Secret HistoryS


Info

Head of a goddess statue discovered


HurriyetDailyNews
Sun, 11 Aug 2013 16:45 UTC
Goddess Statue
© Anadolu AgencyThe head of a mother goddess statue is the first of its kind in Turkey.
The head of an 8,000-year-old statue of a goddess has been found during excavations in İzmir's Yeşilova tumulus.

Associate Professor Zafer Derin said they had found very important pieces during this year's excavations, adding that the four-centimeter head of the statue had a special meaning as it was the first of its kind discovered in Turkey.

Women and fertility were sacred in western Anatolian culture, Derin said, adding that the area was the center of the mother goddess culture. "We have the head of a mother goddess figure. We know that worship of mother goddesses was common in this region in the past, but we have found the four-centimeter head of a goddess statue for the first time in Turkey. People used to put this statue in their home to have healthier children. This small piece is a very beautiful one from 6000 B.C."

Derin said the name of Anatolia came from the holiness of the mother goddess, according to the view of some, adding that they had seen the same portrayal in pots found in the region.

He said another significant find unearthed during the Yeşilova excavations was a seal in the shape of a shoe. "People used to carry this seal with them and use it when a signature was necessary."

Derin said the Yeşilova excavations, were currently hosting scientists from Europe and the U.S.
Read More...
Black Magic

What's Buried Next Door to Vancouver Island University?

admin
KevinAnnett.com
Sun, 11 Aug 2013 00:03 UTC
Crimes against Humanity in our own Backyard are Finally Surfacing
I was held in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital when I was a child, for seven years. I was used like a guinea pig in experiments. Lots of Indian kids died in there.
- Joan Morris, Songhees Nation, at a lecture at Malaspina College (VIU) in the spring of 2004

Nanaimo Indian Hospital c 1948
© Unknown
Just south of the VIU campus stands an overgrown piece of land behind stern barbed wire fencing: the site of the former Nanaimo Indian Hospital, run by the United Church of Canada and the federal government for over a half century.

According to Joan Morris and other Indians, this ground holds the remains of children who were killed after grisly medical experiments were conducted there for decades by military doctors.
Read More...
Info

Prehistoric well could solve questions about local indigenous groups

Nicholas Fouriezos
The St. Augustine Record
Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00 UTC
Ancient Well
© Peter WillottCity archaeologist Carl Halbirt looks at an area of one of his digs off May Street on Thursday, where he believes he has uncovered a Timucuan Indian well than is more that 500 years old.
An archaeological discovery made earlier this summer could show that indigenous people in the St. Augustine area once built and used wells before ever being exposed to European influence.

Local archaeologists previously assumed that the Timucuan indians, who settled in the area before the Spanish arrived, received fresh water from "seeps" in nearby embankments.

"We've never found an example like that, that predates the European settlement here," city archaeologist Carl Halbirt said. "It gives us an idea of where the indigenous population possibly obtained their water."

What appears to be a coquina well was discovered on a property near the Francis and Mary Usina Bridge in June, as part of a county ordinance which requires certain properties to be investigated for archaeological deposits before construction.

The excavation site is littered with historical value. Halbirt said the city has extracted more than a ton of shell, mostly oyster shell, and "tens of thousands" of animal bones, primarily from small fish.

"From that evidence, this is going to give us a really good idea of what their subsistence was like during that time period," Halbirt said. "Most of the shell is fish, but we also have deer, turtle, water birds, and I think we have alligator."
Read More...
Gold Coins

Byzantine coins and gold found in Israel garbage pit

Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery News
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 16:02 UTC
Image
© Pavel Shargo / Institute of Archaeology / Tel Aviv UniversityByzantine gold coin found at the archaeological site of the ancient city of Apollonia-Arsuf
Archaeologists digging at a site north of Tel Aviv have uncovered ancient coins and jewelry in a mysterious garbage dump, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement.

Located near the ancient city of Apollonia-Arsuf, the Byzantine refuse pit is one of many unearthed in the area. But unlike the other garbage dumps, the pit measures more than 100 feet in diameter.

As they dug into it, the archaeologists found a hoard of 400 Byzantine coins, 200 intact Samaritan lamps and gold jewelry amid animal bones, pottery and glass fragments.

Most objects date to the 5th-7th centuries A.D.
Read More...
Gold Coins

Back to Bedlam: Crossrail digging unearths ancient London burial ground

Maev Kennedy
The Guardian
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
Tunnelling project's chief archaeologist says up to 4,000 bodies of plague victims and inmates of Bedlam may be discovered

Every day hordes of London commuters have passed unknowingly over the bodies of thousands of their predecessors, buried a few metres under the roaring traffic and rumbling trains at Liverpool Street, and which are now being exposed for the first time by the huge Crossrail construction project.

The bodies include those of mentally ill patients from Bethlem, the ancient and notorious asylum from which the word Bedlam entered the English language. Bodies that were never claimed by their families - often those of beaten, starved and exploited inmates - would have ended up in the burial ground alongside rich and poor, old and young, victims of plague and war, from across London.

Jay Carver, lead archaeologist on the Crossrail sites - the largest archaeology project in the UK on the largest infrastructure project in Europe - described the site as exceptionally interesting. "Because of its history, we know that this is one of the most diverse burial grounds in London, a real cross section of its people across two centuries. Bone preservation is excellent in the finds we have already made, and we are expecting many important discoveries when we get into the main phase of the excavation."

The trial trenches have already yielded the first treasure from the 40 archaeology sites along the route of Crossrail's tunnelling: a thumbnail-sized golden coin from Venice, pierced so it could be stitched on as expensive decoration on some costly garment - and likely a bad loss when the thread broke and it fell into the gutter some 400 years ago.
Read More...
Crusader

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sun, 14 Jul 2013 18:00 UTC
jesus pilate
'Jesus' before Pontius Pilate: Never happened!
On this show, the SOTT Talk Radio hosts went biblical, but with a strong revisionist bent.

The idea that a man named Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, performer of miracles, betrayed and crucified and declared to be the 'son of god', actually existed during the Roman Empire in the area of modern-day Palestine is the subject of long and often heated debate.

Historians and archeologists are adamant that there is no historical evidence for the existence of such a person, Christians on the other hand, just know in their hearts that Jesus lived and died to take away our sins (or debts). So what's the deal?

The skinny is that, while it isn't exactly widely known (to say the least), there is evidence to suggest that the details of the life of Jesus Christ were in fact pinched from another famous J.C. of the same era. So, seriously, who was on first here?

Have a listen as author and historian Laura Knight-Jadczyk takes us through the evidence that suggests 'Christ' may in fact have been Caesar...

Running Time: 02:27:00

Download: MP3


Comment: Check out part 2 of our discussion about 'Jesus' as Caesar here.

Read More...
Clock

Ancient astronomical calendar discovered in Scotland predates Stonehenge by 6,000 years

David Dickinson
Universe Today
Wed, 07 Aug 2013 13:42 UTC
Moon
© Art ExplosionA wintertime rising gibbous Moon.
A team from the University of Birmingham recently announced an astronomical discovery in Scotland marking the beginnings of recorded time.

Announced last month in the Journal of Internet Archaeology, the Mesolithic monument consists of a series of pits near Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Estimated to date from 8,000 B.C., this 10,000 year old structure would pre-date calendars discovered in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East by over 5,000 years.

But this is no ordinary wall calendar.

Originally unearthed by the National Trust for Scotland in 2004, the site is designated as Warren Field near the town of Crathes. It consists of 12 pits in an arc 54 metres long that seem to correspond with 12 lunar months, plus an added correction to bring the calendar back into sync with the solar year on the date of the winter solstice.

"The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year" said team leader and professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Birmingham Vince Gaffney.

We talked last week about the necessity of timekeeping as cultures moved from a hunter-gatherer to agrarian lifestyle. Such abilities as marking the passage of the lunar cycles or the heliacal rising of the star Sirius gave cultures the edge needed to dominate in their day.
Read More...
Horse

Did ancient Siberians domesticate horses 50,000 years ago?


The Siberian Times
Sun, 04 Aug 2013 13:18 UTC
Image
© Media Centre of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of SciencesExperts aim to discover the horses's coat colour as well as how it related to early man.
The Denisova Cave in the Altai region has given up another riveting secret to modern science, this time equine, say researchers from Novosibirsk.

The mitochondrial genome of a 50,000-year-old horse has been deciphered in the prehistoric bolt-hole where scientists previously discovered the remains of a now-extinct subspecies of humans who coexisted with the Neanderthals.

Experts at the Novosibirsk-based Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Scientists, are uncertain so far whether the horses were hunted for game or represent 'an early attempt at equine domestication'.

If further research establishes it to be the latter, it would pre-date the earliest known domestication of horses, in Kazakhstan, by more than 44,000 years.

The cave is one of the world's most precious sites for research on early man - see our previous stories here. It was famously the site of the discovery of Woman X, whose remains showed her to belong to a subspecies that branched out from Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago.
Read More...
Info

Bulgaria archaeologists find big votive relief of Zeus


FOCUS News Agency
Mon, 05 Aug 2013 02:46 UTC
Zeus Votive
© НИМ
Hisarya - Archaeological team of Dr Ivan Hristov discovered a big votive relief of the ancient Father of Gods and men Zeus close to the archaeological excavations of Bulgaria's National Museum of History at the Kozi Gramadi peak in Severna Gora, close to the village of Starosel.

Director of the National Museum of History, Dr Bozhidar Dimitrov, announced the news for FOCUS News Agency.

"It is bigger than the votive slabs found so far and probably it is the central icon of the ancient temple," Dimitrov said.

A strange event took archaeologists by surprise while the votive relief was taken out. A big imperial eagle started flying over them. In antiquity Zeus was often portrayed as an imperial eagle and the younger women archaeologists started commenting that Zeus had come to see what they were doing in his temple.

The Kozi Gramadi stronghold, built in VI-V century before Christ, was a capital of a Thracian tribe, which used to live in this part of Bulgaria during the antiquity. The popular tombs close to Starosel are in fact the necropolis of the Thracian aristocrats living in the city.
Read More...
Snakes in Suits

Illusions of freedom: The Irish counter-revolution


RTE
Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:52 UTC
Image
This unique 3-part series is a history of 20th Century Ireland presented and co-written by historian Diarmaid Ferriter.

The Limits of Liberty is the story of Irish Independence. How governments of the early decades of independence were preoccupied with one overriding issue, power. Power held by small elites in what would become one of the most centralised countries in Europe. This is the first television history of Ireland since the early 1980s and sets out to re-examine the received opinion of the foundation of the State.

Part 1 examines The War of Independence; The Civil War; The bombardment and destruction of the public record office; The breaking of the 1922 Postal Strike; lack of childcare in the early Free State and the subsequent consolidation of the relationship between Church and State; The Eucharistic Congress; The founding of the Pioneers and the enduring power of the works of Sean O'Casey.

Read More...