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

Our stories from this past week of Archaeologica report on a defensive stone wall in Morocco that is the oldest known feature of its kind outside the Nile Valley, rock art paintings in Mexico appearing to depict a journey to the underworld, a new and much larger estimate of the pre-contact Indigenous Australian population, and a new and revolutionary lead-based method of virtually reading the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls.

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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 September 13th through the 19th, 2026.

Our first story this week comes from northwest Morocco, where archaeologists have identified a wall at the Oued Beht [WED BET] site as one of the earliest defensive structures in the region.  The news source The Conversation reports that the Oued Beht area has hosted exciting discoveries in recent years.  Fieldwork in 2022 revealed roughly 10 hectares that people had settled and farmed during the Late Neolithic period.  Dating between 3400 and 2900 BC, the find makes Oued Beht the earliest and largest agricultural complex that teams have uncovered to date in Africa outside the Nile Valley.

Researchers returned to the site in 2023 to continue their work, focusing on a multi-phase ditch, rampart, and wall that cuts across a narrow stretch of the ridge between the river and a nearby ravine.  The structure sealed off and protected the ridge's southern tip, and its builders took advantage of the surrounding terrain to reinforce the defense.

To determine when communities built the wall, the team radiocarbon-dated samples from the deposits that lay near the structure.  Their results place its construction between 2000 and 1500 BC, making it the oldest known large-scale defensive construction that researchers have found in North Africa outside the Nile Valley.

It remains unclear what threats the inhabitants sought to protect themselves against.  Researchers believe the wall more likely controlled the flow of foot traffic and marked territorial boundaries as competition over land and resources intensified, rather than defending against outside invaders.

Archaeologists still work to determine whether Oued Beht functioned as a permanent settlement or a seasonal one.  Thousands of polished stone axes, finely made painted pottery, and other tools that teams recovered from the site may help researchers answer that question in future studies.

Giulio Lucarini, a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Heritage Science within the National Research Council of Italy, led the research team.  As they described in the professional journal Libyan Studies, the discovery pushes back the timeline for organized defensive architecture in the Maghreb.  Communities in the region planned and executed complex construction projects far earlier than anyone previously believed.

Next, we visit central Mexico, where Alfonso Torres Rodríguez, an archaeologist and researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History Hidalgo Centre, is tracing an ancient narrative about death, ancestors, and supernatural entities through dozens of rock art panels that span four centuries.

The news source Heritage Daily reports that Torres Rodríguez has documented more than 55 paintings across 25 archaeological sites in the state of Hidalgo.  These scenes, most of which date between AD 350 and 750, appear to depict a common story: a journey to meet the lord of the underworld.  Sites displaying the imagery include Huapalcalco, Xihuingo, Dahñé, and San Miguel de las Piedras.

In many of the scenes, a canid guides one or two figures—likely warriors—toward another entity.  This destination figure frequently connects to imagery of the moon, funerary bundles, descent, or subterranean spaces, indicating to Torres Rodríguez that it may represent the lord of the dead.

These scenes feature a variety of forms.  Some depict a single individual approaching one or two supernatural entities, while others show a pair of figures journeying together.  Torres Rodríguez identified four main arrangements overall, and noticed a correlation with the locations where each type appeared.  Scenes with two protagonists were more common in the mountainous regions of eastern and southern Hidalgo, while single-protagonist scenes were more frequent in the Mezquital Valley.

For Torres Rodríguez, one of the most notable aspects of this imagery is the recurring presence of pairs.  These sets tend to display complementary rather than matching qualities, with one embodying masculine, solar, and martial characteristics and the other representing feminine, lunar, and agricultural dimensions.

This belief in the power of duality seems to have endured long past the era in which communities made the paintings.  Traditions that Otomi healers practice in Hidalgo's mountainous regions still center around this concept.  A healer seeking contact with forces from another dimension requires what they understand as a dual soul.  Without that twinned character, the healer cannot make contact with the underworld.

Torres Rodríguez laid out this overview of the enduring importance of these ancient narratives during the 10th International Colloquium on History, Architecture, Sculpture, Urban Planning and Funeral Customs, which Mexico's Ministry of Culture organized.

Our third story takes us to Australia, where a new study from a national coalition of researchers drastically revises our understanding of the continent's history.  The news source Phys.org reports that the team used an innovative modeling system to recalculate the size of the Indigenous population before European colonization.

For decades, historical records relied on estimates that placed the pre-colonial population between 250,000 and one million people.  The most influential figure came from anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s.  He estimated a population of only 250,000 to 300,000 people.  However, his calculations failed to account for the devastating impacts of introduced diseases and frontier violence that had already decimated communities before official records began.

To fix this historical blind spot, a national research group comprising archaeologists from several Australian universities collaborated with Indigenous partners.  As they described in the professional journal Nature Human Behaviour, the team combined ethnographic observations with advanced computer modeling.  These models integrated archaeological evidence, genetic data, and environmental carrying capacities..

The resulting models revealed a stunning conclusion.  At the time of the First Fleet's arrival in 1788, the Indigenous population actually had reached approximately 2.22 million people.  In reconciling this large figure with later colonial census records, the computer model calculated a catastrophic loss.  An estimated 2.06 million excess deaths occurred between 1788 and 1861, which represents an average of 28,200 deaths every year.

By 1861, less than 80 years after European arrival, a mere seven percent of the original population survived.  While the 2021 census shows recovery to 37 percent of the pre-colonial total, the population will not reach parity with the 1788 numbers until roughly 2047.

Lynette Russell, a Distinguished Professor at the Monash University Indigenous Studies Centre, emphasizes that these findings do more than correct the historical record.  She notes that the study exposes the true scale of the colonial demographic catastrophe.  Ultimately, the team hopes these new insights will help communities address intergenerational trauma and guide future supportive policies.

Our final story takes us to the ancient library of Herculaneum, where a new laboratory study offers a clever way to read fragile, carbonized papyri that have remained sealed since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.  The news source ConnectSci News reports that researchers successfully read a simulated scroll without unrolling it, using a method that could unlock hundreds of ancient texts.

For years, teams like the Vesuvius Challenge have used high-resolution X-ray scans and artificial intelligence to read these carbonized scrolls.  However, they frequently hit a wall.  Both the ancient papyrus and the traditional carbon black ink consist of carbonized organic material.  This creates a poor signal-to-noise ratio because the ink absorbs X-rays at almost the exact same rate as the page, leaving the text invisible.

Douglas Seiler, a research affiliate at the University of California, Berkeley, realized that a solution lay in a previous archaeological discovery.  Researchers previously had discovered lead in Herculaneum fragments back in 2016 using synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence.  Because lead blocks X-rays, its presence dramatically increases image contrast.

To test how lead affects readability, Seiler and his colleagues mixed lead nitrate into modern carbon ink and wrote text onto an Egyptian papyrus sheet.  The team tightly rolled the papyrus and baked it in a furnace to simulate the intense heat of a volcanic eruption.

Seiler then sent the brittle, carbonized cylinder to co-author Jacob Michael LaManna, a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  LaManna scanned the delicate object using X-ray tomography.  Without physically touching the scroll, custom unrolling software easily mapped the spiral layers onto a flat plane, revealing clear phrases like "the children of."

Writing in the professional journal PLOS One, the team also demonstrated that a handheld X-ray fluorescence device can easily detect lead through the charred layers.  This means conservators could quickly screen the remaining collection in Naples to identify which scrolls contain leaded ink, giving them the highest probability of a successful reading.

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!