Stories tagged archaeology
Stonehenge: A 19th Century engraving of the mysterious monument.
Courtesy Mark RyanStonehenge is back in the news. Archaeologists working on the mystery-laden prehistoric site located in south central England have now pinpointed the time of its construction to around 2300 BC. This radiocarbon-derived date connects it more closely with burial date of the Amesbury Archer, a wealthy metalworker from Europe’s alpine region, whose tomb was discovered not far from Stonehenge. Examination of the archer’s corpse revealed damage to his knee and other potentially fatal health issues.
This has led Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright, the two professors heading the excavation, to believe that the circle of megalithic stones existed as a healing center. Not everyone agrees, but you can find out all the details here. The dig's progress is also being recorded for an upcoming BBC Timewatch documentary.
All very well and good. But scientists remain uncertain as to how these huge stone monoliths were put in place by Stonehenge’s ancient technopeasant builders. Well, Wally Wallington, a retired construction worker in Flint, Michigan, just might have the answer. This following video came to my attention this past weekend, and I find it quite impressive and amazing. See for yourself.
SOURCES and LINKS
BBC website story
More about Stonehenge
Guardian website story
More on the Amesbury Archer
Tags : Dead Sea Scrolls Xtreme: E-Scrollz
in History and Nature of Science, Structure of Matter, Scientific Enterprise, and Human Organism
Like this: But way better. And stuff.
Courtesy Library of CongressProtect your grills, everybody, because the future is looking to get all up in them again!
Over the next two years, the oldest known copies of biblical documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, will be digitally scanned and placed online for all the world to examine at their leisure.
Well, not all the world. Just the parts with computers and access to the Internet, and just those people who know and care that the Dead Sea Scrolls are available for public study. So not all the world at all.
The first of the scrolls were discovered accidentally in a cave in the West Bank by a goatherd in 1947. Over the next thirty years, more scrolls—about 1000 documents in total—were found in 11 caves in the area. The documents include texts from the Hebrew Bible, dating to before 100 AD. The scrolls are also reported to contain an astonishing number of recipes and very dirty jokes.
The thousands of fragments of the scrolls were photographed in their entirety (up to that point) only once, in the 1950s. Many of those photographs are now crumbling, and so, despite the arguments of some Luddites who are no doubt on the way out themselves, scholars are taking advantage of this amazing time we live in (the future), and are subjecting the whole of the scroll collection to some fancy pants scanning.
The images of the texts will be taken in very high resolution and with varying wavelengths of light, highlighting details not readily visible to the naked eye.
The physical scrolls will be beginning a tour of the United States next month at the Jewish Museum of New York.
Hold your horses: Chariot races were a big part of the original Olympic games. Archaeologists in Greece believe they have found the orginial hippodrome race track where those races were contested.
Courtesy A. BradyDo you have Olympic fever yet? The Beijing Games get underway in just two weeks. And of course, there are bound to be a bunch of new events.
But what I’d like to see is a throwback to one of the old events: chariot races. The idea popped into my head today when reading this article that archaeologists in Greece may have found the ancient hippodrome – fancy term for track – used for chariot races in the original Olympics.
A team of German researchers, using geomagnetic technology to take pictures of structures under the ground, believes it has found the chariot track of Olympia. It was last visible some 1,600 years ago before it was buried in a river of mud. Get the full details here.
The geomagnetic technology has undiscovered an ancient circuit that stretches of nearly 656 feet underneath an area that’s now fields and olive groves. The next step in the process will be to do spot digs at the site to go down and find out what is actually there.
Part of the oblong track's distinctive outline was documented some seven feet (two meters) beneath fields and olive groves and extended almost 656 feet (200 meters) in length. Documents from Greek texts of the past peg the size of the chariot track at 3,444 feet long and featuring very elaborate starting gates, sharp turns and fancy distance posts.
Also, chariot racers where the only old Greeks to be clothed while competing. While other athletes competed nude, chariot drivers wore tunics.
So come on International Olympic Committee and NBC, let’s bring back the good old days of chariot races at the games. My hot tip – but don’t tell anyone you heard it from me – is to bet on the guy who looks most like Charleton Heston driving a team of white horses.
No, not by a volcano but by poor maintenance. Many of the priceless artifacts recovered from the ancient Roman city have been damaged. The Italian government has declared a "state of emergency" to preserve what remains.
Map of Lake Ontario: Planned route and estimated shipwreck area (in yellow) of the HMS Ontario. (After NOAA, Kennard and Scoville diagrams)
Courtesy Mark RyanA long-sought 18th century British warship has finally been discovered on the bottom of one of the Great Lakes bordering Canada and the United States. The HMS Ontario, a Royal Navy sloop that patrolled Lake Ontario during the American Revolutionary War, was sailing to Oswego, New York from Fort Niagara when it sank in a violent storm on October 31, 1780, taking with it all on board.
The shipwreck was discovered a couple weeks ago, sitting in mud under about 500 feet of water off the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville, two shipwreck enthusiasts who share credit for the discovery, used side-sonar and an unmanned submersible device to locate the wreck. The two men have been searching together for the HMS Ontario for more than three years. And now that they’ve found it, they’re keeping the location secret, at least for the time being. They’ll only say that it’s in deep water somewhere between Rochester and Niagara.
"It's a British war grave and we want to make sure it remains undisturbed,” said Kennard, a veteran diver who has found over 200 wrecks. Despite the HMS Ontario’s age and present location, it would still be considered property of the British Admiralty.
The HMS Ontario was constructed in the spring of 1780 on Carleton Island
at the lake’s east end where it flows into the St. Lawrence River. The 80-foot sloop was fitted with two masts and 22 cannons and used mainly to ferry soldiers and supplies back and forth across the lake during the summer of 1780. Some historians speculate the warship never fired any of its cannons. When she sank, the Ontario took with her 88 souls - at least according to official records. Letters from an individual living at Fort Niagara at the time claim there were also 30 unlisted American prisoners on the ship who also died in the tragedy.
Debris from the HMS Ontario washed up on shore about 30 miles east of Fort Niagara, and the ship’s sails were found adrift a few days after the storm. Months later, six bodies were recovered about 12 miles east of the Niagara River, and that was the last evidence of the sinking anyone saw. That is, until Kennard and Scoville located Ontario’s final resting place two week ago.
The discovery has been called a miracle of archaeology, and may be the oldest Great Lake’s shipwreck ever found.
"It's the oldest confirmed shipwreck in the lakes," Scoville said. "And very few warships went down." He added that it’s definitely the most intact warship ever discovered.
The ship’s condition surprised even its seasoned explorers. Kennard said the 228-year-old wreck might have gone down more gently in the storm than previously thought, because it doesn’t appear to be very battered. Two crow’s nests remain on both masts, and eight cannons still line the deck. One anchor is attached to the side of the ship, while another rests on the lake bottom. Some of the windows in the quarter galleries are even intact, despite tremendous underwater pressures. They also contribute the high level of preservation to the lake’s cold temperatures and lack of light and oxygen.
Here's some video of the historic wreck.
More than 4700 shipwrecks litter the bottom of the Great Lakes, 500 of them in Lake Ontario. But for Kennard and Scoville any future discoveries they make are going to be hard to match their discovery of the HMS Ontario.
"This is the Holy Grail of Great Lakes wrecks," Kennard said. "There's nothing more significant than this one."
LINKS
Shipwreck World story
Naval Operations in the Americian Revolutionary War
HMS Ontario shipwreck photos at the LA Times
Story in Tononto Star
Marching backwards, to better times: This must be...right before the executions?
Courtesy Hysterical BerthaIt’s easy, sometimes, to get frustrated with the modern world. Society these days is confusing and violent, and it makes me yearn for humanity’s gentle youth.
7,000 years ago, for instance, would have been a refreshing time to be alive. That would be the life: living with your tribe in lush central Europe, hunting and gathering, perhaps herding cattle, being at one with nature and your fellow humans. Now and again you might run across another group of people, and you would interact in your simple, honest way—an argument might break out, one thing leads to another, and then you and the other men and children are bound with rope and struck on the left side of the head with an axe, while the women of the tribe are taken away by your executioners.
I guess this is why they call archaeology “the dismal science.”
Wait--do I have that right?
Submerged treasures: Underwater archaeologists, like this one, are now swimming and searching the upper Nile River looking for ancient Egyptian artifacts.
Courtesy Viv HamiltonArchaeologists dig and sift their way to finding the clues of previous cultures, right?
Not all the time. A recent project in Egypt has archaeologists donning wet suits and scuba gear to find cool things from ancient Egyptian culture.
The changing course of the Nile River has necessitated archaeologists going “hydro” in their search. And last month they discovered an entryway to a temple near Aswan in Upper Egypt.
It’s the first major underwater discovery of Egypt antiquities for a multi-year project that began this year. The under-water discovery is an entryway to a temple dedicated to Khnum, the ram-headed god of fertility.
Made of massive rocks that weigh in the tons, the portico can’t be taken away from its submerged home, but divers were able to remove a one-ton stone that are part of the entryway that has inscriptions that could give more clues to when it was built, what its purpose was or other information about life from that ancient time.
The larger scope of the project is to do a complete survey of the riverbed of the Nile from Aswan to Luxor starting this fall. Along with the changing course of the river of the centuries, archaeologists think they’ll be able to find artifacts that had fallen overboard while being shipped on the river. Some artifacts are known to be in the waters having been recorded lost through accidents from Egyptian treasure seekers in earlier centuries.
Indiana Jones sells movie tickets and fills archaeology classes
Action on the screen, and in the classroom: Indiana Jones not only attracts viewers at the cineplex. His movies send more people into archaeology classrooms as well.
Courtesy CybjorgAre you like me and making sure that the new Indiana Jones movie is part of your holiday weekend agenda? Read this and find out why archaeology professors like to have movies like this and the Lara Croft series hit the screens. So go ahead, tell your parents that it's part of your homework assignment this weekend to go see the new Indiana Jones movie. You've got my okay!
POST SCREENING UPDATE: Okay, I've now seen the film and had a lot of questions in my head about crystal skulls. Did you encounter the same wonderings after seeing the film? JGordon conveniently answers a lot of them in a post he did here on the Buzz earlier this spring. Also, here's a National Geographic link with even more information on the history of crystal skulls. And IMHO, despite his age Indy still can kick Commie butt pretty well!!!!!
Harrison Ford, the actor who created the on-screen archaeologist "Indiana Jones", has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Archaeological Institute of America. The AIA is North America's oldest and largest non-profit organization devoted to archaeology, and promotes archaeological research, education, excavation, and preservation around the world.
"Knowledge is power, and understanding the past can only help us in dealing witht the present and the future," Ford said.
The film star's new movie, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL opens next week.
You can read more about Ford's new position here, and go here to learn more about some alleged crystal skull archaeological finds that inspired his new movie. Also, JGordon did a previous post on Indy and crystal skulls here.
Marble bust of Gaius Julius Caesar: This is not the recently discovered one, but rather a typical posthumous bust of Caesar. Evidently all busts of the dictator in Rome were posthumous.
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsArchaeologists have recovered the oldest known bust of Roman dictator Julius Caesar . The marble bust was found last autumn along with other statuary at the bottom of the River Rhone, near Arles, France, and has been dated to 46 BC. The bust’s likeness is a typical Republican-era representation of the balding dictator but unlike other busts of Caesar, it predates his assassination by two years.
Republican members of the Roman Senate, including Caesar’s perceived friend, Brutus, stabbed the dictator to death in 44BC.
Luc Long, the archaeologist leading the excavation, said the bust was probably thrown into the river after the assassination because “it would have not been good at the time to be considered a follower of his.”
"In Rome you don't find any statues of Caesar dating from the time he lived, they were all posthumous," Long added.
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