Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew.  Get ready for another 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!

Radiocarbon dating now shows that a circular enclosure southwest of Stonehenge is earlier than Stonehenge and possibly the oldest of its kind in England.  Archaeologists at an Egyptian colonial cemetery in Nubia, now Sudan, have surprisingly found non-elite burials beneath pyramids.  New dates from a site on the Tibetan Plateau show that people were actually able to live there during the Last Glacial Maximum, during really extreme climatic conditions.  And a ceremony in Honduras celebrated the return of a collection of pre-Columbian artifacts that had resided for decades in a Paris museum.

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, including our recent video about finding the lost aircraft of Amelia Earhart.  Please help us spread the word!  Again, that link is heritagetac.org.

Our tour program, TAC Tours, will continue in September 2025 with our tour of Brittany  and its many spectacular megalithic sites.  Please join us for that!  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 March 16th through the 22nd, 2025.

We begin this week in southwest England, where a new radiocarbon dating study has confirmed the age of a monument dating to about 3200 BC—making it some two hundred years older than Stonehenge.  

As reported by Live Science, a look into the circular Stone Age monument and burial site known as Flagstones appeared in the journal Antiquity.  

Located in the town of Dorset about 37 miles southwest of Stonehenge, Flagstones is a 330-foot-wide circular ditch with intersecting pits.  Excavators discovered it in the 1980s during the construction of a bypass.  Today, half of the monument remains under that bypass while the other half is under a historical home managed by the National Trust.  Its artifacts are housed at the Dorset Museum.

The pits contained at least four sets of human remains: a cremated adult and three interred children's bodies.  The partially cremated remains of three more adults were found elsewhere at the site. 

To get a more accurate picture of the site’s age, the team also radiocarbon-dated human remains, red-deer antlers and charcoal unearthed there.  Taking other archaeological finds from the site into account, Greaney and her colleagues estimated that the pits were dug around 3650 BC.  The circular enclosure likely was not formed until 3200 BC, with the burials placed there soon after.

The Middle Neolithic saw a general shift from interment toward cremation as the preferred funerary rite.  Comparison of available dating from Stonehenge and Flagstones shows that the construction of the enclosure and the funerary activity at Flagstones took place earlier than at Stonehenge.  The cremation remains of an adult alongside inhumations of children may represent an early phase of the transition in funerary rites.

At 5,200 years old, Flagstones is the oldest known large, circular enclosure. Its design marks a shift from previous rectangular or linear enclosures toward a circular form, one that may have been influenced by circular passage tombs being constructed in Ireland at the time.

While Flagstones’ age could indicate that it was an inspiration for Stonehenge, these findings are a good opportunity for archaeologists to revisit the dating for the iconic monument.  According to Greaney, some of the artifacts at Stonehenge are thought to pre-date construction at the site.  Whether these items were buried in an earlier enclosure of pits that was later joined to form the continuous ditch will be a question for archaeologists to investigate next.

Next we head to Sudan, where a surprising discovery has challenged the belief that ancient Egyptian pyramid tombs were only for the wealthy elite.  A decade-long study of Tombos, a colonial town in what was then Nubia, has revealed that these tombs held a socioeconomic cross section of the community, from local elites to low-status, high-labor staff.

As reported by the Greek Reporter, Tombos was constructed by the Egyptians to facilitate colonial control.  Situated at the Third Cataract of the Nile, it was occupied for more than seven centuries, from the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom through the Late period, or from 1400 to 650 BC.  Egyptian civilization was at its peak during this era, and royalty had shifted from pyramid burials to rock-cut tombs like those at the Valley of the Kings.

The research team shared their findings in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.  Led by archaeologist Dr. Sarah Schrader from Leiden University, they outlined three distinct areas of the cemetery.  The northern sector is dominated by chamber tombs where middle class individuals were likely laid to rest, including lower-level officials, scribes, functionaries, and possibly members of their households. 

Its western area is a field of pyramids and chapel tombs associated with the Egyptian elite.  The most elaborate tomb was dedicated to the Scribe Accountant of the Gold of Kush Siamun, a title that suggests an important role in assembling the Kushite contribution to the annual Presentation ceremony.  

Based on the style of his burial, he had probably traveled with an entourage whose duties likely included diplomacy, surveillance, and the assembly and shipment of goods to the north.  His skilled staff would have included scribes, priests and various colonial workforce supervisors.

The Eastern area contains Nubian-style tumuli which held one to three individuals each.  Most of them date to the early Late period, around 650 BC, and are believed to reflect a thriving post-colonial community with a Nubian identity.

The use of wooden coffins was widespread, along with a less-expensive alternative: burials bundled in reed matting.  Inside the better-preserved tombs, excavators recovered a variety of grave goods.  Among them were elite items such as canopic jars—which were used in the mummification process—elaborately decorated coffins, specialized funerary figurines, and jewelry.

The Tombos study suggests that Tombos—and likely other Egyptian colonial New Kingdom towns in Nubia—were more socioeconomically diverse than once thought.  Social classes were not segregated, with hard-laboring workers being buried alongside the elite.   

The study may also explain why other contemporaneous non-elite cemeteries have not been found: those people made little distinction between them and the “elite” tombs all along. 

Next, we trek to the Tibetan Plateau, the world’s largest and highest plateau.  With an average altitude of more than 4500 meters and a total area of about 2.5 million square kilometers, this high-altitude, arid steppe was previously thought to be uninhabitable during the Late Pleistocene ice age—the coldest period of the past 2.5 million years.  

As reported by the Jerusalem Post, archaeologists discovered artifacts pointing to human habitation in 2019 during excavations at the plateau’s southern valley.  Radiocarbon dates from a newly discovered site in the same area now, called Pengbuwuqing [pung-boo-woo-CHING],  present the first evidence of human activity during the Last Glacial Maximum, a period when most of the Earth’s surface was covered with ice.  

Wenli Li of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and her team recovered 427 artifacts at the site, including stone tools, blades and flakes, and burnt bones.  These items dated to three distinct periods between 29,000 and 23,000 years ago, two of which lined up with the Last Glacial Maximum.  They reported these results in Quaternary Science Advances.

The team also unearthed the first pieces of ochre ever discovered in Tibet.  Ochre is a red-colored rock used often in ancient art. 

Researchers had previously posited that the river valleys on the southern Plateau may have served as refuges for Tibetans escaping the intensifying cold of the Last Glacial Maximum.  This discovery supports that hypothesis.

Climate data derived from analysis of nearby stalagmites and lake cores suggested that the river valley had more moisture than expected for the harshly dry Tibetan ice age, allowing water, vegetation and game to persist.

According to Li, the discovery reinforces the idea that early humans were highly resilient and adaptable to extreme conditions.  The team plans to further investigate how climatic shifts during the Last Glacial Maximum influenced human occupation and migration at the site.

Finally, we travel to Honduras, where a ceremony at the nation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs took place to commemorate the return of 133 pre-Columbian archaeological pieces from France. 

As reported by the Jerusalem Reporter, and in a press release from the Honduran government, this collection of artifacts included pieces of obsidian, ceramics, carved figures, and a grinding stone assembled in 1964 and 1965 by a research team directed by French archaeologist Claude Baudez.  

Their excavations covered twenty archaeological sites in central and southern Honduras, including El Espino, La Danta, Goegssi, Pasaquina, Mount Lebanon and Lo de Vaca.  Located in the departments of Valle [VAH-yay], Choluteca [cho-lew-TAY-cuh], and Comayagua [co-mah-YA-gwa], these rich archaeological sites have long provided insight into the pre-Columbian civilizations of Central America.  

The so-called Baudez Collection was sent to Paris for archaeological analysis in the 1980s, a time when the Honduran state had no regulatory framework for the export of archaeological objects.  These artifacts had been held ever since by the Quai Branly Museum [doo KAY BRAHN-leee], which also held an art collection that was repatriated to Benin in 2021.

Most of the objects have been dated to the Late Classic and early Postclassic periods, which spanned from AD 600 to 1000.

Their journey back to their homeland began in 2023 when Marie Kolbensetter, a Ph.D. candidate in archaeology at the University of Leiden, identified the objects during a visit to the Parisian museum.  She notified the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, which then initiated restitution efforts.

Enrique Reina, the Honduran chancellor, thanked the people of France for their vital efforts to improve and deepen commercial, political and cultural relations.

Going forward, the pieces will be exhibited at the History Museum of Honduras in the historic center of the capital, Tegucigalpa.

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!