Secret HistoryS


Wine

Stone me! Archaeologists' new theory on ancient north Pembrokeshire site


Western Telegraph
Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:47 UTC
Rare finds have prompted archaeologists to rewrite the history of an ancient north Pembrokeshire stone.

The Trefael Stone, a scheduled ancient monument in a Nevern field, was originally thought to be an ancient standing stone, but is actually the capstone of a 5,500-year-old tomb, according to new research from a Bristol University archaeologist.

Dr George Nash and colleagues' excavations at the site indicate that the 1.2m high stone once covered a small burial chamber, probably a portal dolmen, Wales' earliest Neolithic burial-ritual monument type.
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Attention

Native American Burial Ground Discovered

Mike McKnight
WOWT Channel 6 News
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
 Dirt Moving Uncovers Remains

US, Nebraska - A Native American burial ground has been uncovered during dirt moving for a highway project. Skeletal remains were not found on the construction site but farmland leased for dirt.

District engineer Tim Weander told Channel Six News Fact Finders that bones were discovered in Cass County not far from the highway 75 reconstruction. The state historical society and Nebraska commission on Indian affairs were notified.

The historical society staff removed the remains and is attempting to determine the tribe. A historical society expert told Channel Six News Fact Finders the bone fragments are very old and may predate Europeans coming to America. He said it appears the remains are of about four or five Native Americans.

The Director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs Judi M. Gaiashkibos provided more information of the remains discovery.
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Info

Older Than Giza - Ancient Burial Chamber Revealed

Colin Barras
NewScientist
Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:25 UTC
Ancient Grave
© Centre for Digital Documentation and Visualisation
Even 5000 years ago, Britons were an understated bunch. About 250 years before work began on Egypt's ostentatious Great Pyramid of Giza, the early settlers of Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland, were building impressive stone chambers of their own - and burying them under mounds of dirt. Now, intensive laser scanning makes it possible to virtually peel away the mud, revealing one of those chambers in all its glory.

This is Maeshowe, a 3.8-metre-tall tomb chamber reached via a narrow passage 11 metres long. Maeshowe is one of several Neolithic monuments that comprise the Orkney UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was scanned by a team from the Glasgow School of Art's Digital Design Studio and the government agency Historic Scotland. The team is scanning 10 World Heritage Sites, five of which are in Scotland, for the Scottish Ten project. "We scanned Mount Rushmore [National Memorial] in the US in 2010," says Lyn Wilson of Historic Scotland.

All the sites are tourist attractions, which can make conserving them a challenge. The scans, accurate to within 6 millimetres, will form an invaluable record to monitor future wear and tear.

Not all damage made by visitors is unwelcome, though. A thousand years ago, Orkney was under Norwegian rule and Maeshowe was plundered. The robbers left behind the largest collection of runes known outside Scandinavia, carved into the stone. These, too, have been laser-scanned in sub-millimetre detail. That's pretty impressive for 1000-year-old graffiti
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Info

How European Farmers Spread Agriculture Across Continent

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:00 UTC
Ancient Grave
© Göran BurenhultOsteologists Ove and Evy Persson during the excavation of the grave at Ajvide, Gotland, Sweden, in 1983. The skeleton belongs to a young female in her 20s, and can be dated to around 4,700 years ago.
An analysis of 5,000-year-old genetic material from preserved human remains found in Sweden suggests that people moving from southern to northern Europe spread agriculture across that continent long ago.

In addition to agricultural know-how, the intrepid farmers brought their genes: They interbred with hunter-gatherer communities to create modern humans living in Europe today.

"Genetic variation of today's Europeans was strongly affected by immigrant Stone Age farmers, though a number of hunter-gatherer genes remain," study researcher Anders Götherström, of Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a statement.

The results of this study, to be published in the April 27 issue of the journal Science, match up well with previous archeological evidence of farming in Europe.
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Palette

Painting of Queen Elizabeth I unveils Royals' Reptilian Secret?


Daily Mail, UK
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:33 UTC
Image
Revealed once more: The image of a snake has appeared in a 16th century portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. A faint outline of the coils can be seen superimposed on her hand, while the serpent's body - seen as dark shading - follows the line of the flowers she is holding and also passes beneath her fingers
As many a courtier fatally found out, it was never a good idea to displease the Virgin Queen.

Which may explain why an artist carried out some serious alterations to his first draft portrait of Elizabeth I back in the 16th century.

Where he had drawn the Queen clutching a serpent, the painter had second thoughts and substituted a much more feminine bunch of roses.

The revisions would have remained a mystery had it not been for the ravages of time.

For yesterday, the National Portrait Gallery revealed how the image of the coiled snake had re-appeared.

Deterioration over the centuries has meant the serpent depicted in the Tudor monarch's fingers in the original version has revealed itself once more, with its outline now visible on the surface.

The portrait was created by an unknown artist in the 1580s or early 1590s.

The image has not been on display at the London gallery since 1921 but it will form part of an exhibition titled Concealed and Revealed: The Changing Faces of Elizabeth I, from March 13 to September 26.
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Newspaper

JFK Assassination: Mark Lane Talks On The 'Reliable' Witness Mrs Helen Markham Recorded In 1964


Youtube
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 20:46 UTC

Mark Lane Talks On The "Reliable " Witness Mrs Helen Markham Recorded in 1964 At A Public Debate Into the Findings Of The Warren Commission

Full audio podcast available from here.
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Magic Wand

Fairy Tales of Yore and the Anti-Grimm

A.C.
The Economist
Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:58 UTC
fairy tales

What modern mother hasn't cringed at the pink and passive fairy tale princesses served up to her impressionable girl? The Disney versions of Snow White and Cinderella, Belle and Rapunzel are heroines of such vapid foolishness one wonders how they survived into the 21st century. The answer is that they are rooted in a tenacious and remarkably unaltered cultural tradition, the fairy tales first published two centuries ago by the Brothers Grimm.

The fifty iconic tales in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen collection feature a parade of weak, disobedient heroines whose errors draw down harsh punishment, and an equally noteworthy succession of heroic boys. Numerous studies in recent decades have found the 19th century social world they portray so unremittingly sexist that some leading folklorists warn against reading them to children at all.
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Info

Genes Reveal Secrets of Ancient Peruvian Families

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 05:40 UTC
Anicent chullpas
© M. Baca et. al, BMC Genetics, 2012Ancient chullpas, or funeral towers, are yielding insights into ancient Peruvian families.
Genetic analyses of individuals buried in funereal monuments near a volcano in southern Peru have revealed the family relationships and burial traditions of ancient Peruvians that lived before Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas.

The ancient Peruvians buried their dead in "chullpas," structures resembling vertical tombs, which can be up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) high. Researchers hadn't known how the individuals buried within one chullpa were related.

Families were organized into "ayllu," a group of relatives that shared common land and responsibilities. Historians think that men retained the ancestral land, and they traded their sisters for wives, in a sort of "sister exchange."

Ancient genes

In the new study, researchers from the University of Warsaw, in collaboration with Universidad Catolica de Santa Maria, retrieved and analyzed genomic sequences of 41 individuals buried in six chullpas located 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) up the side of the Cora Cora Mountain in southern Peru. Though the site had been looted, the remains were well preserved by the cold and the dryness of the land, and the researchers were able to isolate DNA from the bones and teeth of 27 individuals.

They looked at the nuclear DNA, which is our main genetic code and is inherited from both parents, along with the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome (which is separate from the nuclear genome, and runs the cell's energy factory, the mitochondria); they also analyzed genetic sequences from the Y chromosome, which is inherited from the father and determines that an individual is male.
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Document

Last fragments from 'magical' Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' from 1420 BC found - after century-long search by archaeologists


Daily Mail
Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:05 UTC
The last missing pages from a supposedly 'magical' Book of the Dead from an Egyptian priest, Amenhotep, have been found after a century-long search - in a museum in Queensland.

British Museum Egyptologist Dr John Taylor said he was 'floored' by the discovery of the 100 fragments.

It's the end of a worldwide search by archaeologists for the papyrus scroll - which supposedly contains spells to guide spirits into the afterlife.

Ms Bates said British Museum Curator and world renowned Egyptologist Dr John Taylor had stumbled across a section of the manuscript as part of a Queensland Museum display.

'After spotting the piece Dr Taylor was shown the other 100 plus fragments held in the Museum's stores and was floored by what he had uncovered,' Ms Bates said.

'These unsuspecting papyrus pieces form the missing part of a highly historically valuable 'Book of the Dead' that belonged to the Chief Builder of the temple of Amun, Amenhotep.

'Sections of this precious manuscript have laid scattered across the globe for a hundred years with some of the pieces held safely in the collections of British Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), New York.
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Document

Whitewashing Colonial Past: British Government ordered thousands of files burned or dumped 'far out to sea'

Ian Cobain, Owen Bowcott & Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:09 UTC
Image
© Martin Argles for the GuardianHanslope Park, where the Foreign Office kept a secret archive of colonial papers.
Review finds thousands of papers detailing shameful acts were culled, while others were kept secret illegally

Thousands of documents detailing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of post-independence governments, an official review has concluded.

Those papers that survived the purge were flown discreetly to Britain where they were hidden for 50 years in a secret Foreign Office archive, beyond the reach of historians and members of the public, and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain.

The archive came to light last year when a group of Kenyans detained and allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau rebellion won the right to sue the British government. The Foreign Office promised to release the 8,800 files from 37 former colonies held at the highly-secure government communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire.

The historian appointed to oversee the review and transfer, Tony Badger, master of Clare College, Cambridge, says the discovery of the archive put the Foreign Office in an "embarrassing, scandalous" position. "These documents should have been in the public archives in the 1980s," he said. "It's long overdue." The first of them are made available to the public on Wednesday at the National Archive at Kew, Surrey.

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been "roasted alive"; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Comment:
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
~ George Orwell, 1984

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