Archaeo News Podcast 273

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to the Stone Pages Arcade News Podcast, episode

number 273.

On my end, we just passed the winter solstice last night, and the days are finally getting

longer and hopefully warmer at some point in time.

I am freezing my butt off.

For those of you who don't know, I recently got a PhD in Norway, and I've been spending

some time between Denmark and Norway, so I go between plus 12 degrees and minus 12

degrees on a daily basis.

But that is not what we're here to talk about today.

We want some archaeological news.

So I have some very good and interesting stories, and there is, of course, as always, tons more

on the news.stonepages.com website.

First, we'll be covering Viking Age longhouses in Norway, then mercury poisoning in the Iberian

Peninsula.

Following that, we have some Stonehenge stories.

Looking at the Neolithic pits in a nearby area.

Then we've got Bronze Age graves, an isotopic analysis of metal, again, from the Iberian

Peninsula in France.

After that, a nice little metal hoard found by a young metal detectorist in England, and

then some 3D models from a Stone Age village in Orkney.

And last, but certainly not least, we have a story on the Stonehenge diet.

Rather, the diet of the population surrounding Stonehenge.

All of that and much more will be coming up today.

All right, guys, let's get started with the first story of today's podcast.

This one is slightly confusing, and I'll try to get into that as best I can when I've been

looking at, or when I've kind of got to it.

The largest known Viking longhouses have recently been discovered in Scandinavia.

More specifically...

They've been discovered in a town or village known as Gelestel, which lies about 100 kilometers

south-southeast of Oslo in Norway.

However, it is thought to be a place of great importance during the Iron Age, which, according

to the Art News article, lasted from 1200 to 600 BCE, or before Christ, if you use the

Dionysian term.

There is one side problem with that, though.

From what I can tell...

Granted, my knowledge of Norwegian archaeology is very limited.

The Iron Age in Norway doesn't start until 500 BCE.

So, if this is true, we...

The longhouses are the least of our problems in this article, but I assume I've had the

same thing happen, too, with other articles on digs I've been on, where the dates have

been presented in kind of a weird manner.

But, be that as it may...

Out of the five longhouses that were identified using ground-penetrating radar, the biggest

measured 60 meters long and 15 meters wide.

This makes it one of the largest known in Scandinavia.

A typical Iron Age longhouse is believed to be around 20 to 30 meters in length.

The size of a longhouse corresponds with the wealth and influence of its owner, further

proving the site was of great importance during the time.

There are also several burial mounds found, along with a ship burial, reserved for the

most important nobles in Viking society.

This find is referred to as the Geddesdalship, and the vessel could have been either commandeered

or specially constructed and brought onto the land.

The deceased was then placed on the boat, along with the funerary offerings, and they

were all interred together.

Classical Viking style.

I assume you guys have seen Vikings or The Last Kingdom, or, you know, read one of those

illustrated history books when you were a kid, or that showed it quite well.

I remember those quite fondly.

Now, this is more...

exciting because it's one of the few surviving examples we have, and the ship will be the

first that Norway has excavated in a hundred years.

So, very exciting.

Again, I am not sure about the author, but like I said, I have been on the receiving

end of this one before, where my excavation leader told about a dig we were going on that

was going to be pre-Roman Iron Age, which is a specific kind of dating we have in Denmark

for the Iron Age.

And the guy wrote it down as pre-Roman Stone Age.

He's not wrong, but, you know, yeah.

So, take those datings with a little bit of grain of salt.

I'm sure the author meant to put it later, especially if it is supposed to be an Iron

Age house.

It should be a lot later than we're like into the Germanic Iron Age going over into the

Viking Age at this point.

So, but anyways, exciting find nonetheless.

Congrats, Norway.

I'm toast.

Totally not jealous at all.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, moving on from that one.

Going from longhouses in Norway, we're going down to look at mercury poisoning in Copper

Age Iberia.

This is because a recent paper that was published in the International Journal of

Osteoarchaeology, which I sadly haven't been able to find yet, revealed that the oldest

victim of mercury poisoning was buried in the regions around Spain and Portugal.

Back in the Copper Age, which is a period of about 5,000 years or so from what I can tell.

While mercury exposure today is common, especially if you eat certain fish or shellfish, or you

live in certain regions, like I believe Japan has some because of their intake of whale

meat, which we won't get into, you do get a little bit of mercury in your blood, but

the levels are quite low.

So, this is a very good example of mercury in your blood.

is opposed to the, what is it, 370 individuals from the 23 different sites around Spain and

Portugal that the researchers compared for this research. These remains showed mercury levels of

up to 400 parts per million, shortened to ppm, which is much higher than the normal

one to two parts per million that we have today and that the WHO recommends. So keep that in mind.

The big question is, where did this poisoning come from? And the answer actually lies in the

artistic element of the time, namely cinnabar powder. This is a very fine powder that, when

it's turned into a pigment, is responsible for the color known as Pompeian red or vermilion.

And it is often used in tombs from this period in southern Portugal and Andalusia,

where they use it to decorate the figurines or paint megalithic chambers.

As the Copper Age drew to a close,

around 2,200 BCE, the use of cinnabar decreased significantly, according to this study,

which I guess also kind of, you know, would then decrease the amount of people who die

from mercury poisoning. Going from Spain, we're jumping directly to Stonehenge. And I mean,

come on, did you really think we were going to do a last stone pages of 2021 and not have a

Stonehenge story? I mean, come on, guys, as you know, let's be realistic, right?

This actually concerns some

Neolithic pits that were found near Stonehenge, and they are actually now believed to have been

human-made. They were originally described as a natural occurrence by the archaeologists who were

digging the sites. However, new findings have proven that these series of deep pits discovered

near Stonehenge were actually man-made. Together, these pits form a circle spanning about two

kilometers, or 1.2 miles, and form the largest known prehistoric structure in Britain.

One interpretation put forward by the archaeologists is that it formed a sort of boundary,

which would guide people to a sacred site, such as the Durrington Walls, which is one of the

largest henge monuments in Britain, and it is actually located precisely in the center of this

circle. One of the archaeologists who headed the team that made this discovery, Professor Vincent

Gaffney of Bradford University, said that the science had proven that it was indeed a huge

Neolithic monument. Some of the debate was that it was a huge neolithic monument, and that it was

about the discovery, and Stonehenge seemed bonkers to me, he said. While not all the circles that had

survived, nine of the pits were analyzed scientifically, and Professor Gaffney goes on to

say, we've now looked at nearly half of them, and they're all the same. So effectively, this really

does say this is one enormous structure. It may have evolved from a natural feature, but we haven't

located that. So it's the largest prehistoric structure found in Britain. This new evidence

also adds and shines light on the fact that the prehistoric people of Britain,

could not only count, but also track hundreds of paces to measure out these pits.

The pits were found using a special remote sensing technology, and then they were dated using

optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL dating. If you remember from the previous Stone Pages

News podcast, that's what they used for the pits at Stonehenge and in Wales as well. And this dates

the last time the soils were exposed to sunlight. To reiterate from last time, it's a very cool

archaeological thing. You're running a lot of data, you're running a lot of data, you're running a lot

around essentially with night vision goggles. I have yet to do it. I almost got the chance to do

it, but I missed it, sadly. And the tests were conducted by Dr. Tim Kennard of the School of

Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St. Andrews, who goes on to say that these

prove beyond a doubt that the pits date to around 2400 BCE. Gaffney, again, the guy who headed the

team at Stonehenge, has studied Stonehenge for more than 20 years.

And said, there's a real revolution in dating technology happening with OSL. You date the

sediments directly. Traditional dating relies on us finding a bit of bone or charcoal, and then we

date that. We don't date the soil. OSL does that. However, again, keep in mind, now I'm very sure

that both Professor Gaffney and, or what's the other guy's name, Dr. Kennard, are both fantastic

archaeologists and scientists in their own right. But do keep in mind that,

last time, or in the last podcast, the datings might not be as conclusive as we would like them

to be. But it is definitely an amazing find, and congrats to the team around there.

Following our story from Stonehenge, we are going back home to my, well,

neck of the woods, roughly speaking. In an extremely rare find, the remains of five

children have been discovered in two separate graves in a burial mound in Denmark about

45 kilometers west of Copenhagen. The collective grave from the late Neolithic era, which spans

from circa 2400 to 1700 BCE, contained the remains of four skeletons, three aged to four years old,

and one a little older. One was buried with a flint dagger, and the second grave dates from

the Bronze Age, circa 1700 to 500 BCE, and was for a single individual found buried with a bronze

ring attached to its head.

All the bones were well preserved in the graves. The researchers hoped to find traces of DNA that

could provide clues about who these children were and how they died. A bronze blade excavated from

the top of the burial mound is not a typical find for a child's grave.

For our next story, we look at isotope analysis unlocking Iron Age secrets. Discovered in 1964,

the Röklung Underwater Archaeological Site, west of Cap d'Arc, in the south coast of France,

is believed to be four small boats dating back to about 600 BCE, before a permanent Greek settlement

appeared in the region. The cargo included around 800 kilos of copper ingots and around

1700 bronze artifacts made from very pure copper with traces of lead, antimony, nickel, and silver.

However, this is more newsworthy because for the first time ever, a team has examined the origins

of these Iron Age metal items, showing the copper and the silver in the remains of the bones. The

composition of different ingots is consistent with Iberian and also Eastern Alpine sources,

and possibly some Mediterranean sources, providing clues to not only a coastal mobility,

but also cultural interactions between the Languedoc area and the broader western

Mediterranean bases around 2600 years ago. The various sizes, shapes, and compositions

of the various ingots show that they originated from a diverse set of geographical sources,

both continental and maritime. Metallic objects lend themselves to source tracing of geological

components, much in the same way that ceramics do, and studies of processing and manufacture,

again, like ceramics. The copper ingots contain low levels of impurities, more than half can be

linked to the Iberian peninsula. Others suggest a local and western Alpine mining and manufacture,

possibly northwestern Sardinia. Local communities would be, of course,

influenced by the trade for metals and the introduction of the Iberian metal.

Foreign cultural goods and practices, especially with the seafaring people from the Levant,

Aegean, and Greek mainland.

From one hoard to the other, a Bronze Age hoard has been found on a Hartfordshire

farm.

This includes about 200 artifacts that were unearthed after two Bronze Age hoards were found

by metal detectorists. One of these was a 13-year-old girl on her third detecting trip

uncovered 20 pieces from an eventual total of about 65 items. This included an assortment of

incomplete pieces such as socketed axe heads, winged axe heads, cake ingots, and blade fragments

dating from about 1300 BCE in a field near Royston, around 65 kilometers north of London.

Other detectors include a number of pieces from the Iberian Peninsula, such as the Iberian

Peninsula, and a number of pieces from the Iberian Peninsula.

The hoarders on the same organized trip identified a second potential deposit nearby,

and the archaeologists were immediately called to excavate the two sites the following day.

The hoards could be related, and both are being treated as a potential treasure.

All the finds have been sent to the British Museum for expert examination, and the museum

manages archaeological finds made by the public through its Portable Antiquities Scheme, which

is free to join, actually. So if you're interested, go have a look. It's quite easy. I've forgotten my

login, but you know, it's free to join. So if you're interested, go have a look. It's quite easy. I've forgotten my login, but you know, it's

free to join. So if you're interested, go have a look. It's quite easy. I've forgotten my login, but you know, it's

easy to get one. The caches date to the Middle Bronze Age. In accordance with the 1996 Treasure

Act, a museum may decide to purchase the artifact after they've been assessed and valued. If

offered any money for the hoard, the young metal detectorist plans to split the proceeds with the

field's owner. Good on her. So, but yeah, very interesting story, and a very lucky 13-year-old

girl. Ah, very jealous again, so, but good on ya.

Staying in the... on the British Isles, anyways, we'll be heading north to Scotland, where a 3D model

of an ancient Neolithic village has been put online. This is as part of a project to digitally

document over 300 Scottish heritage sites and their collections. A model of the Neolithic village

at Skalabrae on Orkney in Scotland lets people explore Europe's most complete late Stone Age

settlement from a web browser.

The settlement was partially exposed by a storm in 1850 and slowly revealed by decades of careful

excavations. The 5,000-year-old site compromises 10 rooms which are linked by passageways, and the

digital tour includes access to House 7, which is the best preserved house at Skalabrae, and it is

not normally accessible to the public. Virtual visitors can also explore Skalabrae through time

from its discovery just over 107 years ago to coastal erosion from rising sea levels and extreme

weather events.

This is only possible due to spatial data from ultra-fast, high-resolution laser scanning combined with hundreds of

overlapping images of the site, which were used to create the model. The site has been documented in this

manner since 2010, where Skalabrae and the surrounding bay have been laser scanned every two years to monitor

coastal change and inform management and maintenance of the site. So, very cool. And I believe you can follow

both of the links on the Stone Pages website for those models.

For our last story of today's podcast, we have a second Stonehenge story. It is Christmas after

all, right guys? Or the holidays, depending on what you celebrate. Here we look at the eating

habits of the Stonehenge builders. This comes from recent evidence that shows that seasonally

forest sweet and savory snacks were part of the winter diet of the inhabitants of the nearby

ancient settlement of Durrington Walls, which is the previously mentioned Henge

Monument.

In the second story, it lies about three kilometers east-northeast of Stonehenge, where the Stone Circle

builders may have lived. Archaeologists who worked with the Stonehenge Riverside Project uncovered

clues that Neolithic people were collecting food and cooking hazelnuts, crab apples, sloes, and other

fruits. These charred plant remains suggest that they might have followed recipes to preserve the

food. Nuts and fruit may have been cooked with meats and fats to make something like pemmican,

a staple of Indian

indigenous people of North America, which continues to fuel people who require energy-dense

foods, such as explorers in harsh arctic and mountain conditions. Actually, a good note.

It is believed that part of this diet is mainly due to the work being carried out.

This is because there are two types of stones that make up the colossal Stonehenge Monument,

the larger and more local sarsens, which are up to 9 meters tall and 22.6 metric tons on average,

and the smaller bluestones, up to 4.5 metric tons,

brought from quarries 290 kilometers away. When the construction was underway between 4,000 and

5,000 years ago, which would be around 2500 BCE, moving such enormous stones would have been a

daunting task. In 2016, a group of university students dragged a sled carrying a 0.9 metric

stone block over wooden tracks with an average hauling speed of about 1.6 kilometers per hour.

Moving the slab required just 10 students, which was fewer than expected, which meant the

construction work on Stonehenge might have been a bit more time-consuming. The construction work on

Stonehenge might have progressed faster than previously thought, and it might also explain

why they needed such good foods, because let's be honest, dragging that, I mean, you're going to

tire out pretty easily, so you need some very protein-rich food. So, a very interesting article.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, and with that last Stonehenge story, that is it for 2021.

Let's hope that it's all better next year. However, before we go,

I do want to thank you for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did,

I want to highlight something. As some of you may know, at least the older listeners may know,

David Connolly sadly isn't doing the podcast anymore and hasn't done it for quite some time.

However, he is still very busy with the British Archaeological Jobs and Resources website

at badgerfed.co.uk. To this end, David has recently, or maybe it's just only recently I

discovered it, started covering archaeological news just like yours truly does, and a post

some short articles and links to different websites. And in the spirit of collegial activity

and because he is, I consider him a good friend, despite us having never met, sadly, maybe we'll

fix that one day, David. I wanted to highlight some of the articles from his website. There's

actually an article here on Sutton Hoo, Liar, and the music of the Silk Road. Another one here,

this is a call for papers at a Scottish Student Archaeology Society conference,

which has some very interesting articles. I want to highlight some of the articles from this

deadline of the 12th and 13th of February next year. A blog from Flagfen, sorry, where they've

been looking at some post-alignments and they have some wonderfully preserved wood. And last

but certainly not least, it's sad that it happens, but there is an H&S notice where an archaeologist

sadly was injured due to cutting a piece of rebar. And

that apparently the rebar, the bolt cutters apparently hurt the guy. So I'm sorry for the

archaeologist. And as always, any archaeologists who listen, even the non-archaeologists, remember

guys, safety never takes a day off. So you shouldn't either. Stay safe, especially around

Christmas time. We've got enough people getting hurt as is from all these other things around

the world. But I wanted to highlight this website because it is an amazing piece of work. Very

interesting. I'm going to leave it at that. And I'm going to leave it at that. And I'm going to

leave it at that. And I'm going to leave it at that. And I'm always happy to see more

archaeological news. But without further ado, thank you guys so much for today, for

listening, for your feedback, for your activity on the Facebook group. It is amazing to see

how many people post things from the absolute bottom of my heart, Diego's heart, everybody

else here at the Stone Pages team, which includes Clive Price-Jones, Paolo D'Aurizio, and

Wolf Vandoy. We would like to wish you a happy holidays, a happy new year, and I

look so forward to seeing you guys next year. All right. Have a good one, guys.