Welcome back, everybody!  This is Rick Pettigrew, to hand off our four 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 Greco-Roman town in ancient Egypt apparently lasted longer than anybody thought.  Viruses identified in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal remains closely resemble viruses found in modern human populations.  A famous stone circle in the Lake District of England could be 700 years older than what is commonly believed.  And a pair of people buried in an embrace over the top of a horse in Austria surprisingly turn out to be two females rather than a male and a female, as well as much earlier than expected.

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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 May 12th through the 18th, 2024.

We begin the week in Egypt, where new radiocarbon dates on remains from a Greco-Roman city have provided evidence of a longer history than previously believed.   

As reported by Newsweek, this new evidence shows the settlement of Karanis [kah-RAH-nis] in the Fayoum Oasis region may have been occupied until the seventh century, not abandoned in the fifth century as was once thought.

Karanis, an agricultural town, is believed to have been founded in the third century BC, when Egypt was ruled by the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty.  In 30 BC,  Egypt came under Roman rule and Karanis thrived, reaching a population of several thousand at its peak.

Nineteenth century archaeologists recovered huge numbers of papyri from the site, and large-scale excavations in the twentieth century uncovered residential areas, production facilities, granaries, temples, and a bath complex.

According to Laura Motta, a professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan and part of the international research team that carried out the study, the Karanis dataset is one of the most extensive of the period.  Like Pompeii's, it reveals detailed insights into everyday Roman life.

Study of the settlement has helped to shed light on the economy and demography of the Roman Empire as well as its collapse, including environmental changes in ancient times and the devastating Antonine Plague of AD 165 to 180.

Yet the town's full chronological framework has remained unclear.  Its earliest incarnation has barely been explored, and the reason for its ultimate abandonment is widely debated.  

To define the site's chronology, researchers radiocarbon-dated thirteen plant remains from structures at the site.  The results, combined with other analysis, indicate that Karanis was not in complete decline during the fourth century, or dying and sporadically occupied by the early fifth century AD, as previously believed.  Instead, it appears to have been inhabited into the sixth century and survived in some form at least up to the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. 

It still remains hard to assess how well Karanis retained its prosperity in a time of difficult political transitions and environmental changes that affected the Faiyum region at the end of a century of unusually warm weather in the Mediterranean.

The study appears in the journal Antiquity.

Next we travel to Brazil to delve into the early history of human disease. There, DNA analysis by the Federal University of São Paulo has recovered the oldest known human viruses in a set of 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones from a group of nine individuals found in 2022 in Russia’s Chagyrskaya Cave, located in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia.  All nine shared DNA, showing they were related.

As reported by Arkeonews, the Brazilian team's test of the bones of two male Neanderthals found in the cave showed traces of several viruses, including two that are still common today: the sexually transmitted papillomavirus and the adenovirus, which causes cold sores and a wide range of other illnesses, from the common cold to acute gastroenteritis.  

Experts have long speculated that viruses may have caused the extinction of Neanderthals, and this discovery may support that explanation. It also suggests that Neanderthals may have been infected with the same viruses that affect humans in modern times.  

Marcelo Briones, the study’s lead author, reports that the team now will attempt to synthesize the viruses to see how they compare to modern ones.  This will be difficult, because the Neanderthal viruses’ DNA is damaged in ways the team cannot fully assess.  What's more, these viruses interacted with their ancient hosts in a different environment, the Altai Mountains of Russian Siberia.   

The research that allowed identification of genome data from the Neanderthals also verified that the viral traces in the remains did not arise from contamination, either by animals during millennia of burial or from the modern humans who excavated them.

The knowledge that viruses infected Neanderthals hardly confirms that they caused the Neanderthal extinction, but the discovery does lend support to the idea that viruses could have been involved in some way.  According to Briones, confirmation of this hypothesis would require finding the genomes of these viruses in Neanderthal remains.  This new research has provided data that could make possible that next step in the investigation. 

The study is available as a preprint in the science journal bioRxiv [bio-archive].

Our third story takes us to northern England, where a new hypothesis argues that the Castlerigg stone circle in the Lake District was built some 700 years before Stonehenge.  Castlerigg is a famous site that our tour groups have visited twice already.

As reported by Newsweek, the circle lies in the northwestern county of Cumbria, within the Lake District National Park, and has long been a draw for tourists.  Of the hundreds of stone circles found across England and Ireland, over 80 are concentrated in the Lake District National Park and the wider county of Cumbria.

Previous estimates have suggested Castlerigg was built around 3000 BC or slightly earlier, but no solid dating work has been carried out.

Now, Cumbrian archaeologist Steve Dickinson has used detailed comparative evidence to suggest that one part of the stone circle, known as the Sanctuary, was erected around 3700 BC.

This section of Castlerigg is a rectangle of large boulders measuring around 23 by 15 feet that projects into the center of the circle from its eastern interior.

The northern side of the rectangle has a roughly six-foot-wide entrance. The eastern side forms part of the stone circle, meaning the Sanctuary is likely not a later addition.  

In its plan and size, the Sanctuary is similar to many small timber structures excavated in Ireland, as well as one recently uncovered in Yorkshire, all dating to the early Neolithic period in Britain and Ireland, dating from around 4300 to 3300 BC.

According to Dickinson, Castlerigg’s similarity to small early Neolithic timber structures in Ireland is the key clue to its age.  Radiocarbon dating on the Irish structures shows they were built from 3730 to 3600 BC.  If Castlerigg Sanctuary is contemporaneous, it dates to the early Neolithic.

Dickinson believes Castlerigg was a late construction during this period, when builders began to make these sanctuary structures more monumental and longer-lasting by creating them in stone.  

Monumentalizing in stone occurred widely across Britain and Ireland.  Many enclosures and circles that were originally marked out with timber posts were eventually made of stone.  Stonehenge, far to the south, is a classic example.  The large stones at the center of Stonehenge, erected around 2500 BC, have features such as mortise and tenon joints like those used in timber carpentry.

Dickinson's proposal has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and will require further research for confirmation.  If accurate, however, it dates Castlerigg to around 700 years before the first phase of construction at Stonehenge.

Some corroborating evidence comes from three stone axes found in and near the stone circle in the nineteenth century.  They likely came from Lake District ax production sites, which operated around 3900 to 3700 BC.

Britain’s stone circles are generally thought to have served as ritual or ceremonial centers.  Some circles, including Castlerigg, appear linked to ax production sites, suggesting that they were centers for the veneration and distribution of axes.

We end the week in Austria, where new analysis shows that two skeletons buried in an embrace were not husband and wife, but two closely related women, probably a mother and daughter.  

As reported by LiveScience.com, the two were buried arm in arm, on top of a horse.  At first, the unique burial in what is now Austria led archaeologists to think that the two were a married couple from Medieval times.  However, further analysis shows they were actually  mother and daughter, or possibly sisters, who died around AD 200, when the Roman Empire ruled the region.

According to Sylvia Kirchengast, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Vienna, this is the first genetically proven mother-daughter burial in Austria in Roman times.  The DNA analysis corrects a long-held misconception about the kind of relation between the two individuals.

In 2004, archaeologists excavated three skeletal remains, two humans and one horse, from a cemetery in the ancient Roman city of Ovilava, today known as Wels [VELS] in the state of Upper Austria.  Also found in the burial were two golden pendants, one shaped like a wheel, the other a crescent moon.  One person’s right arm lay around the other's shoulder, indicating a close social and emotional connection.  An initial analysis assigned the burial to the Germanic Bavarians who lived there from the sixth to seventh centuries AD, based on the depth of the grave and its east-west orientation, common in Bavarian burials. 

In the new study, researchers reevaluated the remains using radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis and anatomical analysis.  They discovered that the bones belonged to individuals whose ages at death were 20 to 25 years old and 40 to 60 years old, respectively.  DNA results confirmed that both were women, and also showed they were first-degree relatives — either sisters or mother and daughter. 

The new study was published in the May issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

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!