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!

Excavators in Pompeii announced the discovery of stunning frescoes in the banquet room of a wealthy Roman.  High-tech mapping and excavation have shown that what is now regarded as a city in Tonga was in use 700 years earlier than anybody thought.  In Virginia, excavation has begun on the still-standing log house built in 1869 by an African-American newly freed from slavery.  And an 1800-year-old clay seal excavated from an ancient fortress in Shiraz, Iran, bears an inscription showing that the city then bore the same name as it does today.

Thanks to everyone for supporting our subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, available at heritagetac.org.  We now have hundreds of titles you can binge upon on Roku.  Please help us spread the word!  Again, that link is heritagetac.org.

Our tour program, TAC Tours, will continue in 2024 with our tour of the many eye-catching civilizations spanning thousands of years in northern Peru.  Plenty of space remains now, but it will fill up!  The link to our tour program is at archaeologychannel.org/tours.

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 7th through the 13th, 2024.

Our first story this week comes from Pompeii, where archaeologists working in the ancient Roman city have found stunning new paintings on the walls of a rich man’s banqueting hall.  

Pompeii was buried by ash during an eruption from nearby Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

As reported by BBC.com, the frescoes are among the finest ever found in the ruins of the ancient city.  The soaring black walls of the large hall hold paintings depicting mythical Greek figures such as Helen of Troy.  The floor of the room is a sweep of gleaming white mosaic, almost complete, containing at least a million individual white tiles and possibly as many as three million.

According to Pompeii archaeological park director Dr Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the stark black background of the walls was probably chosen to hide smoke deposits from the scores of oil lamps used to light the room during evening feasts.  In their shimmering light, the life-size paintings of deities and heroes on the dark ground would virtually have jumped to life.

Two major depictions in the frescoes highlight the origins of the Trojan War.  In one scene, the god Apollo is trying to seduce the priestess Cassandra.   Legend says she rejected him, and he cursed her with a dire fate: from then on, all her prophecies would be ignored.  This meant her foretelling of the Trojan War would be  dismissed, and Troy would be conquered after ten years of war with the Greeks.

Another painting shows the second fatal step toward war, in which Prince Paris of Troy meets the beautiful Helen, wife of Agamemnon of Mycenae.  When she ran away with him, all of Agamemnon’s Greek allies launched the war that ruined the city.

The black banqueting room is the latest treasure to emerge from a new excavation that started twelve months ago.  The chamber lies in a wealthy house tucked into a crowded commercial and residential block in Region 9 of the ancient metropolis.  The identity of the wealthy owner is seen in his initials, ARV, on walls and even on the adjacent bakery's millstones.

According to Dr. Sophie Hay, a park archaeologist, ARV stands for Aulus Rustius Verus (OW lus ROOS teeus VAYR us).  He is seen in other political propaganda in Pompeii as a politician and very rich businessman.  Now it appears his posh house has been found.  It was undergoing renovation at the time of the eruption, as seen by neat stacks of roof tiles, tools and pots of lime mortar on the site.   

According to Dr. Alessandro Russo, the dig's co-lead archaeologist, the fallen ceiling fresco of the banquet hall is another rare and detailed Pompeii treasure, displaying Egyptian landscapes, foods and flowers in vivid swirls of color.  

As in other parts of Pompeii, the details coming to light fill in the picture of life during the first century AD in a vivid way that goes beyond known documents.  

Next we go to the Pacific, where new studies on the island of Tongatapu in Tonga show that one of the first cities in the region is much older than previously thought. 

As reported by the science news site phys.org, a team from the Australian National University used aerial laser scanning to map archaeological sites on the island.  By combining this  high-tech mapping with archaeological investigation on the ground, researchers were able to construct a more detailed chronology of construction features.   

The details appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.  According to lead author Phillip Parton, the new timeline indicates that earth structures were being built in Tongatapu by AD 300—700 years earlier than previously thought.

While the structures form a city, its density is relatively low compared to populous cities like Rome in other parts of the ancient world.   The results of the study show that urbanization in the Pacific was an indigenous innovation which developed before Western influence.

As settlements grew, residents had to come up with new ways of supporting their populations.    The low density urbanization developed on Tongatapu implies not just huge social and economic change, but specific types of interaction between people who were now living and working in closer proximity.  

According to Parton, past studies of urbanization in the Pacific have been challenging because the tropical environment leads to faster decay of organic building materials.  But new technology has changed that.

High-tech mapping combined with archaeological fieldwork have more clearly shown what was happening in Tongatapu, adding to our understanding of early Pacific societies as a whole.

Urbanization is usually visualized from a European point of view, with stone houses lining narrow cobblestone streets.   Pacific cities were very different.  When Europeans arrived in Tonga in the 1700s, they saw many clusters of earthen mounds, often surrounded by defensive walls and linked by transportation networks.   They assumed these structures were all burial mounds, but later learned the majority were house foundations.   

The domestic mound clusters included agricultural features that enabled people to spread out more comfortably across the landscape.   The lower density city structure allowed for large populations, as many as 60,000, linked together by a complex political system that exerted a strong influence across the southwest Pacific Ocean between the 13th and 19th centuries.

According to Parton, the collapse of this low-density urbanization in Tonga was largely due to the arrival of Europeans and deaths from the diseases they introduced.

This new information is likely just the beginning of a clearer picture of early Pacific settlements, with much yet to be discovered.

Our third story takes us to the United States, where students in Staunton, Virginia, are uncovering artifacts from a historic African-American household.

As reported by the local newspaper, the Staunton News Leader, the dig is at the Cabell Log House, the only remaining nineteenth century log structure in the city.   

According to Dr.  Dennis Blanton of James Madison University, shovel tests so far are turning up items that could help illustrate an untold story of Staunton's Black history.

Test pits in the middle of the property have brought up brick, charcoal, redware and porcelain ceramics, nails, cast iron, a collar button, a 22-caliber bullet casing, green glass, gilded glass, and marbles.

The house was built in 1869 by Edmund Cabell, a newly freed man who purchased the land on June 16, 1866, after the Civil War.   The price of the property was $50, and Cabell paid the first $10 in gold coins.  According to records from Historic Staunton Foundation, he constructed the original two-room house using traditional log techniques.

Cabell's descendants owned the home for more than a century.  According to Blanton, it’s a rare example of a post-Civil War home linked to a known African American family.

Blanton’s team began digging at Cabell Log House on April 6, 2024, more than 150 years after Edmund Cabell built his family's home.  The Historic Staunton Foundation recently purchased the house and is consulting with Blanton to document the property's landscape and historic archeological resources.

Archaeology helps in understanding the story of the house, but even more importantly, it reveals new information about the Black community in Staunton.   

According to Blanton, the history of the Black community is not told as completely as that of other communities, because enslaved Black people and those freed after emancipation did not participate in the public sphere in the same way as White people.   Archaeology can give those communities a voice, sometimes for the first time.

Blanton hopes the dig will continue over the course of several years.

We end the week in Iran, where a clay seal from eighteen hundred years ago bears the name of a Sassanid (SA- suh-nid) city.  Excavators found this seal at the Qasr-e Abu Nasr (CASS-er-ee ah-BOO NA-sir) site in Shiraz, Iran’s second-largest city.  This ancient fortress has archaeological layers running from the Achaemenid [ah KEY muh nid] period, which began in 559 BC, to the Abbasid (AB a-sid) period, ending in AD 1258.  Its primary settlement dates back to the Sassanid era, from AD 224 to 651.

As reported by Arkeonews, the name Shiraz (shi- RAHZ) was identified on a clay sealing from the Sassanid era, written in Pahlavi (PAH-lah-vee) or Middle Persian script.

The Sassanid Empire ruled all of what is now Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Afghanistan, and eastern areas of Turkey, as well as parts of Syria, Pakistan, Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula.  It was frequently in conflict with Rome.

The Sassanid era is regarded as one of Iran’s most influential historical periods.  Persia had a significant impact on Roman civilization during the Sassanid era, and the Romans regarded the Sassanid Persians as their equals.

Emperor Ardashir (ar duh SHEER) the First established the Sassanid Empire, or Sasanian [sa-SAN-ee-an] Dynasty, following his victory over Artabanus [ar TAH ba noos] the Fourth, the final Parthian monarch.   The Sassanids called their empire Eranshahr [air-AHN-shahr], or “Empire of the Aryans.” It  came to an end when Yazdegerd [yaz dee JERD] the Third lost the final struggle to fend off the growing Islamic empire that subsequently took over the region in AD 651.

The new find is important in documenting the history of Shiraz, located some 60 kilometers southwest of ancient Persepolis.

The clay artifact bearing the name of Shiraz, excavated in the 1930s by New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of more than five hundred seal impressions stamped on clay and used to mark documents.  They were unearthed from the Sasanian (seh SAY nee en) stronghold, a fortress that burned, baking the clay and preserving the seal impressions.  

According to the Met, this particular sealing clay was stamped with four seals of varying sizes.   The images depict a walking lion, a monogram, an inscription, and a horned quadruped.

According to Iranian archaeologist Mohammadreza Nasab-Abdollahi, (mo-HAHM-ed RAY-zuh na-SAHB ab-dohl- ah-HEE) the inscription turns out to be the name “Mugh-e Shiraz” (moog ee shi-RHAZ) in the Pahlavi script.

Evidence like the Sassanid seals, as well as inscribed Achaemenid-era bricks from Persepolis, corroborate that the city known today as Shiraz bore the same name in antiquity and was among the significant cities of ancient Iran.

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!