Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, with a preview of four top 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!

Investigators in Poland examining a skeleton from a 300-year-old church crypt surprisingly found a prosthesis designed for a man with a cleft palate.  Pottery shards from an island in the Great Barrier Reef now show that Aboriginal Australians in prehistoric times indeed were familiar with ceramic technology.  Structural analysis of pyramids at Teotihuacan reveals that the ancient Mesoamerican city experienced at least five damaging earthquakes.  And genetic examination of Blackfoot people in North America traces their Indigenous ancestry back an amazing 18,000 years.

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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 April 14th through the 20th, 2024.

We begin this week in Poland, where archaeologists excavating a set of crypts recovered a metallic object in the mouth of a male skeleton.  At first believed to be a burial item, it proved to be a prosthesis designed to help the man cope with a cleft palate.  

As reported by Live Science, the team was working at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, located in the city of Krakow.  Most of the church's crypts date from the 17th century to the end of the 18th century.  

The people entombed there included citizens of high social status, church donors, monks and priests of the church's Franciscan monastery, and others who were considered worthy. 

The man with the prosthesis died at about fifty.  His 300-year-old prosthetic device is crafted of copper alloy and covered with a layer of silver and gold.

According to study lead author Anna Spinek, an anthropologist at the Polish Academy of Science, this discovery of a palatal obturator prosthesis designed for a specific individual is likely the first of its kind in Poland, and potentially all of Europe. 

The device was designed to arch into the nasal cavity and restore the separation between it and the oral cavity, helping the wearer eat, swallow, breathe and talk.  It is made up of two parts: a metal elliptical diaphragm and a woolen pad.  Researchers believe a white coating on the pad, visible under scanning electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy, could be silver iodide, known for its antibacterial properties.

In recent years, interest in opening the vaults hidden under the church’s floors has grown.   Research from 2017 to 2018, funded by the National Science Center, aimed to find, inventory and explore crypts and to study burials and grave goods.  

The Franciscan basilica is strictly protected, so only five floor tiles could be removed at a time.  Each open space had to be tented.

Cleft palates arise when the roof of the mouth doesn’t close during fetal development.  Today, the condition can be corrected surgically.  In earlier times, however, ingenuity was required to cope with the condition.

While attempts to replace missing parts of the palate date to antiquity, the first documented instance of a true cleft palate prosthesis was in 1560.  The first person to construct effective versions of the device was likely 16th-century French surgeon Ambrois Paré, [AM-broyz pahr-AY].

Next, we travel to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, where a team of archaeologists has finally answered a puzzling, longtime question: why has no early pottery by Aboriginal people ever been found?  Pottery fragments originating in southeast Asia had previously been located across the continent, but no evidence suggested that Australia had a pottery tradition of its own.

Excavations by a team of Australian archaeologists on the island of Jiigurru [JEE-goo-roo], part of the Lizard Island Group on Australia’s eastern Cape York Peninsula, have filled that gap in the record. 

As reported by Phys.org, the dig was carried out in concert with the area’s Aboriginal Traditional Owners.  It unearthed 82 pieces of pottery from a shell midden, a prehistoric campsite where remains of food and stone tools can be found.

Radiocarbon dating of charcoal and shells found near the pottery shards revealed them to be between 1,800 and 3,000 years old, making this the earliest securely dated pottery ever found in Australia.  The deepest cultural evidence, found six and a half feet below the surface, dated to around 6,500 years ago, the earliest known age of human use in offshore islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

Analysis of the collection's clays and tempers shows all the objects were likely made on Jiigurru.  Subtle differences also appeared between the newly discovered sherds and pottery found in the past in other areas, made by artisans of the Lapita Culture who migrated across the islands of the southwest Pacific.  This appears to further confirm that the Jiigurru finds were locally made by native Australians.

Far from being isolated, the people of the northeast Australian First Nations had the canoe voyaging technology, navigational skills, and connections to other groups across the Coral Sea region to provide them with the knowledge of how to make pottery.

Ian J. McNiven, co-author of the paper on the Jiigurru project, points out that the team's findings challenge racist and colonialist stereotypes of Aboriginal communities as lacking complexity and innovation.  The discovery demonstrates that Aboriginal people on Jiigurru were not only aware of pottery thousands of years before European colonization, but had the ability to create it themselves.

Our third story takes us to central Mexico, where researchers have encountered a possible factor in the abrupt decline and collapse of the ancient Mesoamerican metropolis of Teotihuacan [tay-oh-tee-wha-KAHN].

As reported by Heritage Daily, an analysis of several pyramids in the city has revealed evidence of Earthquake Archaeological Effects.  They include chipped corners, displacement and rotation of masonry blocks, collapse of walls, and destruction of the upper parts of buildings, all of which are potential results of seismic loading.

According to the study authors, a team based in Spain and Mexico, the evidence points to a series of five destructive earthquakes between AD 1 and 600, before the city reached the end of its Classic period around AD 650 and was abandoned about a century after that..   

The study focused on the city's five main temples, the old and new Temple of the Feathered Serpent, the Pyramid of the Sun — the third largest pyramid in the world — and the Pyramid of the Moon.  Each of these locations has visible Earthquake Archaeological Effects.  

Based on their spatial patterns and other factors, the study proposes that a series of seismic shocks struck the city from southwest to northeast.  They may have been generated by repetitive megathrust earthquakes in the Middle American Trench, a major subduction zone in the Pacific Ocean.

Earthquakes were the impetus for the evolution of the Teotihuacan architectural style, leading to the expansion of the main religious and political buildings and rebuilding of the revered Temple of the Feathered Serpent.

Teotihuacan was one of the most influential cultures in the history of the Ancient America Complex, and the Mesoamerican zone.  At the end of the 7th century, the city reached a turning point, with a sharp decrease in the population and a sudden loss of geopolitical power.

The city was gradually abandoned to the elements starting around AD 650.  This was the beginning of the end of the Classic Period of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican history.

Our final destination this week is the North American plains, where a team of US and Canadian genomics researchers, funded by the National Science Foundation, are collaborating on a study to trace the lineage of the continent's native Blackfoot Confederacy.  The effort, as reported by Phys.org, is part of the Blackfoot Early Origins Program, a multiyear and multi-project collaboration with member tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.  The team compared genetically sequenced tissue samples from several living members of the Blackfoot Confederacy to samples from the remains of Confederacy ancestors exhumed from ancient burial sites.  Results show that the genomics of sampled individuals belong to a previously undescribed ancient lineage that diverged from others in the Americas in Late Pleistocene times.

The Blackfoot Confederacy comprises linguistically related groups of Native Americans who make up the Blackfoot or Blackfeet people—mobile, specialized bison hunters and occasional fishermen who occupied large sections of the US and Canadian plains.  They were consigned to reservations by the late 19th century.

Genetic evidence from the study found that the lineage of modern Blackfoot people goes back some 18,000 years.  This affirms Blackfoot oral history traditions, which say that their people have lived in North America for at least 10,000 years.

Since the establishment of reservations in Canada and the US, Blackfoot Confederacy tribes have had to confront biases about their origin and antiquity in land claims and water rights litigation. They have taken legal action to advance and protect their treaty and aboriginal rights.

Recently, their descendants have been suing corporations and the government to reclaim portions of their original land.  In one instance, land near the eastern edges of the Rocky Mountains is currently being tested for drilling by oil companies.  The Blackfoot Confederacy claims it is ancestral and therefore protected by treaties covering Blackfoot territory. 

Going forward, the findings of this study will enable the tribes to work towards their social, educational, legal, and political goals, and provide support for them in their efforts to defend their historical rights.  The study also helps to tell the story of the people of the Americas.

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

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