Welcome back, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew.  Get set for four fascinating 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!

You’ll   hear about Native American sites in Virginia now identified as the ones described by John Smith; evidence in England for the oldest known intentional fire; botanical art in Neolithic northern Mesopotamia that reflects mathematical knowledge; and megalithic structures underwater off the coast of Brittany.

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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 December 7th through the 13th, 2025.

Our first story this week begins along the Rappahannock River in eastern Virginia, where archaeologists are investigating the records that Englishman John Smith left from his travels in the region.

As reported by LiveScience, Smith was a member of the Jamestown colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America.  In 1608, he spent several weeks in an area now known as Fones Cliffs, writing in his journal about the Indigenous villages that were present there.

In the following years, however, the exact locations of those communities were lost.  The debate over whether these villages ever existed at all continued for centuries.

Julia King, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College, has been working with her colleagues to research the early history of this region for a number of years.  She and her team used historical documents and oral histories as their guide to identify the area that Smith documented during his travels.  In an effort to identify the villages described by Smith, they began excavations at a series of sites located in their target locale.

They recovered roughly 11,000 artifacts at the sites, some of which may have originated as early as the 1500s.  Their finds included beads, stone tools, tobacco pipes, and several distinct types of pottery.  These sites very likely represent the settlements described by Smith.

According to King, the presence of these items affirms that settlements did exist in this area at the time of Smith’s exploration.  Taking the local geography into account, King noted that the high cliffs provided rich soil that would have supported corn cultivation, offered a wide view of the entire river valley and limited access to the community from below.

The presence of these items aligns with the Rappahannock tribe’s oral histories.  Many members of the tribe still live nearby.  With these new findings, they have begun an effort, in collaboration with private partners and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to protect and purchase the key sites that their ancestors called home for generations. 

Our second story this week takes us to eastern England, where archaeologists have identified the earliest known evidence that humans deliberately made fire, dating to about 400,000 years ago.

As reported by PBS NewsHour, a team of excavators led by the British Museum investigated Barnham, a Paleolithic-era settlement that has been surveyed for decades.  Describing their work in the journal Nature, the researchers recovered a patch of baked clay, flint hand axes fractured by intense heat, and two fragments of iron pyrite.  This mineral produces sparks when struck against flint.

Over the past four years, researchers worked to rule out naturally occurring wildfires and lightning strikes as the cause of the burned materials.  Using geochemical tests, they documented repeated burns in the same location, where temperatures exceeded 700 degrees Celsius.  This evidence indicates that a hearth had been deliberately built at the site.

According to Rob Davis, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, these findings show that the community deliberately made fire.  One key piece of evidence is the use of iron pyrite, which does not occur naturally at Barnham.  The settlement’s inhabitants likely collected it intentionally with the knowledge that it could be used to ignite tinder.

This awareness marks a significant step in human evolution.  Scientists have known for many years that humans used fire for cooking, warmth and other purposes as far back as one million years ago or more.  The important distinction here is fire-making.  Archaeological evidence almost never shows how a particular fire started, and we have to assume that people knew how to start fires long before this.  However, this study is exceptional because it documents fire-making itself at a much earlier time than previously confirmed.  Of course, that does not mean that people were not deliberately starting fires earlier.  Almost certainly, they were.

Ash, charcoal and heat-altered sediments, the key markers of fire, rarely last long enough to be preserved.  At Barnham, however, the burned materials were sealed within pond sediments.  This allowed the team to reconstruct how the site’s inhabitants interacted with fire.

Prior to this study, the earliest evidence of intentional fire-making came from Neanderthal settlements in what is now northern France.  Those examples dated to about 50,000 years ago, making the Barnham site the earliest known case by far.

Our third story this week takes a closer look at motifs in northern Mesopotamian art and what they can tell us about its creators’ ability to think mathematically.

As reported by Phys.org, illustrations of flowers, branches, trees, and shrubs drawn more than 8000 years ago by members of the Halafian culture represent the earliest known systematic depictions of plant motifs in human history.  These people lived in what is now northern Syria, southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq.

Beyond simply capturing the flora in their environment, these careful illustrations painted on pottery show an attention to symmetry, repetition and geometric organization.

Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich, professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology, examined artifacts from 29 archaeological sites and documented hundreds of these motifs.

According to their analysis, these designs mark the first time humans turned their artistic focus toward the botanical world.  Before this period, prehistoric art largely centered on depictions of humans and animals.

The researchers noted that these images, some naturalistic and others abstract, were drawn with precision.  Among the illustrations were flowers with 4, 8, 16, and 32 petals, as well as one piece that included 64 flowers arranged into symmetrical groups.

These designs suggest that the Halafians understood spatial division thousands of years before written numbers came into use.  This ability to visualize divisions, sequences and numerical balance likely had practical uses beyond art.  According to Garfinkel, it may have helped people divide harvests and organize shared fields.

The study appeared in the Journal of World Prehistory.

And we should mention that our planned tour of southeastern Turkey, to take place in October 2026 and available now for registration, includes the Halafian area of upper Mesopotamia.

Our final story this week brings us to the northwestern coast of France, where archaeologists have identified a new group of megalithic structures in a long-suspected location: underwater.

As reported by Heritage Daily, archaeologists documented the waters around the island of Sein [Sen (like the English "sen" but with a French nasal vowel)], off the coast of Brittany, using LiDAR surveys and a series of diving expeditions conducted between 2022 and 2024.

A research team made up of French archaeologists examined data from these expeditions and recently described their findings in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.  By using relative sea levels to date the structures, the team placed their construction between 5800 and 5300 BC.  This timing falls in the late Mesolithic and the transition into the Neolithic period and predates the megaliths still standing on land today by about 500 years.

This locale will be familiar to some of our listeners.  Just this past September, we conducted our second tour of Brittany’s megalithic sites.  For many years, researchers have suspected that older sites must exist offshore, in landscapes that were once dry land during the Mesolithic and early Neolithic periods.

The researchers created a digital elevation model to identify and measure each structure.  Based on their layouts, some appear to have served as protective features, while others may have functioned as fish weirs.

The largest structure is a wall stretching about 120 meters across a submerged valley.  It consists of stacked stone blocks and includes more than 60 vertical monoliths and slabs reaching heights of up to 1.7 meters.

Another notable structure is a wall about 50 meters long, built from smaller monoliths placed close together and in part forming two or three parallel lines.

People in Brittany have long shared stories of a submerged city said to lie near Sein Island.  According to the study’s authors, those legends could reflect the human-made structures identified at this site and point to once-thriving settlements that now lie beneath the sea.

The study appeared in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

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!