Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew.  Stay tuned for 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!

Eight stone catapult balls at an English castle mark a long siege in 1266.  Excavators found dozens of intact bottles of cherries and other preserves at George Washington’s home of Mount Vernon, Virginia.  Protein analysis of the plaster from the royal capital of Dahomey in West Africa demonstrates the truth of the story that the king incorporated human blood into the mix.  And a study of 20 skeletons, apparently of Celtic people who died in Iron Age Switzerland in connection with a bridge collapse, reveals they were mostly young men, with some women and children.

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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 June 16th through the 22nd, 2024.

We begin this week in central England, where routine work at Kenilworth Castle turned up eight medieval catapult balls fired during a thirteenth-century siege.

As reported by LiveScience.com, the eight perfectly preserved stone spheres were quickly identified as ammunition used during the siege of Kenilworth Castle, part of a civil war that took place in 1266.  

According to a statement from English Heritage, a charity organization that oversees historic sites, the fight for the huge castle was one of the longest sieges in English history, with rebels managing to hold out inside the structure for 172 days. 

The siege was part of a rebellion against King Henry the Third by a number of his barons, led by the king’s own brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort.  After de Montfort died in battle elsewhere, the rebels continued to hold out within the castle.  Kenilworth was one of the largest castles in England, heavily fortified and further protected by two large lakes that nearly surrounded it, making direct assault a challenge.

According to William Wyeth, an historian for English Heritage, the large stone catapult balls just found were immediately recognized as coming from the 1266 siege: similar finds had been recovered during archaeological digs at the castle in the 1960s. 

The artifacts range widely in size, from 231 pounds to 2 pounds.  In addition to catapults, royal forces used a wide arsenal of weapons to attack the castle's 14-foot-high walls, including 60,000 crossbow bolts or projectiles.  

Since the rebels had plenty of weaponry to fight back with, including their own catapults, it's unclear which side the newly discovered balls belonged to.  But they certainly would have caused serious damage to whatever or whoever they hit.  According to Wyeth, historical accounts report that one of Henry III's wooden siege towers, containing around 200 crossbowmen, was destroyed by just one well-aimed missile.

It wasn’t catapults that won the battle, however.  Starvation and disease eventually took a toll on the rebels, and they surrendered the castle to the king on Dec. 13, 1266.

Next we go to colonial Virginia, where archaeologists recently found dozens of glass bottles of preserved fruit in the cellar of George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon.

The 29 European-made bottles, containing perfectly preserved cherries together with gooseberries and currants, came to light in five storage pits dug into the earth of the mansion's cellar.  

According to Doug Bradburn, President and CEO of the Mount Vernon historic site, the preserves had probably been there since before the American Revolution.

As reported by England’s Daily Mail, the bottles will be sent to labs for preservation and  chemical analysis of their contents. 

The artifacts provide a glimpse into the time of the founding of the United States of America, including the life of its first president.  

Excavators found the first two bottles of fruit two months ago.  So far, the identifiable contents include 54 cherry pits and 23 stems.  The Mount Vernon team hopes that the cherry pits might even still be viable. 

Work in the cellars was part of a $40 million Mount Vernon revitalization project slated to be completed by 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  A major focus of the project involves restoring the foundation, including the cellar where the bottles were discovered.

According to Jason Boroughs, Mount Vernon’s Principal Archeologist, underground storage was the best way to preserve fruit during this era.  The pit holding the 29 bottles was a rectangular hole about a foot deep, dug in the cellar floor sometime after 1758 but before 1776.  After the bottles were set in, the pit was filled with a dense clay.  

Given this timeline, Bradburn thinks the bottles could have been forgotten during the chaotic time when Washington left his home to lead the Continental Army against the British in the Revolutionary War.

Hundreds of enslaved people ran Mount Vernon, and historical records show they managed food preparation and preservation.  

Washington, who moved to the northern Virginia home after his marriage to Martha Custis Washington in 1759, was the only Founding Father whose will directed that all his slaves be freed upon his wife's death.  He served as the first US President from 1789 to 1797, died in 1799, and was buried at Mount Vernon.  On January 1, 1801, Martha Washington freed her slaves, just over a year before she died.

Our third story takes us to the Republic of Benin [beh-NEEN], in West Africa, where researchers examining the wall of a ceremonial tomb found proteins that could only have come from human blood.

The ceremonial tomb was built nearly 200 years ago in a royal palace complex in Abomey, then the capital city for a long dynasty of powerful kings who ruled as both civil and religious leaders in the kingdom of Dahomey.  

Legend has it that human blood was part of the rituals conducted following the customs of Voodoo, the official religion of Dahomey, to protect a king’s tomb.  Now, an investigation into the proteins found within the tomb's walls may indicate that the legend is true.

As reported by LiveScience.com, new specialized analyses show that the tomb at Abomey contains proteins that could only have come from human blood, confirming the site's grisly history.  This is one of the first times such a discovery has been made through paleoproteomics, (PAY lee oh pro tee OH miks), the study of trace proteins left behind in archaeological contexts.

According to biochemist Jean Armengaud, an expert on ancient proteins at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the discovery provides concrete evidence of rituals and practices previously described only in histories. 

Armengaud, senior author of the new study, was part of a joint French and Beninese team that set out to discover the truth of the historical accounts.  The team examined samples of carefully scraped surface colorations removed from the tomb between 2018 and 2022, during excavations by archaeologists from France and Benin.

History indicates that the tomb within the Abomey palace complex was built in the mid-nineteenth century by King Ghezo [GAY-zo] of Dahomey, in honor of his father King Adandozan [uh DAHN doz'n].  Its builders used plaster containing the blood of 41 human sacrifices.  The number 41 was sacred in Voodoo. 

Ghezo, who ruled from 1818 to 1858, is famous for his wars against the region's powerful Yoruba [YOH-roo-bah]state, or Oyo Empire.  His victories ended the annual tribute of slaves Dahomey had been required to send to the Yoruba.

Ghezo reportedly showcased the deaths of his foes to underline his power.  According to histories, the path to his hut was paved with the skulls and jawbones of defeated enemies, and one of his thrones stood on the skulls of four enemy leaders.

Dahomey, now called Benin, is a center of the original African Vodun [VOH-doon] or Vodou [VOH-doo] religion that later developed into Voodoo in the Caribbean.  Traditional Vodun practices often feature sacrifices of animal blood.

The crucial analytic technique used to study the Abomey tomb walls began with a  process called tandem mass spectrometry, which breaks down protein ions in the samples into fragments, revealing their chemical structure. 

This process yielded more than 10,000 matches to a database of proteins.  They showed the presence of thousands of microorganisms, along with human and chicken blood.

According to Armengaud, proteins are more stable than DNA molecules, so their study,  paleoproteomics, can reveal better information about which organisms produced these proteins.

A paleogenomic study of the ancient DNA might detect genetic material from individuals, but can't determine how they were involved.  Was their blood inside the plaster?  Did they simply apply it?  Or even, many years later, did they just touch the wall?

Paleoproteomics and paleogenomics can also complement each other.  Armengaud plans to carry out DNA sequencing of samples from the Abomey tomb in the hope that it will identify the number of sacrificial victims and their origins,  providing a more detailed historical context.

The results of the study are published in the journal Proteomics. 

We end the week in Switzerland, where archaeologists studying human bones found near the ruins of an ancient Celtic bridge in the Three Lakes region can’t identify the cause of their violent deaths. 

The bones and skulls came to light in a jumble with wood beams from the bridge during renovation of a canal in 1965.  The Celtic bridge at Cornaux/Les Sauges  [COR nokes lay SAH jez] and the 20 skeletons found in its ruins have been studied by specialists in archaeology, anthropology, thanatology, biochemistry, and genetics.  

As reported by Phys.org, the leading hypothesis is that these men, women and children perished in a sudden accident.

The study is part of a joint international project conducted by the University of Bern and the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, which seeks to enhance our understanding of the Celts in Switzerland and northern Italy.  The Celts had a predominantly oral culture, which produced very little writing about their lifestyle.  Most is by Julius Caesar, a military adversary and thus neither a trained observer nor an unbiased one.

According to Zita Laffranchi [la-FRAHN-key], a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Bern, the new archaeological finds speak more accurately.

Laffranchi’s team carried out bioarchaeological investigations to try to reconstruct what happened at the Cornaux/Les Sauges bridge.

Past interpretations included death in a sudden flood that collapsed the wooden structure and human sacrifice, a known Celtic practice often associated with water.

The researchers examined the skeletons from every angle to attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of the drama.  Their state of preservation and the remarkable presence of brain fragments in five of the skulls suggest that sediment covered the corpses not long after death.  The remains show multiple bone lesions spread across the bodies, from skulls to legs.

The injuries appear to have been caused by violent impacts, but not intentional ones, and wounds not caused by sharp objects like swords.  This contrasts with other European sites where human sacrifices display such injuries.  

Some of the bones were also entangled with pieces of wood, pointing to an accidental event like a calamitous collapse of the bridge that took people down with it.

Tests also included chemical analysis of bones and teeth, radiocarbon dating, and isotopic analyses to reveal the victims' diets and places of residence.   Paleogenetic analyses allowed the research team to analyze ancient DNA from half the individuals.

The results confirm that at least twenty people were killed here, with no apparent family link between them.  One was a young girl, two others were children of indeterminate gender, and seventeen were adults, most of them young and fifteen likely to have been men.

This clear demographic bias toward young adult men could correspond to a group of prisoners or slaves who were sacrificed, or a group of merchants or soldiers.  

Some of the radiocarbon dates, all between the third and first centuries BC, suggest that the deaths may not all have taken place in conjunction with the destruction of the bridge.

According to Marco Milella, [mee- LEHL-ah] researcher at the University of Bern and co-leader of the project, the preponderance of the evidence suggests a sudden accident.  However, some of the deaths may have resulted from sacrifices at the bridge in earlier times. 

The study appears in the journal Scientific 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!