Tag: Archeology

Archeology For A Sunday

Weekends and I choose stuff that is not a big headline generator….since I like history and archeology I want to share some of the stuff that has come to light recently….

We are discovering that the Maya were a lot more widespread than first believed….these fascinating people are coming into better understanding…..

Maya civilization was no mere collection of city states using slash-and-burn farming—that we learned earlier this year. Now archaeologists are looking deeper into an airborne survey that revealed a formidable civilization double the size of medieval England at its peak 1,200 years ago, Ars Technica reports. The survey, which used LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) to peek beneath the jungle foliage, revealed some 61,000 buildings, draining canals, fortresses, and roads across roughly 828 square miles. What archaeologists are saying about those details in Science:

  • Population: About 7 million to 11 million people populated the central Maya Lowlands—an area including some of Belize, Guatemala, and Yucatan—between 650 and 800 CE, the Late Classic Period. How did researchers crunch that number? By counting the structures per square mile and estimating how many were houses. Big cities like Tikal likely had hundreds of people per square mile, per Discovery.
  • Farming: A huge agricultural effort was needed to keep all those mouths fed, LiveScience notes. Imagine a complex grid of channels providing flood control and irrigation, with grids up to six feet wide and 20 inches deep, some stretching over half a mile. Still, densely populated cities like Naachtun and Tikal had to import food from other Maya kingdoms to survive.
  • Causeways: In earlier Maya times, from 1000 to 250 BCE, cities were linked by elevated roads or causeways up to 65 feet wide and up to 13 miles in length—but they fell into disuse when so-called Preclassic cities were abandoned. Yet their faded ghost outlines are visible on the LIDAR.
  • Fortresses: Mayans built more of them than expected in the Late Classic Period, and sophisticated ones, too. One has walls over 25 feet high and an Olympic-pool-size reservoir: “In other words, this place was ready for a siege,” says Ithaca College archaeologist Tom Garrison. “That is not really the type of conflict that we think about for the ancient Maya.”
  • Overall: “Seen as a whole, terraces and irrigation channels, reservoirs, fortifications, and causeways reveal an astonishing amount of land modification done by the Maya over their entire landscape on a scale previously unimaginable,” a Tulane researcher says in a statement.

The iconic sphinx has been a lonely monument to the early Egyptians and today it is not as lonely as it was in the past…..

Egypt says archaeologists have discovered a statue of a lion’s body and a human head in the southern city of Aswan. Per the AP, the Antiquities Ministry says the sphinx made of sandstone was found in the Temple of Kom Ombo during work to protect the site from groundwater. Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, says the statue probably dates back to the Ptolemaic time. The Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt for some 300 years—from around 320BC to about 30BC. Egypt hopes such discoveries will spur tourism, partially driven by antiquities sightseeing, which was hit hard by political turmoil following the 2011 uprising. (Another recent discovery in Egypt predates this one’s origins by thousands of years.)

Since I can remember some archeologists have wanted to proven the Exodus and so far nothing….but a new site has been found and the attempt to prove continues…..

Ancient ruins found in the Israeli wilderness could solve the biblical mystery of the Exodus, archaeologists claim.

According to the Bible, Moses liberated the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and led them through the wilderness of Sinai, before they crossed the River Jordan into the promised land of Canaan.

Yet no historical basis for the legend exists, and experts generally agree the Israelites were in fact native to Canaan – an ancient region covering modern day Israel.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6210313/Do-ruins-prove-Biblical-story-Exodus.html

Personally, I think that the Israelites were just an off-shoot of the Canaanites and were in the region always since it is proven that the Egyptians have been proven to have not employed slaves…..but that is just me…..

Any thoughts?

Archeology Today

I know that sounds like a monthly magazine…..

My regulars know that I am a bit of an amateur archeologist and historian….I find the acts of our distant ancestors as amazing and fascinating…..Easter Island has been a source of wonder and speculation….just how did they do those massive statues?

Of course those ding-dongs of the “Ancient Aliens”say that only visitors from the outer worlds could have  assisted in the making and moving of these statues……but…….

The tale of the demise of Easter Island’s people may have to be rewritten. The story has long held that infighting as resources ran out was one of the main drivers of the collapse, but a new study published in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology suggests a different scenario. CNN reports on the “unlikely method” of examining the society via of some of the stone tools used to carve the island’s famous stone figures: Researchers performed a chemical analysis on four of the statues and fragments from 17 of the roughly 1,600 basalt tools, called toki, that had been excavated. The goal was to determine where the basalt had come from. There were three quarries on the island that were potential sources of the volcanic rock; the key discovery is that there was “near exclusive” use of a single quarry to make the toki.

Here’s the jump researchers are making from there, per a press release: Lead study author Dale Simpson Jr. sees that as “solid evidence that there was cooperation among families and craft groups. … The idea of competition and collapse on Easter Island might be overstated.” But Jo Anne Van Tilburg, who led the excavations, cautions against coming to an overstated conclusion in this case. She says the findings bolster the view “of craft specialization based on information exchange, but we can’t know at this stage if the interaction was collaborative. It may also have been coercive in some way. Human behavior is complex.” (This separate study pushes the same theory but based on different evidence: obsidian.)

When I relax in my garden I like to consume nuts, fruit and cheese…..aged cheese is always better…..but how about a cheese that is 3000 years old?

For thousands of years beneath Egypt’s desert sands, a solidified whitish substance sat in a broken jar. Scientists now say it’s “probably the most ancient archaeological solid residue of cheese ever found,” per the AP. Archaeologists came across the finding while cleaning the sands around a 19th-dynasty tomb at the vast Saqqara necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis. The tomb of Ptahmes, the mayor of ancient Memphis, was initially discovered in 1885 but had been swallowed by shifting sands until its rediscovery in 2010. The whitish solidified mass was found during the excavation work between 2013 and 2014, along with a canvas fabric that may have been used to cover the jar, a study published this week in Analytical Chemistry said. The 3,200-year-old cheese was found to be made from a mixture of cow milk and that of a sheep or goat.

Cheese-making has been depicted on wall murals of ancient Egyptian tombs from 2,000 BC. Also, a 2012 study published in the science journal Nature traces the earliest evidence of the industry to the 6th millennium BC in northern Europe, some 7,000 years ago. Older cheese residues discovered were typically attributed to natural fermented milk like yoghurt or kefir, but the discovery at Saqqara revealed no trace of proteins from natural milk fermentation, said study lead author Enrico Greco. “For this reason we can say that it is the oldest solid cheese ever found to date.” There is little information on this particular cheese-making process, but “it was necessary to develop a specific technology and procedures that did not exist before,” Greco said. “This is a very important point in the history of dairy food.”

Okay, what wine would I pair with this “aged” cheese?

That is my offering on this Sunday…..I hope you have a wonderful day and all is well with you and your family….chuq

Saturday, 18Aug18

I have finally read about a program that I feel could help returning troops and veterans adjust to civilian life.

In my case when I returned from Vietnam there was a 24 hour lag between rice paddy and downtown San Francisco….definitely not enough time to leave the war behind……

I wish there had been a program that helped me handle my return….and today there are those that attempt to help……a new program…..

A partnership between a crowdsourced archaeology organization and a veterans recovery program has opened up new possibilities for American military veterans in a field that may once have seemed like a stretch: archaeology.

DigVentures, a company based in the United Kingdom, aims to change the way archaeology is done by expanding it beyond academic research settings. They crowdfund financial support, crowdsource site locations, and use real-time digitization technology to create collaborative digs that are accessible to experts and enthusiastic novices alike.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture-exploration/2018/08/military-veterans-archaeology-shaker-dig-explorer-digventures/

What better way to help the adjustment than giving the veterans something to do and think other than his/her war experiences….plus assisting the world to learn more about history.

I am looking forward to my day…will be a little cooler this early morn so I will take advantage and spend some time in the garden until the heat makes it uncomfortable.

Hoping all my visitors have a great Saturday…..chuq

Saturday 21Jul18–Food Issues

Let me begin my weekend with some food stories that would fit nicely in my old food blog “The Food Nazi”……

First some archeology and food…..

At least 4,000 years before the advent of farming, humans were baking bread. Two dozen charred crumbs found in hearths at an ancient hunter-gatherer site in northeastern Jordan have been identified as the world’s oldest samples of bread—specifically, a 14,400-year-old flatbread made from wild cereals. That predates the next oldest sample found in Turkey by 5,000 years. Making bread from scratch—including grinding cereals—is labor intensive, note the researchers. “That it was produced before farming methods suggests it was seen as special, and the desire to make more of this special food probably contributed to the decision to begin to cultivate cereals,” says Dorian Fuller, one of a team of researchers who discovered the crumbs at the Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 in the Black Desert between 2012 and 2015, reports the Guardian.

Described Monday in PNAS, the bread was likely made from wild wheat and barley flour, with ground tubers of a plant called club-rush adding a bitter, nutty flavor, reports the BBC. Combined with water, the mixture is believed to have been baked in ashes or on a hot stone and consumed as part of a feast of gazelle, water birds, and hare, remains of which were also found. Tasting a bit like modern multigrain bread, the flatbread might have even formed part of a meat sandwich. Noting “food remains have long been ignored in archaeology,” researcher Amaia Arranz-Otaegui believes similar “bread-like cereal products” perhaps existed 25,000 years ago. Given this “exceptional find,” she now hopes to explore how the Natufians’ bread production influenced the later agricultural revolution

That was fascinating…..now let’s move into the present and possibility a look into the future of food…….

A Dutch company that presented the world’s first lab-grown beef burger five years ago said it has received funding to pursue its plans to make and sell artificially grown meat to restaurants in 2021.

Maastricht-based Mosa Meat, which has in the past received more than $1m from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, said it hopes to sell its first products – most likely ground beef for burgers – in the next three years.

The aim is to achieve industrial-scale production two to three years later, with a typical hamburger patty costing about $1.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/lab-grown-meat-restaurants-2021-180718065215654.html

Another interesting story……my burger is grown?  Now that may turn me vegan….but I like my beef medium to medium rare……LOL

https://theantimedia.com/mosa-meats-could-disrupt-factory-farming/

Have a good day….chuq

Xena– A Warrior Princess

My regulars know that I enjoy many subjects among which is archeology and history especially the history of war and there are none better than the Vikings….these warriors were feared around Europe….and everyone has an image of a large blond or red hair warrior with axe in hand, right?

Well it has been possibly proven that not all the warriors were male……

The remains of a powerful Viking — long thought to be a man — was in fact a real-life Xena Warrior Princess, a study released Friday reveals.

The lady war boss was buried in the mid-10th century along with deadly weapons and two horses, leading archaeologists and historians to assume she was a man, according to the findings published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Wrong.

“It’s actually a woman, somewhere over the age of 30 and fairly tall, too, measuring around [5 feet 6 inches] tall,” archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University, who conducted the study, told The Local.

https://nypost.com/2017/09/08/viking-skeletons-dna-test-proves-historians-wrong/

The Vikings are fascinating and as time goes by we are learning more and more…..speaking of which there is more on tap about the Vikings…stay tuned.

The Red Snake

It is Saturday and I am in an historic frame of mind…..

I am a member of a program that takes mere civilians to analyze satellite images for possible archeological sites…..while looking at an image of Northern Iran I spotted a long line that looked like a wall of about 120 miles in length…..I know that there are a few walls that are very long…the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall in Britain……being the geek I started researching for a possible explanation and after awhile I found one……

The ‘Red Snake’ in northern Iran, which owes its name to the red colour of its bricks, is at least 195km long. A canal, 5m deep or more, conducted water along most of the Wall. Its continuous gradient, designed to ensure regular water flow, bears witness to the skills of the land-surveyors responsible for marking out the Wall’s route. Over 30 forts are lined up along this massive structure.

Their combined size is about three times that of those on Hadrian’s Wall. Yet these forts are small in comparison with contemporary fortifications in the hinterland, some of which are around ten times larger than the largest Wall forts. The ‘Red Snake’ is unmatched in so many respects and an enigma in yet more. Even its length is unclear: its western terminal was flooded by the rising waters of the Caspian Sea, while to the east it runs into the unexplored mountainous landscape of the Elburz Mountains. An Iranian team, under the direction of Jebrael Nokandeh, has been exploring this Great Wall since 1999. In 2005 it became a joint Iranian and British project.

http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/_The_Red_Snake_The_Great_Wall_of_Iran.htm

So I did not find a new site but I got to do what I enjoy…..research….

Your history lesson is complete……

Enjoy your day….chuq

Early Wine Making

Saturday and a very cool day here……Sun and the garden make it a good day to sit and enjoy some cheese and nuts….but again doctor says NO wine….I think he is a masochist…LOL

The day before New Years Eve and lots of celebrating to be done and quantities of wine will be drunk by those doing the celebrating……

Speaking of wine…..a new discovery has changed the dates of the earliest known wine makers……

A series of excavations in Georgia has uncovered evidence of the world’s earliest winemaking, in the form of telltale traces within clay pottery dating back to 6,000BC – suggesting that the practice of making grape wine began hundreds of years earlier than previously believed.

While there are thousands of cultivars of wine around the world, almost all derive from just one species of grape, with the Eurasian grape the only species ever domesticated.

Until now, the oldest jars known to have contained wine dated from 7,000 years ago, with six vessels containing the chemical calling cards of the drink discovered in the Zagros mountains in northern Iran in 1968.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/13/evidence-of-worlds-earliest-winemaking-uncovered-by-archaeologists

Yes, it is a torture to talk about wine and not be able to enjoy a glass or two…..so if you have any enjoy it for me….thanx my friends.

That is it for me for today…..I will be back Monday morn with more great stuff…..see you then my friends…..peace and love…..chuq

Meeting Of The Psi Phi Society

First let me wish all the Fathers that follow and read IST a very Happy Father’s Day.  Enjoy your special day.

Yesterday I got to watch the start of 24 hrs du Le Mans……as a sports car racing fan this is a must…..I am pulling for the Ford GT and the Toyota in the “hybrid” category…..had to take a break from the race to attend my meeting…..

To celebrate the race I am preparing a Cassoulet served with a fine white Bordeaux and a baguette….very French…….oui?

The Psi Phi Society has nothing to do with science fiction or the channel on cable (SyFy)……it is just a friendly (mostly) discussion group that meets a couple times a year.

My Sunday begins and I would like to talk about the meeting of the Psi Phi Society…..we have our get together at a local steak house and hold our discussions and debates.

After our meal we settle in with a cocktail and decide what the topic will be for the evening…..the group is me and another professor, a preacher, a scientist (chemist), a nurse, a contractor and a local artist.

As you would imagine with a diverse group there would be diverse opinions on what the discuss….after about an hour of debate my fellow professor, a historian, brought up a topic that we all found interesting….what race were the Greeks and Romans?  (To be honest she picked up the check for all of us as a bribe to discuss her topic)

She brought up a paper that she had read recently on this subject…..to be on equal footing we asked the owner of the steakhouse (a friend) if he would print out the paper so that we could read it and then debate…..

Recent films about ancient Greece such as Troy, Helen of Troy, and 300, have used actors who are of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic ancestry (e.g. Brad Pitt, Gerard Butler). Recent films about ancient Rome, such as Gladiator and HBO’s series Rome, have done the same (e.g. Russell Crowe). Were the directors right, from an historical point of view? Were the ancient Greeks and Romans of North European stock?

Most classical historians today are silent on the subject. For example, Paul Cartledge, a professor of Greek culture at Cambridge, writes about his specialty, Sparta, for educated but non-academic readers, yet nowhere that I can find does he discuss the racial origins of the Spartans. Some years ago I asked several classics professors about the race of the ancient Greeks only to be met with shrugs that suggested that no one knew, and that it was not something worth looking into. Today, an interest in the race of the ancients seems to be taken as an unhealthy sign, and any evidence of their Nordic origins discounted for fear it might give rise to dangerous sentiments.

Source: What Race Were the Greeks and Romans? – The Unz Review

The discussion went into the late evening.

Me?

I came down on the side that the Greeks were of Minoan descent because they were great seafaring people and opened up new lands for colonies and settlements….thus Romans were descendants of these people as well…therefore olive skin with dark hair.

The evening ended when I got a call from a friend in Lebanon and had to cut my evening short.

We did decide to have another meeting next month…..

If you read the paper then….what do you think?

Settling in for a good a restful day and in prep for Monday and a new week……after all it is Father’s day….I hope everyone enjoys their special day……plus the race should be ending shortly…..Peace Out……chuq

Christmas Eve Post–2016

It is Christmas Eve and I would like to share the historic and archaeologic finds of this past year…..gifts to extend our knowledge of our ancestors.

We’ve learned quite a bit about the past in the past 12 months. Heritage Daily rounds up the top archaeological discoveries of 2016, from an ancient Greek city to a shrine dedicated to a Viking king:

  1. A well-preserved Bronze Age settlement of wooden homes on stilts in England
  2. The ancient Greek city of Vlochós, which hit its peak around 2,400 years ago
  3. A 1,600-year-old shipwreck in Caesarea, Israel
  4. A lost city first established 5,000 years ago in Iraq
  5. An Iron Age monument built 2,500 years ago in Britain
  6. A shrine to a Viking saint-king in Norway
  7. Structures in a French cave likely made by Neanderthals 176,500 years ago

Click for the full list, which includes the mummy of an Egyptian queen.

Some great finds but it does not include some far more reaching discoveries….after years of speculation it is now confirmed….some dinosaurs had feathers.

Researchers were perusing an amber market in Myanmar when they stumbled across a truly extraordinary specimen, National Geographic reports. Trapped inside a golden piece of amber—already partially shaped to be sold as jewelry—was a fully feathered section of a dinosaur’s tail. According to the Los Angeles Times, the person selling the amber thought it was some kind of plant. While scientists have found evidence of feathered dinosaurs, not to mention feathered prehistoric birds, this piece of amber is the first time feathers have been found perfectly preserved and attached to what is unmistakably a dinosaur. The find was published Thursday in Current Biology.

The tail section is believed to belong to a young, sparrow-sized coelurosaur that lived 99 million years ago. Researchers know the tail belongs to a dinosaur because of its articulated vertebrae; birds have vertebrae that are fused together. And because of the way the features are structured, researchers believe they were useless for flight. It remains unclear exactly what purpose the feathers served, though researchers theorize dinosaurs may have used them for camouflage, regulating their body heat, or signaling to other animals. Now that researchers can see how feathers actually appeared on a dinosaur’s body, they hope to learn how they evolved for flight in modern-day birds. They also believe that, given access to Myanmar’s amber mines, they may one day find a whole preserved dinosaur.

Finally another find of our first ancestors…..Lucy and the bunch…..

Famous footprints of nearly 3.7-million-year-old hominids, found in 1976 at Tanzania’s Laetoli site, now have sizable new neighbors.

While excavating small pits in 2015 to evaluate the impact of a proposed field museum at Laetoli, researchers uncovered comparably ancient hominid footprints about 150 meters from the original discoveries. The new finds reveal a vast range of body sizes for ancient members of the human evolutionary family, reports an international team led by archaeologists Fidelis Masao and Elgidius Ichumbaki, both of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Source: New footprint finds suggest range of body sizes for Lucy’s species | Science News

Some great finds to extend our knowledge of our ancestors……

Go now and start enjoying your Christmas break from school or work or just life…..

I thank everyone for their loyalty and their comments it has been a good year…..so….Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays (whichever you prefer)…..

Peace!  Out!

Don’t Be A Philistine

Sunday so why not something sort of religious…..the Bible goes on and on about those darn pesky Philistines….Goliath and the boys…..the problem is that there has been little evidence that they actually existed…..some even thought they may be figment of someone’s imagination…..

When I was in college and studying Middle East I was fascinated by the early history of the region….and consumed all I could on the subject (I shall write about this a little later).

In the past there have been a few pieces of pottery but no actual physical evidence……well that has been put to bed…..

Harvard University archaeologist Lawrence Stager has led the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon since 1985, clocking more than 30 years of excavations in a 150-acre site in the ancient seaport 35 miles south of Tel Aviv, reports the Harvard Gazette. Now, a major find related to the little-known Philistines, some of the Hebrew Bible’s “most notorious villains,” as National Geographic puts it, with Goliath and Delilah (of David and Samson infamy, respectively) among their ranks. To unlock the mysteries of the Philistines, archaeologists needed to find bodies, not just artifacts, but until now human remains have been elusive. “Archaeologists who study the Philistines began to joke that they were buried at sea like the Vikings—that’s why you couldn’t find them,” one archaeologist tells National Geographic. Sunday brought the news that the expedition has for three years been excavating the first Philistine cemetery to be found.

From the time the Ashkelon expedition team first discovered a human tooth in 2013 until this week, when the year’s final expedition came to a close, archaeologists have counted at least 145 sets of human remains in several burial rooms, reports the BBC. Most are buried without any objects or ornamentation, though some perfume, food, jewelry, and weapons were unearthed, and the small number of children and infants buried were found covered in a “blanket” of broken pottery. DNA analysis and carbon dating will hopefully shed light on some long-running mysteries about the Philistines’ origins and whether they have a connection to the mysterious Sea Peoples who tore across the Mediterranean in the 13th and 12th centuries BC; the remains date to the 11th to 8th centuries. “So much of what we know about the Philistines is told by their enemies,” says the expedition’s co-director. “We’ll really be able to tell their story by the things they left behind for us.” (Check out where these Philistine pottery shards were discovered.)

I have been doing research on the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon and the event we call the Exodus…..all of which I shall share as soon as the research is done and I compile my findings…..

Have a great day….I shall return to normal tomorrow….peace out…..