Welcome to our show, everybody!  I’m Rick Pettigrew. 

Our stories from this past week of Archaeologica are about an ancient solar alignment that predates the nearby Stonehenge, hunter-gatherer burials in Siberia that surprisingly reflect an outbreak of plague, evidence of intensive fishing in the Canary Islands, and the discovery of a second cannonball at the Alamo.  We’ll get to those in a few seconds.

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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 June 14 through June 20, 2026.

Our first story this week reports on a prehistoric monument in southern England.  The site indicates that people marked the solstices centuries before they erected Stonehenge’s famous stone settings.

The news outlet Arkeonews reports that archaeologists discovered a 5,000-year-old timber monument near the village of Bulford in Wiltshire, about 5 kilometers from Stonehenge.  Phil Harding, an archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology, led the excavation team.

Radiocarbon dating places the monument at about 2950 BC.  The structure dates to the earliest phase of Stonehenge, when people first constructed the earthwork enclosure at the site.  However, it predates by about 500 years the massive stone settings that make Stonehenge famous today.

Very little of the timber monument survives.  Archaeologists found two large pits where wooden posts once stood about 120 meters apart.  The research team believes that ancient builders carefully positioned these posts to mark the summer and winter solstices.

Dr. Fabio Silva, a researcher at Stone x Sky and the Skyscape Academy, studied how the monument aligned with the sky.  His analysis showed that the posts pointed toward the sunrise at the summer solstice and the sunset at the winter solstice.  These solstices mark the longest and shortest days of the year.  Dr. Silva found that the alignment was accurate within about one degree.

The excavation also uncovered pottery, animal bones, charcoal, and worked flint.  These artifacts suggest that large groups of people gathered at the site, possibly to participate in ceremonies associated with these seasonal events.

One pit contained a rare disk-shaped flint knife.  Harding noted that its circular shape may have symbolized the sun.  The team believes that people deliberately placed the knife in an area where crowds gathered to watch the solstices.

According to Dr. Matt Leivers, a Senior Research Manager at Wessex Archaeology, this represents the earliest known structure in the Stonehenge landscape that people built to align with the solstice.  The team believes it preserves evidence of traditions that thrived centuries before people built the famous stone circles.

The discovery suggests that Stonehenge did not appear suddenly.  Instead, the monument grew out of conditions that already existed across the surrounding landscape.

Our second story this week focuses on the oldest known plague outbreak, which researchers identified among ancient hunter-gatherers in Siberia about 5,500 years ago.  The discovery suggests that deadly plague outbreaks were surprisingly not limited to high-density farming villages..

Science News reports that archaeologist Ruairidh [ROO-uh-ree] Macleod of the University of Oxford worked with molecular biologists Martin Sikora and Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen.  Together, this research team analyzed ancient DNA extracted from human remains near Lake Baikal in southeastern Siberia.

The team analyzed the remains of 46 individuals from four burial sites.  They discovered genetic traces of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, in 18 of those individuals.  These data come from cemeteries dating back roughly 5,500 years.  This timeline makes the outbreak several hundred years older than any previously documented case of the disease.

The community buried many of the victims in shared graves, and families apparently used several of these burial sites only once.  The researchers argue that these specific patterns point to a swift, deadly disease outbreak that caused multiple deaths within a short timeframe.  The cemeteries also contained an unusually high number of children’s graves.  This striking demographic clue originally prompted the team to investigate the cause of death.

Until now, archaeologists linked major plague outbreaks primarily to early farming communities.  Previous hypotheses suggested that high-density settlements allowed rodents and fleas to spread the pathogen easily.  However, these new findings demonstrate that small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers faced similar deadly risks from serious epidemics.

Macleod noted that the team did not expect to find plague among prehistoric hunter-gatherers.  The discovery indicates that high population density is not a requirement for lethal outbreaks.  Furthermore, the study identified the most ancestral strain of plague yet discovered, showing that the bacterium diverged from its relatives at least 5,700 years ago.

The researchers believe that local marmots, which are large burrowing rodents that still carry plague in parts of Asia today, served as a natural reservoir for the disease.  These findings suggest that plague was already capable of causing lethal outbreaks long before the rise of cities and large agricultural settlements.  The full study appeared in the professional journal Nature.

Our third story this week examines evidence that Indigenous communities in the Canary Islands caught, processed, and preserved large quantities of seafood about a thousand years ago.

Live Science reports that archaeologist Jonathan Santana of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria led a research team studying Playa Chica, a coastal site on the island of Gran Canaria.  Occupied from about AD 1000 to 1300, the site preserves evidence of intensive marine resource use.

The Canary Islands lie off the northwest coast of Africa.  Archaeological, genetic, and linguistic data indicate that the island’s settlers were people whose ancestors came from Berber-speaking regions of northwestern Africa during the first millennium AD.  This is an area where archaeologists previously had little information on human use of ocean resources.

The researchers recovered thousands of fish scales, fish bones, shellfish remains, and traces of sea urchins from the site.  The team also found goat horn tools that apparently served to remove fish scales, as well as fish hooks made from pig tusks.  Together, these finds indicate that people processed and preserved large quantities of seafood, and did not simply catch fish for immediate consumption.

The team identified remains from many fish species, most of which live close to shore.  This distribution suggests that fishing took place mainly in coastal waters.  Evidence from the fish hooks indicates that people likely used both line fishing and nets.

The excavation also uncovered numerous hearths and the remains of plants that people may have burned to create smoke for preserving fish.  Jacob Morales, a university professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and co-author of the study, noted that this practice helped dry and lightly smoke fish.  This technique allowed coastal communities to store seafood for longer periods or exchange it with inland populations.

Santana stated that Playa Chica is important because it demonstrates how Indigenous communities organized their relationship with the sea.  Rather than serving as an occasional food source, marine resources formed a central part of daily life and the local economy.  The full study appeared in the professional journal PLOS One.

Our final story this week highlights the discovery of a second cannonball from the Battle of the Alamo, which represents a key event in the 1836 Texas Revolution.

The science news outlet Live Science reports that archaeologists working at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, uncovered an iron cannonball that Texan defenders likely fired during the historic battle.  The discovery occurred just three months after the team found a bronze cannonball that researchers believe the Mexican Army fired.

The Alamo began as a Spanish mission founded in 1718.  It later became the site of a 13-day siege during the Texas Revolution, when Anglo-American settlers, referred to as Texians, and Hispanic Texans known as Tejanos seceded from the Republic of Mexico.  In March 1836, Mexican forces led by General Antonio López de Santa Anna assaulted the mission, killing the 180 Texian rebels defending the structure.

Tiffany Lindley, the Director of Archaeology at the Alamo, noted that the discovery was unexpected because intact cannonballs are extremely rare finds at the site.  Although archaeologists have recovered ammunition fragments and shrapnel over the years, these two projectiles represent the first examples of solid shots ever found during excavations at the Alamo.

The newly excavated iron cannonball came to light near the northeast corner of the historic church building.  Data regarding its size and weight suggest that ancient gunners fired it from a cannon designed for six-pound projectiles.  According to Kolby Lanham, a Senior Researcher and Historian at the Alamo, these physical attributes suggest that the iron ball belonged to the Texian defenders, while the bronze shot belonged to the Mexican Army.

The team recovered the two cannonballs close to one another.  Researchers believe they represent physical evidence of the opposing sides exchanging fire during the fateful siege nearly two centuries ago.  Lindley noted that the cannonballs have remained untouched since 1836, offering an extraordinary window into the conflict.  The ongoing excavations continue to uncover artifacts spanning centuries of local history.

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!