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Kazakhstan to rebury ancient warlord, fearing 'curse'


RIA Novosti
Fri, 28 Jun 2013 15:17 UTC
Buried Treasure
© RIA Novosti/Dmitriy KorobeinikovJewelry found in the burial mound of the first “Golden Man” in 1970.
Moscow - Ever heard about the curse of the pharaohs? Well, how about the curse of a 2,500-year-old chief of a nomadic Scythian tribe that brings about floods, droughts, livestock decimation and high atmospheric pressure?

Though the curse of the pharaohs has repeatedly been debunked as myth, the Scythian curse is very real, say locals in a remote area of eastern Kazakhstan where the chieftain's remains were discovered - and where they will be reinterred this weekend to appease his spirit, to the chagrin of archeologists.

In 2003, an archeological expedition dug up a burial mound in the Shiliktinskaya Valley to find a Golden Man - a presumed leader of the Saka tribe, a branch of the Scythian nomads that populated Central Asia and southern Siberia in the 1st millennium BC.

The pagan Saka fought the ancient Persians and Indians, and grew rich through trading across the great steppes of Central Asia. Some of their wealth ended up in the tombs of their chieftains, who were buried wearing jewelry and gold-plated armor - like the man in the Shiliktinskaya mound, the third such find in Kazakhstan since 1970.
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The death of gender-neutral clothing: New book details the history of when blue and pink became gender synonymous


Mail Online
Sat, 29 Jun 2013 14:05 UTC
Pink & blue
Gender in America: University of Maryland Professor Jo B. Paoletti has been studying the meaning of children's clothing for 30 years
It's easy to spot the newborn girls from the newborn boys in any hospital nursery - the pink and blue blankets are a dead giveaway. But it wasn't until rather recently that those two colors were relegated to the sexes.

Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland, has studied the meaning of children's clothing for 30 years. Later this year she will release her latest study of children's clothing, a book called Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America.

In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Paoletti says: 'It's really a story of what happened to neutral clothing.'

It was only in the 1940s when children's clothing began to change, and become specific to gender. Gender-neutral clothing had always been the norm with boys wearing the same crisp white dresses as girls until age 6 or 7.

'What was once a matter of practicality - you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached - became a matter of "Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they'll grow perverted,"' Paoletti says.

While pink and blue and other pastel colors were introduced as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, it wasn't until just before World War I that they had any gender specificity. And not until much later that they were set in stone like today. Paoletti, says that it easily could have gone the other way - with pink being for boys, and blue for girls.
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Briefcase

Germany can keep Eichmann records secret, court rules


The Guardian
Fri, 28 Jun 2013 15:42 UTC
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© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBAdolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem.
Attempt to prove West Germany knew the senior Nazi was in Argentina in the 1950s frustrated by ruling.

Germany's foreign intelligence agency can keep secret some of its records on Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi known as the architect of the Holocaust, a court ruled on Thursday.

The federal administrative court ruled that the intelligence agency was within its rights to black out passages from the files sought by a journalist attempting to shed light on whether West German authorities knew in the 1950s where Eichmann had fled after the second world war.

Thursday's ruling followed a decision last year in which the court said the Federal Intelligence Service had to release some files it had previously kept secret.

Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 and brought him to Jerusalem for trial. Eichmann, who helped organise the extermination of Europe's Jews as the head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, was found guilty of war crimes, sentenced to death and hanged in 1962.

The mass-circulation Bild daily, whose reporter sued for the files' full release, has reported that West German intelligence knew as early as 1952 that he was in Argentina.
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Cave art reveals ancient view of cosmos

Miriam Kramer
LiveScience
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 13:04 UTC
Cave Art_1
© Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood / Antiquity Publications Ltd.The image drawn in this black charcoal pictograph found in a Tennessee cave is also found on prehistoric, religious artifacts.
Some of the oldest art in the United States maps humanity's place in the cosmos, as aligned with an ancient religion.

A team of scientists has uncovered a series of engravings and drawings strategically placed in open air and within caves by prehistoric groups of Native American settlers that depict their cosmological understanding of the world around them.

"The subject matter of this artwork, what they were drawing pictures of, we knew all along was mythological, cosmological," Jan Simek, an archaeologist at the University of Tennessee said. "They draw pictures of bird men that are important characters in their origin stories and in their hero legends, and so we knew it was a religious thing and because of that, we knew that it potentially referred to this multitiered universe that was the foundation of their cosmology."

Simek and his team studied art from 44 open-air locations and 50 cave sites. The earliest depiction of this kind of cosmological stratification dates to around 6,000 years ago, but most of the art is more recent, from around the 11th to 17th centuries.

The researchers noticed that certain kinds of drawings and engravings only appear in specific areas of the plateau. For instance, open-air spots in high elevations touched by the sun feature "upper world" artistic renderings that include depictions of weather forces, heavenly bodies and characters that can exert influence on humans.
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Sherlock

Amazingly untouched royal tomb found in Peru

Megan Gannon
LiveScience via Yahoo News
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 14:25 UTC
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A rare, undisturbed royal tomb has been unearthed in Peru, revealing the graves of three Wari queens buried alongside gold and silver riches and possible human sacrifices.

Though the surrounding site has been looted many times, this mausoleum has managed to evade grave robbers for hundreds of years, archaeologists say.

Long before the Inca built Machu Picchu, the Wari empire flourished between A.D. 700 and 1000 throughout much of present-day Peru. At a time when Paris had just 25,000 residents, the Wari capital Huari was home to 40,000 people at its height, according to National Geographic, which reported the find.

Despite their reach, the Wari have remained somewhat mysterious, and it is rare for archaeologists to find burials that have not been ravaged by grave robbers. In hauling away treasures, looters destroy archaeological context and information, leaving researchers grasping for answers about how ancient people lived.

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Sherlock

Archaeologists unearth Roman frontier fort and settlement in England


Popular Archaeology
Sun, 16 Jun 2013 09:25 UTC
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Located near the small coastal town of Maryport in northwestern England, remains of the ancient Roman fort of Alauna were first uncovered by amateur archaeologist Joseph Robinson in the late 19th century. Among the finds were an assemblage of no less that 22 stone altars, some bearing inscriptions, that tell a story of successive Roman commanders who commanded this, one of Imperial Rome's northernmost outposts during the height of the Roman Empire's expanse. The altars now grace the nearby Senhouse Museum, which serves as a popular tourist attraction.

Now a team of archaeologists and volunteers have returned to the site where the original stone altars were found to uncover more clues about the layout of the fort and its associated settlement, and about the lives of the military officers and soldiers who manned this remote garrison. Led by Newcastle University's Professor Ian Haynes and site director Tony Wilmott, the archaeologists have been here before.

Says Haynes: "The last two years' excavations focused on the area in which the altars were discovered in 1870.

 This year sees some further work at the 1870 site and the start of a three year project focusing on the place where, in 1880, local bank manager and amateur archaeologist Joseph Robinson uncovered further altars and two possible temples.

 Photographs and other documents from the 1880s indicate that the antiquarian investigation only unearthed part of the site and it is clear that much remains to be discovered." [1]

Additional images
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Prehistoric paintings reveal native Americans' cosmology

Joel N. Shurkin
Inside Science News Service
Tue, 25 Jun 2013 16:19 UTC
Cave Art
© Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood/Antiquity Publications Ltd.This art features a bird holding ceremonial maces and a ceremonial monolithic axe transforming into a human face.
A large, sophisticated civilization that once built one of the largest cities in the world left behind hundreds of works of art, carved or painted on rocks in the open air or deep in caves in the Appalachian Mountains in the Southeastern United States, archaeologists have reported.

That art work, some of it 6,000 years old, tells a unified story, the view the Native Americans had of the universe they lived in, according to archaeologists. It was a layered cosmology, similar to civilizations from ancient Greece to modern religions, full of spirits -- good and evil -- and colors -- dark and light.

The paintings reflected not only where they were painted, but contemplated the layers of their spiritual world, according to Jan Simek of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Simek, along with Nick Herrmann of Mississippi State University, Alan Cresser of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Sarah Sherwood at the University of the South who published their findings in the current issue of the journal Antiquities.

The people are known to archaeologists as the Mississippians or the Mound builders, named for the ceremonial mounds they built across the area, many of which survive to this day.
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Photos could prove Amelia Earhart lived as castaway

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Sat, 22 Jun 2013 04:38 UTC
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© TigharA contact sheet with aerial images of Nikumaroro, the island where Amelia Earhart and her navigator are believed to have survived for a time as castaways.
An array of detailed aerial photos of the remote island where Amelia Earhart may have survived for a time as a castaway, has resurfaced in a New Zealand museum archive, raising hopes for new photographic evidence about the fate of the legendary aviator.

Found by Matthew O'Sullivan, keeper of photographs at the New Zealand Air Force Museum in Christchurch, the images lay forgotten in an unlabeled tin box in the museum's archives.

The box contained five sheets of contact prints -- for a total of 45 photos, complete with negatives -- and a slip of paper with the words "Gardner Island."

Now called Nikumaroro, the uninhabited tropical atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati is believed to be Earhart final resting place by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

The legendary aviator disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.
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Arrow Down

Site of earliest known urban warfare threatened by Syrian war

Owen Jarus
LiveScience
Mon, 24 Jun 2013 07:09 UTC
Hamoukar
© Courtesy University of Chicago News Office, released in 2005An aerial photograph of part of Hamoukar that dates back to the fourth millennium B.C. During this time Hamoukar was attacked and burned, the first known victim of urban warfare. Today the site is threatened by the effects of a modern-day war.
An ancient city in Syria, which was the site of the earliest known case of urban warfare, now finds itself threatened by the effects of a modern-day war.

Around 5,500 years ago, before writing was even invented, the people of an ancient city called Hamoukar, located in modern-day Syria, were subjected to the horrors of urban warfare, the earliest case of this style of combat that scholars know about.

They were assaulted by a force armed with slingshots and clay balls. The attackers, possibly from a city named Uruk and perhaps motivated by Hamoukar's access to copper, succeeded in taking the city, destroying part of it through fire.

"The attack must have been swift and intense. Buildings collapsed, burning out of control, burying everything in them under vast piles of rubble," Clemens Reichel, one of the team leaders of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's Hamoukar Expedition, said in a 2007 University of Chicago news story.

Today, more than 5 millennia after the battle, the horrors of urban warfare are being revisited on the modern-day people of Syria. But rather than slingshots, they face automatic gunfire, helicopter gunships and, as Western intelligence agencies have now verified, chemical weapons.

The conflict has killed more than 60,000 people and resulted in more than a million refugees being forced to flee the country. It has also damaged and otherwise put in peril numerous historical sites, including Hamoukar.
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Document

New signs of language surface in mystery Voynich text

Lisa Grossman
New Scientist
Fri, 21 Jun 2013 22:00 UTC
Voynich Text_2
© Beinecke RareBook and Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityBeautiful as well as cryptic.
A mysterious and beautiful 15th-century text that some researchers have recently deemed to be gibberish may not be a hoax after all. A new study suggests the text shares quantifiable features with genuine language, and so may contain a coded message.

That verdict emerges from a statistical technique that puts a figure on the information content of elements in a text or code, even if their meaning is unknown. The technique could also be used to determine whether there is meaning in genomes, possible messages from aliens or even the signals between neurons in the brain.

The Voynich manuscript has baffled and captivated researchers since book dealer Wilfred Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. It contains illustrations of naked nymphs, unidentifiable plants, astrological diagrams and pages and pages of text in an unidentified alphabet.

Although the patterns of word lengths and symbol combinations in the text are similar to those in real languages, several recent studies have suggested that the book was a clever 15th-century hoax designed to dupe Renaissance book collectors, and that the words have no meaning. One study showed that techniques known to 16th-century cryptographers would have allowed someone to create these patterns using a nonsense set of characters. Another study concluded that the statistical properties of the script are consistent with gibberish.
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