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Archaeologists launched a bid to uncover the site one of the most famous battles in Scottish history: Battle of Bannockburn


Telegraph.co.uk
Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:32 UTC
Image
Archaeologists launched a bid to uncover the site one of the most famous battles in Scottish history -- in the grounds of a police headquarters.

Central Scotland Police's headquarters at Randolphfield, Stirling, is named after Sir Thomas Randolph, one of the commanders of Robert the Bruce's army at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

The first major skirmish of the two-day battle occurred on Sunday 23 June when Randolph routed around 300 English cavalry, who were attempting to relieve Stirling Castle.

A pair of small standing stones near the entrance to the current police headquarters is believed to mark the site of the fighting, but until now there has been no other physical evidence.

Stirling Council archaeologist Murray Cook said ground-penetrating radar would be used to locate the Roman road on which King Edward II's army marched on Stirling and the famous spike-filled pits that played a crucial role in the outcome.
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Sherlock

U.S. said to cover up Polish massacre


Associated Press
Sat, 15 Sep 2012 17:27 UTC
Image
© Associated Press
American and British POWs held by German soldiers look over a mass grave in 1943 where slain Polish military officers were buried near Smolensk, Russia.
The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943, they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.

Documents released last week lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.

Newly declassified documents

The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the U.S. National Archives released and is putting online. Democratic Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who helped lead a recent push for the release of the documents, called the effort's success Monday a "momentous occasion" in an attempt to "make history whole."

Historians who saw the material days before the official release describe it as important. The most dramatic revelation so far is the evidence of the secret codes sent by the two American POWs - something historians were unaware of and which adds to evidence that the Roosevelt administration knew of the Soviet atrocity relatively early on.
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Question

New Coptic Papyrus Fragment Has Jesus Referring to His Wife

Laurie Goodstein
The New York Times
Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:09 UTC
Papyrus fragment
© Karen L. King
Cambridge, Mass. - A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: "Jesus said to them, 'My wife ...'"

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, "she will be able to be my disciple."

The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at an international meeting of Coptic scholars by the historian Karen L. King, who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation's oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has asked to remain anonymous. Until Tuesday, Dr. King had shown the fragment to only a small circle of experts in papyrology and Coptic linguistics, who concluded that it is most likely not a forgery. But she and her collaborators say they are eager for more scholars to weigh in and perhaps upend their conclusions.
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Info

First Ever Etruscan Pyramids Found in Italy

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:49 UTC
Subterranean Pyramids
© David George
The subterranean pyramids found in Orvieto, Italy could offer a unique insight into the mysterious Etruscan culture. Stairs carved into the wall can be seen at left.
The first ever Etruscan pyramids have been located underneath a wine cellar in the city of Orvieto in central Italy, according to a team of U.S. and Italian archaeologists.

Carved into the rock of the tufa plateau --a sedimentary area that is a result of volcanic activity -- on which the city stands, the subterranean structures were largely filled. Only the top-most modern layer was visible.

"Within this upper section, which had been modified in modern times and was used as a wine cellar, we noticed a series of ancient stairs carved into the wall. They were clearly of Etruscan construction," David B. George of the Department of Classics at Saint Anselm, told Discovery News.

As they started digging, George and co-director of the excavation Claudio Bizzarri of the Parco Archeologico Ambientale dell'Orvietano noted that the cave's walls were tapered up in a pyramidal fashion. Intriguingly, a series of tunnels, again of Etruscan construction, ran underneath the wine cellar hinting to the possibility of deeper undiscovered structures below.

After going through a mid-20th century floor, George and Bizzarri reached a medieval floor. Immediately beneath this floor, they found a layer of fill that contained various artifacts such as Attic red figure pottery from the middle of the 5th Century B.C., 6th and 5th century B.C. Etruscan pottery with inscriptions as well as various objects that dated to before 1000 B.C.
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Sherlock

Archaeologists unearth 1,500-year-old Jewish town in southern Israel

Matti Friedman
Times of Israel
Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:58 UTC
Israeli archaeologists digging on the route of a planned highway have found new ruins from a 1,500-year-old Jewish town, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Sunday.

The remains of two Jewish ritual baths and two public buildings were uncovered in a salvage dig ahead of the paving of a new section of Israel's Highway 6, a north-south toll road eventually slated to run much of the length of the country.

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Info

Enormous Roman Mosaic Found Under Farmer's Field

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:13 UTC
Roman Mosaic
© University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Each section of the mosaic features its own geometric design.
A giant poolside mosaic featuring intricate geometric patterns has been unearthed in southern Turkey, revealing the far-reaching influence of the Roman Empire at its peak.

The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation. The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) - the size of a modest family home.

"To be honest, I was completely bowled over that the mosaic is that big," Hoff told LiveScience. [See Photos of the Roman Mosaic]

The first hint that something stunning lay underground in southern Turkey came in 2002, when Purdue University classics professor Nick Rauh walked through a freshly-plowed farmer's field near the ancient city of Antiochia ad Cragum. The plow had churned up bits of mosaic tile, Hoff said. Rauh consulted other archaeologists, including experts at the local museum in Alanya, Turkey. The museum did not have funds to excavate more than a sliver of the mosaic, so archaeologists left the site alone.

Last year, with a new archaeological permit for the site in hand, museum archaeologists invited Hoff and his team to complete the dig.
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Palette

Ice Age Art - Trove of early ceramics shows the mindset of ancient humans: More metaphor, less blood

Allana Mitchell
Star Tribune
Sat, 15 Sep 2012 20:13 UTC
We know them best for their stone tools and intrepid mammoth hunting. But new discoveries in Croatia suggest that ice age humans made evocative ceramic art far more regularly than once believed. Thirty-six fragments of fired clay, excavated in the Vela Spila cave on an island off the Adriatic coast, make up the second-largest collection found so far of the earliest human experiments with ceramic art. They are 15,000 to 17,500 years old -- the first European evidence of ceramic art after the ice sheets stopped spreading.
Image
© Rebecca Farbstein
An archaeologist at the University of Cambridge worked in a trench at a cave where ancient ceramics were found in Croatia. The find reinforced the idea that ceramic work was invented for art rather than utility.
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Info

'Lost' City of Atlantis: Fact & Fable

Benjamin Radford
LiveScience
Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:49 UTC
Atlantis
© LiveScience
A 1669 map by Athanasius Kircher put Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The map is oriented with south at the top.
Atlantis is a legendary "lost" island subcontinent often idealized as an advanced, utopian society holding wisdom that could bring world peace. The idea of Atlantis has captivated dreamers, occultists, and New Agers for generations.

In the 1800s, mystic Madame Blavatsky claimed that she learned about Atlantis from Tibetan gurus; a century later, psychic Edgar Cayce claimed that Atlantis (which he described as an ancient, highly evolved civilization powered by crystals) would be discovered by 1969.

In the 1980s, New Age mystic J.Z. Knight claimed that she learned about Atlantis from Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit who speaks through her. Thousands of books, magazines and websites are devoted to Atlantis, and it remains a popular topic.
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Grey Alien

TV Show Says Aliens Visited Easter Island

Benjamin Radford
Discovery News
Sat, 15 Sep 2012 07:19 UTC
Moai
© Corbis
A British television series called Wild Pacific is resurrecting the claim that the huge statues on Easter Island were created (or influenced) by extraterrestrials.

According to one news story, the show asks,"Did extraterrestrials visit Earth, as... the TV series Wild Pacific speculates? Who built the giant stone Moai of Easter Island that's been called 'a solemn reminder of a fallen alien civilization?' These and other questions... can never be fully answered, states Wild Pacific narrator Mike Rowe."

The idea that extraterrestrials visited ancient civilizations has been around for decades, a theory most prominently promoted by Erich von Daniken, author of the best-selling classic work of pseudoscience Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past.

Von Daniken believes, for example, that ancient Egyptians had neither the intelligence nor the tools to create the pyramids at Giza -- thus they must have been made by aliens. Similar claims have been made about the Mayan pyramids in Central America and the giant drawings in the Nazca desert of Peru; archaeologists and other scientists have long since discredited Von Daniken's theories.

The Wild Pacific program makes statements such as that "the great stone origins on Easter Island [have] vexed experts for decades: Who built these giant stone statues and how did they get there on this remote Pacific Island?"
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Pharoah

Mystery of King Tut's Death Solved?

Matthew Rosenbaum
ABC News
Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:28 UTC
Image
© Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
The mystery of King Tut's death might finally be solved, according to one scientist who argues that the secret to the young Pharaohs demise is hidden in plain sight.

Dr. Hutan Ashrafian, a lecturer and surgeon at the Imperial College London, says the key to the mystery lies in the art of the time, which depicted King Tut with highly feminine features, including enlarged breasts.

The enlarged breasts, he argues, are indicative of a condition known as gynecomastia, which, when added to a host of historical and familial evidence, indicates that Tutankhamun might have suffered and eventually died from temporal lobe epilepsy.

Ashrafian says the first clue is in the relatively early deaths of other rulers who were directly related to Tutankhamun.

"For all of them to die sequentially at younger ages is a sign of a genetic inheritance of some sort," Ashrafian said, adding "you could argue one of them died in battle, one of them was poisoned but none of them did die in battle. They could have been poisoned, of course, but it's very odd for sequential pharaohs who were aware that they could have been killed to be killed at such a young age."
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