By Jeanna Bryner, Live Science

Newly discovered footprints made by carnivorous dinosaurs in Australia reveal the ancient beasts survived in polar climes when the outback was still joined to Antarctica and close to the South Pole.

The discovery of the three fossil tracks, each about 14 inches (36 centimeters) long and showing two to three partial toe-prints, was presented by Anthony Martin, senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory U. Friday at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Austin, Texas.

The researchers estimate the tracks were made 115 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period by theropod dinosaurs, a group of bipedal carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurus rex.

Read the rest here.

Archaeologists examine remains at the Twyford School site.

WHEN workmen discovered human remains as they cleared a site for new classrooms at a Twyford school, staff briefly thought they had a crime scene on their hands.

The panic soon turned into a historical feast for pupils and teachers alike, however, when it turned out the bones found at Twyford School were more than 1,000 years old.

Now, work on the site has halted as archaeologists try to find out more about what they think is a Saxon burial site - a very rare find.

A full excavation of the area is underway to make sure all remains are recorded and taken away for further investigation.

Paul McCulloch, project manager for Wessex Archaeology, which is carrying out the work, said: "The first time Twyford, which means Two Fords', is mentioned in historical sources is the seventh century.

"We think the burials date right back to this time, about 1,300 years ago.

Read the rest here.

WHITBY FIND: Archaeologist Jess Tibber cleans the stone

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed what could be one of the earliest tribal markers ever found in this country.

Rock art experts are still to fully examine the mysterious carved stone, which dates back thousands of years and was found on the headland at Whitby.

But one theory is that the stone could have been an instantly recognisable "logo" with a specific meaning to the people that were around at the time.

Project director Sarah Jennings said: "It's possible it had some sort of symbolic importance that needed no explanation, in the same way that the well-known logos of today do."

Whitby's headland is regarded as one of the country's most important archaeological sites, with Iron Age finds dating from the period 500BC to 100AD.

However the carved stone found in the latest dig is much earlier and possibly dates from the Bronze Age period of 2000BC to 700BC.

Measuring 16ins by 20ins, it displays linear carved markings which have yet to be understood or deciphered, and was found in one of four trenches dug just to the east of Whitby Abbey.

Ms Jennings said: "It's potentially a very significant find as we have hardly any material from this period in the headland's past.

Read the rest here.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In one of the earliest hints of "modern" living, humans 164,000 years ago put on primitive makeup and hit the seashore for steaming mussels, new archaeological finds show.

Call it a beach party for early man.

But it's a beach party thrown by people who weren't supposed to be advanced enough for this type of behavior. What was found in a cave in South Africa may change how scientists believe Homo sapiens marched into modernity.

Instead of undergoing a revolution into modern living about 40,000 to 70,000 years ago, as commonly thought, man may have become modern in stuttering fits and starts, or through a long slow march that began even earlier. At least that's the case being made in a study appearing in the journal Nature on Thursday.

Researchers found three hallmarks of modern life at Pinnacle Point overlooking the Indian Ocean near South Africa's Mossel Bay: harvested and cooked seafood, reddish pigment from ground rocks, and early tiny blade technology. Scientific optical dating techniques show that these hallmarks were from 164,000 years ago, plus or minus 12,000 years.

"Together as a package this looks like the archaeological record of a much later time period," said study author Curtis Marean, professor of anthropology at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

This means humans were eating seafood about 40,000 years earlier than previously thought. And this is the earliest record of humans eating something other than what they caught or gathered on the land, Marean said. Most of what Marean found were the remnants of brown mussels, but he also found black mussels, small saltwater clams, sea snails and even a barnacle that indicates whale blubber or skin was brought into the cave.

Read the rest on CNN.

By Caroline Lewis

One of the above ground prison cells at the Galleries of Justice. © Galleries of Justice

New evidence has been discovered that the medieval caves under Nottingham’s Galleries of Justice museum were once used by the Sheriff of Nottingham as a prison. The dark dungeon cells would have been in use when the Sheriff resided at the Shire Hall and County Gaol.

“It is an exciting discovery,” said Tim Desmond, Chief Executive at the Galleries.
“The cave has always been known as the ‘Sheriff’s Dungeon’, but until now we have
only been aware of its later use as a chapel for the Georgian prison.”

Read the rest here.

Read the rest on Malibu Surfside News

The unfinished Obelisk Quarry in Aswan, Egypt, has a canal that may have connected to the Nile and allowed the large stone monuments to float to their permanent locations, according to an international team of researchers. This canal, however, may be allowing salts from ground water to seep into what has been the best preserved example of obelisk quarrying in Egypt.

"Working deposits and surfaces exposed during excavation are being damaged by accumulation of salts," the researchers said at the Second International Conference on Geology of the Tethyr at the Cairo University. "These unique artifacts document quarry methods and should be preserved."

The granite quarry, located on the east bank of the Nile in the center of Aswan City, contains a very large unfinished obelisk that was not completed because of latent cracks. While the cracks were bad for the ancient Egyptian stone carvers, the unfinished monument provides the opportunity for archaeologists to understand how people worked hard stone quarries.

Excavations by the Aswan Office of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Egypt, began in 2002 to prepare the site for tourists. Among the discoveries made were a trench at least 8.25 feet deep. Archaeologists were unable to reach the bottom because of groundwater incursion.

"Some researchers suggested that this trench linked the quarry with the Nile," says Dr. Richard R. Parizek, professor of geology and geo-environmental engineering at Penn State. "Transporting huge granite monoliths by boat to the Nile during the annual flood would appear to be easier than having to transport these blocks overland from the quarry to the Nile."

Salt incursion into layers of rock indicating how obelisks were mined.

Parizek, working with Adel Kelany, inspector, Supreme Council of Antiquities; Amr El-Gohary, geologist, National Research Centre,
airo; and Shelton S. Alexander, professor emeritus of geophysics; David P. Gold, professor emeritus of geology: Elizabeth J. Walters, associate professor of art history; and Katarin A. Parizek, instructor, integrated arts, all at Penn State, looked at minimally invasive ways to determine whether the canal, as suggested, existed.

Read the rest on Eurekalert.

Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"

By Cahal Milmo

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks " in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of " scientific racism".

Read the rest on the Independent.

MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. — State underwater archaeologists on Monday raised a cannon from a sunken ship that could have belonged to the pirate Blackbeard.

The roughly 8-foot-long cannon weighs about 2,500 pounds and was pulled from an ongoing excavation at the presumed site of the Queen Anne's Revenge.

Fay Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Cultural Resources, said the crew finished bringing it to the surface early Monday afternoon.

Read the rest on FoxNews.

Campaign for return of Elgin marbles receives historic propaganda boost

Helena Smith in Athens
The Guardian

4,500 antiquities from the Acropolis will be moved by cranes to the new museum. Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

A collective gasp filled the air early yesterday as a blue crate containing a 2.5-tonne slab of marble universally viewed as one of the most important works of antiquity, was hoisted by a giant crane from the Acropolis. For those who had come to watch, this was history in the making, the first sculpture to officially leave the ancient citadel since Phidias carved the artworks, 2,500 years ago.

The moment, heavy in symbolism, was not lost on Greece's culture minister, Michalis Liapis. "For the first time, after 25 centuries, the sculptures are being transferred to the new Acropolis museum. It is awe-inspiring and deeply moving," he said after witnessing the metal crate make the 400-yard journey to the spectacular cement and glass building that will be the artworks' new home. "It naturally raises our demand for the reunification of the Parthenon marbles"

Read the rest on The Guardian.

by Eric H. Cline

Biblical archeology is too important to leave to crackpots and ideologues. It's time to fight back.

Eric Cline at Megiddo (Courtesy Eric Cline)

Noah's Ark. The Ark of the Covenant. The Garden of Eden. Sodom and Gomorrah. The Exodus. The Lost Tomb of Jesus. All have been "found" in the last 10 years, including one within the past six months. The discoverers: a former SWAT team member; an investigator of ghosts, telepathy, and parapsychology; a filmmaker who calls himself "The Naked Archeologist"; and others, none of whom has any professional training in archeology.

We are living in a time of exciting discoveries in biblical archeology. We are also living in a time of widespread biblical fraud, dubious science, and crackpot theorizing. Some of the highest-profile discoveries of the past several years are shadowed by accusations of forgery, such as the James Ossuary, which may or may not be the burial box of Jesus' brother, as well as other supposed Bible-era findings such as the Jehoash Tablet and a small ivory pomegranate said to be from the time of Solomon. Every year "scientific" expeditions embark to look for Noah's Ark, raising untold amounts of money from gullible believers who eagerly listen to tales spun by sincere amateurs or rapacious con men; it is not always easy to tell the two apart.

Read the rest on Archaeology.org.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The skeleton of what could be a new dinosaur species — a giant, Patagonian plant-eater — has been uncovered in Argentina.

At more than 105 feet, it is among the largest ever found, scientists said Monday.

Scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the Patagonian donosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species because of the unique structure of its neck.

They named it Futalognkosaurus dukei after the Mapuche Indian words for "giant" and "chief," and for Duke Energy Argentina, which helped fund the skeleton's excavation.

"This is one of the biggest in the world and one of the most complete of these giants that exist," said Jorge Calvo, director of paleontology center of National University of Comahue, Argentina, lead author of a study on the dinosaur published in the peer-reviewed Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Scientists said the giant herbivore walked the Earth some 88 million years ago.

Read the rest on FoxNews.

By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine

The Mary Rose in dry dock

The raising of the Mary Rose in 1982 was greeted with feverish excitement, but what has this landmark find actually told us in the 25 years since?

At the tail end of 1982 it seemed like you couldn't switch on Newsround without seeing something to do with Mary Rose.

Our fascination with the ship that met a sticky end while firing at a French invasion fleet in 1545 has flared at times in the years since. It is almost a rite of passage for some school children to go and see this emblem of the Tudor age.

But as significant as the ship itself are the artefacts that were recovered (both from within and from the sea bed), providing an insight into the life of the Tudors; proving and disproving countless strands of conjecture about the period.

Historian David Starkey has described the Mary Rose as "this country's Pompeii, preserved by water not by fire". Unlike most archaeological sites it has not been significantly interfered with by subsequent generations.

The ship may have looked a little like this reconstruction

"It is a time capsule, literally frozen in time from the day she sank in 1545," explains Rear Admiral John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust. "It has given us an insight into Tudor life that was unachievable."

Items recovered from the wreck have given alarming insights into the world of Tudor medicine. Looking at a urethral syringe that would have been loaded with mercury, one might wince. But this would have been used to treat syphilis in the sailors. We know now, of course, that mercury is a poison.

As well as the artefacts, the bodies recovered from the wreck have shown the state of health of some Tudor males. The average height of the sailors was 5ft 7ins, not perhaps as short as some might have supposed.

To Captain Christopher Page, head of the Naval Historical Branch, this is perhaps the most startling discovery.

"I'm a historian of the First World War and the average height of a soldier in that conflict was in the order of 5ft 6ins." Compared with their counterparts 350 years later, "the men in the Mary Rose were bigger, stronger and fitter," says Capt Page.

Read the rest on the BBC.

Henry Hopfe

By Beth Hillyer

WAIANAE (KHNL) - Despite a warning from the Department of Land and Natural Resources, city workers unearthed ancient Hawaiian remains on Oahu's leeward coast.

To make matters worse, some Makaha families say it's at a place where work crews should have known better.

They e-mailed our Talk Story link at khnl.com.

Family members maintain this is a well documented historical site. They claim the city is well aware of the burials, that's the reason the city bought the property back in the 1980's.

Pokii whose ancestors are buried here stands guard. He and other family members covered up and flagged each bone fragment.

Now they maintain a vigil.

This ground has a long history as hallowed to native Hawaiians including Henry Hopfe, "It's sacred to us especially this burial, our ancestors date back to Niihau."

Read the rest on khnl.com.

By GEORGE BRYSON
Anchorage Daily News

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Plumbing the shallows of Lower Cook Inlet near the tip of the Kenai Peninsula this summer, a team of divers located what authorities say is the oldest American shipwreck in Alaska.

It also marks a pivotal chapter in U.S. history.

The four-person party charted and photographed remnants of the Torrent, a huge, square-rigged sailing vessel that struck a reef and sank near Port Graham in 1868, less than a year after the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia.

Aboard the vessel at the time were women, children and a battery of 130 U.S. soldiers, some of whom were veterans of the recent Civil War. They had been ordered to construct the first U.S. fort on the mainland of south central Alaska.

Before they found a suitable building site, however, their vessel, a 576-ton bark piloted by civilians, struck a reef near Dangerous Cape, partly due to the absence on deck of a captain who had been drinking. The castaway crew and passengers had to camp on an adjacent beach for 18 days awaiting rescue as the ship broke up offshore and sank.

Somewhere near the reef at the bottom of the sea the shipwreck remained unexamined for 139 years, until July, when a team of divers -- authorized by the state to conduct an archaeological survey of the site -- finally located significant pieces of the vessel at the end of a two-year search.

In addition to partly buried portions of the wooden hull (most of which had been swept away by powerful tides), the search team located the rudder, anchors, portholes, plumbing, pieces of rigging and two cannons.

"Like a jigsaw puzzle -- one piece at a time over the course of quite a number of dives -- we were able to find different distinctive pieces of wreckage," said team leader and local shipwreck historian Steve Lloyd, co-owner of Title Wave Books in Anchorage.

The group held back on announcing its discovery until this week so the state could take steps to preserve and protect the shipwreck, which is now being considered for listing in the National Registry of Historic Places.

"It's really quite an extraordinary wreck," said Dave McMahan, an archaeologist in the state Office of History and Archaeology.

"Ultimately this would be a great (exhibit) for a maritime museum. It's a very important part of Alaska's history."

Among the artifacts is the brass remnant of a mountain howitzer, a short-barreled, large-caliber cannon on wheels used extensively in the Civil War.

"I think that's pretty dramatic," said Alaska shipwreck historian Mike Burwell.

Read the rest on SHNS.com.

Reuters

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - French archaeologists have discovered an 11,000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world.

The 2 square-meter painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo, team leader Eric Coqueugniot told Reuters.

"It looks like a modernist painting. Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee. Through carbon dating we established it is from around 9,000 B.C.," Coqueugniot said.

"We found another painting next to it, but that won't be excavated until next year. It is slow work," said Coqueugniot, who works at France's National Centre for Scientific Research.

Rectangles dominate the ancient painting, which formed part of an adobe circular wall of a large house with a wooden roof. The site has been excavated since the early 1990s.

The painting will be moved to Aleppo's museum next year, Coqueugniot said. Its red came from burnt hematite rock, crushed limestone formed the white and charcoal provided the black.

The world's oldest painting on a constructed wall was one found in Turkey but that was dated 1,500 years after the one at Djade al-Mughara, according to Science magazine.

Read the rest on Reuters.

by Marco Merola

Fragments of ancient writing illuminate 3,000 years of life in an Egyptian oasis town.

The papyri found at Tebtunis illuminate many aspects of life, including religious rituals, reports of crimes, legal documents and contracts, and personal communications. (Marco Ansaloni)

Seventy-five miles south of Cairo, hidden by shifting sands on the edge of the desert, are the remains of the ancient oasis town of Tebtunis. Archaeologists and diggers clamber over the site, a collection of impressive ruins that sprawl across nearly 100 acres and more than 3,000 years. At dusk, the exposed walls and oblique light call to mind a giant desert labyrinth. At the south end of the site are the low ruins of a Greek settlement, including a massive temple to the crocodile god Sobek. To the north, later Byzantine and Islamic ruins once stood higher--10 to 12 feet in the 1930s--before unknown assailants knocked them down. But the true value of this old town is not in its remaining walls; it is in little flecks of paper that document three millennia of life here and across this region of Egypt.

The desert swallowed Tebtunis in the twelfth century A.D., so the town does not appear on any maps. We know its name, and a great deal more, from the tens of thousands of papyrus fragments found throughout the twentieth century by a succession of archaeologists, including those working at the site today. These records, which range from pieces found in ancient garbage dumps, to sheets recycled as wrappings for mummies, to five-yard-long scrolls, include literary texts and records of private contracts and public acts. "The papyri give us particular and historic information that cannot be found elsewhere," says Claudio Gallazzi, professor of papyrology at Milan University who has led the international effort here since 1988. The papyri and other archaeological finds are painting an ever more detailed picture of life in this ethnically mixed village over a long period of time. For example, Gallazzi says, they show that there was a strong Greek presence in the town at a time when most Greeks in Egypt were thought to have lived only in big cities. They also illuminate the surrounding areas with which Tebtunis interacted and traded. "When we find a treasurer's registry, I know it contains interesting economic matters from many villages in the Fayum area, not just Tebtunis. And when we find religious documents, we can understand more about previously unrecognized religious-magic rituals [surrounding the crocodile god] pertinent to all of Egypt," he adds.

Read the rest on Archaeology.org.

The Knights Templar, the medieval Christian military order accused of heresy and sexual misconduct, will soon be partly rehabilitated when the Vatican publishes trial documents it had closely guarded for 700 years.

A reproduction of the minutes of trials against the Templars, "'Processus Contra Templarios - Papal Inquiry into the Trial of the Templars'" is a massive work and much more than a book - with a 5,900 euros (£4,113) price tag.

"This is a milestone because it is the first time that these documents are being released by the Vatican, which gives a stamp of authority to the entire project," said Professor Barbara Frale, a medievalist at the Vatican's Secret Archives.

"Nothing before this offered scholars original documents of the trials of the Templars," she said in a telephone interview ahead of the official presentation of the work on October 25.

The epic comes in a soft leather case that includes a large-format book including scholarly commentary, reproductions of original parchments in Latin, and - to tantalise Templar buffs - replicas of the wax seals used by 14th-century inquisitors.

Only 799 numbered copies of the work have been made.

One parchment measuring about half a metre wide by some two metres long is so detailed that it includes reproductions of stains and imperfections seen on the originals.

Pope Benedict will be given the first set of the work, published by the Vatican Secret Archives in collaboration with Italy's Scrinium cultural foundation, which acted as curator and will have exclusive world distribution rights.

The Templars, whose full name was "Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon", were founded in 1119 by knights sworn to protecting Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land after the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099.

They amassed enormous wealth and helped finance wars of some European monarchs. Legends of their hidden treasures, secret rituals and power have figured over the years in films and bestsellers such as "The Da Vinci Code".

The Knights have also been portrayed as guardians of the legendary Holy Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper before his crucifixion.

The Vatican expects most copies of the work to be bought up by specialised libraries at top universities and by leading medieval scholars.

The Templars went into decline after Muslims re-conquered the Holy Land at the end of the 13th century and were accused of heresy by King Philip IV of France, their foremost persecutor. Their alleged offences included denying Christ and secretly worshipping idols.

The most titillating part of the documents is the so-called Chinon Parchment, which contains phrases in which Pope Clement V absolves the Templars of charges of heresy, which had been the backbone of King Philip's attempts to eliminate them.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

By Cnaan Liphshiz

For some 40 years, one of the flashiest opal signets on display at the Israel Museum had remained without accurate historical context. Two weeks ago, Dutch researcher Marjo Korpel identified article IDAM 65-321 as the official seal of Queen Jezebel, one of the bible's most powerful and reviled women.

Israeli archaeologists had suspected Jezebel was the owner ever since the seal was first documented in 1964. "Did it belong to Ahab's Phoenician wife?" wrote the late pioneering archaeologist Nahman Avigad of the seal, which he obtained through the antiquities market. "Though fit for a queen, coming from the right period and bearing a rare name documented nowhere other than in the Hebrew Bible, we can never know for sure."

Avigad's cautious approach stemmed from the fact that the seal did not come from an officially-approved excavation. It was thought to come from Samaria in the ninth century B.C.E., but there was no way of knowing for certain where it had been found. And that has been the scientific hurdle that Korpel - a theologian and Ugaritologist from Utrecht University and a Protestant minister - set out to conquer.

In her paper, scheduled to appear in the highly-respected Biblical Archaeology Review, Korpel lists observations pertaining to the seal's symbolism, unusual size, shape and time period. By way of elimination, she shows Jezebel as the only plausible owner. She also explains how two missing letters from the seal point to the Phoenician shrew.

"As a minister, I never speak of coincidence, but my research happened by chance," Korpel told Haaretz last week. "I was asked to deliver a paper on female embodiment. I'm not much of a feminist, but I'd written on the imagery of the seal."

Korpel says she had probably seen the seal years before on a visit to the Israel Museum, but only much later did it spark her interest. "The missing letters on the top intrigued me. I was used to reconstructing broken texts from earlier research."

Upon hearing of Korpel's research, Dr. Hagai Misgav of Hebrew University said he believed the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Museum have in their possession many more articles carrying unnoticed historical clues. "Not all the artifacts have been thoroughly examined," he said. "There are many discoveries waiting to be made." Misgav added he would have to study Korpel's work more thoroughly to further comment on it.

Read the rest here.

The ancestors of humanity are often depicted as knuckle-draggers, making humans seem unusual in our family tree as "upright apes."

Controversial research now suggests the ancestors of humans and the other great apes might have actually walked upright too, making knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas the exceptions and not the rule.

In other words, "the other great apes we see now, such as chimps or gorillas or orangutans, might have descended from human-like ancestors," researcher Aaron Filler, a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist and medical director at Cedars-Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles, told LiveScience.

Filler analyzed how the spine was assembled in more than 250 living and extinct mammalian species, with some bones dating up to 220 million years old.

He discovered a series of changes that suggest walking upright-and not with our knuckles-might actually have been the norm for the ancestors of today's great apes.

In most creatures with a backbone, the body is separated roughly in half by a tissue structure that runs in front of the spinal canal. This "horizontal septum" divides the body into a dorsal part (corresponding to the back side of humans), and a ventral part (or the front half).

A strange birth defect in what may have been the first direct human ancestor led this septum to cross behind the spinal cord in the lumbar or lower back region-an odd configuration more typical of invertebrates. This would have made horizontal stances inefficient.

Read the on LiveScience.

A row has erupted over a plan to dig up a third of a million bodies from an historic east London cemetery to make way for a new Muslim burial site.

Tower Hamlets council in London is considering reopening the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in Mile End to answer a long-running campaign for a Muslim graveyard in the area.

The park, off Bow Common Lane, was deconsecrated as a Church of England cemetery by Parliament in 1966, after being deemed full with about 350,000 bodies buried there.

It is not yet clear what the Council proposes to do with the remains, if they are ultimately removed from the graves and a new burial site built in their place.

Council sources have said the plans are not yet at a stage where this has been properly considered.

But already opponents to the proposal are lining up. They include the environmentalist and broadcaster, who is leading calls for the park to be kept as a wildlife haven.

The botanist, who is patron of a charity that acts as the guardian of the graveyard, said he will 'pray that the wisdom of all faiths' prevails in the decision over the cemetery's future.

The other options are to find land outside Tower Hamlets or redevelop the Bow Common gas works.

The Labour-controlled council had asked officers to find ways of opening a Muslim-only cemetery - but lawyers warned them that would be illegal.

The authority then examined the possibility of a multi-faith site, clearing existing graves to create a new cemetery with an area set aside for Muslim burials.

But now outraged East Enders have declared "there is no way we'll allow them to dig up our ancestors".

They have bombarded their local paper, the East London Advertiser, with protests against the plan to exhume 350,000 graves dating back to 1841, including those of the children of Dr Barnardo.

Religious leaders and politicians have also reacted angrily.

Tower Hamlets Tory group leader Peter Golds said no new cemetery had been opened in an inner city area for decades.

Cllr Golds insisted: "Of course, there must be respect for the recent dead and for those who mourn, but this proposal will cause untold damage to community cohesion in a borough that seriously wants for tranquil open space."

Labour's Poplar and Canning Town MP Jim Fitzpatrick said: "The cemetery is a very special piece of green space and I would personally want to examine very carefully any proposal to change that."

The Rev Alan Green, chair of the Tower Hamlets Inter-Faith Forum and dean for the borough, said the former Church of England graveyard was not an 'appropriate' place for a new cemetery.

Rev Green said: "The Church supports the move to ensure suitable future provision for the burial and cremation needs for all local residents.

"However, we do not believe that the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is an appropriate location due to the emotional, practical and ecological issues of removing thousands of bodies and destroying an important wildlife centre.

"Therefore, we hope that we can work with the council and other faith groups to find a more suitable alternative."

Performance artists are known for pushing the bounderies, but one Australian has astonished his contemporaries by having a third ear implanted onto his arm.

The Cypriot-born eccentric Stelios Arcadious spent 10 years searching for a surgeon willing to perform the controversial operation.

He got his wish after working as a Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University's Digital Research Unit. The ear was grown in a lab from cells and implanted into the 61-year-olds left forearm in 2006.

Mr Arcadious said he thought art "should be more than simply illustrating ideas." Once the ear has fully developed he hopes to get a microphone implanted as well.

"It is more of a relief at present than an ear but it is still recognisable as an ear," he said.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

BY DAVID DERBYSHIRE

Hidden away in a remote outcrop in America's badlands, it looks little more than a brown stain.

But according to a British dinosaur hunter, this peculiar mark in the rock is the Holy Grain of fossil hunters - the world's first footprint of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Dr Phil Manning, of Manchester University, believes the 29 inch long mark was made by the flesh-eating giant as it stomped over a prehistoric floodplain more than 65 million years ago.

He found the print last year during a field trip to the Hell Creek rock formation in Montana. Two other partial dinosaur footprints lie close by.

Although other scientists have claimed to have unearthed T. rex prints before, their claims have been impossible to prove.

"People have been trying to find T. rex tracks for a hundred years," said Dr Manning, who is keeping the location of the print secret until he can confirm its identity with more tests next year.

"Unless you come across an animal dead in its tracks you can't say for definite what left them. However with information available about the numbers of T. rex in the rocks of the Hell Creek formation means it is the closest we have got so far to discovering a tyrannosaur track."

Hell Creek is a massive rock formation that stretches over three states and which was formed around 65 to 67 million years ago, when T. rex stalked prehistoric North America.

Dr Manning said the footprint clearly was made by a three-toed giant predator that walked on two feet.

Given the age and location of the prints, they could have been made by just two dinosaurs - the T. rex or the smaller Nanotyrannus. He believes T. rex is the best candidate.

"All the best T. rex fossils in the world have come from Hell Creek. The frustrating thing is that we have never found their tracks.

"You have a choice of two dinosaurs. We know it was made by a big predator and we know that T. rex was in the area at the time so it seems likely."

In the early 1990s, scientists announced they had found a T. rex print in new Mexico. However, the researchers found no bones nearby and the identity of the prints has been disputed.

Dr Manning will return to the site next year and hopes to get permission to excavate more tracks. That would give clues about the speed and size of the dinosaur that made them.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

By DAVID DERBYSHIRE

The process beginned hundreds of years ago and bringed a huge change in our use of the language.

Now researchers believe more of the irregular verbs that make English such a rich and varied experience are heading for extinction.

In future, 'stank' will evolve into 'stinked', 'drove' will become 'drived' and 'slew' will turn into 'slayed', a team of linguists and mathematicians say. And if the simplification becomes really serious, 'begun' could change to 'beginned', 'brought' to 'bringed' and 'fell' to 'falled'.

The prediction comes from the first study of its kind into how irregular verbs have evolved in literature over the last 1,200 years.

Around 97 per cent of verbs in English are regular. That means in the past tense they simply take an '-ed' ending – so 'talk' becomes 'talked', and 'jump' becomes 'jumped'.

Irregular verbs, however, do their own thing. Some like 'wed' stay the same in the past tense while others like 'begin' take a different ending to become 'begun'.

The study, carried out at Harvard University, found that irregular verbs are under intense pressure to change into regular verbs as language develops.

The team identified 177 irregular verbs used in Old English and tracked their use over the centuries from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf to the latest Harry Potter novel.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

By Hamed THabet

In ancient Yemen, people believed in life after death. Their belief in resurrection was essential to ensure a safe passage to the afterlife for their dead. Mummification was an important step to ensuring one's afterlife in ancient Yemen. However contradictory to their belief, not only the dead lost their way to the afterworld; sadly, the mummies have never crossed the boundaries of their tombs. So where did all the mummies go?

According to the researchers, In the ancient days, Yemen was one of the most famous countries in the world with its civilization and secrets. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that there are huge numbers of mummies in Yemen that have not been revealed and introduced to the international community

It is difficult to know exactly why this society practiced mummification, but it must surely reflect a desire to keep their dead with them since the mummies do not seem to have been buried immediately. Ancient Yemenis used to embalm their dead due to their belief that they would return to this world on the Day of Resurrection. Researchers confirmed that many mummies have been found in Yemen in several different places by accident in the last 20 years and many of them are still hidden in their tombs and unknown.

For the first time, ,Windol Fliees, the head of an American expedition group found samples in Ma’reb in 1951-1952 in the graveyard or cemetery of Awam Temple called Haied Bin Aqeed. But the important discovery was in 1983 in Shebam Al Garas by the archeology expedition department, which found 26 Mummies at a depth of 60 centimeters, and among all those, only one has survived. Moreover, in 1991 Mummies have been found in the Al Noman mountain in Al Mahweet governorate, and until today their work is not finished as there are many more. In 1994 in Saih Bani Matar, Mummies have been found in natural caves, but unfortunately, no one has examined them until this date; because there are no specialists and experts to study the tombs and the bodies. In 1999, another body was found in Shaoob and finally a local found a Mummy of a small child in Damar.

However, not all mummies that were found belong to Yemenis, “A Mummy has been found which belonged to the 6 century, however the body wasn’t preserved by humans, but by natural forces. We prsume this mummy belonged to one of the Ethiopian soliders who served in the Army of (Abraha) when they invaded Yemen. There are two theories about the solider’s death: the first theory was that he was killed in battle, the second theory was that he died because of suffocation by volcanic smoke,” said Dr, Abdul Hakim, who is a tutor at Sana’a University in the Archeology Department and also the storekeeper at the museum.

Abdul Hakim explained the ancient Yemeni steps of mummification , saying the theory and idea of Mummies in Yemen are the same as that of any other country but of course each have their own system of embalmment. On the basis of some researches on Mummies, a kind of plant called Al Ra’a, was found in all the bodies, and also chemical materials like oxides of iron and sulfur dioxide. Furthermore, camel oil was found to be the principle agent of embalming the dead.

During this process, they would tear the stomach, take out the bowels, and put the plant material and distribute the chemicals in a way that would fill the stomach in order to keep it preserved. The body was covered and painted with a color called Henna. Furthermore, the shrouding process in Yemeni Mummies took several steps. Firstly, rolls with silk and then leather were placed on the body and if the person was rich more money was spent for more rolls of silk and leather rolls. Nevertheless, some Mummies that were found in Shaoob in Sana’a were embalmed by shrouding, using cotton and straw. After putting the materials, the body was well dressed and adorned with new shoes, coats, and mineral rings in order to drive away evil spirits.

HOBBITS may have had long arms and tiny brains but our new-found cousins were agile and smart enough to make stone tools used to fashion other tools, probably for hunting and butchering animals.

What's more, they did so at least 40,000 years before modern humans arrived on their home island of Flores in Indonesia.

The discovery comes from Queensland scientists who have studied wear patterns and residue on about 100 stone tools found with the remains of hobbits (Homo floresiensis) in Liang Bua cave by Australian and Indonesian researchers.

University of Queensland and Southern Cross University archeologist and paleobotanist Carol Lentfer said: "We're talking about a creature that was fairly well advanced. It was able to use stone tools to make other tools - value-adding in a sense."

Working with University of Queensland colleagues Michael Haslam and Gail Robertson, Dr Lentfer found evidence of plant work and butchery on stone flakes and cobbles from archeological layers ranging from 12,000 to 55,000 years old.

They identified blood and bone on some tools, but more than 90 per cent of the residues were from woody and fibrous plants. That doesn't mean the metre-high people ate only a little meat, but rather that most of the tools studied so far were used for working with plants.

"Maybe they were making spear-shafts or traps or sharpening sticks," Dr Lentfer said.

"So far there's no evidence they used stone spear points for hunting. They probably used fire-hardened sticks."

Read the rest on The Australian.

Washington Post Staff Writer

by Richard Owen

Italian archeologists have uncovered the ruins of a 2,700 year old sanctuary which they say provides the first physical evidence of Rome at the time of Numa Pompilius, Rome’s legendary second king, in the 8th century BC.

Numa Pompilius, a member of the Sabine tribe, was elected at the age of forty to succeed Romulus, the founder of Rome. He reigned from 715-673 BC, and is said by Plutarch to have been a reluctant monarch who ushered in a 40-year period of peace and stability. He was celebrated for his wisdom, personal austerity and piety.

Clementina Panella, the archeologist from Rome’s Sapienza University who is leading the dig, said Numa Pompilius was also known to have established religious practices and observance in the emergent city state, instituting the office of priest or pontifex and founding the cult of the Vestal Virgins. She said the temple or sanctuary her team had uncovered lay between the Palatine and Velian hills, close to the Colosseum, the Arch of Titus and Via Sacra, and had probably been dedicated to the Goddess of Fortune.

The dig began a year ago, with the help of 130 students and volunteers. The wall of the temple was found seven metres below the surface, together with a street and pavement and two wells, one round and one rectangular. Both wells were “full of thousands of votive offerings and cult objects”, including the bones of birds and animals and ceramic bowls and cups.

Dr Panella said there was no doubt that the objects dated from the period of Numa Pompilius. However there were no statues or figures because Numa forbade images of the gods in his temples, arguing that it was “impious to represent things Divine by what is perishable”.

Numa Pompilius is also credited with dividing Rome into administrative districts, and according to Plutarch organised the city’s first occupational guilds, “forming companies of musicians, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, shoemakers, skinners, braziers, and potters”.

Corriere della Sera said the unearthing of the temple proved there were still “remarkable discoveries” to be made in the Forum and Palatine Hill areas. Last year Andrea Carandini, Professor of Archeology at La Sapienza, announced that he had discovered the remains of a royal palace dating to the time of Romulus.

Read the rest on the Times.

I'll be in Georgia the next few days giving a reading and a talk in Decatur, so History Buff will be on vacation as well. I hope to return on Wed. October 10 with links to great new archaeological discoveries!!! Until then, have a wonderful weekend ;]

A painting believed to be a £25 million Leonardo da Vinci painting stolen from a stately home four years ago was recovered today in a police operation.

The Madonna With The Yarnwinder was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfries and Galloway in August 2003.

Despite numerous police appeals and an international investigation, the artwork, which belonged to the Duke of Buccleuch, remained missing.

Dumfries and Galloway Police said today it was a "fast-moving inquiry".

A spokesman for the force said today's operation also involved the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, the Serious Organised Crime Agency and Strathclyde Police.

He confirmed that the painting was recovered today but would not reveal further details.

Tests are being carried out to authenticate the recovered painting as the da Vinci.

Thieves posing as tourists took the Madonna With The Yarnwinder from the castle, 17 miles north of Dumfries, on August 27, 2003.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

By Cynthia Johnston

CAIRO, Oct 2 (Reuters Life!) - Egypt will put the mummy of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun on display next month inside his tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings, allowing visitors to see his face for the first time, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Tuesday.

Zahi Hawass, head of the High Council for Antiquities, said he would place the mummy in a climate-controlled glass showcase in the tomb and cover the body with linen. Tutankhamun's bare face would be visible.

"You will enter the tomb and see for the first time the face of Tutankhamun ... This is the first time in history that anyone will see the mummy (in public). This will continue the magic of Tutankhamun," Hawass told Reuters in an interview.

Tutankhamun, who died on the cusp of adulthood, ruled Egypt between about 1361 and 1352 BC. The 1922 discovery of his intact tomb, whose treasures included a now famous gold funerary mask, stunned the archaeological community.

Although the artefacts from Tutankhamun's burial tomb have toured the world, the mummified body of the king has been examined only a handful of times in detail since the tomb was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter.

Hawass said Tutankhamun's mummy was currently resting in a sarcophagus inside the tomb covered by a gilded coffin, but that the humidity caused by the breathing of thousands of visitors threatened to damage it.

"I thought that this will help tourists and at the same time help preserving the mummy. I think a mummy like this, the golden boy, it is time that people should really see it," he said.

Tutankhamun came to the throne shortly after the death of Akhenaten, the maverick pharaoh who abandoned most of Egypt's old gods in favour of the Aten sun disc and brought in a new and more expressive style of art.

Read the rest of the article here.

Archeologists were very pleasantly surprised to discover an unknown rune stone under the floor of Hauskjeen church in Rennesøy, Rogaland in western Norway.

This roughly 1000-year-old rune stone was found under a church floor. PHOTO: Terje Tveit / Arkeologisk museum i Stavanger

The rune stone likely stems from the 11th century, and tells of Halvard's powers or Halvard's magnificence. The stone slab has been broken off at both ends, and the text ("Mæktir haluar") is just a small part of the original inscription.

Archeologists from the Archeological Museum in Stavanger thought at first that they had rediscovered a rune stone documented in 1639 and 1745, but closer examination revealed that the stone has not been reported before.

The discovery site implies that the slab could have been a tombstone, but the text makes it more likely that it is the remains of a monument.

The rune stone is now on exhibit at Stavanger's Archeological Museum. The runes are from the so-called medieval runes in use from the second half of the 11th century.

A Faberge egg that no one knew existed is expected to make up to £9million at auction.

It was created for the French branch of the Rothschild banking family in 1902 and has not left their hands until now.

The egg contains a diamond-set cockerel which pops up and flaps its wings, nods its head and crows every hour.

There are no more than 12 recorded examples of eggs created by the Faberge workshop for private clients to the same standards as those commissioned by the Russian royal family.

This piece is one of only three made with a clock and automation.

It will be sold during London Christie's Russian week from 26 to 29 November.

Anthony Phillips, international director of silver and Russian artworks for Christie's, said the discovery of the 'masterpiece' - signed and dated by Carl Faberge in 1902 - was the most exciting of his 40-year career.

Read the rest on DailyMail.

When Daisy the dachshund bounds along the shoreline, she often picks up a stick or a dead fish to gnaw on.

But going walkies the other day, she briefly found herself in doggie heaven ... when she was confronted by a bone as big as herself.

However, this was no meaty treat - just a prehistoric prize. For Daisy had discovered a fossilised mammoth bone up to two million years old.

Unable to dig it up, she waited for owner Dennis Smith to arrive - and he was stunned to see the 13in, 8lb thigh section sticking out of the sand.

The bone on the beach at Dunwich, near Southwold, Suffolk, is believed to be from a Southern Elephant, a type of mammoth once common in East Anglia.

And it was a good job Daisy, a miniature wire-haired dachshund, wasn't around when the creature was alive - they grew up to 14ft high and weighed 16 tons.

"We were walking along the beach when Daisy spotted this object halfway between the high tide and low water mark," said Mr Smith, a 69-year-old retired turf salesman from Witham, Essex.

by Rob Edwards

MORE THAN 10,000 of the most important ancient and historical sites around Scotland's coastline are at risk of being destroyed by the storms and rising sea levels that will come with global warming.

Sites in jeopardy include the neolithic settlement of Skara Brae on Orkney and the prehistoric ruins at Jarlshof on Shetland. Others under threat range from Viking burial boats to Iron Age brochs and Mesolithic middens.

New surveys for Historic Scotland reveal that the remains of communities up to 9000 years old could be lost for ever due to accelerating coastal erosion.

The potential loss is incalculable and has alarmed experts. "This is a uniquely valuable and totally irreplaceable part of the nation's cultural heritage, with much still to teach us about our past," said Tom Dawson, an archaeologist at the University of St Andrews.

"While people argue over whether climate change is leading to sea level rise and an increase in stormy weather, the coast continues to erode. Although wildlife and the natural habitat may be able to recover, ancient sites will be destroyed forever, and the remnants of our ancestors will be lost."

Dawson manages a group called Scottish Coastal Archaeology and the Problem of Erosion (Scape), which was set up in 2001 to protect ancient shoreline sites. With the help of local Shorewatch' groups across the country, Scape has been investigating the status of the sites.

So far some 30% of Scotland's coastline has been surveyed, discovering 11,500 archaeological sites of which 3500 are judged to be at risk of erosion. According to Dawson, that suggests that more than 10,000 sites around the whole coast are likely to be at risk.

The results of the surveys have been summarised in a report by Scape to Historic Scotland, which has not yet been published. But Dawson is due to unveil his findings at a major conference on climate change and the historic environment in Stirling on Tuesday.

Read the rest on the Sunday Herald.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Thursday, September 27, 2007

Stone Age Chinese began cultivating rice more than 7,700 years ago by burning trees in coastal marshes and building dams to hold back seawater, converting the marshes to rice paddies that would support growth of the high-yield cereal grain, researchers plan to report today.

New analysis of sediments from the site of Kuahuqiao at the mouth of the Yangtze River near Hangzhou provides the earliest evidence in China of such large-scale environmental manipulation, experts said.

"It shows people were changing the environment, actively manipulating the system, and well on their way to having an agricultural way of life," said University of Toronto anthropologist Gary Crawford, who wasn't involved in the study.

Read the rest on Statesman.com.

By Dan Hurley

Today, the valley is dry, dusty and unremarkable, but 250 years ago it was one of the most fascinating spots ever discovered in the North America. From the very first time in 1739 that local Indians led a contingent of French explorers to the salt licks near the Ohio River in what is today Boone County, Ky., the spot raised intellectually troubling questions.

European and American scientists understood the importance of salt licks and why thousands of modern buffalo, deer and elk beat broad paths to the marshy lick, but they could not explain why they found huge bones and tusks of "elephants," as well as other giant animals for which they had no names (eventually named giant ground sloth, the moose ox, flat headed peccary, etc.) lying on the ground and exposed in the banks of the nearby creek.

As explorers pushed westward, fantastic reports piled up. In 1751 Christopher Gist acquired two large teeth found at Big Bone Lick from men who reported that they had seen a skeleton with rib bones "eleven feet long, and the skull bone six feet wide, across the forehead."

In 1765 and 1766 George Croghan became the first explorer to collect significant quantities of bones, including two tusks "about six feet long." He sent these to London for inspection by the leading scientists of the day, including Benjamin Franklin, who thought the bones were "extremely curious on many accounts; no living elephant having been seen in any part of America by any of the Europeans settled there, or remembered by any tradition of the Indians."

It is difficult today to appreciate the intellectual shock waves set off by these giant bones in the 1790s and early 1800s. The first dinosaur would not be unearthed until 1824. Scientists, like everyone else, operated with the religiously grounded view of a "perfect creation" in which every creature had its place in a divinely established, hierarchical and stable "Great Chain of Being."

Not until people like French scientist George Cuvier, working with specimens from Big Bone collected by French explorers, and Benjamin Franklin, working with specimens collected by Croghan, did anyone pose one of the shattering question that both reflected the emerging modern consciousness: Is it possible that a species which once existed can become extinct?

Read the rest on the Cincinnati Post.

by Roxanne Khamsi

DNA extracted from skeletal remains has shown that Neanderthals roamed some 2000 kilometres further east than previously thought.

Researchers say the genetic sequence of an adolescent Neanderthal found in southern Siberia closely matches that of Neanderthals found in western Europe, suggesting that this close relative of modern humans migrated very long distances.

Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues examined skeletal remains found in the Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains and dated as between 30,000 and 38,000 years old . Until now, archaeologists have been unable to determine whether the remains belonged to Neanderthals or another species of extinct hominid because the bones are too fragmented.

Pääbo and his colleagues took 200 milligram samples of bone from the adolescent. After dissolving the mineral component of the bone, the team succeeded in extracting DNA from mitochondria – parts of the cell that produce energy.

Near-perfect match

After sequencing a short fragment of this DNA, the team compared it with that of several Neanderthals found in Europe. They discovered that it matched DNA recovered from remains found in Belgium almost perfectly. The match was "quite a bit of a surprise", according to Pääbo, since the new evidence extends the territory of this hominid some 2000 kilometres further east.

Read the rest on New Scientist.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The ancient saber-toothed cat had some pretty scary dentures, but when it came down to actually biting, well, it was no lion.

In fact, a study of the cat's jaw indicated it has only about one-third the biting power of a modern lion, according to a study in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers led by Colin R. McHenry at the University of Newcastle in Australia used computer modeling to calculate the bite force of the cat, Smilodon fatalis.

"For all its reputation, Smilodon had a wimpy bite" co-author Stephen Wroe said in a statement.

That doesn't mean the saber-toothed cat wasn't a good hunter, though.

Read the rest on CNN.

Family legend: Bui Van Thuan, head of the Bui clan in Quang Tien hamlet, walks to the village pagoda. In the Bui clan, everyone knows by heart a poem lamenting the loss of the pottery craft of their forefathers. — VNS Photos Viet Thanh Heirloom: Bui Duc Loi shows the saucer with inscriptions presented to him by his father. The inscription bears the same wording as the tombstone of the mysterious Bui Thi Hy, possible creator of many of the Chu Dau ceramics. Brown study: All Chu Dau ceramics bear a brown layer of glaze at the base, and experts continue to argue over the purpose. Some think it is another form of artisan’s signature.

At 62 years of age, Bui Xuan Nhan buried himself in newspapers and magazines, sifting through piles of archived materials to research the Gia Loc District Communist Party for a competition. But during his search, he stumbled across an article that would take him far from his initial pursuit and towards astonishing findings about trade and the place of women in Vietnamese history.

Nhan and his nephew, Bui Duc Loi, worked together to produce a 200-page collection of hand-written texts with more than 300 of Loi’s photographs picturing many villages in Gia Loc District of Hai Duong Province. The collection, which took four months to complete, was awarded a special jury prize in 2006 and is now on display at the House of Tradition in Gia Loc District.

However, after completing their project, Nhan and Loc remained curious about a passage from one of the articles. In 1980, a former cultural attache at the Japanese Embassy in Ha Noi, Makoto Anabuki, wrote a letter to a communist party secretary. The letter was written in regards to an inscription on a blue and white vase displayed at the Topkapi Saraji Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Its inscription read, "The eighth year of Thai Hoa reign, Nam Sach District, sculptor Bui Thi Hy penned."

An avid aficionado of Vietnamese culture, Anabuki posed three questions in his letter: First, what part of Nam Thanh District was called Nam Sach in the 15th century? Second, where did Bui Thi Hy learn and produce her craft? Third, could he contact archaeologists and fine artists to help research this ancient kiln?

Read the rest on Viet Nam News.

By Craig Brierley

Hair samples from naturally preserved child mummies discovered at the world's highest archaeological site in the Andes have provided a startling insight into the lives of the children chosen for sacrifice. Researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust used DNA and stable isotope analysis to show how children as young as 6-years old were "fattened up" and taken on a pilgrimage to their death.

A team of scientists led by Dr Andrew Wilson at the University of Bradford analysed hair samples taken from the heads and from small accompanying bags of four mummies found in the Andes. These included the 15-year old "Llullaillaco Maiden" and the 7-year old "Llullaillaco Boy" whose frozen remains were found in 1999 at a shrine 25m from the summit of Mount Llullaillaco, a 6,739m volcano on the border of Argentina and Chile. The Maiden, described as a "perfect mummy" went on display for the first time last month in Salta, northwest Argentina.

Dr Wilson and colleagues studied DNA and stable light isotopes from the hair samples to offer insight into the lives of these children. Unlike samples of bone collagen and dental enamel, which give an average reading over time, hair growth allows scientists to capture a unique snapshot at different intervals over time, helping build up a picture of how the children were prepared for sacrifice over a period of months. The results are published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

"By examining hair samples from these unfortunate children, a chilling story has started to emerge of how the children were 'fattened up' for sacrifice," says Dr Wilson, a Wellcome Trust Bioarchaeology Fellow.

It is believed that sons and daughters of local rulers and local communities were chosen for sacrifice, possibly as a way for the ruling Incas to use fear to govern their people. Some girls, know as acllas, were selected from around the age of four and placed under the guardianship of priestesses; some would later be offered as wives to local nobles, others consecrated as priestesses and others offered as human sacrifices.

By analysing stable isotopes found in the hair samples, Dr Wilson and colleagues were able to see that for much of the time prior to sacrifice, the children were fed a diet of vegetables such as potato, suggesting that they came from a peasant background. Stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen from an individual's diet are deposited in their hair where they can remain unchanged over thousands of years.

Read the rest on Eurekalert.

Dinner at Suez, tea on the Pyramids ... Military Cross hero's letters are a truly remarkable read

By PAUL HARRIS and ANDREW LEVY The style is so jaunty it might have come from an adventure holiday diary.

Tea on the Pyramids ... a fancy dress whist drive ... Christmas dinner overlooking the Suez Canal. It sounds like a spectacular vacation.

But these remarkable letters are one man's chronicle of the First World War - and a fascinating insight into the unbreakable spirit of British troops.

They were written by a Military Cross hero to his family back home.

Now - nearly a century later - they reveal not so much the horror of that conflict, but how soldiers used humour and optimism to see them through it.

In one, Lieutenant Hubert Wolton describes how he and his comrades organised a pre-battle whist drive - half dressing up as 'ladies' to take on the men.

In another, from Cairo, he recalls climbing 460ft up a pyramid and taking tea at the top.

There were games of football between attacks and constant jokes to make light of the prospect of death.

During a 1915 advance against the Turks, for example, Lieutenant Wolton casually records: "One fellow said to me, 'I would go to Hell with you, sir'. I told him I wasn't in much of a hurry at the moment."

And then, perhaps, a glimpse of grim reality.

From the trenches at Gallipoli, the young officer writes: "No words can properly describe a bombardment.

But from a distance it sounds as if a large empty tank was rolling down a cliff."

The unique insight into Lieutenant Wolton's war begins with crowds cheering him off in the summer of 1915, then follows his progress for more than three years through the trenches, into battle, and at one stage in a military hospital.

Read the rest on DailyMail here.

MOSCOW (AP) — There is a "high degree of probability" that bones found recently near the Russian city of Yekaterinburg are those of a daughter and son of the last czar, an official said Friday, citing preliminary forensic work.

If confirmed, the latest find would fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed Romanov family, whose reign was ended by the violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which ushered in more than 70 years of communist rule.

The bones were found by archaeologists in a burned field near Yekaterinburg, a city in the Ural Mountains where Czar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were held prisoner by the Bolsheviks and then shot in 1918. The discovery was announced in August.

"Investigators have made a preliminary conclusion that there is a high degree of probability that the bones ... belong to the Crown Prince Alexei and Princess Maria," said Vladimir Gromov, deputy forensic chief in the Sverdlovsk region, in televised remarks.

Read the rest here.

An adze from the Cook Islands Jane Willcock, Anthropology Museum, The University of Queensland

The discovery of an adze fashioned from Hawaiian basalt on a Tuamotu atoll in French Polynesia provides the first material evidence that ancient voyagers made an 8,000-kilometre round trip from the South Pacific to Hawaii and back again.

More than 2,000 years ago, seafarers from Samoa and Tonga ventured eastward to settle on more remote archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean, including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands, colonizing most of these places by 900 AD. Eventually, the travellers set foot on Hawaii.

Scientists have long thought that these journeys must have been accidental or one-time events, but recent research has hinted that these peoples were capable of greater feats of navigation than previously suspected. Despite this, there has been debate about how much travel and trade took place among these remote islands in eastern Polynesia during the early years of their colonization; did those settlers who made it to Hawaii ever travel back again?

Hawaiian oral histories point to voyages to and from Tahiti, but in the absence of evidence these feats have remained the stuff of legends.

Read the rest on Nature.com.

XI'AN (Xinhua) -- The first emperor of China would be rolling in his grave if he knew his Qin empire outlived him by only three years, and its last emperor had since been lying within a kilometer of himself for 2,200 years.

A noted Chinese archaeologist, who was heavily involved in the excavation and research of Qin Shihuang's terracotta army, has located the tomb of Ziying, the third and last emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-207 B.C.), about 500 meters from the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shihuang in the suburbs east of Xi'an, capital of the northwestern Shaanxi Province.

Ziying's tomb, 109 meters long, 26 meters wide and 15.5 meters deep, was the second largest in the area after the grave of the first emperor himself, said Yuan Zhongyi, former curator at the Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shihuang.

Read the rest here.

By day, Lazar Kunstmann is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter. By night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers.

Read the rest on the Times Online.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attacking several tons of woolly mammoth with stone-tipped spears must have taken extraordinary courage -- and ancient people left paintings to prove they did it.

Read the rest here.

By TONY RENNELL

The advertisement in the "Miscellaneous" column of the Bristol Times & Mirror newspaper was poignant.

"Wanted," it read, "respectable woman to take young child."

It was a sadly common request in Victorian Britain, where life was particularly hard for unmarried mothers.

The ad had been placed by 25-year-old Evelina Marmon, who two months earlier, in January 1896, had given birth in a boarding house in Cheltenham to a little girl she named Doris.

Evelina was a God-fearing farmer's daughter who had gone astray, left the farm for city life and resorted to work as a barmaid in the saloon of the Plough Hotel, an old coaching inn.

With her blonde hair, busty figure and quick wit, she was popular with its male customers - though which one of them made her pregnant has gone unrecorded.

And now she was deserted, with a baby she loved but knew she could not bring up on her own.

She would have to find a foster home for little Doris - to have her "adopted out", in the language of the time - go back to work and hope in time to be able to reclaim her child.

Quite by chance, next to her own ad, was another: "Married couple with no family would adopt healthy child, nice country home. Terms, £10."

It seemed the answer to her prayers, and she quickly contacted the name at the bottom, a Mrs Harding.

From Oxford Road in Reading, Mrs Harding replied in ecstatic terms.

"I should be glad to have a dear little baby girl, one I could bring up and call my own."

She described her situation. "We are plain, homely people, in fairly good circumstances. I don't want a child for money's sake, but for company and home comfort.

"Myself and my husband are dearly fond of children. I have no child of my own. A child with me will have a good home and a mother's love."

Mrs Harding sounded every bit the respectable, caring woman that Evelina hoped to find for Doris and she wrote at once begging her not to consider anyone else until they had met.

The reply came back: "Rest assured I will do my duty by that dear child. I will be a mother, as far as lies in my power.

"It is just lovely here, healthy and pleasant. There is an orchard opposite our front door." Evelina could visit whenever she wished.

The only issue between them was that Evelina really wanted to pay a weekly fee for her daughter to be looked after whereas Mrs Harding preferred - indeed, insisted on - a full adoption and a one-off payment in advance of £10, for which "I will take her entirely, and she shall be of no further expense to you".

Reluctantly, the desperate mother agreed, and a week later Mrs Harding, clutching "a good warm shawl to wrap round baby in the train for it is bitter cold", arrived in Cheltenham.

Read the rest on the Daily Mail.

Parts of a temple dating to the reign of pharaoh Ramses II have been discovered inside a mosque in Luxor, Egypt, officials report.

Experts restoring the historic mosque uncovered sections of columns, capitals, and elaborately inscribed reliefs from one of the ancient temple's courtyards built around 1250 B.C.

The previously concealed architectural elements reveal well-preserved hieroglyphics and unique scenes depicting the powerful pharaoh.

The discovery is likely to touch a nerve among religious leaders, because the newly exposed reliefs contain representations of humans and animals, which are forbidden inside mosques, the experts said.

The mosque was erected as a shrine to Muslim saint Abul Haggag in the 13th century A.D. on the site of an earlier Christian church, which was itself built on top of the ancient temple, the archaeologists explained.

The discovery was made during repair work on the mosque after a fire damaged part of the structure in June.

"To do this project of restoration, [workers] had to reclean and reopen many things, and this is when the scenes were found, and they are really unique," said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

(Hawass is also a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence. National Geographic News is a division of the National Geographic Society.)

Encryptions and Glyphs

Christians, and later Muslims, frequently built their shrines on top of ancient Egyptian holy sites, said W. Raymond Johnson, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago who has seen the newly exposed temple sections.

Builders of both faiths usually erased or defaced ancient artwork in the temples, he said, but the newfound reliefs remain virtually untouched.

"We are very lucky that these have been so well preserved," Johnson said.

Rather than destroying the reliefs, the mosques builders carefully hid them away with a protective layer of straw-reinforced plaster, shielding them from the elements.

Read the rest on National Geographic.

Read the rest on National Geographic.

AP: Tunnels run beneath Chinatown in Fresno, Calif.: brick-walled passages that were once home to people and activities that couldn't be mentioned aboveground.

Rick Lew knows, because he walked the passages as a child, entering through a trapdoor in his grandfather's liquor store.

"There was a nightlife you couldn't see from the streets," he said.

But to many others, the lace-work of tunnels sprawling under the city was just another tall tale from Fresno's days as a Western railroad town and a hub of gambling and prostitution.

Now, a group of archaeologists is using ground-penetrating radar to find evidence of the secret passages, which are believed to branch out from long-abandoned basements littered with animal and human waste, cobwebs and other filth.

The project, funded by the city and headed by a group working to preserve Chinatown, will take data gathered via radar and compare the findings to the memories of those who recall the neighborhood's heyday, said Kathy Omachi, vice president of Chinatown Revitalization. That will help archeologists decide where to dig trenches and look for the passages, researchers said.The approximately six blocks just west of the railroad tracks that make up the historic Chinatown were Fresno's birthplace, said Karana Hattersley-Drayton, the city's historic preservation officer. Unlike the better-known Chinese quarters of San Francisco and New York, there's little left of it today — at least on the surface.

But fire insurance maps from the 1880s show a densely populated area offering a stark contrast from the wide-open ranch and farm country all around.

Read the rest here.

TEHRAN, Sept. 22 (MNA) -- A team of archaeologists has recently discovered 24 graves dating back 3000 years during salvage excavations at the Galabar Dam reservoir in Zanjan Province, central northwest Iran.

Read the rest on MehrNews.

NEW YORK — A never-before-exhibited collection of letters from Vincent van Gogh to a colleague reveal the beliefs and mundane challenges of the artistic genius — from his beliefs about sex to keeping his easel steady in the wind.

Van Gogh wrote the letters to Emile Bernard over two years starting in 1887, shortly before the tortured artist committed suicide.

"You see the human being in a body — who gets exhausted, working at his easel, outdoors in the blazing sun, with no food on some days," said Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of "Painted With Words: Vincent Van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard," on display at The Morgan Library & Museum.

The 20 letters — alternately frank, humorous and profound — relate to 22 paintings, drawings and watercolors in the exhibit that the two artists discussed or exchanged, including a portrait of a French soldier dressed in a bright uniform influenced by the Algerian background of the so-called Zouave regiment.

"It's coloristically brilliant. And it captures the humanity of the moment," Tonkovich said of the face, which the artist describes as "bloody ugly."

Bernard, an artist and poet 15 years younger, became friends with the Dutch-born van Gogh in Paris, and the two often worked side by side. Van Gogh later moved to Arles, in the south of France. He committed suicide in 1890 at age 37, walking into fields outside Paris and shooting himself in the chest.

Read the rest here.

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The family that calls a mummified baby a family heirloom will have it tested to determine whether it is really related to them.Charles Peavey said the baby was handed down to him from his aunt.The family calls the mummy Baby John and believes it is a long lost relative.A court ordered Peavey's family to bury the baby unless they could prove the baby was a relative.

Read the rest here on WMUR9.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Just blocks from where U.N. diplomats debate their interpretations of tyranny and democracy, what may be the first document to articulate the difference is going up for sale.

This will be the first time any version of the Magna Carta has ever gone up for auction, according David Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby's.

The Magna Carta is expected to fetch at least $20 million to $30 million, Redden said.

Redden, who has also sold dinosaur bones, space race artifacts and a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, called the Magna Carta "the most important document on earth."

The charter mandated the English king to cede certain basic rights to his citizens, ensuring that no man is above the law.

Many believe the Magna Carta was the first document to recognize the legal right to freedom from tyranny, an influential concept to American political philosophers -- from the founding fathers to the modern presidency.

The version to be auctioned is one of fewer than 20 known copies of the Magna Carta, which means "Great Charter" in Latin. The document was first devised in 1215, but not confirmed into English law until 1297 -- the year this version was issued and sealed by King Edward I.

Read the rest here.

Or, perhaps, he'll find you four centuries later.

Ray is one of the many amateur archaeologists entranced by the Lost Colony -- the 117 English settlers who disappeared from North Carolina's Outer Banks in the late 1500s, having left behind only a single clue to their fate. In all the years since, no one has found much of anything else.

But there have long been stories told about a rotting boat in the Great Dismal Swamp, a national wildlife refuge that straddles North Carolina's border with Virginia. Ray's colleagues think the colonists may have passed through the swamp after leaving Roanoke Island. They studied satellite images until they found something that looked like a boat, then set out to find it.

"We're not looking for gold," Ray said. "We're looking for history."

But the search for the Lost Colony has confounded experts and enthusiasts alike.

Eric Klingelhofer, a Mercer University professor, is an archaeologist with a doctorate from Johns Hopkins. He helped uncover the English colony at Jamestown, Va., and is working with the National Park Service to conduct digs on Roanoke Island.

"This is one of the hardest archaeological puzzles imaginable," said Klingelhofer, who serves as vice president of the First Colony Foundation, a research team of archaeologists and historians founded three years ago to dig at Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island.

Ray is a retired home builder from Durham who got his start as a member of the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research, a group comprised mostly of amateurs pursuing a variety of theories: that the colony left Roanoke Island for the southern Outer Banks, or North Carolina's interior, or Virginia via the swamp.

Though The Lost Colony Center has consulted with academics and experts, other observers dismiss their work, which is published primarily on a blog instead of a peer-reviewed academic journal.

"I fear that they are only out looking for publicity," said Charles Ewen, who heads the Department of Anthropology at East Carolina University.

Perhaps, but no one with a degree and university tenure has been able to figure out exactly what happened to the Lost Colony , either.

Here's what's known: In 1585, English explorer Ralph Lane landed on the Outer Banks with a crew of 75 men, writing upon his arrival that they had come upon the "goodliest soyle under the cope of heaven."

The enchantment didn't last. The "First Colony " fought with natives, and food supplies quickly dwindled. They sent a party back to England seeking fresh supplies, but didn't wait for their return. Instead, they hitched a ride back home with Sir Francis Drake, who was passing through after raiding Spanish ports in the Caribbean.

When the men with relief supplies arrived to find the colony abandoned, they left a detachment of about 15 and sailed themselves for England.

Undeterred by the chaos, Sir Walter Raleigh sent John White and a new group of settlers one year later to pick up the so-called "holding colony " and to found a new settlement in what is now Virginia. White was unable to find the men left behind, and Indians reported that other natives had attacked the group and forced them to flee by boat.

Concerned about their own future and plagued by a lack of food, the colonists persuaded White to return to England for help. He agreed, leaving behind 116 colonists and his newborn granddaughter Virginia Dare - the first English child born in the New World. The colonists promised White they would carve a Maltese cross into a tree if they encountered turmoil and were forced to flee.

White made it back to England, but was delayed for three years by war between Spain and England. When he returned in 1590, he found no trace of the colonists he left behind, aside from the post and the word "Croatoan."

Some researchers speculate the Lost Colony could have assimilated with the Croatan tribe, which lived to the south near Cape Hatteras and is now considered part of the Lumbee tribe that lives in the sandhills of North Carolina.

Others have suggested the colonists moved farther inland and joined with other American Indians. Some suspect the natives simply killed the foreigners, or that the colonists died off from illness, malnutrition or in flight back to England.

Read the rest here.

By Robin Emmott

MONTERREY, Mexico, Sept 24 (Reuters Life!) - Ancient Mexicans and Egyptians who never met and lived centuries and thousands of miles apart both worshiped feathered-serpent deities, built pyramids and developed a 365-day calendar, a new exhibition shows.

Billed as the world's largest temporary archeological showcase, Mexican archeologists have brought treasures from ancient Egypt to display alongside the great indigenous civilizations of Mexico for the first time.

The exhibition, which boasts a five-tonne, 3,000-year-old sculpture of Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II and stone carvings from Mexican pyramid Chichen Itza, aims to show many of the similarities of two complex worlds both conquered by Europeans in invasions 1,500 years apart.

"There are huge cultural parallels between ancient Egypt and Mexico in religion, astronomy, architecture and the arts. They deserve to be appreciated together," said exhibition organizer Gina Ulloa, who spent almost three years preparing the 35,520 square-feet (3,300 meter-square) display.

The exhibition, which opened at the weekend in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, shows how Mexican civilizations worshiped the feathered snake god Quetzalcoatl from about 1,200 BC to 1521, when the Spanish conquered the Aztecs.

From 3,000 BC onward Egyptians often portrayed their gods, including the goddess of the pharaohs Isis, in art and sculpture as serpents with wings or feathers.

"The feathered serpent and the serpent alongside a deity signifies the duality of human existence, at once in touch with water and earth, the serpent, and the heavens, the feathers of a bird," said Ulloa.

Egyptian sculptures at the exhibition -- flown to Mexico from ancient temples along the Nile and from museums in Cairo, Luxor and Alexandria -- show how Isis' son Horus was often represented with winged arms and accompanied by serpents.

Cleopatra, the last Egyptian queen before the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, saw herself as Isis and wore a gold serpent in her headpiece, Ulloa added.

Read the rest here.

Archaeologists excavate the medieval dog grave

A team of professional and voluntary archaeologists have uncovered what seem to be the remains of a medieval castle in a north Pembrokeshire car park.

The dig, organised by PLANED, Cambria Archaeology and the National Park, and funded by the EU Transnational project, is taking place at the castle site in Maenclochog, beneath the village's car park.

So far excavators have uncovered what look to be the outer walls of a medieval castle, as well as post holes, the hearth of a medieval house and fragments of medieval pottery.

They have also discovered the skeleton of a dog, which archaeologists think is likely to be a family pet dating from the Middle Ages.

"When they first discovered bones the first thought was 'Oh my goodness it's a human,'" said PLANED's Christian Donovan, "But it is a dog.

"It looks like it was laid to rest carefully, which has lead the team to conclude that it was someone's pet."

Read the rest here.

Anna Salleh ABC Science Online

Why would Aboriginal Tasmanians flock to one of the coldest parts of the island during an ice age? One researcher says it was to shelter from the wind in caves and steep valleys (Image: Ian Gilligan)

Ice age Aboriginal Australians protected themselves from bitterly cold winds by flocking to caves in one of the most inhospitable parts of the continent, says an archaeologist.

Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University, lays out his argument in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.

Gilligan says parts of the island state of Tasmania are buffeted by high-speed winds, including the southwest quarter.

"It's more exposed to the prevailing southwesterly, the coldest wind," says Gilligan. "It's higher up, it's colder, it's further south."

But Aboriginal people seem to have gone there during the last ice age to escape the worst of the cold.

"The only real evidence we have for Tasmanian Aboriginal people during the ice age is in that very coldest, windiest southwest corner and that's a paradox," he says.

Researchers have found ice age stone tools age in rock shelters and caves in the southwest, Gilligan says, but not in other parts of the island.

Until now, he says researchers have not explained why people once flocked to the exposed southwest because scientists have underplayed the importance of protection from the cold in determining where people live.

"In terms of human tolerance of cold, it's not the air temperature it's wind chill that's important," he says. "Half of that is air temperature, the other half is wind."

He argues the caves and steep valleys of the southwest provided important shelter from chilling winds.

"Whilst the temperature may be somewhat colder in that area, what the southwest offered to humans during the glacial maximum was protection from wind," he says.

Read the rest on ABC.net.au

CAIRO, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Egyptian archaeologists working in the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun have found baskets and intact clay pots apparently overlooked when the tomb was cleared out in the 1920s, the government said on Monday.

The 20 clay pots, sealed with Tutankhamun's name, probably contain seeds and the remains of drinks, a government statement said, quoting chief government archaeologist Zahi Hawass.

One of the baskets contains dried fruit and eight others hold almost 60 small limestone plaques also inscribed with Tutankhamun's name in the traditional cartouche format.

Read the rest here.