Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew.  Get ready for a brand-new batch of 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 still-occupied seaside residence in England turns out to be the long-lost home of the last Anglo-Saxon king.  An irrigation and drainage system found in Bolivia is evidence of the first known example of maize monoculture in the Amazon Basin.  Roman inscriptions and a coin found deep in a Spanish cave point to a religious sanctuary in a site marked also by Paleolithic paintings.  And a study of sheep DNA across Eurasia shows how sheep populations were the product of human breeding and migration.

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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 January 26th through February 1st, 2025.

Our first story this week takes us to southern England, where archaeologists have found new evidence that a house in the seaside town of Bosham stands on the site of the once-opulent residence of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England.

As reported by Heritage Daily, the monarch was elected by the king's council in 1066 after his brother-in-law, King Edward the Confessor, died without an heir.  The brief rule of Godwinson, also known as Harold the Second, ended at the legendary Battle of Hastings when the army of William the Conqueror killed him while challenging his claim to the throne.  

The Bayeux Tapestry, a famous textile that chronicles these events, twice shows Harold feasting in an opulent hall at Bosham.  The tapestry also contains the only visual representation of a lordly center from pre-Conquest England.  While the exact location of the residence was unknown, previous evidence has suggested that it could have stood where a private home is today.  

In a new study published in The Antiquaries Journal, archaeologists from Newcastle University and the University of Exeter have located two previously unidentified Medieval buildings on the grounds of that home: one integrated into the house and another in the garden.

The first clue came in 2006 when excavations on the property uncovered a latrine inside a large timber structure.  During the 10th Century, aristocrats were beginning to incorporate these upscale toilets into complexes like the estate shown in the Bayeux Tapestry.  

After further analysis of the timber structure in studies during 2010 and 2015, researchers realized it matched the design of an Anglo-Saxon en-suite. 

According to Dr. Duncan Wright, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at Newcastle University and leader of the study, this discovery confirms beyond all doubt that the house lies on the site of an elite residence that predated the Norman Conquest and belonged to Harold the Second.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is the first nation-wide systematic survey of physical evidence for lordly centers, focusing on rural locations where the era’s elites invested in both ecclesiastical and residential structures.  

Next, we travel to northern Bolivia, where archaeologists have discovered an innovative landscape engineering system in the monumental mounds region of the Llanos de Moxos [YA-nos day MO-schos].  It was designed by the Casarabe [ca-suh-RA-bay], a pre-Columbian civilization that inhabited this area from AD 500 to 1400.

As reported by Phys.org, this system enabled farmers to transform flooded tropical savannas into highly productive year-round maize fields.  This unique agricultural infrastructure, which included extensive drainage canals and reservoirs, supported the first grain-based agrarian economy in the Amazon.

In this tropical lowland savanna, the challenging climate cycled from intense rainy seasons and flooding to very dry seasons.  Archaeologists had previously dismissed the possibility that pre-contact peoples had developed intensive monoculture farming there.

The study, published in the journal Nature, was the work of an interdisciplinary team of researchers from universities in Spain, the UK, Brazil, and Bolivia.  Led by Umberto Lombardo, an environmental archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the team identified a unique agricultural system that had not yet been documented anywhere else in the world. 

The researchers utilized aerial remote-sensing imagery to see through the dense forest canopy to the remains of ancient structures below.  They conducted soil coring, test pits, radiocarbon dating, and pollen and phytolith analyses on both seasonally flooded savannas and forest areas.  

Their system enabled farmers to drain excess water from flooded fields during the rainy season and preserve it in reservoirs throughout the dry season.  This not only enabled at least two harvests of maize per year but also attracted fish, birds and game, ensuring the stable, year-round food supply needed to sustain a relatively large population.  The results drove the development of the "Neolithic Revolution" in the Amazon.

According to Lombardo, this agricultural strategy points not only to the consistent cultivation of maize by the Casarabe, but also to the crop being a staple within their culture. 

No evidence of maize cultivation appeared in the forest profiles.  This may suggest that the Casarabe preserved the spatially limited and highly valuable forest areas for key ecosystem products like firewood, building materials and medicinal plants.  

Intensive cultivation of maize played a major part in supporting the economy of some of the most complex ancient societies in the Americas.  The methods they employed can guide us toward solutions for modern agricultural sustainability. 

Our third story takes us to one of the largest and most important sites of rock art on the Iberian peninsula: Cova de les Dones, or the Women's Cave.  A research team comprising archaeologists from the Universities of Alicante and Zaragoza has unearthed a remarkable find at the site: a Roman sanctuary.

As reported by Arkeonews, these findings support the use of the cave in prehistoric times as well as in the Roman era—making it one of the most significant cave sites in the Mediterranean for archaeological study.

Placed in a deep chamber of the cave, more than 200 meters from the entrance, the temple contains fifteen Roman inscriptions.  A coin dating to the time of Emperor Claudius, discovered in a crack in the ceiling next to a stalactite, may have been used in rituals during the first century AD.  Their placement in such a remote area of the cave indicates that the sanctuary was re-used—if not repurposed—by the Romans. 

This study builds upon previous explorations of the cave, which is located in the Millares [me-YA-rays] municipality of Spain’s Valencia province.  The earliest documented exploration took place in the 18th century and focused on the many Paleolithic rock art panels there.. 

Archaeologists in the 1960s classified the cave as a sanctuary based on its abundance of Iron Age ceramics, and a 2023 study published in the journal Antiquity catalogued more than 100 Paleolithic rock art motifs at the site.  Detailing the variety of techniques and number of representations among the artwork, this recent research amplified the significance of the site.  

Evidence of the Romans’ presence in the cave was scarce prior to this study.  These discoveries shed new light on the Roman occupation of the Iberian peninsula, providing archaeologists with new opportunities to study the interactions between Iberian and Roman cultures.  

Only twenty percent of the cave’s rock art section has been thoroughly analyzed to date, and many more of its vast caverns are left for archaeologists to explore.  More discoveries about the rich history and symbolic and religious importance of this underground sanctuary are sure to come in the years ahead. 

Finally, we take a look at new DNA research revealing just how humans and sheep have been intertwined over millennia—and the vital role the animals have played in human cultural and economic development.

As reported by Phys.org, the research was the work of an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and zooarchaeologists from LMU Munich and the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History.  They published their findings in the journal Science.

The team traced the prehistoric trajectory of sheep by analyzing 118 genomes from bones dating across 12 millennia, from the earliest days of domestication in the western Fertile Crescent of Anatolia to the development of wool as a major textile.  These bone samples originated from an area stretching from Mongolia to Ireland.

Analysis of the earliest European sheep populations, dating back to 8,000 years ago, reveals the earliest evidence of humans shaping another animal's biology.  Farmers had intentionally designed their flocks, selecting in particular for sheep with white coats. 

By this time, the earliest domestic sheep genomes from Europe, Iran and Central Asia had diverged—and then began to blend as people moved sheep from east to west.

Parallel to human cultures expanding outwards from the early cities of Mesopotamia, sheep genomes also moved westward within and beyond the Fertile Crescent around 7,000 years ago.  Around 5000 years ago, pastoralist people from the Eurasian steppe migrated westward with their flocks, bringing with them the Indo-European languages and largely replacing the European human population.  By the Bronze Age, half the ancestry of the tested European herds stemmed from the Eurasian steppe.  

According to Dr. Kevin Daly, the study’s first author, this discovery of a significant prehistoric sheep migration during the Bronze Age aligns with what we know about human movement during that era.  

The emergence of pastoralist people groups and their spread from the Eurasian steppe towards the west had a significant genetic, linguistic and cultural impact on Europe’s ancestral populations.  According to the data analyzed in this study, this migration may have been driven by sheep herding and the use of milk, cheese and wool.  When people moved, they brought their flocks with them, shaping human culture and economics for generations to come.

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 new subscription platform, Heritage Broadcasting Service, at heritagetac.org!

I’m Laura Kennedy and I’ll see you next week!