Posted on 07/01/2011 8:54:25 PM PDT by Palter
When archeologists recently excavated a 3,800-year-old palace near the eastern German city of Weimar, they discovered about 100 valuable weapons buried next to a massive structure. Now they are puzzling over how an ancient chieftain buried nearby became so rich.
In 1877, when archeology was still in its infancy, art professor Friedrich Klopfleisch climbed an almost nine-meter (20-foot) mound of earth in Leubingen, a district in the eastern German state of Thuringia lying near a range of hills in eastern Germany known as the Kyffhäuser. He was there to "kettle" the hill, which entailed having workers dig a hole from the top of the burial mound into the burial chamber below.
When they finally arrived at the burial chamber, everything lay untouched: There were the remains of a man, shiny gold cloak pins, precious tools, a dagger, a pot for food or drink near the man's feet, and the skeleton of a child lying across his lap.
The "prince" of Leubingen was clearly a member of the elite. Farmers who had little to eat themselves had piled up at least 3,000 cubic meters (106,000 cubic feet) of earth to fashion the burial mound. They had also built a tent-shaped vault out of oak beams and covered it with a mound of stones, as if he had been a pharaoh.
For years, scholars have puzzled over the source of the prince's power. But Thuringia's state office of historical preservation has now come a step closer to solving the mystery. Agency archeologists used heavy machinery to excavate 25 hectares (62 acres) of ground in the mound's immediate surroundings, exposing a buried infrastructure.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
In the far future history will repeat itself.
Except archeologists will be puzzled as to why the remains had a name like Barack Hussein Obama.
And they will decree its all just a prank and a joke and the burial site will become a landfill.
He may have cornered the ancient market on-
Thanks for the recommendation. They don’t have it on the Kindle yet though.
As far as I can tell if you come across something that you are not sure what it is you label it "toy" or "religious artifact". You can't go wrong as long as you insist that all civilizations advance exactly the same way and have exactly the same values.
Never consider that raising fruit and nut trees is a lot easier and in some places more practical then raising grain type crops or that fish farms can support a rather large population.
That will allow you to declare that someplace was a "untouched wilderness" even when you have eyewitness reports that only a few hundred of years back there were large groups of people living there.
It’s a big picture book. Might lose a little on kindle.
Although I’m one of those people that can’t understand how people can watch a movie on a phone.
Wow, thanks for the tips. Archeology major, here I come. ;-p
I took several classes because I actually wanted to go into that field. But I quickly found out that A.) It cost a LOT of money and B.) very few of them had any practical idea of how the world worked so they would believe 6 impossible things before breakfast.
If they came across a area where there were wild tomato, pepper, corn and pumpkin plants all growing together they would naturally conclude that you had found a abandon garden. They would then say that this was a agricultural society. That is in line the way they view agricultural development.
However they come into an area where there are all sorts of food trees growing together they go "oh look at the natural biodiversity untouched by human hands." Idiots. Do they think that all sorts of fruit and nut trees just happen to plant themselves in clumps?
:climbs off soap box:
Yeah, if it has a lot of pictures, the Kindle would not work well.
If you have pictures or are interested, there are a lot of used copies on Amazon.
I read that when it first came out in the late 70's; supposedly it was influenced by the tour of the King Tut exhibit. Another book in that same vein (which preceded Motel, and which delves somewhat deeper into the division of religion and science is Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, also very well worth taking the time to read.
Hmmm... hidebound dingbat... I can do the dingbat part! I’m sure.
Who knew that digging around in the dirt and making stuff up about what you find would be $o expen$ive?
What? you mean that the fruit and nut trees don’t plant themselves in clumps? No wonder there are no fruit and nut trees in our yard. Heck.
Hey, I told you I can do dingbat. ;-p
That one is already on my To Do reading list. I’m reading Anna Karennina and then when I get bored with that I am also reading Catcher in the Rye.
"The Pharaoh of Thuringia: Archaeologists Puzzle Over Opulent Prehistoric Burial Find" Credit: Ben Behnke/ DER SPIEGEL]
What’s that in post 33, SunkenCiv—the king’s shoe horns?
Those are nice bronze-age bronze axeheads, look like mass-produced, don’t they? Nice stuff they made back then, the bronze lasts millennia in the soil.
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