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The 2021 project, reports Sarah Cascone for Artnet News, was a joint effort between Interpol, Europol and the World Customs Organization (WCO), and was led by the Spanish authorities.Officials recovered stolen statuettes, musical instruments, archaeological finds, pieces of pottery, paintings, furniture and more, according to the statement.Amateur metal detecting is a popular—and profitable—pastime for many Europeans in recent years, but some have employed the hobby illegally. Seven European countries confiscated a combined total of 90 metal detectors used for illicit looting at archaeological sites, per the Guardian.Highlights of the past four months include the recovery of a trove of golden...

Last month, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson asked Princeton Professor and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin 5 questions, all in the foreign policy and history realm. Since then, the world has changed in ways that were unimaginable just 3 weeks ago. So we asked Professor Kotkin to come back for a second round of questions, this time all dedicated to one topic: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And as usual, his answers are concise, incisive, and analytic. If you want to understand this crisis and some possible outcomes, don’t miss this conversation.

The Roman Gadget Archaeologists Can't Figure Out | March 29, 2022 | Sideprojects

Historians and polling companies love to provide their assessments of past presidents, and to a lesser extent vice presidents. While it is still early in her tenure – so there’s a chance she’ll make a comeback – let’s just say those future assessments of Vice President Kamala Harris’s job performance will likely not be kind. It’s remarkable, since the U.S. Constitution gives the vice president almost no duties to fail at — and yet failing she is.

Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas. While not quite as old as sites like Stonehenge, these ancient ruins, known as Chankillo, are considered a "masterpiece of human creative genius", holding unique features not seen anywhere else in the world. Based in the coastal desert of Peru, the archaeological site famously contains a row of 13 stone towers, which together trace the horizon of a hill, north to south, like a toothy bottom grin. 1920px ThirteenTowersOfChanquilloFromFortress The...

Archaeologists working to restore Paris’s fire-damaged Notre Dame cathedral have discovered something remarkable: previously unknown tombs hidden beneath the 850-year-old Gothic church. Workers made the discovery while installing ground-level scaffolding to help rebuild the church’s fallen spire, according to a statement from the French Ministry of Culture. When they realized that there was something buried at the spot where the transept crosses the nave, the cathedral called in the Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research to investigate. What they found were several tombs and a leaden sarcophagus, probably dating to the 14th century. “The floor of the transept crossing has revealed...

For the better part of four centuries, Greenland's southern coast defined the westernmost edge of Viking occupation. Seduced by visions of verdant hills and fertile ground, in the late 10th century waves of Norse migrants set sail in hopes of an easier life abroad. At its peak, the colony's population numbered in the thousands, spread out across three major settlements. And then it ended. No word of hardship. No record of struggle. By the middle of the 15th century, the Norse experiment in Greenland was a bust. New research suggests we might have had it all wrong about the prime...

A rare archeological find from Mount Ebal: A small, folded 3,200-year-old lead plate sheds new light on biblical study - and was unveiled today (Thursday). Inside it - an ancient curse in ancient Hebrew script ("Proto-Canaanite"), with the God's explicit name [of the Divine]. Prof. Gershon Galil, from the University of Haifa, calls the discovery an "earthquake in biblical studies." He said, "The new find unearthed today is the earliest Hebrew inscription found so far." An inscription was found in Hebrew from the 13th century BC Prof. Galil: "The new finding is a death blow to all biblical deniers" An...

Over his many years as the leader of Russia, President Vladimir Putin has dedicated a lot of time and effort to controlling history. The Kremlin works hard to ensure Putin’s constructed worldview, in which Russian greatness is derived from the country’s past glory and suffering, is taught in schools and shown in all media and academic discourse as reality. A shocking and important example of this was the closing late last year of the Memorial human rights organization, which investigated Soviet repression, with the prosecution claiming that Memorial “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state and...

The joke is on Twitter — not only is the Big Tech bully showing its ridiculous vendetta and giving the Bee a lot of publicity, it’s also helping the Bee’s prophesies come true.After USA Today named Rachel Levine, the male head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, one of its “Women of the Year,” Twitter suspended popular satire site The Babylon Bee for bestowing a similar award on Levine: Man of the Year.The Babylon Bee's Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine https://t.co/mZdcXbUnmf— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 15, 2022Twitter threatened to keep the account locked until the...

The current backlash against Critical Race Theory in K–12 schools has been mischaracterized as an attempt to ban teaching about slavery. Actually, the proper teaching of the history of slavery undermines CRT. Few other topics, when deeply understood, reveal the moral and economic evolution of Western civilization more than does the topic of slavery and the West's crushing of it.Students need to know that slavery has been nearly universal. Slavery can be found throughout the world and in every era, including in Africa, well before the Europeans ever attached themselves to this already well established system practiced on members of...

We say happy birthday to the Grand Old Party, the GOP, or, the Republican Party. The birth of the party happened in Ripon, Wisconsin, on this day in 1854. The new party was formed by former members of the Whig Party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. In my case, I became a de facto Republican after the Kennedy administration fumbled The Bay of Pigs invasion.

A mind-blowing 3D reconstruction has revealed what a Stone Age woman looked like 4,000 years ago. It’s now on display at Västernorrlands Museum in Sweden and is based on skeletal remains that were found in 1923. The remains of the Stone Age woman were found next to the body of a seven-year-old boy who may have been her son. Scientists have reconstructed her after all this time and designed her expression as if she was watching over her child....

The term ‘hysteria’ derives from the Greek word ‘hystera’ meaning ‘uterus,’ and is generally attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. In the 15th century, another outbreak of mass hysteria occurred in Germany when a nun in a convent started biting the other sisters. Before long, the behavior spread throughout the convent and, as news spread further afield, so too did the phenomenon, resulting in biting outbreaks in convents across Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. After a few examples of nuns being punished, the behavior quickly subsided. In the 1844 book ‘Epidemics of the Middle Ages’...an account is given of...

The gravesite of Mordechai and Esther An exchange of letters dating back to the year 1968, on display now in the National Library in honor of the upcoming festival of Purim, shows that representatives of Iranian Jewry sought to purchase the gravesite of Mordechai and Esther in the city of Hamedan, in western Iran, and that the Shah was amenable to their request. The letters, quoted by Israel Hayom, reveal the negotiations between representatives of the Jewish community in Iran and the Shah, who ruled the country until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The representatives sought to purchase the...

Merkel's Legacy as Russian Invasion Lays Up to the final hours before Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, former chancellor Angela Merkel had been touted as the person favored by Germans to try to talk President Vladimir Putin out of the conflict. But as Russian bombs fell on Ukrainian cities, a shadow has fallen on Merkel's 16 years in office, with some observers now questioning if her detente policies with Putin had in fact left Germany, and Europe, vulnerable. Once hailed as the leader of the free world, the veteran center-right leader has been accused by some of increasing Europe's...

This World [HaOlam HaZeh], Nov 7, 1962.Was Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, Known as Stalin, a Jew? It turns out that this question greatly troubled Adolf Hitler. This week, British journalist Sefton Delmer published his memoirs, revealing that Hitler's personal photographer had told him that Hitler had personally instructed him to inquire into the matter. The photographer was sent with the Nazi foreign minister to Moscow at the time of signing the famous Soviet-German agreement. Hitler told him: "Listen, I want you to get as close to Stalin as possible and take a picture of his earlobe. I want to know if...

In case it wasn’t obvious, the Western mind is damaged goods. Many observers would say that this is a recent state of affairs, but in truth it’s something that has been slowly building for centuries. It started with the broad acceptance of Cartesian dualism, the conceptual separation of the mind from the body that developed as an over-mechanised response to the scientific discoveries of men like Copernicus and Kepler. This “analytical mindset,” in the original sense of analysis as “the resolution of something complex into simple elements,” destroyed the manifold intricacy of organic traditional society as it was conceptually applied...

Anti-Oligarchs... - propaganda war I just think that the Oligrach targeting, first by Biden, now by UK, is a political propaganda stunt to show something is done. It did not, does not have any affect on Putin who understands only force. No boots! Given all that, I was never 'for' any wars / boots on the ground.. I probably can dig out old emails before Iraq War which I was worried about... Mercy! I pray, prayed for peace and my heart goes out seeing innocent non combatant Ukranians hurt, killed, flee... Nazis? Are Ukrainians neo Nazis like Putin claims? Of...

The Bible In Paintings 2 ENCOURAGEMENT FOR APPRECIATING AND APPLYING GOD'S MESSAGE E X O D U SCHAPTER 16 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” The LORD said to Moses, “I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in...