Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, bringing you 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!

Another winning application of AI has nearly doubled the number of recognized Nazca lines.  An early site in New Zealand reveals that the earliest Polynesian settlers there brought with them the sweet potato, originally a South American crop that did well in the cooler New Zealand climate.  A Neolithic cemetery in Spain shows a remarkable female bias.  And Bronze Age burials in the Tarim Basin of today’s western China now boast the world’s oldest known cheese.

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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 September 22nd through the 28th, 2024. 

We begin this week in south Peru, where archaeologists have used an artificial intelligence model to identify more than 300 new Nazca lines, nearly doubling the number of known geoglyphs in the area. 

As reported by Live Science, the Nazca Lines are a series of geoglyphs found in a 440 square kilometer area of Peru’s Nazca Desert.  A pre-Inca civilization called the Nazca carved the glyphs between 200 BC and AD 500.  They created the images by removing the upper, red-tinged layer of the ground to reveal sections of lighter colored soil. 

The Lines fall into two categories.  The first are complex relief-type drawings depicting humans and domesticated animals.  The second type are larger, averaging around 90 meters in length.  These line-type drawings depict wild animals, including birds and whales. 

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses spatial relationship analysis on the artworks.  The team found that relief-type images were placed closer to historic trails.  They likely communicated information to those walking the paths. 

The geoglyphs were rediscovered in the 1920s by airplane passengers flying over the desert.  In the century since, researchers have identified around 430 images.  Most discoveries come from improvements in satellite technology over the last 20 years.  However, the rate of discoveries had slowed, as the remaining geoglyphs may be too faint to see with the human eye.  

The team trained a neural model on photographs of found Lines.  This proved challenging, given how similar models are trained on tens of thousands of images while the team had only a few hundred to work with.  The model produced a list of possible glyphs, which the archaeologists then sorted by hand according to their potential for authenticity.  For every 36 model suggestions the team looked at, they found one promising candidate. 

After visiting the desert to check the most likely candidates, the team confirmed 303 new glyphs.  Among these were depictions of ancient ceremonies, abstract humanoid figures and a large image that resembled a killer whale holding a knife.  One hundred twenty five of the new artworks were not suggested by the model.  The team either located them near a proposed location or without any assistance from the model. 

The archaeologists hope to return to the desert to search for new geoglyphs.  They believe they can confirm at least 248 more glyphs suggested by artificial intelligence.  

Our next story takes us to Aotearoa [AH-oh--tay-oh-ROH-uh], or New Zealand, where researchers have found the earliest known location of sweet potato cultivation in Polynesia.  Microscopic starch granules of the crop, known as kumara [KOO-ma-ra] in the region, were found alongside Asia-Pacific taro and Pacific yam, or uwhi. 

As reported by Phys dot org, a research team from the University of Otago found the particles at Triangle Flat in Golden Bay, or Mohua [MO-huu-uh].  They published the results in the journal Antiquity.  They found that the cultivation of these crops began within a period as early as AD 1290 to 1385, during the earliest period of Maori settlement. 

According to study lead author Professor Ian Barber from the University of Otago, the site shows evidence of the longest period of garden conservation from a single location across Polynesia.  Triangle Flat shows kumara-like starch from the fourteenth century, which coincides with the first settlement of Polynesians in the island. 

Even though the sweet potato is a staple crop across Polynesia today, not much is known about how it spread across the region. 

Many anthropologists propose that transoceanic travelers brought the sweet potato, especially given that the Maori name for the crop, kumara, is a variation on the names for the plant from pre-Columbian South America.  The new research also questions the historical assumption that early Polynesian settlers to the cooler New Zealand abandoned tropical horticulture in favor of hunting and fishing. 

Researchers hope to use this microbotanical method of identifying ancient crops to trace the growing of taro and uwhi. 

In comparison to other, more tropical islands, Aotearoa cultivated fewer starch-producing crops.  The island’s first gardeners developed sophisticated techniques such as shell mulch.  

Sweet potatoes are the fifth most important edible crop in the world.  However, they currently face challenges from environmental and climatic concerns.  Researching ancient Polynesian agricultural techniques may lead to improvements in kumara’s hardiness and nutritional value.  

Next, we head to the southern Spanish city of Granada, home to the ancient town of Panoría [pan-oh-REE-ah].  Researchers discovered the city’s necropolis held twice as many women as men and 10 times as many juvenile girls as boys. 

As reported by Phys dot org, the necropolis contains at least 19 collective graves.  Researchers conducted excavations of 9 graves between 2015 and 2019, uncovering more than 55,000 human skeletal remains. 

Carbon dating shows the first burials were interred at the site 5,600 years ago.  They would continue intermittently for the next 1,500 years. 

A multidisciplinary team from the University of Granada’s GEA research group and the University of Tübingen’s Archaeometry research group conducted the study and published it in the academic journal, Scientific Reports.

Archaeologists used new bioarchaeological methods to build demographic profiles of the individuals buried at the megalithic site.  Analyses of DNA and the protein amelogenin. found in human tooth enamel, identified the chromosomal sex of 44 individuals. 

The typical gender composition of human populations is around one to one.  More unusual gender ratios are typically caused by exceptional circumstances, such as war or intense migration processes.  However, the heavily female-biased gender ratio in Panoría’s necropolis is consistent throughout all graves, age groups and periods of use.  Researchers concluded that this indicates the bias towards female burials was the result of persistent social practices. 

Many funerary structures hold people based on biological kinship, which suggests that the women may have been related through matrilineal descent.  These findings suggest that the people who lived at Panoría had a matrilineal society, reflected in their funerary rites and cultural traditions.  This interpretation resonates with conclusions by other researchers that women had relatively high status in other Neolithic societies in the Mediterranean and central Europe 

Finally, we arrive in northwestern China, where analysis of 3,600-year-old pieces of cheese is casting a new light on the origins of the fermented food. 

As reported by Cosmos, researchers discovered the Bronze Age cheese alongside mummies buried in the Xiaohe cemetery in the Tarim Basin.  The mummies are between 3,300 and 3,600 years old. 

Archaeologists discovered the cheese twenty years ago when they took note of an odd white substance smudged on the heads and necks of some of the mummies.  They posited that it might have been a type of fermented dairy product.  However, their suspicions were unconfirmed until the new study, published in the journal Cell. 

The team detected cow and goat DNA in samples of the cheese, revealing that the Xiaohe people likely separated different types of milk into distinct batches.  This presents a different cheese-making technique from the mixed milk cheese common in the Middle East and Mediterranean. 

Prior to this find, the oldest known cheeses were Egyptian cheeses dating between 3,200 and 2,900 years ago. 

Further DNA analysis found the cheese is a type of kefir [keh-FEER], a common drink today in western Eurasia made by fermenting milk with kefir grains.   

Researchers identified bacterial and fungal species in the cheese that are often found in modern kefir grains.  These included Lactobacillus and Pichia species. 

The majority of Lactobacillus bacteria originates in Russia or Tibet.  Analysis of the strain from the cheese sample showed it was more closely related to Tibetan strains.  This is surprising, given that the Russian form is more commonly used for making yogurt and cheese.  This discovery points to a second point of origin for kefir, which was long believed to have been developed in the North Caucasus Mountain region of Russia. 

According to Qiaomei [CHAOH-may Fu], corresponding author of the study and paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, this analysis suggests that kefir has been produced in the Xinjiang region since the Bronze Age.  As food items like cheese are difficult to preserve, this provides a rare opportunity for researchers to learn more about the diet of ancient humans.  The study also unprecedentedly allows researchers to trace the evolution of a bacterium over millennia. 

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!