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King Herod the Great, king of Judea in the second half of the first century BC, is well known for his grandiose building projects, abundant wealth, political power and relentless pursuit of the opulent Roman lifestyle. Among the few archaeological artifacts found which give a peek into his private life are two of his personal calcite-alabaster bathtubs found in the palace of Herodium and his Kypros fortress near Jericho.Though never scientifically tested, archaeologists have until now assumed that all calcite-alabaster vessels found in the Southern Levant (modern day Israel and Palestine) had been made with foreign alabaster mainly from Egypt....

Evidence of the beliefs and rituals of the inhabitants of the Danish island of Bornholm (Baltic Sea) over 5,500 years ago, have been discovered by Warsaw University archaeologists during excavations in Vasagard. The research project is the result of several years of collaboration between the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw and Bornholms Museum. This year also included students from the University of Copenhagen. Sun worship The study site -- Vasagard, is a puzzling one, but is thought to be a temple for Sun worship. During this season of excavations, archaeologists have discovered several ditches, in which, in...

A team of researchers working in Hungary has proposed that a sun compass artifact found in a convent in 1948 might have been used in conjunction with crystals to allow Vikings to guide their boats even at night. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences, the team describes theories they've developed that might explain how Viking sailors were able to so accurately sail to places such as Greenland. Since the discovery of the sun compass fragment, researchers have theorized that Viking sailors used them to plot their course—at least when the...

A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed by some to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say. In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal—a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel—worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon. That's because of a property...

Vikings used rocks from Iceland to navigate the high seas, suggests a new study. In Norse legends, sunstones are said to have guided seafarers to North America. Now an international team of scientists report in the journal the Proceedings of the Royal Society A that the Icelandic spars behave like mythical sunstones and polarise light. By holding the stones aloft, voyaging Vikings could have used them to find the sun in the sky. The Vikings were skilled navigators and travelled thousand of kilometres between Northern Europe and North America. But without a magnetic compass, which was not invented until the...

'Sunstone' crystals may have helped seafarers to find the Sun on cloudy days. A Viking legend tells of a glowing 'sunstone' that, when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the Sun even on a cloudy day. It sounds like magic, but scientists measuring the properties of light in the sky say that polarizing crystals — which function in the same way as the mythical sunstone — could have helped ancient sailors to cross the northern Atlantic. A review of their evidence is published today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B1. The Vikings, seafarers from Scandinavia...

The sun was not necessary for Vikings to navigate, say researchers Vikings may have used a special crystal called a sunstone to help navigate the seas even when the sun was obscured by fog or cloud, a study has suggested. Researchers from Hungary ran a test with sunstones in the Arctic ocean, and found that the crystals can reveal the sun's position even in bad weather. This would have allowed the Vikings to navigate successfully, they say. The sunstone theory has been around for 40 years, but some academics have treated it with extreme scepticism. Researcher Gabor Horvath from...

How Vikings Might Have Navigated on Cloudy Days By Corey Binns Special to LiveScience posted: 02 March 2007 08:33 am ET Vikings navigated the oceans with sundials aboard their Norse ships. But on an overcast day, sundials would have been useless. Many researchers have suggested that the on foggy days, Vikings looked toward the sky through rock crystals called sunstones to give them direction. No one had tested the theory until recently. A team sailed the Arctic Ocean aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden and found that sunstones could indeed light the way in foggy and cloudy conditions. Would have...

Physicists from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary have determined that the sunstones claimed to be used by Vikings to navigate on foggy and cloudy days could provide accurate results. Vikings living between 900 and 1200AD did not have magnetic compasses, and their ability to navigate was attributed in part to the use of calcite, cordierite or tourmaline crystals which functioned as linear polarizers to help them determine geographic north. The crystals can split sunlight into two beams, and when the crystal is turned, splitting the two beams at the same brightness, a navigator could see the polarized rings around the...

Lake Sediments Record Climate Change At Cahokia INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA —National Public Radio reports that climatologist Broxton Bird of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and colleagues analyzed layers of calcite crystals interspersed with layers of mud on the bottom of Indiana’s Martin Lake in order to learn about historic rainfall levels at Cahokia. The study suggests that beginning in the 900s, the Central Mississippi Valley received more rain than usual. And carbon isotopes found in skeletons at Mississippian cities indicate that people ate a lot of corn. “That comes at right around 950, and that’s around the time the population at Cahokia...