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!

Excavators In Denmark have uncovered a large Viking cemetery containing over 50 well preserved skeletons with their grave goods.  A batch of 1100 clay tablets from ancient Persepolis, inscribed in cuneiform, made their way back to Iran from the University of Chicago on the plane carrying the Iranian president back from the UN meeting in New York.  A study of walrus ivory sent by Norse hunters to Medieval Europe points to sources in far northern Greenland and Canada and strongly suggests direct contact between the Norse and Indigenous North Americans.  And a study of human genomes from skeletons in a South African cave reveals clear genetic continuity over a span of 9,000 years.

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 March 2025 with our tour of southern Iran and its many spectacular sites, including Persepolis, spanning thousands of years in the cradle of civilization.  Space is still available for this rare opportunity!  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 September 29th through October the 5th, 2024.

Our first story this week comes from eastern Denmark, where archaeologists has discovered a burial ground with over 50 well preserved Viking skeletons. 

As reported by CNN, a team from the Museum Odense excavated the remains from the Åsum [OH-soom] site in the suburb of Odense on the Danish island of Funen.  The burial ground likely dates to the ninth and tenth centuries.

According to archaeologist and curator Michael Borre Lundø, researchers often find only a handful of teeth in other excavations from the Viking age.   The site conditions led to the remains being remarkably preserved.  Chalk in the ground helps preserve the bones and the water that covered the remains helps slow decomposition. 

This unprecedented find allows researchers to analyze the health, diet and origins of those buried at the site.  It might also allow scientists to analyze whether the remains are related, which has never been done at similar sites. 

Archaeologists also found artifacts from beyond Denmark buried with the skeletons.  This points to the Vikings traveling long distances to trade.  The artifacts also demonstrate the deceased’s social status. 

One of the deceased is a woman found buried in the upper part of a Viking cart.  She likely traveled in the cart.  Alongside her was a glass bead necklace, an iron key, a knife with a silver-threaded handle and a small piece of glass that might have functioned as an amulet.  Her wagon held a wooden chest whose original contents remain unknown. 

Another skeleton was buried with a bronze brooch [BROHCH], a red glass bead necklace, an iron knife, and a small chunk of rock crystal.  As rock crystal does not form naturally in Denmark, the chunk likely came from Norway.  This find suggests that the deceased participated in international trade networks. 

This burial site confirms that Åsum was a critical location for early urban developments that ultimately led to the nearby modern city of Odense, the third largest city in Denmark.

The remains are now drying out in preparation for being washed and transported to Copenhagen for future research.  Archaeologists hope to use DNA analysis to learn more about the deceased.  The results might reveal the skeleton’s age, sex, relations, and any possible diseases. 

Next, we go to Iran, where the University of Chicago repatriated a group of 1100 clay tablets from a collection made at Persepolis in the 1930s.  This is the fifth batch of returned artifacts from that collection, delivered to Iran on the plane carrying current Iranian President Pezeshkian home from his recent visit to the United Nations General Assembly.

As reported by the Tehran Times, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, now called the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, held the tablets for almost 90 years.  They returned the artifacts after negotiations involving Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts, and the Legal Affairs Office of the President  

The university discovered the tablets during excavations of Persepolis, a key site of the ancient Persian Achaemenid Empire in 1933.  Two years later, the Institute and Iran agreed to send the tablets to the United States for translation and study. 

The tablets vary in size and shape.  They are inscribed largely in Elamite and Aramaic cuneiform, shedding light on many aspects of the Achaemenid [Ah-KEE-menid] Empire under Darius [DAR-ee-uhs] the first.  This includes social relations, wages, resource management, and infrastructure. 

The Achaemenid Empire was the largest empire of its time, between 550 and 330 BC.  It covered areas including Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Central Asia and India and included within its borders about 40 percent of the human population of the world.  Persepolis, known in Iran as Takht-e Jamshid [TAKT -ay- JAHM-sheed], was the ceremonial capital.  The royal complex is known for its unique architecture, art, construction technology, and urban planning.  Alexander the Great burned the city in 330 BC, possibly as revenge for the Persian King Xerxes [ZURK-seez] burning Athens 150 years before that. 

The visit from President Ebrahim Raisi to the United States last year prompted the return of over 3,500 Achaemenid tablets.  This is not the first large repatriation of tablets to Iran.  The largest batch returned, in 1951, comprised more than 37,000 tablets.  In 2004 and 2019, the US returned other tablets. 

Some of the repatriated tablets are now displayed in the National Museum of Iran.  However, the University of Chicago still holds on to a large number of clay tablets, as each batch of artifacts requires complex negotiations.  Such a complex process can take decades.

Persepolis is one of the many important sites on the itinerary of our upcoming tour of Iran, scheduled for March 2025 and currently accepting registrations.

Our third story takes us to the High Arctic of Greenland, where archaeologists have retraced Viking Age walrus ivory trade routes.  The new study indicates that Vikings and Indigenous peoples in the Arctic likely met and traded together. 

As reported by Phys.org, Medieval Europe from the late ninth to the mid-fourteenth century desired luxury products such as walrus ivory.  Vikings were instrumental in bringing this ivory to Europe.  In search of new sources, they traveled to Iceland and Greenland. 

According to Peter Jordan, professor of archaeology at Lund University in Sweden, archaeologists previously assumed that Vikings hunted walrus near their settlements in southwest Greenland.  However, the new study indicates that they hunted in remote areas of the High Arctic. 

The international research team led by Lund University used genetic fingerprinting to decipher the ivory’s origins.  Using extracted DNA from walrus samples taken from locations across the North Atlantic Arctic, they could compare the genetic profiles of walrus artifacts from the Greenland Norse. 

The researchers divided Norse Greenlandic history into an Early Period before AD 1120 and a Late Period afterwards.  The genetic profiles suggest that the Vikings in the Early Period hunted walrus closer to home.  In the Late Period, Vikings ventured farther away into the High Arctic, before they abandoned Greenland in the fifteenth century.  This abandonment may have come about after Europeans turned from walrus to African elephants as their source of ivory.

After finding the ivory’s origin, researchers questioned how the Vikings had the skills and technology to travel so far into icy Arctic waters.  Greer Jarrett, a doctoral researcher, reconstructed possible sailing routes and tested them in traditional clinker-built Norwegian boats. 

According to Jarrett, the Norse likely departed from their settlements as soon as the sea ice melted, because of the short seasonal window to hunt walrus.  They also needed time to prepare the walrus and return home before the seas froze. During this tight window, they likely encountered the area’s inhabitants, including the Thule Inuit, who arrived in Greenland around AD 1200, and the Paleo-Eskimo people of the Dorset Culture, who lived there from 500 BC to around AD 1350.  

The new study supports the notion that the Norse and the Indigenous people met and possibly conducted exchange.  It also confirms that the North Water Polynya, an area of year-round open water surrounded by sea ice between Greenland and Canada in northern Baffin Bay, was an important site for these cross-cultural interactions.

Despite hunting walrus in the same waters, the Vikings and the Inuit were culturally very different.  The Norse Vikings dressed in wool clothing, sailed plank-built vessels and hunted walrus with iron-tipped lances in haul-out sites.  The Inuit dressed in fur clothing, sailed kayaks and open umiak [OO-mee-ak] boats and used sophisticated toggling harpoons to hunt walrus in open waters. 

Researchers hope to understand more about these interactions and possible trade, especially from an Indigenous perspective. 

The study was published in Science Advances. 

Our last story this week turns to the southern coast of South Africa, where researchers have reconstructed the human genomes of the Oakhurst rock shelter site.  The genomes indicate that the Oakhurst human population had genetic continuity for almost 9,000 years, remarkable in comparison to other regions of the world. 

As reported by The Conversation, humans occupied Oakhurst for 12,000 years.  Excavations there over the years, beginning in the 1930s, recovered the remains of 46 people, along with rock art, stone tools and ceramic fragments. 

The researchers in the new study produced 13 genomes from Oakhurst human skeletal remains.  A genome is an organism’s complete genetic blueprint, passed down through generations.  Archaeogenetics is the study of ancient genomes and has the potential to trace population movements and the historical background of living people. 

Archaeogenetics has not been very fruitful in Africa, because the high average temperatures prevent good preservation of DNA.  However, African history is very important for human history since Africa is the continent with the greatest human diversity.

An interdisciplinary team from the University of Cape Town and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology began their study in 2017. They sampled the 13 adult individuals in the collection.  Five of the deceased were women and eight were men.  Through radiocarbon dating, the team determined that two individuals were between 9,000 and 10,000 years of age and had the oldest DNAknown so far in the region. 

The team extracted DNA from powdered remains, then replicated it for sequencing. The genomes identified are similar to the San and Khoekhoe [KO-ek-hoe] people currently living in the region.  The results show that no ancestry from outside South Africa was present at the Oakhurst rock shelter between 10,000 and 1,300 years ago.  This is noteworthy in comparison to Europe and Asia, where genomes often changed in response to population movements. 

Despite representing genetic continuity, the Oakhurst site shows evidence of cultural innovations over time, such as shifts in stone technology.  Two thousand years ago, the arrival of Bantu groups from the north brought herding, farming and new languages to the region. Despite that, the genome dating to 1,300 years ago is still similar to genomes from 10,000 years ago. 

The hope is that the Oakhurst study will pave the way for further insights into Africa’s remarkable genetic, cultural and linguistic diversity.

The study was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. 

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!