This is EXTREMELY interesting. Honestly!

I've always been puzzled that when pyramids are discovered somewhere on Earth, folks are quick to extrapolate that there were similarities to the Egyptian pyramids and maybe a connection of civilizations (or Alien overlords?) by their mere existence.

My take is that a pyramid is so absolutely basic a form for building, that I'm only surprised that they aren't found everywhwere.

Have you ever watched a kid build with blocks, or sand, or dirt, or rocks? Inevitably, they build something that looks like a pyramid. Its just a very basic design. One that can go upwards with very little lateral support, which would entail more complicated engineering, than just 'stacking stuff up until it wants to fall over'.

In my humble opinion, there's no connection except the desire to build 'up' (for whatever reason, religious or merely practical) and lack of any other way to accomplish that feat.

I seem to be following you around tonight, reading about your very interesting archeology finds. Where do you find these articles?

Where do you find these articles?
That was going to be my question!!

Yes, it is interesting. I had a subscription to Archeology magazine, but I failed to renew it. Reading articles such as this makes me want to subscribe again, I love this sort of stuff.

This is the best site that I have ever found for breaking and up to date news in this field. Go HERE. to visit Archaeological News Hourly.

Non-UFO old stuff bump

A side note:
Afghanistan is considered by some (mainly afghanis) to be the site of the original Garden of Eden.

There is a bit of a mystery about the ancient culture that developed there. Found this from the Detroit Free Press. Another ancient civilization found

Oasis evidence shows trade, farms, cities May 3, 2001

BY FAYE FLAM
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

PHILADELPHIA -- A major early civilization -- rivaling in sophistication the ones that emerged in the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, the famed cradle of civilization -- apparently thrived in central Asia between 2200 BC and 1800 BC.

These people, who lived in desert oases in what is now Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, used irrigation to grow wheat and barley, forged distinctive metal axes, carved alabaster and marble into intricate sculptures, and painted pottery with elaborate designs, many with stylized versions of local animals, according to discoveries that have emerged during the past decade or so.

"Who would have thought that now, at the beginning of the third millennium AD, we'd be discovering a new ancient civilization," said Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. He has excavated in the region nearly every year since 1988, shortly before the Soviet Union fell.

Some researchers consider writing to be a criterion for any true civilization, and now Hiebert said he thinks he may have evidence for meeting that, too -- a tiny stamp seal carrying four letter-like symbols in an unidentified language. He has dated it to 2300 BC.

On May 12, Hiebert will present his findings at an international meeting on language and archaeology at Harvard University.

"The implication of the seal is incredible," he said, because there's no existing evidence that these people had a written language. And the characters engraved in the stone stamp are unlike any ever seen.

"It's not ancient Iranian, not ancient Mesopotamian. I even took it to my Chinese colleagues," he said. "It was not Chinese."

How could such an advanced culture have been so overlooked?

In the 1970s, Soviet archaeologists working in remote deserts west of Afghanistan came upon vast ruins, each one bigger than a football field. All were built with the same distinct fortress-like pattern -- a central building surrounded by a series of walls.

By the mid-'70s, the Soviet archaeologists had discovered several hundred of these structures in the areas known as Bactria and Margiana.

But their findings remained little known to the outside world because they had never been translated from Soviet journals.

"I was absolutely stunned," said Harvard archaeologist Carl Lambert-Karlovsky, who reads Russian and who, 20 years ago, first read some of the Soviet literature on this unknown world. He transferred his amazement to Hiebert, who was one of his graduate students.

No one knows the extent of this civilization, which may reach beyond Margiana, deep in the Kara Kum desert, and Bactria, which straddles the Uzbek-Afghan border.

Hiebert said he believes that a third area, Anau, outside Ashgabat near the Iranian border, is connected to this civilization, perhaps even the origin of the culture. It is about 2,000 years older, going back to 4500 BC, or the Copper Age.

A New Hampshire archaeologist, Raphael Pumpelly, had discovered ancient ruins at Anau in 1904, but the site did not receive much attention from the Russians. Only now, said Hiebert, are all the pieces, once divided by political boundaries, falling into place.

Planned, not haphazard

Over his years of study in the area where the civilization existed, Hiebert discovered that the various oases "looked like they were in the middle of nowhere, but they are part of the route everyone went on from west to east for thousands of years."

The oases, built in moist areas, created natural stepping stones on a trading route that reached from China through the Indus Valley to Mesopotamia -- all Bronze Age civilizations of the third millennium BC.

The fortress-like buildings of the civilization are larger than the biggest structures of ancient Mesopotamia or China, said Harvard's Lambert-Karlovsky. "The size at the base of some of the buildings is equivalent to the base of the pyramids," he said.

The Soviet archaeologists determined them to be temples because of their size and distinctive layout, but Hiebert, who spent time looking for bone shards, seeds and other remnants of living patterns, came to a different conclusion.

He said the buildings were more like housing complexes, with areas for ordinary people to live, others for the elite, storage areas, and what appear to be areas for ritual.

The dwellers were industrious in other ways as well. In Bactria and Margiana, there was no natural stone or metal. "It was nothing but sand," Hiebert said, and yet the ruins contained elaborate works in alabaster, marble and bronze. "The oasis people would import materials and manufacture them in their own art style."

Lambert-Karlovsky said that many of the artworks, utensils and jewelry were buried with the dead. In an unusual pattern for other early people, the women were buried with more valuables than the men.

Most of the artifacts Hiebert found remain in Turkmenistan -- the politically correct way to do archaeology today. But in his office on the fifth floor of Penn's University Museum, he displays a few.

There is a foot-tall alabaster column, a carved marble plate on a stand, an alabaster bowl, pieces of delicately painted pottery, and a bone pipe, possibly for drug use, carved into a little stylized human figure. Near the pipe, Hiebert found remains of the herb ephedra as well as poppy.

Small bronze axes carry designs, including one of a wild boar, and a piece of pottery is decorated with leopards. "Their world was full of dangers -- wild boars, snakes, scorpions," Hiebert said. These animals show up in their ritual art.

The animal patterns support an idea, suggested by the Soviet archaeologists, that the people practiced an early form of the religion known as Zoroastrianism, which originated in Persia. Animal worship was part of Zoroastrian ritual, as was the use of fire, suggested by some hearths, or altars, found in the remains of ancient buildings.

Hiebert is convinced that this oasis civilization originated around Anau. Not everyone agrees with him. At the forthcoming meeting in Boston, he expects a French team to present findings pointing to a migration from the north, rather than from Anau.

More laboratory work might reveal what the climate was like during the Bronze Age -- probably much wetter and more conducive to farming than it is now.

Hiebert plans to go back in June, armed with satellite maps he obtained with the help of NASA. These reveal wet oasis areas -- where other lost cities are likely to be found.

The hourly Archeology News site is very interesting--thanks for the post.

David Meadows, who can be reached as dmeadows@direct.com publishes a weekly summary of ancient history news every Sunday Morning under the name of Explorator. Subscription is free and I think all you need to do is email him at the direct address and he will put you on the distribution list.

Here's, I believe, the largest American pyramid at Cahokia, Illinois.

Q & A

Fredrik Hiebert

BY JOHN MCCALLA

It's the stuff that made Indiana Jones and that lost ark an international sensation: adventures over land, across seas and in the middle of deserts. Archaeologist Fredrik T. Hiebert, Ph.D., would probably be the last to find the glamour in his adventures, but his energetic tales and disarming enthusiasm leave listeners captivated.

The Robert H. Dyson Jr. Assistant Professor of Anthropology and assistant curator of the University Museum, Hiebert set out to be an artist, took a turn in Paris and wound up an archaeologist.

From the Silk Road to the Black Sea, Fred Hiebert searches for the common language of trade.

Photo by Candace diCarlo

His pursuits in the latter profession have made him someone to watch, with cameras from National Geographic about to track his work with research partner Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic.

In November, Hiebert received a $15,000 Chairman's Award from the National Geographic Society's Committee on Research and Exploration. Throughout his career, Hiebert's chosen obsession has been the Silk Road trade routes, and since 1994, he has focused on the Black Sea connections between ancient civilizations.

His work with Ballard combines land and sea exploration in a single program, "from mountain top to ocean bottom" - a first in the research world. Hiebert's goal is nothing short of changing the way people think of the Black Sea.

Q. How did you segue from artist to archaeologist?
A. Most people, when asked how they started in archaeology, always say they were interested in it since they were a kid playing in the sandbox. I wasn't. I didn't have any interest in going to college. I was trained at Interlochen Arts Academy, a professional-arts-oriented high school. After I graduated, my teacher sent me to Paris, to an art studio in a basement at the bottom of Montmartre. When I got to Paris, they said, "We don't take apprentices." So, I had to pay to work in the studio. And the way I did that was to work for an archaeologist drawing artifacts. They kept inviting me back, so I went into the field with them, and that's how I got interested in archaeology. Then they said you can't go into archaeology unless you go to college. So I came back from a wonderful year in Paris and went to the University of Michigan.

Q. Where did you start?
A. I worked in Egypt. My first interest was in maritime trade - long-distance trade through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. I went to Harvard after that. My first semester, my professor said, "What are you doing? You should go work overland, and compare overland with overseas trade," which sounded great, except of course I had to learn Russian to do that. So I did an intense crash course in Russian, and received an IREX year-long grant to go to the Soviet Union. It was a university-to-university exchange, and I was the first American ever to be placed in Turkmenistan.

Q. What did you do there?
A. I went out in the desert oases to look at the origins of the Silk Road. I [expected to] work with the medieval and classical Silk Road, the Silk Road that we know from historians that talked about the great trade that went across it. But we kept finding much earlier stuff. We found that the desert oases, these ports in the sand, existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years earlier than that. So, in the spring of that year, I joined a Russian excavation out there. My wife and I went out and we lived in a tent way out in the middle of the desert in what was a dried up Bronze Age oasis. There we found the remnants of what turned out to be a separate civilization. It was not only the origins of the Silk Road, but it was a civilization that had previously been unknown, to the West that is, which was comparable in age to ancient Mesopotamia, ancient India and ancient China. We were finding the link in Asia between the great civilizations. We were finding trade items from China, from Anatolia, from the Steppe region where the nomads were, and we were even finding traces all the way to the Black Sea.

Q. When did your interest in the Black Sea escalate?
A. In 1994, when Bob Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, called me up almost out of the blue and said he was interested in the Black Sea for completely different reasons. His reason was that it was the world's most special deep-water environment. In the Black Sea, there are no microbes, no oxygen, no wood bores. If there were a shipwreck in that area, in deep water, it would be perfectly preserved. I thought well, this is a way to get back into this long-term interest I had in the Black Sea, and to work with someone whose technology just couldn't be beat. This was a dream situation.

Q. And what did you find?
A. The same 4,000-year-old Bronze Age culture we had found in the desert oasis, we also found in the Black Sea. But, surprisingly, we were also finding materials almost 6,000 years old. This was very interesting because it showed a strong interaction around the Black Sea. This was particularly interesting in light of what linguists have been proposing for some time about the origins of our language, Indo-European languages. Indo-European language may not be affiliated with one single culture, but it may well be an intercultural language, a trading language.

Q. What have you dug up since you started?
A. What we've done the last three years is a walking survey along one of the key port areas of the Black Sea coast. We've taken the area from being almost terra incognita, and we found over 170 sites. Trying to figure out where the key port sites are, we've been able to create a very systematic program of research that allows us to focus where we search for shipwrecks with Robert Ballard. In July 1998, we did a six-day sonar survey and must have found a dozen real targets. And that was just a test of what we're going to do. We're going to go in and do a systematic survey to see if we can find shipwrecks [or] any evidence of settlements that may have been affected by sea-level change.

Q. That method is what got you the award?
A. Yes, it is a unique structure which we call mountain top to ocean bottom. And our future work is being funded by National Geographic and the Oliver S. Donaldson Trust and the Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust in New York. It was a risk to try and do a land-and-sea operation, but I think we've been successful.

Q. And you're basically hoping to change the way people think about the Black Sea.
A. Absolutely. The coastal cultures are more closely related to each other than they are to the inland areas. This is the natural economic unit and we find it very interesting. We are having a common dialogue with our contemporary economic situation where now the borders of the Soviet Union have fallen and there's an attempt to re-establish the Black Sea as one of the major trading zones in Eurasia. As someone who has studied land and sea trade, I can tell you sea trade is a much better and a much less risky way of trading than overland. Ships represent a much more efficient way of moving stuff around. Rather than being a barrier to communication and exchange, the sea is a natural conduit for trade. We're seeing this coming back despite old [nationalistic] walls that exist which had been restricting trade through the Black Sea.

YES, it is extremely interesting ... thanks for posting this.

From my limited study of linguistics, I also believe the sources of Indo-European languages not to be as written in history.
Also, I find it amazing the volumes of ideas attributed to the Greeks ... that were NOT of Greek origin.

Thanks, bookmarked for later read at home.

I didn't check to make sure all of these links work, but if you want to explore the world of archaeology, here's a good start for you.

ArchNet
The Archaeology Channel
National Geographic - ARCHAEOLOGY & PALEONTOLOGY
The Wild Side of Geoarchaeology Page
Nautical Archaeology - Texas A & M University (TAMU)
Index of Cartographic Images
Forensic Archaeology
Tracy's personal website - list moderator of HistoryRUs@egroups
Archaeologists, Influential
Encyclopaedia
Bullfinch's Mythology
Mercator's World magazine
BEAUTIFUL pictures - AnthroArcheArt
www.novaonline.org
Archaeology Web Ring
Mysteries of History
The History Web Ring
Ancient History (about.com)
Archaeology on the Net Web Ring
Archaeology Magazine Newsbriefs
Biblical Archaeology Society
Karen's Archaeology Page - A goldmine of links
Discovering Archaeology News
NGNews @ nationalgeographic.com
Welcome to American Archaeology
UCSB Archaeology Department
Previous issues of weekly features and columns, archived by topic, from your archaeology about.com Guide
Archaeology
Archaeology
ABCNEWS.com : Lee Dye's Previous Columns
K. Kris Hirst - your About.com Guide to:Archaeology
Archaeology
Index to newsbriefs
Web search results
World Wide Archaeology
EXPEDITION NEWS
Horses on Ice
Antiquity of Wheel
Lewis & Clark expedition

Both articles are interesting. The Chinese pyramids next?

I find it amazing the volumes of ideas attributed to the Greeks ... that were NOT of Greek origin.

Yes, like the idea that the Greeks and Archimedes invented geometry. Clay tablets found in Babylon in what appears to have been a temple school show the unmistakable signs of a geometry workbook. These tablets were a thousand years older than Archimedes.

I think it was in the same part of Babylon from about the same period that electric storage batteries were found. I always wondered how the ancients did gold and silver plating without electricity.

Thanks for the article, where did you find it?

the volumes of ideas attributed to the Greeks ... that were NOT of Greek origin.

True, not everyone was Greek. The Greek language was everywhere, so much was written in that common language, the coine, the Lingua Franca. No one was literate unless he could write in Greek. Okey-doke?

SO, PYRAMIDS, OR SOMETHING ELSE?

Fredrik Hiebert