Gods, Graves, Glyphs
Weekly Digest #202
Saturday, May 31, 2008
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Climate
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Digging In The Desert (Turkmenistan)
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05/24/2008 1:47:19 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 6 replies · 436+ views
Leader-Post /Canwest News | 5-24-2008 | Owen Murray
Tish Prouse would be the first to admit that his interest in archaeology stems from a boyhood love of Indiana Jones. But the Edmonton native had no idea his interest would one day lead him to Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country of brutally hot summers, bitterly cold winters and a pockmarked landscape that invites comparisons with the moon. So why is he here? The answer is Merv, an ancient city along the Silk Road that was once a thriving metropolis, one of the...
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Ancient Autopsies
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Rubbish Threatens Tuvixeduu Necropolis (Ancient Ruins - Sardinia)
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05/24/2008 2:32:40 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 4 replies · 244+ views
Times On Line | 5-24-2008
An ancient Mediterranean necropolis described as one of the world's greatest historical sites is being submerged beneath cement, high rise housing and rubbish dumps, according to Italian conservationists. Tuvixeddu - which means "hills with small cavities" in the Sardinian dialect - contains thousands of Phoenician and Punic burial chambers from the 6th century BC. It has long been robbed of funerary objects but some of its tombs have retained their original paintings, including "Ureo's Tomb", named after a sacred serpent, and "The Warrior's Tomb", in which a decoration depicts a warrior throwing...
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Ancient Europe
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Unique Dutch Settlement Discovered From Bronze Age
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05/24/2008 8:36:32 AM PDT · Posted by blam · 4 replies · 355+ views
M&C | 5-23-2008
Archaeologists have found a settlement dating back to the Bronze Age just north of Eindhoven, a city in the southern Netherlands, Dutch archaeologist Nico Arts told Dutch media Friday. The discovery was made during preparations for the building of a highway junction at Ekkersrijt, north of Eindhoven. The settlement may be the largest ever discovered in the Netherlands, and is definitely the largest settlement ever found in the southern Netherlands. Bronze Age settlements (1500-850 BC) have also been discovered in the province of Drenthe in the...
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Megaliths and Archaeoastronomy
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Did Stonehenge start out as royal cemetery?
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05/29/2008 4:47:46 PM PDT · Posted by RDTF · 9 replies · 389+ views
msnbc | May 29, 2008 | not specified
England's enigmatic Stonehenge served as a burial ground from its earliest beginnings -- perhaps for ancient kings or chieftains, researchers reported Thursday. Radiocarbon dating of cremated remains shows that burials took place as early as 3000 B.C., when the first ditches around the monument were being built, said University of Sheffield archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson. Those burials continued for at least 500 years, when the giant stones that mark the mysterious circle were being erected, he said. Parker Pearson heads the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project, which has been excavating sites around the world-famous monument for five years. He...
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Stonehenge Mystery Solved. [Open]
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05/29/2008 5:46:06 PM PDT · Posted by SouthDixie · 22 replies · 914+ views
AOL
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Stonehenge Could Have Been Resting Place For Royalty
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05/29/2008 6:43:44 PM PDT · Posted by nickcarraway · 6 replies · 158+ views
ScienceDaily | May 30, 2008 | ScienceDaily
Archaeologists at the University of Sheffield have revealed new radiocarbon dates of human cremation burials at Stonehenge, which indicate that the monument was used as a cemetery from its inception just after 3000 B.C. until well after the large stones went up around 2500 B.C. The Sheffield archaeologists, Professor Mike Parker-Pearson and Professor Andrew Chamberlain, believe that the cremation burials could represent the natural deaths of a single elite family and its descendants, perhaps a ruling dynasty. One clue to this is the small number of burials in Stonehenge's earliest phase, a number that grows larger in subsequent centuries, as...
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Gone To the Dogs
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Star Watch - Archaeologists Discover A "Cosmic Clock"
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05/25/2008 8:29:53 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 22 replies · 1,289+ views
Tenerife News | 5-24-2008
Overcrowded in their lower reaches they might be, but the Canary Islands still possess some solitary mountain wilder-nesses, places little visited thanks to their rugged inaccessibility, and which have hardly changed since they were frequented by the pre-colonial aboriginal islanders. And traces of their presence are still turning up, often in the form of petroglyphs, enigmatic scratched marks on rocks and boulders which held some special significance about which we can only guess today. The latest find is, say archaeologists, one of the most exciting. They are calling it a cosmic clock,...
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Diet and Cuisine
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Archaeologists find medieval feeding bottles in northwest Russia
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05/26/2008 5:20:08 PM PDT · Posted by rdl6989 · 12 replies · 418+ views
Ria Novosti | May 26, 2008
Archaeologists have made a rare find of a number of medieval baby bottles at excavations in Veliky Novgorod, an ancient city in northwest Russia, a scientist said on Monday. "Similar bottles are rarely found in excavations, and here we have already discovered... three of them," Medieval Slavs made feeding bottles by attaching leather bags to the wider part of cow horns. A baby drank the milk from a hole made on the tip of a horn. Novgorod is one of the most ancient cities of the Eastern Slavs. It was first mentioned in...
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Archeologists Discover Unique Things In Veliki Novgorod (Baby Bottles)
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05/27/2008 3:00:16 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 10 replies · 391+ views
Russiaq IC | 5-27-2008
A group of archeologists carrying out diggings in Veliki Novgorod have found several ancient feeding bottles for babies. The finds were discovered at the digging site in Mikhailova Street. Here the archeologists found wooden feeding devices made of cow horns. The Slavs used to attach leather sacks with milk to the broad ends of hollow horns and their babies would suck the milk through holes in the narrow part of horns. It is interesting to note that not far from the archeological excavation site there is a working municipal kindergarten. Almost every...
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PreColumbian, Clovis, and PreClovis
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Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?
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05/28/2008 4:14:50 AM PDT · Posted by Renfield · 11 replies · 318+ views
Discover Magazine | 5-20-08 | Heather Pringle
Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the world's leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson looks as pleased as the father of a newborn -- and perhaps just as anxious -- as he shows me one of his...
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The Vikings
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Newfoundland Viking Site Remarkable
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05/24/2008 8:41:39 AM PDT · Posted by blam · 18 replies · 843+ views
Canada.com | 5-23-3008 | Jeff Lukovich
L'Anse aux Meadows likely marks the first European contact with New World -- 500 years before Columbus Jeff Lukovich , Special to The Sun More than 1,200 years ago, Vikings from Norway set out on a series of daring voyages that would eventually result in their being the first Europeans to explore the east coast of North America. In stages they established settlements in the Shetland Islands, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and finally Newfoundland and Labrador. Though we passed through an area around the capital of Nuuk, that would have been near the former Viking "Western Settlement,"...
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Navigation
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Sea Stallion Steps Back In History
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05/27/2008 3:06:51 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 13 replies · 386+ views
Irish Examiner | 5-25-2008 | Richard Collins
Richard Collins on a remarkable Danish replica ship. At three o'clock next Thursday afternoon Dubliners will be treated to an extraordinary spectacle. The Viking ship Sea Stallion, which has been on display at the National Museum in Collins Barracks, will be lifted 50 metres into the air by a giant crane. Then the huge vessel will be swung out over the three-storey museum building and deposited in the nearby Croppy's Acre. In the middle of the night it will be moved to the River Liffey, prior to its long sea journey back to Denmark. The...
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Viking voyage: The crew's diary
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07/13/2007 7:40:37 AM PDT · Posted by WesternCulture · 49 replies · 923+ views
news.bbc.co.uk | 07/12/2007 | Hans Jacob Andersen
A replica Viking ship has set sail for Dublin from the Danish port of Roskilde. It is currently crossing the North Sea, in an attempt to recreate the voyages undertaken by early Norsemen. The volunteer crew on the 30m-long (100ft) Sea Stallion from Glendalough are recording their experiences on the journey. Bad weather is already proving a major challenge. Like the vikings the crew have no shelter from the weather, no cleaning facilities and no lavatories.
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Helix, Make Mine a Double
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Researchers retrieve authentic Viking DNA from 1,000-year-old skeletons
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05/28/2008 6:46:59 AM PDT · Posted by Red Badger · 32 replies · 981+ views
www.physorg.com | 05/28/2008 | Staff
Although "Viking" literally means "pirate," recent research has indicated that the Vikings were also traders to the fishmongers of Europe. Stereotypically, these Norsemen are usually pictured wearing a horned helmet but in a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE this week, J¯rgen Dissing and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, investigated what went under the helmet; the scientists were able to extract authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers. Analysis of DNA from the remains of ancient humans provides valuable insights into such important questions as the origin...
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Africa
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'Indiana Jones'-Like Archeologist Says He's Found Cleopatra's Tomb
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05/25/2008 1:02:47 PM PDT · Posted by AngieGal · 28 replies · 1,022+ views
Fox News | May 25, 2008 | The Sunday Times
A flamboyant archeologist known worldwide for his trademark Indiana Jones hat believes he has identified the site where Cleopatra is buried. Now, with a team of 12 archeologists and 70 excavators, Zahi Hawass, 60, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has begun the search for her tomb. In addition, after a breakthrough two weeks ago, Hawass hopes to find Cleopatra's lover, the Roman general Mark Antony, sharing her last resting place at the site of a temple, the Taposiris Magna, 28 miles west of Alexandria.
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Egypt
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Headquarters of pharaohs' army found
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05/29/2008 8:48:44 AM PDT · Posted by CarrotAndStick · 15 replies · 633+ views
REUTERS via. The Times of India | 29 May 2008, 0023 hrs IST | REUTERS
Egyptian archaeologists have discovered what they say was the ancient headquarters of the pharaonic army guarding the northeastern borders of Egypt for more than 1,500 years, the government said on Wednesday. The fortress and adjoining town, which they identify with the ancient place name Tharu, lies in the Sinai peninsula about 3km northeast of the modern town of Qantara, Egyptian archaeologist Mohamed Abdel Maksoud said. The town sat at the start of a military road joining the Nile Valley to the Levant, parts of which were under Egyptian control for much of the period, the government's Supreme Council for...
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Rome and Italy
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Vatican Unveils Newly Restored Pagan Tomb
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05/27/2008 11:58:00 AM PDT · Posted by NYer · 27 replies · 1,115+ views
CBS News | May 27, 2008
The Vatican unveiled the largest and most luxurious of the pagan tombs in the necropolis under St. Peter's Basilica on Tuesday after nearly a year of restoration work. A family of former slaves built the Valeri Mausoleum during the second half of the second century, when Emperor Marcus Aurelius ruled. It is one of 22 pagan tombs in the grottoes under the basilica. The newly restored tomb was shown to media Tuesday. Visitors can have a guided tour of the grottoes by appointment. Emperor Constantine, a convert to Christianity, had the pagan burial grounds covered up...
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Anatolia
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2,000-Year-Old Treasures Tell Wild Story (Tillya Tepe)
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05/25/2008 8:09:52 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 12 replies · 867+ views
The News Tribune | 5-25-2008 | Neely Tucker
This sculpture likely depicts a supervisor of Greek athletics. It was unearthed in Afghanistan.Pendants showing the Dragon Master, a mythical nomadic man holding dragons by the leg, date back to the days of Christ.PHOTOS BY THIERRY OLLIVIER/MUSEE GUIMETA detailed ivory statuette of a woman probably adorned a piece of furniture in the 1st or 2nd century.An exhibit in Washington, D.C., reveals gold, intrigue and jewelry once buried in Afghanistan. The finds have survived looters and wars.
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Elam, Persia, Parthia, Iran
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Rag And Bone Cup Dates To 300BC
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05/27/2008 3:21:27 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 23 replies · 611+ views
The Telegraph (UK) | 5-27-2008
The grandson of a rag and bone man who acquired a small metal cup is in line for a windfall after discovering it is a pure gold vessel dating back to the third or fourth century BC. A rag and bone man gave his grandson the pure gold vessel, which is from the third or fourth century BC The piece could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. The 5 inch cup, believed to be from the Achaemenid empire, has two female faces looking in opposite directions, their...
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Gold cup from 2,500 years ago found under bed
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05/28/2008 3:13:20 AM PDT · Posted by Daffynition · 50 replies · 809+ views
The Times Online | May 28, 2008 | Simon de Bruxelles
A 2,500-year-old gold cup that has spent the past 60 years in a box under its owner's bed is expected to fetch up to £100,000 after being rediscovered during a house move. The cup was given to John Webber by his grandfather, a rag-and-bone man, who acquired it in the 1930s. Because his grandfather, William Sparks, dealt in brass and copper scrap, Mr Webber assumed that it was made from those metals until he had the unusual piece valued this year. The cup, which is 5.5in (14 cm) high, is embossed with two female faces, each wearing a crown formed...
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Longer Perspectives
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Women's rights in ancient Persia
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05/26/2008 9:19:16 PM PDT · Posted by freedom44 · 16 replies · 446+ views
Press TV | 5/25/08 | Press TV
Zoroastrian texts such as the Avesta clearly define the status of Persian women and reveal that at a time when many women in the world were deprived of their basic rights, Persian women enjoyed social and legal freedom and were treated with great respect. Avestan texts mention both genders asking them to share responsibility and make decisions together. They are equally praised for their good deeds rather than their gender, wealth or power. "Whoever, man or woman, does what Thou, O Ahura Mazda, knowest to be the best in Life. Whoever does right for the sake of Right; Whoever in...
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Agriculture and Animal Husbandry
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Ancient Chinese Irrigation System Stands Test Of Time -- And Quake
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05/24/2008 1:55:14 PM PDT · Posted by blam · 9 replies · 546+ views
Yahoo News | 5-22-2008 | Ian Timberlake
High above the world's oldest operating irrigation system, Zhang Shuanggun, a local villager, stands on an observation platform cracked by China's massive earthquake last week. She has a simple answer for why the ancient, bamboo-based Dujiangyan irrigation system sustained only minor damage, while nearby modern dams and their vast amounts of concrete are now under 24-hour watch for signs of collapse. "This ancient project is perfection," Zhang said. From the hillside platform, the workings of the...
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Haiku You Have Missed This?
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Ancient Poem Found On Wood Strip (Japan)
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05/24/2008 8:46:56 AM PDT · Posted by blam · 12 replies · 373+ views
Yomiuri | 5-24-2008
A wooden strip unearthed in fiscal 1997 from remains of the eighth-century Shigarakinomiya palace in Koka, Shiga Prefecture, was found to be inscribed with a pair of waka poems, one of which is included in "Manyoshu" (The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), Japan's oldest existing collection of poems, a board of education announced Thursday. It is the first time that a wooden strip inscribed with a poem from the collection has been found. On one side of the strip is a poem about Mt. Asaka, in present-day Fukushima Prefecture, while the...
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Australia and the Pacific
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Hobbit's relatives may have existed in northern Australia
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05/28/2008 9:43:22 AM PDT · Posted by SunkenCiv · 9 replies · 267+ views
Top News India | Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 | Sahil Nagpal
An archaeologist, who discovered the "Hobbit", an ancient human like species, on an Indonesian island in 2003, has determined that a relative of the species may have existed in northern Australia. The Hobbits, or Homo floresiensis, who were only about one metre tall and weighed just 30kg, existed on the remote Indonesian island of Flores until about 12,000 years ago. The specie was dubbed as "hobbits" because of its small size and big feet. Now, according to Professor Mike Morwood, who had made the finding in 2003, these ancient species could have had relatives living in northern Australia. "We are...
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Paleontology
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Oldest Embryo Fossil Found
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05/28/2008 12:11:24 PM PDT · Posted by NormsRevenge · 10 replies · 299+ views
LiveScience.com on Yahoo | 5/28/08 | Jeanna Bryner
An armored fish was about to become a mom some 380 million years ago. Though the primitive fish perished, its fossilized remains remarkably reveal an embryo and umbilical cord inside the soon-to-be mother's body. The discovery marks the oldest evidence of an animal giving live birth, pushing the known record of such reproduction back by some 200 million years. It also supports the idea that internal fertilization in vertebrates (animals with backbones) originated in a group of primitive fish. "When I first saw the embryo inside the mother fish, my jaw dropped," said researcher John Long, a paleontologist at Museum...
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Biology and Cryptobiology
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Huge Flying Reptiles Ate Dinosaurs
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05/27/2008 9:38:03 PM PDT · Posted by pissant · 53 replies · 1,206+ views
Live Science | 5/27/08 | jeanna Bryner
With a name like T. rex, you'd expect to be safe from even the fiercest paleo-bullies. Turns out, ancient, flying reptiles could have snacked on Tyrannosaurus Rex To uncover these feeding habits, Witton and Portsmouth colleague Darren Naish analyzed fossils of a group of toothless pterosaurs called azhdarchids, which are muchbabies and other landlubbing runts of the dinosaur world. A new study reveals a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs some 230 million to 65 million years ago did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land. Until now, paleontologists pictured the...
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Health Care
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Leeds medics solve an ancient riddle -- and offer new tool for diagnosis (finger clubbing)
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05/30/2008 3:18:02 PM PDT · Posted by decimon · 11 replies · 530+ views
University of Leeds | May 28, 2008 | Unknown
A puzzling medical condition, identified more than 2,000 years ago by Hippocrates, has finally been explained by researchers at the University of Leeds. The phenomenon of "finger clubbing", a deformity of the fingers and fingernails, has been known for thousands of years, and has long been recognized to be a sign of a wide range of serious diseases -- especially lung cancer. "It's one of the first things they teach you at medical school," explained Professor David Bonthron of the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine. "You shake the patient by the hand, and take a good look at their fingers...
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Middle Ages and Renaissance
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Pisa's leaning tower said to be safe for 300 years
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05/28/2008 2:10:35 PM PDT · Posted by Daffynition · 15 replies · 299+ views
YahooNews | May 28, 2008 | Philip Pullella
The leaning tower of Pisa has been successfully stabilised and is out of danger for at least 300 years, said an engineer who has been monitoring the iconic Italian tourist attraction. "All of our expectations have been confirmed," Professor Michele Jamiolkowski, an engineer and geologist, was quoted as telling Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera. The tower's tilt of about four metres off the vertical has remained stable in recent years, after a big engineering project that ended in 2001 corrected its lean by about 40 centimetres from where it was in 1990 when the project began. "Now we can...
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Epigraphy and Language
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National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R Thru With Through
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05/30/2008 7:32:21 AM PDT · Posted by MissouriConservative · 85 replies · 1,316+ views
The Wall Street Journal | May 30, 2008 | Rebecca Dana
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel. They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation. Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and...
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Oh So Mysterioso
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Shakespeare was a woman: Expert
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05/28/2008 4:21:43 AM PDT · Posted by CarrotAndStick · 88 replies · 1,635+ views
PTI via, The Times of India | 28 May, 2008 | PTI
Shakespeare was actually a Jewish woman who had disguised to get her work published in Elizabethan London where original literature from women was not acceptable, an expert has contended. The woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier Bassano, was of Italian descent and lived in England as a Marrano. She has been known only as the first woman to publish a book of poetry ( Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in 1611) and as a candidate for "the dark lady" referred to in the sonnets, daily Ha'aretz reported. The theory rests largely on the circumstances of Bassano's life, which John Hudson, an expert...
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Faith and Philosophy
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When the Founding Fathers Faced Islamists ( History ... The Barbary Pirates )
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05/28/2008 10:00:46 AM PDT · Posted by Ernest_at_the_Beach · 53 replies · 1,187+ views
Pajamas Media | May 27, 2008 | Michael Weiss
Back in 1784, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had to decide whether to appease or stand up to armed Middle Eastern pirates. Sound familiar? John McCain and Barack Obama are now engaged in a long-distance dispute over whether talking to America's enemies is integral to America's security (with neither one wishing to talk to poor Hillary Clinton any longer). McCain has not so subtly assailed Obama as an "appeaser" for his stated willingness to sit down with the Iranian leadership about its nuclear weapons program and sponsorship of jihadism in Iraq -- and never mind for now if that leadership...
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Thoroughly Modern Miscellany
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Absolutely chuffed! What happened when 30 grown men gave up 18 years to build a steam train
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05/30/2008 5:23:00 PM PDT · Posted by uglybiker · 12 replies · 377+ views
Daily Mail | 30th May 2008 | Michael Hanlon
Ask any child to draw a picture of a train and you will invariably get the same result: a cylindrical boiler shape, with some big wheels underneath, a cab and a chimney belching steam and smoke at the front. In other words, the classic railway locomotive. Nobody draws a picture of a diesel or an electric train. To a child there is only one noise a train can make: 'choo choo'. Plenty of enthusiasts...
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end of digest #202 20080531
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