Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew, and I’m here to tell you about 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!

Archaeologists in the UK examining Roman Period remains from a cemetery in York, have identified the first physical evidence of gladiatorial combat between a man and an animal.  Peruvian archaeologists working in the coastal territory of the Caral-Supe Civilization report the discovery of the superbly preserved remains of an elite woman who died 5000 years ago.  A DNA study of Phoenician-Punic sites across the Mediterranean shows that the population of this civilization that resided west of the Levant had only a small percentage of their ancestry from Phoenicia itself.  And dating of early post-glacial sites in southern Mongolia surprisingly places the region’s earliest pottery 2000 years earlier 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 April 20th through the 26th, 2025. 

For our first story we head to Great Britain, where a multidisciplinary study of a male skeleton from an English cemetery has revealed the first physical evidence for Roman-era human-animal gladiatorial combat found anywhere in Europe.   

As reported by Newsweek, the remains, along with 82 other burials and evidence of 37 cremations, date from approximately AD 200 to 300.   They were initially unearthed twenty years ago from Driffield Terrace cemetery in York.  Once the Roman city of Eboracum, it contains one of the best-preserved gladiator graveyards in the world. 

Founded in AD 71, Ecoracum was the largest Roman settlement in northern Britannia.   By the third century AD, it had become a colonia, the highest status  a Roman city could achieve.

Since most burial subjects appeared to be young men, many of whom showed signs of bone fractures or execution-style decapitations, it had long been speculated that they were gladiators, not soldiers or slaves.

This new study, published in the journal PLOS One, was a collaboration among the University of York, Maynooth University, Cranfield University, Durham University,  King’s College London, York Archaeology, and York Osteoarchaeology Ltd. 

The research team created a three-dimensional scan of a series of pelvic depressions in the skeleton and compared them with the bite marks of various animals.  The best fit was the bite of a big cat.  The location solely being on the pelvis suggests that the bites were not part of an attack, but rather the result of scavenging around the time of death.

The discovery provides direct new testimony of Roman spectacle culture--the staging of often violent performances with animals as combatants, victims and executioners.  As new direct testimony, these pelvic trauma markers enable the spectacle culture of the colony and garrison community at York to be more clearly understood.

According to study co-author and archaeologist John Pearce of King's College London, the find makes an important contribution to desanitizing Britain's Roman past, demonstrating how civic elites celebrated the imperial cult with brutal demonstrations of power.

While many imagine that these battles were set in the grand surroundings of the Colosseum in Rome, these latest findings show such events reached well beyond core Roman territories.

Our next destination is northern Peru, where archaeologists have just unearthed the remains of a high-ranking woman with partially preserved skin, hair and nails during a recent excavation of the Huaca de los Ídolos ceremonial structure.

As reported by Heritage Daily, this site is located in the ruins of the ancient town of Áspero, a fishing settlement on the coast in the Barranca province.  Prior to becoming a Late Preceramic archaeological site in the 1990s, the location had been a municipal dumping ground.  

Áspero was one of the principal satellite cities of Caral, some 180 kilometers up the Pacific Coast from Lima.  Considered the mother culture of the Americas, it flourished from 3000 to 1800 BC, around the same time as other great early civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. 

Known for its sizable towns and cities, the Caral civilization is named for the archaeological site of Caral (also known as the sacred city of Caral-Supe), a 1,300-acre city that contained pyramids and temples.  The Caral civilization brought urban life to the region on a very large scale.  It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The remains of the noblewoman, aged 20 to 35 and less than five feet tall, were wrapped in multiple layers of cotton cloth covered in rush matting.  The bundle was decorated with a mantle of blue and brown macaw feathers—one of the oldest examples of feather art in the Andes.   

The burial also contained a woven headdress, reed baskets, an incised bone needle, an Amazonian snail shell, a toucan beak inlaid with beads, weaving tools, a fishing net, and over thirty sweet potatoes.   A collection of funerary offerings included bottle-shaped gourd vessels and another basket, set on a totora reed mat.

The upscale presentation and exquisite workmanship of the objects suggest the woman's high status and underline the prominent role of women in the Caral-Supe civilization some five millennia ago.

For more information about the Caral-Supe civilization, you can listen to our audio interview with Peruvian archaeologist, Dr. Ruth Shady [SHAH-dee], the principal researcher there, on The Archaeology Channel in our Audio Interviews area.

We now head to Harvard, where a groundbreaking genome-wide study by The Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean has produced surprising and illuminating news about the Phoenician-Punic [PYOO-nik]civilization.

As reported by Phys.org and published in Nature, the extent of human movement between the Levantine Phoenician homeland and Phoenician/Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean had long been unclear.  The Center's study has shown that, despite abundant archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious links, Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements between the sixth and second centuries BC.

The Phoenician culture emerged in the Bronze Age city-states of the Levant.  By the early first millennium BC, Phoenician cities had established a vast maritime network of trading posts as far as Iberia, spreading their culture, religion and language throughout the central and western Mediterranean and developing innovations like the phonetic alphabet.

By the sixth century BC, Carthage, a Phoenician coastal colony in what is now Tunisia, dominated this region.  Dubbed "Punic" by the Romans, this empire made indelible history.   Among its highlights were three large-scale "Punic Wars" with the rising Roman Republic, including Carthaginian general Hannibal's surprise campaign to cross the Alps with war elephants.

The Harvard study sequenced and analyzed a large sample of genomes from human remains buried in 14 Phoenician and Punic archaeological sites that spanned the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, and the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza.   

The results showed that, far from being linked to the Phoenicians, most Punic ancestry derived from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean.  Deeply interconnected by trade, intermarriage and population mixing, ancient Mediterranean Punic societies intermingled across large distances and created highly variable ancestries.  At the same time, a small proportion of Phoenician ancestry is present in all the samples.

Rather than a Phoenician heritage transplanted across the sea, the Punic world was a cultural melting pot that absorbed and transformed surrounding populations while retaining Phoenician language, religion and social structures.

We end this week's travels in the Flint Valley region of southern Mongolia, one of the most extensive prehistoric sites in Central Asia.   Located on the borderland area between the Altai Mountains and the Gobi Desert, it has seen little archaeological research despite its numerous remains of Stone Age settlements.

As reported by Phys.org, new accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating of Flint Valley Holocene sites, which span from 11,700 years ago to the present day, have shown that Mongolia's earliest pottery is some 2,000 years older than previously thought.  The research team, including Dr. Przemysław Bobrowski of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences and his colleagues, published their findings in the journal Radiocarbon.

Before the Gobi became a parched desert, the region was a mosaic of shallow lakes, grassy plains, and seasonal rivers.  Using intensive surface surveys and satellite mapping, Bobrowski’s team identified the faint traces of these now-vanished paleolakes that once dotted the area.  One of them, Baruun Khuree, was rich with artifacts, including stone objects, ostrich eggshell artifacts, pottery, and hearths.   

Scholars previously believed that the earliest pottery reached Mongolia around 9,600 calibrated years before present.  However, the pottery found here is almost 2,000 years older.  The team is carrying out multiple specialist analyses of both pottery and artifacts.

Eleven radiocarbon dates relate to the Baruun Khuree excavations. The older horizon dates back 11,251 to 11,196 years ago.  The younger horizon is slightly more recent: 10,620 to 10,535 years ago.

This makes the Baruun Khuree complex one of the earliest securely dated sites associated with Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Gobi Desert.  The site is a powerful testament to the adaptability of these ancient people, who survived and thrived in the fluctuating climate following the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.

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!