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An archaeological excavation in northern Israel has unearthed glass-making kilns that date back 1,600 years, proving that ancient Israel was one of the most important centers of glass making in the world during the late Roman period. Yael Gorin-Rosen, head curator of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Glass Department, said. “This is a very important discovery with implications regarding the history of the glass industry both in Israel and in the entire ancient world. We know from historical sources dating to the Roman period that the Valley of Acre was renowned for the excellent quality sand located there, which was highly...

The 12-centimeter high statue confiscated by the PA is a sculpture of King Herod's lover valued at nearly a million dollars. Security Services (PPS) arrested Monday night three Palestinians who tried to smuggle an ancient statue of King Herod's lover from the West Bank city of Tulkarm into Israel. A statement released by the PPS following the incident read: "Based on intelligence information, security forces burst on Sunday into a home in Zeita, a village in north Tulkarm, and carried out a complicated security operation, during which they arrested three archaeologists and confiscated the statue." According to the statement, the...

Egypt’s Culture Ministry on Sunday explained for the first time why it banned Ridley Scott's biblical epic "Exodus: Gods & Kings", claiming the movie presents a "racist" image of Jews, reports The Associated Press (AP). The ban was announced several days ago, but Sunday’s statement from the Culture Ministry marks the first time that the reason for the ban was officially explained. According to AP, the statement said the film put forth a reading of Egypt's history that is at odds with the story of Moses told by the world's monotheistic religions. Censors objected to the "intentional gross historical fallacies...

Incredible and haunting scenes from a trove of old films discovered in a basement in 1994. The footage was taken by two men who filmed scenes of ordinary people and normal life at the turn of the last century. Included are street scenes, sporting events, workers going to and from their jobs, parades and social gatherings and people recreating.The movie men would film the people at a time when moving pictures was cutting edge technology and then show the films that night in local theaters letting people see themselves in a motion picture (for a small price). In a lot...

The first results of textile and dye analyses of cloth dated between 400-650 AD and recovered from Samdzong 5, in Upper Mustang, Nepal have today been released by Dr Margarita Gleba of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Identification of degummed silk fibres and munjeet and Indian lac dyes in the textile finds suggests that imported materials from China and India were used in combination with those locally produced. Says Gleba: "There is no evidence for local silk production suggesting that Samdzong was inserted into the long-distance trade network of the Silk Road." "The data reinforce the...

Based on a statistical analysis of the results, and taking into account the content of the texts that were chosen for the sample, the researchers concluded that at least six different hands had written the 18 missives at around the same time. Even soldiers in the lower ranks of the Judahite army, it appears, could read and write... The study was based on a trove of about 100 letters inscribed in ink on pieces of pottery, known as ostracons, that were unearthed near the Dead Sea in an excavation of the Arad fort decades ago and dated from about 600...

Washington State University scientists... say the region saw three other cultural transitions over the preceding five centuries. The researchers also document recurring narratives in which the Pueblo people agreed on canons of ritual, behavior and belief that quickly dissolved as climate change hurt crops and precipitated social turmoil and violence... Bocinsky, WSU Regents Professor Tim Kohler and colleagues analyzed data from just over 1,000 southwest archaeological sites and nearly 30,000 tree-ring dates that served as indicators of rainfall, heat and time. Their data-intensive approach, facilitated by climate reconstructions run at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of...

When the first prehistoric people trekked into South America toward the end of the Ice Age, they found a wondrous, lush continent inhabited by all manner of strange creatures like giant ground sloths and car-sized armadillos. But these hunter-gatherers proceeded to behave like an "invasive species," with their population surging then crashing as they relentlessly depleted natural resources. Only much later did people muster exponential population growth after forming fixed settlements with domesticated crops and animals... The researchers identified two distinct colonization phases: the first unfolding about 14,000 to 5,500 years ago, with the human population hitting around 300,000; the...

Back in the day - we're talking WAY back in the day - beer was brewed with malt, and bread, and honey and wine . . . and just about anything that could be fermented. How the ancients brewed - and how you can too! Archaeology and beer seem to go together, and it’s not just because a cold brew helps wash the dust from your teeth after a long day on the digs. I’m an archaeologist by profession and a homebrewer by avocation. Lots of archaeologists brew their own, and those who don’t often have a passion for more...

About 400 years ago, a throng of dusty workmen laid down their shovels and huddled around an ancient painted wall -- a fresco, technically -- unearthed in a tunnel near Italy's Bay of Naples. The men were at work on a massive construction project, burrowing through a hill to build a canal for a local armament factory and mill. No one expected to find fine art. But as the workmen dug deeper into the hill, they encountered wonder upon wonder -- house walls painted blood red and sunflower yellow, fragments of carved inscriptions, pieces of Roman statues. The architect supervising...

The ruins are located close to the popular tourist destination and UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mamallapuram, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Just before the devastating 2004 Asian Tsunami hit, the ocean receded several hundred feet, and tourists reported glimpsing large stones and boulders in the distance. A 10-member team from the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) surveyed the area from March 10 to 18, and have found the ruins of one of six ancient temples that are thought to have been swallowed up by the ocean as sea levels rose. The team, comprising of divers, geologists and...

The project, called Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS)... is led by Dr Philippa Steele of the University's Faculty of Classics... For instance, today the notion of "alphabetical order" is used to arrange everything from dictionaries to telephone books, but why is the alphabet organised the way it is? Alphabetical order as we would recognise it first appeared over three thousand years ago in Ugaritic, written in a cuneiform script made of wedge-shaped signs impressed on clay tablets. The Ugaritic alphabet was in use in the ancient city of Ugarit, uncovered at Ras Shamra in modern Syria....

Few have heard anything about the "Abba Cave," discovered in 1971 in the north Jerusalem suburb of Givat Hamivtar-not far from the tomb of "Yehohanan," the famous "crucified man," discovered in 1968-about which much has been written. The Abba cave held the remains of another "crucified man," with three nails-not just a single one in the heel bone-that clearly pinned the hands (not the wrists, as some have argued) in hook-like fashion to a cross beam. It was assumed back in the 1970s that these bones were buried and no longer available for analysis-but it turns out this is not...

Egypt has recently been witnessing a great commotion following the archeological discovery of two Star of David engravings in an ancient Temple in the southern city of Aswan. The Roman Temple, which dates back to the 3rd century B.C, is located in the Elephantine Island in Aswan. Dr. Mahmoud Afifi, the head of the Egyptian Antiquities branch in the Antiquities Ministry, said that he noticed a stone with two Star of David engravings in the Roman temple. Afifi accused the delegation of German archaeologists that has been working on the site's reconstruction of engraving the Stars of David into the...

An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered Earth with radioactive debris. The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical terms, said research leader Dr Anton Wallner from The Australian National University (ANU). "We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years," said Dr Wallner, a nuclear physicist in the ANU Research...

Martin Bizzarro of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues set out to determine the amount of iron in the early solar system. To do so, they measured nickel-60, a decay product of iron-60, in eight meteorites known to have formed at different times during the first 3 million years of the solar system. The meteorites that formed more than about a million years after the start of the solar system contain significantly more nickel-60 than do those that formed earlier, the team found. In a neighborhood of young stars, only a supernova could have produced iron-60, the parent of...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 May 23 Working in Space Credit: , NASA Explanation: High above planet Earth, a human helps an ailing machine. The machine, in this potentially touching story, is the Hubble Space Telescope, which is not in the picture. The human is Astronaut Steven L. Smith, and he is retrieving a power tool from the handrail of the Remote Manipulator System before resuming in 1999 December. For most astronauts,...

Theory Proposes New View of Sun and Earth's Creation Spaceref May 20, 2004 Like most creation stories, this one is dramatic: we began, not as a mere glimmer buried in an obscure cloud, but instead amidst the glare and turmoil of restless giants. Or so says a new theory, supported by stunning astronomical images and hard chemical analysis. For years most astronomers have imagined that the Sun and Solar System formed in relative isolation, buried in a quiet, dark corner of a less-than-imposing interstellar cloud. The new theory challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing instead that the Sun formed in a...

http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,651829,00.html How star blasts forged mankind Cosmic radiation two million years ago had a crucial impact on our evolution Robin McKie Sunday February 17, 2002 The Observer They are the most destructive events in the universe, vast eruptions that rip apart stars and blast radiation across space. But supernovae may also play constructive roles in the cosmos - recent scientific research has revealed that these stellar annihilations had a crucial impact on human evolution. Two million years ago, just as the Earth's primitive apemen were evolving into big-brained humans, a pair of supernovae explosions occurred near Earth. Our planet was ...

Supernova "smoking gun" linked to mass extinctions 15:07 09 January 02 Eugenie Samuel, Washington DC Evidence of an astronomical "smoking gun" has been discovered that supports the idea that cosmic rays from a nearby supernova triggered at least one of the six mass extinctions on Earth. Luckily for us, the astronomers say, there is very little danger of it happening again anytime soon. Narcisco Benítez at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and Jesús Maíz Appellániz of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Virginia traced the motion of a cluster of young, short lived stars formed from the debris of ...