Xaragalls this month.

Our third story takes us to western Ukraine, where stone tools excavated in the 1980s have been dated to 1.4 million years ago—making them the oldest known artifacts in Europe.  The findings support the interpretation that these early arrivals — probably people belonging to the species Homo erectus — entered Europe from the east and spread westward.

According to the co-lead author of the new study, Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, this is the first strong evidence for an east-to-west migration at this early time.

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As reported by the science journal Nature, prehistoric sites documenting the presence of human ancestors in Europe earlier than 800,000 years ago are extremely rare.

Although the stone tools were found in the 1980s at the Korolevo archaeological site near Ukraine’s border with Romania, dating them had been a challenge.

Garba and his colleagues used a dating method based on cosmogenic nuclides — rare isotopes generated when high-energy cosmic rays collide with chemical elements in minerals on Earth’s surface.   By calculating the ratio of specific cosmogenic nuclides in the sediment layer in which the tools were buried, the team estimated that the implements must be 1.4 million years old.

Until now, the earliest precisely dated evidence of hominins in Europe were fossils and stone tools found in Spain and France, dated at 1.1 million to 1.2 million years old.

The dates of the Korolevo tools lead the researchers to speculate that the human ancestors who made them were Homo erectus, the only archaic humans known to have lived outside Africa about 1.4 million years ago.  The Korolevo tools resemble those found at archaeological sites in the Caucasus Mountains that have been linked to Homo erectus and dated to about 1.8 million years ago.

According to study co-leader Mads Knudsen, a geoscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, it is impossible to associate the tools conclusively with Homo erectus, since Korolevo didn’t yield any fossilized human remains.

Korolevo lies between older archaeological sites at the intersection of Asia and Europe, and younger sites in southwestern Europe.  According to Garba, the findings give a fuller picture of the direction of travel probably taken by the first Europeans, supporting the idea that they spread from east to west — perhaps along the valleys of the Danube River.  We should note, however, that the sample of sites is so small that it can’t possibly prove one direction of movement over another.

According to study co-author Vitaly Usyk, an archaeologist affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, Korolevo is a treasure trove of prehistoric remains.  Usyk visited the site last year with Garba for the first time since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The Korolevo site is relatively safe and hasn’t been damaged so far during the war.

However, Usyk notes, few scientists can participate in field research at Korolevo or anywhere else in the country, either because of travel restrictions or because they have fled the conflict.  Usyk himself left Ukraine in 2022 and is now working at the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, Czech Republic, with a fellowship that allows him to continue his research.  

We end the week in Italy, where a medieval astrolabe from Spain documents not only the heavens, but a long history of scientific use by multiple cultures.

As reported by Sciencealert.com, the brass artifact was made in eleventh-century Moorish Spain, but subsequently engraved with annotations in multiple additional languages, as centuries of new owners adapted and updated it for their own uses.

The object is thus a palimpsest [PAL imp-sest] , a layered record of its users’ comments as it crossed both countries and cultures.

According to historian Federica Gigante [gee-GAHN-tay] of the University of Cambridge, who rediscovered and studied the astrolabe, the instrument underwent many modifications, additions and adaptations as it changed hands.  At least three users felt the need to add translations and corrections to the object, two using Hebrew and one using a Western language.

Astrolabes, instruments that chart the heavens, have been used since ancient Greek times to allow users to calculate their positions in time and space.

The Islamic world is credited with fully developing the astrolabe into a versatile tool for timekeeping, navigation, astronomy, and astrology.

The Verona astrolabe—so called because it was discovered in the collection of the Miniscalchi-Erizzo [minis-CAL-kee - AIR-eetz-oh] museum in Verona—was likely acquired as part of the collection of the nobleman Ludovico Moscardo, who lived in Verona in the seventeenth century.

Gigante, who specializes in artifacts from the Islamic world in the early modern period, noticed a newly uploaded photo of the astrolabe on the museum's website, and reached out to the institution to find out more about it.

According to Gigante, the museum didn't know what it was, and thought it might actually be fake. It's now the single most important object in their collection.  It is not  only covered in beautifully engraved Arabic inscriptions, also faint inscriptions in Hebrew as well.

The style of the astrolabe, the engraving on the back, and the style of the calligraphy are consistent with other astrolabes made in Islamic Spain in the eleventh century.  This is supported by the positions of the star pointers, which are consistent with an astrolabe made by Ibrāhīm ibn Saʿīd al-Sahlī in the Spanish municipality of Toledo in 1068.  This suggests that it was based on star coordinates used in the late 11th century.

The engravings speak to a rich cultural history.  Some of the Arabic inscriptions are Muslim prayer lines and prayer names, suggesting that at least one owner used the artifact to keep track of the time for prayers.

Another Arabic inscription, added later, reads "for Is āq" and "the work of Yūnus."  It's impossible to know who Is āq and Yūnus were, but the names in English are Isaac and Jonas.  Medieval Spain had a sizable Sephardic Jewish community who spoke Arabic.  This inscription could mean that the astrolabe spent some time with them, too.

The Hebrew inscriptions include translations for astrological constellations, which suggest that at a certain point the object left Spain or North Africa and circulated among the Jewish diaspora community in Italy.  

Finally, someone, at some point, scratched latitude corrections on both sides of the astrolabe in Western Arabic numerals (the ones we use today), probably for a Latin or Italian speaker.  Interestingly, though, some of the corrections appear to be wrong.

Gigante’s research has been published in the journal Nuncius [NOON-see-us].

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!