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Sherlock

Israeli archaeologists unearth Islamic-period fortress


Xinhuanet.com
Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:07 UTC
Israeli archaeologists announced Tuesday they have discovered the remains of an early Islamic fortress and Roman-style bathhouse at a dig along the country's southern Mediterranean coastline.

The finds uncovered at the Yavneh-Yam promontory apparently served as part of a string of fortifications against Crusaders invaders, Prof. Moshe Fischer of the Department and the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University told Xinhua.

Both the fortress and the bathhouse are from the Early Islamic period (8th-12th centuries CE) and were part of the Islamic defensive system against the crusaders that had taken Jerusalem and the port city of Jaffa, Fischer said.

Yavneh-Yam was an important port town during the early Islamic period and it served as a port for inland settlements almost without interruption between the Bronze Age (mid-2nd millennium BCE) and the Middle Ages.
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Sherlock

Pictish beast intrigues Highland archaeologists

Steven McKenzie
BBC.co.uk
Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:59 UTC
A Pictish symbol stone built into the wall of a Highland farm building has been recorded by archaeologists. The markings show a beast, crescent, comb and mirror.

Image
© Andrew Dowsett
Archaeologist Cait McCullagh said it was a mystery how it had taken until this year for the stone to be officially recorded. She said it also suggested that more Pictish stones have still to be documented on the Black Isle where the beast was recorded.

Ms McCullagh, the co-founder and director of Archaeology for Communities in the Highlands (Arch), said the symbol stones probably dated from the 5th to 7th centuries AD. She said it was unusual to find such carvings on the north side of the Moray Firth.
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Sherlock

Mausoleum of Ottoman conqueror found at Perperikon


The Sofia Echo
Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:54 UTC
Archaeologists working at Bulgaria's ancient sacred site of Perperikon have found a mausoleum, with a sarcophagus inside containing a human skeleton believed to be that of a 14th century Ottoman conqueror, Bulgarian National Radio reported.

Image
© Tsvetelina Nikolaeva
The building is oval, with a diameter of eight metres. The skeleton was found to have been laid out in accordance with Muslim custom, the report said. The remains are said to be those of Izrail, who in the 14th century led to a force of 300 soldiers to the site, then one of the most powerful fortresses in Bulgaria's Rhodope Mountains. Dozens of silver coins from the Ottoman era were found next to the mausoleum.
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Info

US: Confederate Flying Machine Will Rise Again at Auction

Jeremy Hsu
LiveScience
Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:35 UTC
Flying Machine Designs
© RR Auction
While Rebel and Union soldiers still fought it out with bayonets and cannons, a Confederate designer had the foresight to imagine flying machines attacking Northern armies. He couldn't implement his vision during the war, and the plans disappeared into history, until resurfacing at a rare book dealer's shop 150 years later. Now those rediscovered designs have found their way to the auction block, providing a glimpse at how Victorian-era technology could have beat the Wright Brothers to the punch.

The papers of R. Finley Hunt, a dentist with a passion for flight, describe scenarios where flying machines bombed Federal troops across Civil War battlefields. Hunt's papers are set to go up for sale at the Space and Aviation Artifacts auction during the week of Sept. 15-22, giving one lucky collector a chance to own a piece of an alternate technological history that never came to pass.

"It's incredible for someone who loves early aviation, because it poses the great question of 'What if?'" said Bobby Livingston, vice president of sales and marketing with RR Auction. "What if planes had appeared above the wilderness when [Union general Ulysses S.] Grant began his campaign in the Shenandoah Valley?"
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Human-Neanderthal Mating Was Rare: Study


The Local
Tue, 13 Sep 2011 04:17 UTC
Human-neanderthal mating
© State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt
Scientists have shown that modern humans have some traces of genes from Neanderthals, but a study out on Monday suggests that any breeding between the two was most likely a rare event.

The new computational model, based on DNA samples from modern humans in France and China, shows successful coupling happened at a rate of less than two percent.

The research suggests that either inter-species sex was very taboo, or that the hybrid offspring had trouble surviving, according to the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

There may have been "extremely strong barriers to gene flow between the two species because of a very low fitness of human-Neanderthal hybrids, a very strong avoidance of interspecific mating, or a combination," said the study by researchers at the University of Geneva and the University of Berne in Switzerland.

Between two and four percent of the human genome can be linked to the long-extinct Neanderthals and their cavemen relatives.
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Question

US: Arctic Archeological Dig Uncovers Mysterious Disks

Mike Dunham
Anchorage Daily News
Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:58 UTC
Mystery Disk
© Scott ShirarUA Museum of the North fine arts collection manager Mareca Guthrie makes a tracing of the petroglyph-adorned boulder that marks one of the prehistoric house pit at Feniak Lake.

Mysterious disks found at an archeological dig in Northwest Alaska have experts puzzled.

The four small pieces, formed from clay, are round and adorned with markings. Two have neatly centered holes. They may be 1,000 years old and, at the moment, what they were used for is anyone's guess.

The existence of similarly-decorated boulders at old village sites in Noatak National Preserve was first recorded by archeologists in the 1960s. But the sites remained unstudied until last summer when Scott Shirar, a research archeologist at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, took an expedition for a closer look at two locations.

Making small-scale excavations, they came upon the disks.

"The first one looks like a little stone that had some scratch marks on it," said Shirar. "We got really excited when we found the second one with the drilled hole and the more complicated etchings on it. That's when we realized we had something unique.

"We only opened up a really small amount of ground at the site, so the fact that we found four of these artifacts indicates there are probably more and that something really significant (was) happening."
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Card - VISA

Debt Came Before Money: An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber

Philip Pilkington
Naked Capitalism
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:48 UTC
Image
Ancient Mesopotamian Coin
David Graeber currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' which is available from Amazon.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.

Philip Pilkington: Let's begin. Most economists claim that money was invented to replace the barter system. But you've found something quite different, am I correct?

David Graeber: Yes there's a standard story we're all taught, a 'once upon a time' - it's a fairy tale.

It really deserves no other introduction: according to this theory all transactions were by barter. "Tell you what, I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow." Or three arrow-heads for that beaver pelt or what-have-you. This created inconveniences, because maybe your neighbor doesn't need chickens right now, so you have to invent money.

The story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it's the founding myth of economics. Now, I'm an anthropologist and we anthropologists have long known this is a myth simply because if there were places where everyday transactions took the form of: "I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow," we'd have found one or two by now. After all people have been looking since 1776, when the Wealth of Nations first came out. But if you think about it for just a second, it's hardly surprising that we haven't found anything.
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Sherlock

Bulgarian Archaeology Finds Said to Rewrite History of Black Sea Sailing


Novinite.com
Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:36 UTC
Massive ancient stone anchors were found by divers participating in an archaeological expedition near the southern Bulgarian Black Sea town of Sozopol.

Image
© BNGESThe 200-kg beautifully ornamented anchors have two holes in them – one for the anchor rope and another one for a wooden stick.
The expedition, led by deputy director of Bulgaria's National Historical Museum Dr Ivan Hristov, found the precious artifacts west of the Sts. Cyricus and Julitta island.

The 200-kg beautifully ornamented anchors have two holes in them - one for the anchor rope and another one for a wooden stick. They were used for 150-200-ton ships that transported mainly wheat, but also dried and salted fish, skins, timber and metals from what now is Bulgaria's coast.
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Sherlock

1,400-Year-Old Funeral Chamber Found in Mexico


The Fort Meade Leader
Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:22 UTC
A 1,400-year-old funeral chamber was found by chance in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, authorities said.

The chamber, regarded as an elite burial place and dating between A.D. 600 and A.D. 900, was found by locals in the village of Chilacachapa, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said late Wednesday.

Locals intended to bring down a dry stone wall that risked collapse when they came upon the tomb. Under the stones, they found sand and then a stone slab, and they alerted INAH officials. Archaeologists then reviewed the site and consolidated the finding.

"After looking through what was inside layer by layer, we came to the conclusion that the skeleton or skeletons of individuals that were put inside the tomb, perhaps that of a ruler, were taken out six centuries ago, before the Spaniards arrived," an INAH statement said.

Archaeologists noted that the chamber was built by the Chontal ethnic group. It ends in a vault.

Archaeologist Edgar Pineda noted that it was probably linked to a building on the surface, most likely at the center of a former city.
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Sherlock

US: Researchers Find Ancient Artifacts in Alaska

Theresa Bakker
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Wed, 07 Sep 2011 06:00 UTC
Image
© Scott ShirarResearch archaeologist Scott Shirar holds one of the clay disks found during the excavation at Feniak Lake.
Archaeologist Scott Shirar expected to find boulders adorned with petroglyphs during his expedition to explore the previously discovered remains of three prehistoric lakefront dwellings in Northwest Alaska's Noatak National Preserve this summer.

When he and members of his team began small-scale excavations at two of the sites, they made a new discovery: four decorated clay disks that appear to be the first of their kind found in Alaska.

"The first one looks like a little stone that had some scratch marks on it," said Shirar, a research archaeologist at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. "We got really excited when we found the second one with the drilled hole and the more complicated etchings on it. That's when we realized we had something unique."

After sharing information with colleagues and looking up examples in the archaeological record, Shirar said the disks appear to be a new artifact type for Alaska. "We only opened up a really small amount of ground at the site, so the fact that we found four of these artifacts indicates there are probably more and that something really significant is happening."
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