Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, with the latest 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!

Archaeologists in Egypt have found a royal tomb, the first such discovery since the tomb of King Tut.  A new LiDAR survey in southern Mexico has generated a detailed map of an important Zapotec city.  A historical study identified the presence of the plague in the Middle East a century before it appeared in western Europe as the Black Death.  And excavations in China have identified a segment of the Great Wall that is 300 years older than anybody thought.

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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 February 16th through the 22nd, 2025.

Our first story this week comes from near the city of Luxor in Egypt, where archaeologists have discovered the tomb of King Thutmose [thoot-MOH-suh] the Second.  

As reported by Arkeonews, British and Egyptian teams collaborated on the discovery, which comes more than a century after the 1922 discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun.

The Eighteenth Dynasty lasted from 1550 to 1292 BC and began the New Kingdom period.  During this significant period, sometimes known as the Thutmosid Dynasty, the Egyptian empire expanded into western Asia, Nubia and across the Euphrates River.  The Dynasty oversaw many religious and cultural developments as well as the reigns of several notable pharaohs.

King Thutmose the Second ruled for only a short period and is commonly known for his wife, Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled as one of the greatest Egyptian pharaohs.  

Researchers previously believed that the tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs were closer to the Valley of the Kings.  However, in 2022, they discovered the entrance and main passage of the tomb 2 kilometers away in the mount of Thebes.  Because it was near the tombs of Queen Hatshepsut and the wives of King Thutmose the Third, they initially believed the tomb belonged to the wife of a king. 

The archaeological teams realized it was Thutmose the Second’s tomb when they found fragments of alabaster vases marked with his name, calling him the “deceased king.”  They also found portions of the Amduat [AHM-doo-waht], a religious text used for royal burials, and pieces of ceiling plaster covered in blue paint and yellow stars, which indicate a king’s tomb.

The tomb is simple, with an entrance, main corridor and burial chamber.  Its large staircase was blocked with debris, so archaeologists had to crawl through a small passageway to reach the burial chamber.

The tomb, which was built underneath a waterfall, is mostly empty and poorly preserved, likely because of flood damage that occurred several years after the king’s death.  It appears that many of the original contents of the tomb were removed.  This includes King Thutmose’s mummy, which was among the Royal Cache of pharaoh’s mummies discovered in the Theban Necropolis by archaeologists in the nineteenth century.

According to Dr. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, this is among the most significant contemporary archaeological discoveries.  It demonstrates the importance of continued excavations, as further research on the tomb will likely uncover many new insights about the Eighteenth Dynasty. 

Next, we turn to southern Mexico, where researchers have used laser technology to map out a fifteenth century Zapotec city called Guiengola. 

As reported by Live Science, a team led by Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis, a post-doctoral student from McGill University in Canada, used lidar technology to survey the area.  It revealed that Guiengola covered 890 acres, including over 1100 buildings and 4 kilometers of walls. The team’s study appeared in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica. 

Lidar, which tracks millions of laser pulses sent to the ground from an aircraft, helped create a topographical map.  The city likely contained around 5000 residents at its height.  It included temples, communal spaces like ballcourts and separate neighborhoods for the elite and commoners. 

The Zapotec are an Indigenous people in Mexico.  During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some of the Zapotec migrated from the Oaxaca Valley to the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec.  There, they founded Guiengola.  Archaeologists have studied some of the site, but its thick forest cover has made it difficult to fully examine. 

Previous research on the Zapotec Migration has focused on the lives on the nobles and elite.  One of the goals of this study was to understand the role of commoners during the period. 

One of the most important discoveries was a complex measuring around 45 by 50 meters.  According to Celis, this was the residence of the city’s rulers.  The study also discovered how the city’s architecture relied on geographic features, such as a natural rock formation that protected a palace. 

The Zapotec founded the city, which lies near the modern city of Tehuantepec, during their conquest of the Pacific Coast.  It was inhabited between AD 1350 and 1500, and was abandoned shortly before contact with Europeans in 1521.  It was not only a military site, but a thriving urban area where commoners took an active role in creating the city.

According to Celis, Spanish records claim that the Aztecs unsuccessfully attacked the city in 1497.  The researchers found thousands of pebbles and river rocks near the river.  They might indicate a battle, as the Aztecs used slings in warfare. 

Celis plans to conduct further research within the year. 

Our third story takes us to western Asia, where a new study suggests that plague may have caused epidemics a century before the Black Death. 

As reported by Phys dot org, researchers have linked epidemics in Syria, Iraq and Egypt during the late 1250s to the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes plague.  Previously, historians believed that plague existed in the Middle East only after the Black Death spread through Europe from 1346 to 1351.  

Medical historians Dr. Monica H. Green, an independent scholar, and Professor Nahyan Fancy from the University of Exeter conducted the study.  Their recent work builds on an essay they published in 2021, in which they used historical records to hypothesize the likely presence of plague in west Asia from 1258 to 1260.  Their new study demonstrates how symptoms described by contemporary accounts are consistent with the disease caused by Yersinia pestis.  

The researchers relied on many pre-1348 chronicles and religious and medical texts.  According to Professor Fancy, some of the records include the Arabic word for plague and indicate “buboes,” or swollen lymph nodes, which are associated with the disease.  Observers connected outbreaks in the region to the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, during which scribes reported the infection among Mongol troops.

In the thirteenth century, people believed that epidemics were caused by ‘miasms,’ or harmful air from sites of decay like battlegrounds.  However, the bacterium would have started in rodents and insects and, through climatic and environmental changes, spread to humans. 

According to Professor Fancy, it’s important to analyze the spread of pathogenic organisms.  An enormous human outbreak of plague like the Black Death can come only after the bacterium has passed through rodents and vectors like fleas or lice. 

The new research is vital, because it shows how medical historians can use both historical sources and modern genetic information to unravel the development of the plague bacterium.  These details should also aid geneticists as they map the evolutionary history of Yersinia pestis. 

The study appeared in the journal Medical History. 

Our last story this week comes from the Changqing district of Jinan in China’s Shandong Province, where recent excavations reveal the Great Wall to be 300 years older than previous timelines would suggest.

As reported by Arkeonews, archaeologists excavated around 1100 square meters from May to December 2024.  They collected artifacts and specimens which indicate that sections of the Great Wall date back to the Western Zhou [ZHOH] Dynasty, from 1046 to 771 BC, and the early Spring and Autumn Period, from 770 to 476 BC. 

The team used optically stimulated luminescence and carbon-14 dating on samples of animal bones and plant silica from among the excavations to gather more data.  According to Liu Zheng, a member of the Chinese Society of Cultural Relics, revelations from these tests help confirm the Great Wall of Qi [CHEE] as the oldest section of the Great Wall.  The section is also the longest, spanning 641 kilometers. 

Archaeologists unearthed roads, residential fountains, walls, and large rammed-earth structures.  This evidence points to three phases of construction. 

The first phase dates to the Spring and Autumn period and the Zhou Dynasty.  These walls are 10 meters wide.  The second phase walls are from the Warring States period from 475 to 221 BC.  Construction on the third phase occurred during the peak of the Qi State during the Warring States period.  The walls from this era are 30 meters wide, well preserved and demonstrate advanced construction techniques.

Researchers uncovered an ancient town mentioned in historical records as Pingyin City 1.5 kilometers north of the Wall.  They also found two houses from the Zhou Dynasty under the earliest walls.  The homes are semi-subterranean and built on a square foundation with rounded corners.  They might suggest that the Wall was constructed over a small settlement. 

According to Zhang Su, project leader from the Shandong Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, the location, infrastructure and layout of the Great Wall of Qi demonstrate the Qi State’s advanced strategies and military planning.  The nearby Pingyin City shows that the Wall was also important for controlling transportation routes.

This discovery presents an invaluable breakthrough for understanding the Great Wall, and it helps establish the Wall’s purpose in both defense and trade. 

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!