Archives

July 7th, 2013

Lost cities

Over the past few months, a spate of reports has emerged about the discoveries of several so-called lost cities — most notably Ciudad Blanca in Honduras, Heracleion off the coast of Egypt and Chactun in Mexico. Much of this is due to technological advances: satellite imagery, aerial photography and Google Earth have all aided in the detection of heretofore unseen archaeological sites. No technology, however, approaches the impact of lidar, a light-and-radar machine that can pierce through the thickest, highest forests and vegetation within minutes and has only recently been used in the hunt for lost cities. It was lidar that led explorers to what they call Ciudad Blanca. (New York Post)

Mexican researchers extract intact DNA from Palenque’s Red Queen

The osseous remains of the Red Queen, the enigmatic character from Lakamha, “Place of the big waters”, today known as Palenque, in Chiapas, are being scientifically analyzed in order to date the burial in a more precise manner. It is still unknown as to whether the Red Queen was the wife of the celebrated dignitary Pakal II or if she was a ruler of that ancient Mayan metropolis. (Archaeology News Network)

5,000-year-old pyramid destroyed in Lima

Archaeologists blame two building companies for destroying part of ancient pyramid in the Lima district of San Martin de Porres. The pyramid El Paraiso, located near the river Chillon, is one of the oldest structures constructed in the Americas, made up of 12 pyramids and covering over 64 hectares. (Peru This Week)

Georgia’s rich maritime history largely unknown

he wind and the waves peeled back layers of Cumberland Island sand last December to reveal a piece of history: the wooden bones of a long-lost cargo ship. Archaeologists surmised from the gunnel and wooden nails that the 100-foot-long vessel was at least 150 years old, possibly a blockade runner used during the Civil War to transport guns, food and soldiers past Union forces. (Savannah Now)

Scientists want to study Bulls Scarp, ocean-bottom archaeological site that was Ice Age coast

Anyone who stood on a rock ledge a few hundred feet above an ocean-swept river delta could have watched for walruses or whales among the icebergs and searched for woolly mammoths tracking across the barren savannah behind. And those people might well have left traces — thousands of years ago, about 60 miles from Charleston, offshore. Bulls Scarp could be the most fascinating and important archaeological site waiting to be surveyed in the region. There’s just one little problem: That Ice Age rock ledge is under about 140 feet of seawater (The Post and Courier)

June 30th, 2013

First Unlooted Royal Tomb of Its Kind Unearthed in Peru

Three queens were buried with golden treasures, human sacrifices. It was a stunning discovery: the first unlooted imperial tomb of the Wari, the ancient civilization that built South America’s earliest empire between 700 and 1000 A.D. Yet it wasn’t happiness that Milosz Giersz felt when he first glimpsed gold in the dim recesses of the burial chamber in northern Peru. (National Geographic)

Mummies reveal ancient nicotine habit

The hair of mummies from the town of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile reveals the people in the region had a nicotine habit spanning from at least 100 B.C. to A.D. 1450. (NBC News)

Museum visitors can ‘unwrap’ a mummy

A museum in Sweden will digitise its mummy collection in 3D to allow visitors to unwrap a real mummy in digital form. The mummies from Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm will be digitised by technology which uses photos and X-ray scans to create 3D models. The permanent exhibition is scheduled to open in the spring of 2014. (BBC News)

June 25th, 2013

Colonial America’s Oldest Unsolved Murder

When archaeologists in Virginia uncovered the skeletal remains in 1996 of one of Jamestown’s first settlers — a young European male designated as JR102C in the catalog — they said he was the victim in what was perhaps Colonial America’s oldest unsolved murder. At the time, archaeologist William Kelso, now director of archaeological research and interpretation at Jamestown Rediscovery, reported that “the lead bullet and shot fragments lodged in his lower right leg contained enough force to fracture his tibia and fibula bones, rupturing a major artery below the knee. JR would have bled to death within minutes.” (NPR)

Why 2 Birds in the Hand May Be Better Than a “Hobbit” Skull (in a Cave Deposit, at Least)

The discovery in 2003 of Homo floresiensis, affectionately referred to as a ‘hobbit’, took scientists worldwide by surprise, and challenged many things thought to be understood about human evolution. Intense scientific debates followed about the validity of Homo floresiensis and its status as a separate species, and many of these debates continue to this day. (Scientific American)

For Its Latest Beer, a Craft Brewer Chooses an Unlikely Pairing: Archaeology

The beer was full of bacteria, warm and slightly sour. y contemporary standards, it would have been a spoiled batch here at Great Lakes Brewing Company, a craft beer maker based in Ohio, where machinery churns out bottle after bottle of dark porters and pale ales. But lately, Great Lakes has been trying to imitate a bygone era. Enlisting the help of archaeologists at the University of Chicago, the company has been trying for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon. (NYTimes.com)

Unique gold figurine of naked woman found in Denmark

A small figurine depicting a slim, naked woman was recently found in a Danish field. Strangely, this is the fifth in a series of tiny golden human figurines found recently in the area. (ScienceNordic)

A Section of an 1,800 Year Old Road was Exposed in Jerusalem

An ancient road leading from Yafo to Jerusalem, which dates to the Roman period (second–fourth centuries CE), was exposed this past fortnight in the Beit Hanina neighborhood in northern Jerusalem. The road remains were revealed in an archaeological excavation the IAA conducted in Beit Hanina prior to the installation of a drainage pipe by the Moriah Company. (Antiquities.org.il)

June 11th, 2013

Archaeologists Say 400 Animal Species Were Offered to Gods in Tenochtitlan

Mexican archaeologists have identified more than 400 animal species in some 60 offerings made to the gods at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, including molluscs, fish, birds, reptiles and mammals, the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, said. The scientists have recovered, “for example, fish from coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean, reptiles including crocodiles, snakes and turtles, as well as birds like toucans and quetzals, and large mammals from the tropics like the jaguar,” INAH biologist Norma Valentin Maldonado said Friday. (Latino Daily News)

New North America Viking Voyage Discovered

Some 1,000 years ago, the Vikings set off on a voyage to Notre Dame Bay in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, new evidence suggests. The journey would have taken the Vikings, also called the Norse, from L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the same island to a densely populated part of Newfoundland and may have led to the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous people of the New World. (Live Science)

Ancient Irish texts show volcanic link to cold weather

Researchers have been able to trace the impact of volcanic eruptions on the climate over a 1200 year period by assessing ancient Irish texts. The international team compared entries in these medieval annals with ice core data indicating volcanic eruptions. Of 38 volcanic events, 37 were associated with directly observed cold weather extremes recorded in the chronicles. The report is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. (BBC News)

The Iceman Suffered Brain Damage Before Death

An injury to the head, not an arrow wound, may have killed Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old mummy found in the Italian Alps, says a new paleoproteomic study into the brain of Europe’s oldest natural human mummy. The protein investigation appears to support a 2007 research into the mummy’s brain. The study pointed to a cerebral trauma as the cause of death. (Discovery News)

Mysterious Monument Found Beneath the Sea of Galilee

The shores of the Sea of Galilee, located in the North of Israel, are home to a number of significant archaeological sites. Now researchers from Tel Aviv University have found an ancient structure deep beneath the waves as well. Researchers stumbled upon a cone-shaped monument, approximately 230 feet in diameter, 39 feet high, and weighing an estimated 60,000 tons, while conducting a geophysical survey on the southern Sea of Galilee. (Science Daily)

Ape-like feet ‘found in study of museum visitors’

Scientists have discovered that about one in thirteen people have flexible ape-like feet. A team studied the feet of 398 visitors to the Boston Museum of Science. The results show differences in foot bone structure similar to those seen in fossils of a member of the human lineage from two million years ago. (BBC News)

Evidence Of Escape Tunnel Found At Sobibor, Nazi Death Camp Where 250,000 Jews Were Murdered

Archeologists excavating a former Nazi death camp in Poland believe they have found evidence of an escape tunnel created by a group of prisoners. The rudimentary tunnel was first located in May at the Sobibor death camp, near what is now the eastern border of Poland. Dug about five feet beneath the surface and wide enough for a human, the tunnel stretched 32 feet from a barracks to beneath one of the barbwire fences surrounding the camp, according to the Telegraph. (Huffington Post)

June 6th, 2013

Bone Tumor Found in Neanderthal Rib

For the first time, a bone tumor has been found in a Neanderthal rib bone dated to about 120,000 years ago. The rib was recovered at a site near Krapina in present-day Croatia. The tumor, a form of cancer called fibrous dysplasia, predates previous evidence of such by more than 100,000 years. Prior to this, the earliest known bone cancers were detected in samples approximately 1,000-4,000 years old. Fibrous dysplasia in modern-day humans occurs more frequently than other bone tumors, but study author David Frayer of the University of Kansas says that the evidence for cancer almost never shows up in the human fossil record. This may be partly due to the fact that the fossil record accounts for a comparatively small sampling of human species or human ancestors. (Popular Archaeology)

Fossil Discovery Will Rewrite Primate and Human Evolutionary History, Say Scientists

An international research team has announced the discovery of the world’s oldest known fossil primate skeleton, an animal that lived about 55 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch in present-day China. Smaller than today’s smallest primate (the pygmy mouse lemur), Archicebus achilles, as they named it, was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China’s Hubei Province near the Yangtze River. (Popular Archaeology)

How Timbuktu’s manuscripts were smuggled to safety

When Islamist rebels set fire to two libraries in Timbuktu earlier this year, many feared the city’s treasure trove of ancient manuscripts had been destroyed. But many of the texts had already been removed from the buildings and were at that very moment being smuggled out of the city, under the rebels’ noses. (BBC News)

2nd-century wooden mask unearthed in Nara, oldest yet found

Once used to hide a face, a wooden mask fragment recently discovered here and currently on public display hints at ancient cultural links between this part of western Japan and China, archaeologists said May 30. (The Asashi Shimbun)

Roman Seawater Concrete Holds the Secret to Cutting Carbon Emissions

The chemical secrets of a concrete Roman breakwater that has spent the last 2,000 years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea have been uncovered by an international team of researchers led by Paulo Monteiro of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. (Science Daily)

June 4th, 2013

Earliest Archaeological Evidence of Winemaking in France Discovered

A team of researchers from France and the U.S. have uncovered evidence for the earliest winemaking industry in France, a country long well known for its preeminence in the production of fine wines. While investigating the ancient port site of Lattara in southern France, archaeologists uncovered imported ancient Etruscan amphorae and a limestone press platform. (Popular Archaeology)

Diet Change After 3.5 Million Years Ago a Gamechanger for Human Ancestors, Say Scientists

It has long been theorized by human evolutionists that the human diet, and how it may have changed over hundreds of thousands of years, was a central element in the successful emergence of modern humanity from the biological and behavioral backdrop of the animal world. Now, the results of a series of four newly completed studies by a team of two dozen researchers from several institutions have shed more light on the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of these changes. (Popular Archaeology)

Eight bronze age boats surface at Fens creek in record find

A fleet of eight prehistoric boats, including one almost nine metres long, has been discovered in a Cambridgeshire quarry on the outskirts of Peterborough. The vessels, all deliberately sunk more than 3,000 years ago, are the largest group of bronze age boats ever found in the same UK site and most are startlingly well preserved. (The Guardian)

ORIGINAL COLOURS OF PHOENICIAN IVORY CARVINGS SHINE AGAIN

The ivory carvings and plaques found at the 8th century BCE Phoenician city of Arslan Tash — “Stone Lion” — may appear as flat monochrome objects when viewed in museums today, but once they shone with brilliant blue, red and several other colours as well as glittering with real gold paint. (Past Horizons)

Gladiators of Aydın to appear on 3D screens

The Aydın Archeology Museum starts a new project to exhibit ancient gladiator mosaics on screens. Ancient mosaics and excavated blocks from the Orthosia ancient city, which include many gladiator patterns and shapes, have been portrayed onscreen with animations and detailed visuals (Hurriyet Daily News)

How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked

We are not biologically identical to our Paleolithic predecessors, nor do we have access to the foods they ate. And deducing dietary guidelines from modern foraging societies is difficult because they vary so much by geography, season and opportunity (Scientific American)

May 30th, 2013

Real, or Desert Mirage?

It is considered the driest desert in the world. Without provision, a person would not last long in this hostile place, where after a few days without water one just might hallucinate, might see things that simply were not there. And it could be that a small group of people may be seeing things in this place that are not what they seem to be — lines and walls on a landscape, remains of structures that may or may not be man-made. The site, located in the Atacama desert, a 105,000 square kilometer (41,000 sq mi) plateau along the Pacific coast of Chile, has attracted the focused attention of only a few to date. Most professional news organizations and journals will not touch the story, presumably because there is not enough solid information and evidence about the site advanced by any professionally recognized archaeologists or scholars to justify the risk of publishing even an acknowledgement of its existence. (Popular Archaeology)

Ancient Egyptians accessorized with meteorites

Researchers at The Open University (OU) and The University of Manchester have found conclusive proof that Ancient Egyptians used meteorites to make symbolic accessories. The evidence comes from strings of iron beads which were excavated in 1911 at the Gerzeh cemetery, a burial site approximately 70km south of Cairo. Dating from 3350 to 3600BC, thousands of years before Egypt’s Iron Age, the bead analysed was originally assumed to be from a meteorite owing to its composition of nickel-rich iron. But this hypothesis was challenged in the 1980s when academics proposed that much of the early worldwide examples of iron use originally thought to be of meteorite-origin were actually early smelting attempts. (EurekAlert!)

Archaeologist treats guests to 1,000-year-old recipes

Prehistoric Museum archaeologist Tim Riley displays some of the Fremont cuisine he prepared. (SunAdvocate)

‘World’s oldest Torah’ scroll found in Italy

The University of Bologna in Italy has found what it says may be the oldest complete scroll of Judaism’s most important text, the Torah. The scroll was in the university library but had been mislabelled, a professor at the university says. It was previously thought the scroll was no more that a few hundred years old. However, after carbon dating tests, the university has said the text may have been written more than 850 years ago. (BBC News)

Ancient First Nations site damaged during BC Hydro work

Members of a Nanaimo First Nations group are outraged after crews contracted by BC Hydro damaged a documented ancient rock art site during work recently. Douglas White, chief of the Snuneymuxw First Nation said the damage is disrespectful of native heritage and he doesn’t understand how crews could make the mistake, since existing petroglyph rock art sites are documented and protected by legislation. (Journal of Commerce)