Free Republic

The Roman stadium where Emperor Antoninus Pius staged Rome's version of the Olympic Games will be open this weekend for the first time in almost 500 years. Archaeologists have so far excavated half of the stadium, which was built of volcanic rock around 142 A.D. near Naples, and was buried by volcanic ash in 1538 following an eruption by Mount Nuovo, ANSA reported Friday. "Like the great Italian culture capitals of Florence, Venice, Rome and Urbino, Pozzuoli can also take advantage of its illustrious past, which is reflowering from the bowels of the earth," said Pozzuoli Mayor Pasquale Giacobbe. In...

Francesco Rutelli, the former Italian Minister for Culture and Deputy Prime Minister, told the Italian Parliament he had believed that some of the antiquities to be auctioned in London next week had been exported illegally from Italy. In an "urgent question" to Sandro Bondi, his successor as Culture Minister, he accused the centre-right Berlusconi Government, which took power in May, of failing to take action over the illegal export of archaeological treasures. Mr Rutelli later told reporters that he was most concerned about an elaborately decorated Apulian 4th-century BC red krater or Greek vase that forms part of the Bonhams...

New sites have been explored during this season's excavations in Ephesus. Archeologists have been exploring a necropolis housing 55 bodies and 18 pieces of 1,700-year-old golden jewelry in the ancient city of Ephesus, located in the Aegean province of Izmir. The deputy leader of the excavation team, Austrian Sabine Ladstätter, spoke yesterday to the Anatolia news agency and said they had found important archeological remains during this year's Ephesus excavation season, which finished at the end of September, and added that the jewelry they found had been a surprise. Ladstätter noted that they had found a necropolis this year with...

In early May I went to the Guerrero highlands to see the celebrations that take place during the Catholic Holy week, which coincides with the beginning of the spring planting season. The people in several mountain towns practice a type of Catholicism that incorporates religious beliefs and rituals that pre-date the arrival of Europeans. The most spectacular of these rituals are the Tigré fights. Men in the village of Acatlan dress in jaguar costumes and box each other as a kind of sacrifice to the rain god, Tlaloc. (The goggle-like eyes on their headgear match ancient depictions of both Tlaloc...

Archaeologists excavating north of Jerusalem have found a piece of a sarcofagus - a stone coffin - belonging to a son of a High Priest. The visible inscription reads, "the son of the High Priest" - but the words before it are broken off. It thus cannot be ascertained which High Priest is referred to, nor the name or age of the deceased. Many other findings in the excavation are from the late Second Temple period, and archaeologists assume that the High Priest in question lived between 30 and 70 C.E. Yoli Shwartz, Spokesperson for the Israel Antiquities Authority, notes...

In Israel, Remembering The Yom Kippur War By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Jerusalem ----October 8, 2008 .....As I wrote the below account 5 years ago, the first time retracing steps taken thirty-five years ago during Yom Kippur in Israel and the US in October 1973, memories began to pour back along with the anxiety and tears that we all experienced at the time. For many of us, the scars of war will never heal. Nor should they. Sitting in the relative safety of a suburban Long Island home, I first heard news reports of Arab armies attacking Israel on...

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) handed out the first payments in a multi-million-dollar project to explore epigenomics last month. But some researchers are voicing concerns about the scientific and economic justification for this latest 'big biology' venture. Epigenetics, described as "inheritance, but not as we know it"1, is now a blisteringly hot field. It is concerned with changes in gene expression that are typically inherited, but not caused by changes in gene sequence. In theory, epigenetic studies can help explain how the millions of cells in the human body can carry identical DNA but form completely different cell...

This toy hedgehog, found in a child's grave at Stonehenge, is proof of what we have always known - children have always loved to play. Archaeologists who discovered the grave, where the child was laying on his or her side, believe the toy - perhaps placed there by a doting father - is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in British history. The diggers were working to the west of Stonehenge in what is known as the Palisade Ditch when they made the remarkable discovery last month in the top of the pit in which the child was buried....

...in the early 1990s Goddio began to work on the other side of Alexandria's harbor, opposite the fortress. He discovered columns, statues, sphinxes and ceramics associated with the Ptolemies' royal quarter -- possibly even the palace of Cleopatra herself... he has found that much of ancient Alexandria sank beneath the waves and remains remarkably intact. Using sophisticated sonar instruments and global positioning equipment, and working with scuba divers, Goddio has discerned the outline of the old port's shoreline. The new maps reveal foundations of wharves, storehouses and temples as well as the royal palaces that formed the core of the...

Daniel Deocampo, a Georgia State assistant professor of Geology, is investigating ancient lakes and volcanic ash to help scientists better understand the environment in which humans evolved, and eventually used ash and sediment to build infrastructure in ancient civilizations... His research into volcanic ash that formed sedimentary rocks in Italy and California helps scientists better understand the ways ancient societies, including the Romans, used rocks to create mortar and concrete that, in some cases, was actually more durable than the modern varieties. Over hundreds of years, Romans experimented with different volcanic ash layers to perfect the building materials which would...

Serbian archaeologists say a 7,500-year-old copper axe found at a Balkan site shows the metal was used in the Balkans hundreds of years earlier than previously thought. The find near the Serbian town of Prokuplje shifts the timeline of the Copper Age and the Stone Age's neolithic period, archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic told the independent Beta news agency. 'Until now, experts said that only stone was used in the Stone Age and that the Copper Age came a bit later. Our finds, however, confirm that metal was used some 500 to 800 years earlier,' she said. The Copper Age marks the...

I was only slightly surprised when, in 1978, during excavations at a badly pot-hunted cemetery at the site of Nacascolo on the Bay of Culebra in Guanacaste, we encountered the first Red Ochre burial ever reported from Greater Nicoya. The Nacascolo burial was from approximately 1,200 years ago, making it more than a millennium more recent than the Wisconsin red ochre burials. At Nacascolo, a central male figure was surrounded by carefully sorted piles of the arm and leg bones of previously buried males of apparently more or less the same age, who had been moved aside to make room...

The people of the Mondsee Lake settlement were apparently relatively advanced within this cultural group. They had metallurgical skills, which were rare in Europe. They cleverly searched the mountains for copper deposits, melted the crude ore in clay ovens and made refined, shimmering red weapons out of the metal. In dugout canoes... they paddled along the region's river networks and sold their goods in areas of present-day Switzerland and to their relatives on Lake Constance. Even Otzi the Iceman had an axe, made of so-called Mondsee copper. At approximately 3200 B.C., says Binsteiner, the master blacksmiths were struck by a...

Whisonant and Ehlen also studied the terrain at Antietam, the site of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War, where on 17 September 1862 up to 23,100 soldiers were killed, wounded, or declared missing. "What's so striking at Antietam," says Whisonant, is that "two geologic units underlie [that area]. One is a very, very pure limestone that as it erodes it literally melts. Mostly what you get with that is a very even, level, open surface -- there just aren't a lot of deep holes and high hills that give soldiers a place to hide." On one area of this...

Stonehenge was used as a cremation cemetry throughout its history, according to new evidence that divides archaeologists over whether England's most famous ancient monument was about celebrating life or death... The latest evidence is from a team of archaeologists from a number of British universities who have been carrying out excavations over the past five summers... The report said: "We propose that very early in Stonehenge's history, 56 Welsh bluestones stood in a ring 285 feet 6 inches across. This has sweeping implications for our understanding of Stonehenge." The second significant finding was from radiocarbon dating of human remains found...

Archaeologists have discovered the bones of at least 50 prehistoric people killed in an armed attack in Germany around 1300 BC. The signs of battle from around 1300 BC were found near Demmin, north of Berlin. They are the first proof of any war north of the Alps during the Bronze Age, said state archaeologist Detlef Jantzen on Thursday. One of the skulls had a coin-sized hole in it, indicating the 20- to 30-year-old man had received a mortal blow. A neurologist said he was probably hit with a wooden club and died within hours. Scientists plan DNA tests on...

A thousand years ago York ranked among the 10 biggest settlements in Western Europe, but archaeologists have now found the remains of a Viking settlement at the Hungate dig close to banks of the River Foss. The discovery is less than a mile from the remains of similar buildings found during the world-famous Coppergate dig 30 years ago, providing further clues as to the true size of the Viking town of Jorvik... The timber-lined cellar of a two-storey Viking age structure was unearthed more than 10ft below the current street level at Hungate last week, and it is thought...

Chinese paleontologists discovered the two incisors in 1965 and the relatively simple stone tools in 1973 in the Yuanmou Basin... and might be from the species Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of humans that may have been the first human to spread beyond Africa about 1.8 million years ago. Scientists have gotten mixed results for the age of the site because there were no volcanic crystals in the soils for reliable radiometric dating. Lacking solid dates, researchers thought until a decade ago that the earliest humans didn't reach Asia until 1 million years ago. But a series of dates for...

Underground caves in which thousands of civilians took shelter from one of the heaviest Allied bombings of World War II have been re-opened in northern France. The time capsule labyrinth lies deep below the Normandy city of Caen, which was all but destroyed by British guns around D-Day, June 6th 1944. Largely undisturbed since, the makeshift bunkers still contain numerous reminders of a terrified population whose only thought at the time was survival. They include packed suitcases, tins of syrup, decaying maps and official passes, and even lady's make-up bags including nail varnish and lipstick. There are also children's magazines...

Ying Zheng was the First Emperor of China, who ended the Warring States Period, established the first empire of China (Qin Dynasty) in 221 BC and died in 210 BC. According to historical records, it took 39 years and 720,000 workers to build an amazingly magnificent mausoleum... the population size of Qin Dynasty was twenty-two millions and it controlled a vast territory... Between February and March 2003, 121 human skeletons were excavated by a team from Archaeology Institute of Shannxi when cleaning up a Qin-Dynasty kiln 500 meters away from the site where Terra Cotta Warriors were found... Aiming at...

Israeli archaeologists on Monday announced the discovery of a stone sarcophagus fragment with Hebrew script that was apparently taken from the original burial grounds and used for a Muslim building near Jerusalem. The discovery was made along the West Bank separation barrier north of Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement. The sarcophagus is believed to be that of a Jewish priest from about 2,000 years ago. The fragment of the limestone lid bears the carved inscription "Ben HaCohen HaGadol" which can be loosely translated as "the high priest." "It seems that the fragment was plundered from its...

Sole member of world's first single-species ecosystem depends on rocks and radioactivity for life. The rod-shaped D. audaxviator was recovered from thousands of litres of water collected deep in the Mponeng Mine in South Africa.Greg Wanger, J. Craig Venter Institute / Gordon Southam, University of Western Ontario Nestled kilometres down in the hot, dark vaults of Earth's crust, scientists have discovered a remarkably lonely bacterium species. The rod-shaped bacterium, Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator, lives independently of any other organism in a part of the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa, some 2.8 kilometres beneath Earth's surface. There, water flows from...

One of the earliest villas in Budapest is being excavated at Bécsi út 262 (District III), reports the Budapest History Museum. The site is of special importance, as it fits well into the line of villas previously found in the area, providing more information on the location and extension of villa farms around Aquincum, wrote Krisztián Anderkó, the archaeologist leading the excavations, on the museum's website. Ruins of the Roman building complex were discovered following several months of excavation work at a plot destined to become a hypermarket. The Office of Cultural Heritage had ordered the excavation to be carried...

HILL OF TARA, Ireland–It is a battle worthy of the old Irish legends, pitting history against modernity. But as a controversial highway creeps ever closer to the spiritual home of the early Celtic kings, it now appears both sides may lose. For advocates of the twin ribbons of asphalt called the M3 now under construction north of the Irish capital, there is no choice but to live pragmatically with the roar of a commuter corridor in the shadow of the sacred Hill of Tara, because getting to nearby Dublin is a nightmare without it. For opponents, the new toll highway...

THE remains of a Viking home have been discovered in York by archaeologists. York Archaeological Trust archaeologists have exposed what they believe to be a timber-lined cellar of a two-storey house, during excavations at the site of the new Hungate development, which is being built near Stonebow. The archaeologists say the home, which was uncovered about three metres below street level, would have been built in the mid to late tenth century. It appears that ships’ timbers used in the building’s construction – the first discovery of its kind in York. Hungate excavations project director Peter Connelly said: “To find...

Desulforudis audaxviator is an organism that lives independently in total darkness and at high temperature by reducing sulfate and fixing carbon and nitrogen from its environment, deep within the Earth. It constitutes the first known single-species ecosystem. Illustration © 2008 Thanya Suwansawad Click here to enlarge image The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat...

It may look like a grubby bit of rock but this ancient carving has caused a stir among archaeologists and hedgehog lovers. It is a prehistoric toy hedgehog and was unearthed from a three-year-old child's grave at Stonehenge in Wiltshire. Thought to be about 2,500 years old, it is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in Britain. 'Amid the aura of gloom that surrounds Stonehenge, it comes as a beam of light to find a child's toy,' said archaeologist Dennis Price. A rock found is believed to be a prehistoric toy hedgehog for a child

The remains of a Viking-era stave church, including the skeletal remains of a woman, have been uncovered near the cemetery of the Lä nnä s church in Odensbacken outside Örebro in central Sweden. "It' a unique find," said Bo Annuswer of the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) to the Nerikes Allehanda newspaper. "The churches that have found earlier have been really damaged. Now archaeologists uncovered for posts which mark the church, and the burial site. Such an undisturbed site is unique." Stave churches, common in medieval northern Europe, are constructed with timber framing and walls filled with vertical planks. The...

Archaeologists in Greece have found Roman remains in a submerged ancient port on the Cycladic island of Kythnos, the Greek culture ministry said today. The archaeologists found the bearded head of a man and the torso of a warrior wearing a Roman-era breastplate at a depth of 2.5 metres underwater in the island bay of Mandraki last month. It is unclear whether the fragments were part of the same statue. They had apparently been used as building materials in a wall running along the harbour, the ministry said. The age of the fragments has not been certified. The Romans became...

On November 29, 1947, the very day that Hebrew University Professor E.L. Sukenik acquired the first three Dead Sea Scrolls and brought them back to Jerusalem, the United Nations passed by a two -thirds vote the resolution partitioning Palestine, effectively creating a Jewish state for the first time in two millennia. To Sukenik, it was almost as if the apocalypse had arrived: A 2,000-year-old Isaiah scroll -- which prophesied the return of Israel -- surfaced virtually on the same day that Jewish sovereignty was reestablished in the Holy Land. But within two days of that glorious day in Jewish history,...

Photo: Ostia Archeological Authority

AMHERST, Mass., — Some students join for pie. Others show up for the Bard. Whatever their reasons are for joining the new Shakespeare and Pie club at Hampshire College, first-year student and club founder Josh Parr is pretty happy with the response. Parr started reading Shakespeare in high school, and the idea to pair Shakespearean discussion and snacks came to him shortly after he arrived on the Hampshire campus. The addition of pie, he said, was something he hoped would boost the club's popularity. "I had a few friends who were interested in a Shakespeare club. But everybody loves pie,"...

Stockholm, Sweden (AHN) - Another trio of scientists were recognized by the Nobel Foundation for their discovery of the mystery behind the green glow of jellyfish. The past two days saw trios also being awarded the Nobel laureates for Medicine and Physics. For this finding, Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California at San Diego will be awarded the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

Washington, Oct 06: A meteorite, which crashed into Australia 40 years ago, is telling researchers new things about how life may have started on Earth, and how that almost universal protein left-handedness came to be. For more than 150 years, scientists have known that the most basic building blocks of life - chains of amino acid molecules and the proteins they form - almost always have the unusual characteristic of being overwhelmingly “left-handed.” The molecules, of course, have no hands, but they are almost all asymmetrical in a way that parallels left-handedness. This observation, first made in the 1800s by...

Hwy. 99 bridges, train trestles, town ruins emerge as water level drops There's more than just muddy flip-flops and busted lawn chairs emerging from the depths of Lake Shasta as the reservoir drops to its lowest levels in 16 years. Old bridges, train trestles, tunnels and the foundations from towns long-drowned have begun to pop out of the lake's muddy depths. One such relic from Shasta County's pre-lake past even has taken on a new life. A bridge from Highway 99, the precursor to Interstate 5, was being used last week as a makeshift low-water boat ramp at Antlers Resort...

Human evolution is grinding to a halt because of a shortage of older fathers in the West, according to a leading genetics expert. Fathers over the age of 35 are more likely to pass on mutations, according to Professor Steve Jones of University College London. Speaking Tuesday at a UCL lecture entitled "Human Evolution Is Over," Professor Jones will argue that there were three components to evolution — natural selection, mutation and random change. "Quite unexpectedly, we have dropped the human mutation rate because of a change in reproductive patterns," Professor Jones told The Times. "Human social change often changes...

A team of scientists led by renowned French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio recently announced that they have found a bowl, dating to between the late 2nd century B.C. and the early 1st century A.D., that, according to an expert epigrapher, could be engraved with the world's first known reference to Christ... The full engraving on the bowl reads, "DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS," which has been interpreted by French epigrapher and professor emeritus Andre Bernand as meaning either, "by Christ the magician" or "the magician by Christ." ...He and his colleagues found the object during an excavation of the underwater ruins...

New remote-sensing technology reveals huge structure beneath surface A new remote sensing technology has peeled away layers of mud and rock near Peru's Cahuachi desert to reveal an ancient adobe pyramid, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a satellite imagery conference in Rome. Nicola Masini and Rosa Lasaponara of Italy's National Research Council (CNR) discovered the pyramid by analyzing images from the satellite Quickbird, which they used to penetrate the Peruvian soil. The researchers investigated a test area along the river Nazca. Covered by plants and grass, it was about a mile away from Cahuachi's archaeological site, which contains the...

The last remaining survivor of the sinking of WWII battle cruiser HMS Hood in May 1941 has died at the age of 85, his naval association has said.

A Mycenaean warrior who died in western Greece over 3,000 years ago was the proud owner of a rare gold-wired sword imported from the Italian peninsula, a senior archaeologist said on Thursday. "This is a very rare discovery, particularly because of the gold wire wrapped around the hilt," archaeologist Maria Gatsi told AFP. "To my knowledge, no such sword has ever been found in Greece," said Gatsi, head of the regional archaeological department of Aetoloakarnania prefecture. Tests in Austria have confirmed that the bronze used in the 12th century BCE, 94-centimetre (37-inch) sword came from the Italian peninsula, she said....

Photos by Kevin Fitzsimons, Ohio State University. COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought. The tracks -- two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter -- date back some 570 million years, to the Ediacaran period. The Ediacaran preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved. Scientists once thought that it was primarily microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, explained Loren...

It may have taken Michelangelo four long years to paint his fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,but his earliest predecessors spent considerably longer perfecting their own masterpieces. Scientists have discovered that prehistoric cave paintings took up to 20,000 years to complete. Rather than being created in one session, as archaeologists previously thought, many of the works discovered across Europe were produced over hundreds of generations who added to, refreshed and painted over the original pieces of art. Until now it has been extremely difficult to pinpoint when prehistoric cave paintings and carvings were created, but a pioneering technique...

One hundred years ago this afternoon, the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs played a game that can still be found on baseball's figurative Mount Rushmore, next to the Bobby Thompson home run game, the Sandy Amoros catch game, Don Larsen's perfect game, and the game where Carlton Fisk waved it fair. No one who played in or saw the game is alive. The Polo Grounds, where it was played, was demolished a half century ago. Doesn't matter. Some games just endure. More specifically, what happened on Sept. 23, 1908, was this. With the first breezes of autumn in...

The two new species of bacteria found growing on the walls of the Roman tombs may help protect our cultural heritage monuments, according to research... The Catacombs of Saint Callistus are part of a massive graveyard that covers 15 hectares [37 acres], equivalent to more than 20 football pitches. The underground tombs were built at the end of the 2nd Century AD and were named after Pope Saint Callistus I. More than 30 popes and martyrs are buried in the catacombs. "Bacteria can grow on the walls of these underground tombs and often cause damage," said Professor Dr Clara Urzì...

Another crop circle has appeared in the English countryside — and this one's clearly been made by someone, or something, that understands math.

Benjamin Franklin, Londoner. The U.S. founding father lived in the British capital for almost two decades before the American Revolution, working to bridge the widening gap between the colonies and the crown. After decades of neglect and a $5.3 million restoration, his house was unveiled to the public Tuesday as a museum dedicated to a revolutionary who spent years trying to keep Britain and its American colonies united. "He wasn't very successful, but he sowed the seeds of the Anglo-American special relationship," said Marcia Balisciano, director of the Benjamin Franklin House museum. U.S. Ambassador Robert H. Tuttle and Foreign Secretary...

A MEDICAL journal in March published a study suggesting that drinking coffee can raise the risk of heart attack, but only for people with a gene that makes them slow metabolizers of caffeine. Experts called the finding intriguing, but said it needed to be validated by others and its health implications better understood. Still, Consumer Genetics, a company formed only a month earlier, is already advertising a genetic test that purports to tell consumers whether they can continue to enjoy their morning jolt. That is how fast things can move in the rapidly expanding, chaotic and largely unregulated world of...

Genghis Khan, law giver, free trader and diplomat, is back with a new image By Richard Spencer in Ulan Bator (Filed: 11/07/2006) The Mongolian capital has been swamped with images of its former potentate, Genghis Khan, in honour of the anniversary of his unification of the nation in 1206. At the climax of celebrations in Ulan Bator yesterday, soldiers in traditional uniform and bearing yaks' tail standards heralded the unveiling of an enormous statue of the Great Khan in the main Sukhbaatar Square. The monument in which it is set contains earth and stones from the holy and historic places...

Massacre of Drogheda under Oliver Cromwell. the Staff or associates of Christian History Institute. After the massacre, Oliver Cromwell declared to the English Parliament, "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbued their hands in so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion [shedding] of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." Oliver Cromwell, responsible for a massacre. Just what happened at Drogheda, Ireland on this day, September 11, 1649 is hard to...

A US accountant has proof that he is descended from the Mongol warlordTHEY seem the unlikeliest of relatives. One was a fearsome warlord whose name became a byword for savagery. The other is a mild-mannered accountancy academic from Florida. Yet Tom Robinson, 48, has become the first man outside Asia to trace his ancestry directly to Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol leader whose empire stretched from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf. And, since his paternal great-great-grandfather emigrated to the United States from Windermere, Cumbria, many more descendants are probably scattered across the Lake District. Genetic tests have...