Welcome to Sott.net
Thu, 05 Oct 2023
The World for People who Think

Secret History
Map

Arrow Down

US: Scudder Falls site predates William Penn, dig reveals

Emilie Lounsberry
Philly.com
Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Ed Hille
Field archaeologist Amadeus Zajac screens dirt from the dig looking for artifacts belonging to American Indians.
Beneath the roaring traffic of I-95 near the Delaware River in Bucks County, archaeologists are slowly unearthing the remains of another era - arrowheads, chunks of pottery, and perhaps even the remnants of a fire pit used by American Indians up to 1,000 years ago.

And they're just getting started.

During the next few months, workers will continue to strip away layer after layer of rich brown soil on a small piece of what used to be farmland in Lower Makefield, and they could find artifacts dating to 8000 to 10,000 B.C.

"It takes a lot of patience," said John W. Lawrence, senior archaeologist at the excavation site along River Road, where a new bridge is scheduled to be built in the coming years to replace the Scudder Falls Bridge between Bucks County and New Jersey.

The $322 million Scudder Falls project is the largest ever undertaken by the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission. Such archaeological digs are required by federal law when a construction project may threaten historic and archaeological artifacts.
      Read More...
Pharoah

Giant statue of Amenhotep III unearthed in Egypt


Agence France-Presse
Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:18 UTC
Image
© Agence France-Presse
Parts of a statue are seen during the excavation of an area close to the Temple of Amenhotep III in western Luxor. Archaeologists have discovered a giant statue of Egypt's famous pharaoh Amenhotep III at his mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor, according to the antiquities authority
Archaeologists have discovered a giant statue of Egypt's famous pharaoh Amenhotep III at his mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor, the antiquities authority said on Tuesday.

The 13-metre-tall (43-foot) statue was found buried in seven pieces at the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III at Kom al-Hitan.

It was one of two statues placed at the northern entrance of the temple, and was probably destroyed during an earthquake in 27 BC, the antiquities authority statement said.

"The archaeological team is now working to clean, restore and collect the seven pieces and find the head of the statue," the statement said.

It also said it was hoped the statue's twin would be unearthed soon.

Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt between 1390 and 1352 BC, is the father of Akhenaten, the "heretic pharaoh" considered a precursor of monotheism because he tried to impose the exclusive worship of Aten.
      Read More...
Book

500-year-old book, a history of the world, surfaces at small town US museum

Brian Skoloff
The Associated Press
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 01:52 UTC
Image
© AP/ Brian Skoloff
In this photo taken April 23, 2011, a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle published in 1493 is displayed at Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City. The Utah book dealer came across the 500-year-old German language edition while appraising items brought in by locals at a fundraiser for the town museum in Sandy, about 15 miles south of Salt Lake City. It's considered to be one of the earliest and most lavishly illustrated books produced after the invention of the printing press.

Book dealer Ken Sanders has seen a lot of nothing in his decades appraising "rare" finds pulled from attics and basements, storage sheds and closets.

Sanders, who occasionally appraises items for PBS's Antiques Roadshow, often employs "the fine art of letting people down gently."

But on a recent Saturday while volunteering at a fundraiser for the small town museum in Sandy, Utah, just south of Salt Lake, Sanders got the surprise of a lifetime.

"Late in the afternoon, a man sat down and started unwrapping a book from a big plastic sack, informing me he had a really, really old book and he thought it might be worth some money," he said. "I kinda start, oh boy, I've heard this before."

Then he produced a tattered, partial copy of the 500-year-old Nuremberg Chronicle.
      Read More...
Hourglass

The Meaning of Words: New Evidence of Ancient Maya History

Fabio Esteban Amador
National Geographic
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00 UTC
Image

Figure 1. Lithograph of Stela at Copan, Published in 1844 by Frederick Catherwood in Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.
The ancient Maya culture flourished in Mesoamerica. At the height of their splendor there's an overwhelming rise in architectural construction, the type of buildings that pay homage to their rulers and their ancestors. Archaeologists call this phenomenon the Classic Maya Period, a time between 200 and 900 A.D. Within these centuries, archaeologists have found evidence that city-states expressed their power by creating unique architectural centers that in many ways were meant to replicate their cosmology. Perhaps the most important social act for a new king was to establish their relationship with the founder of the lineage and they did so by sponsoring magnificent works of art.

Our fascination with the Maya is credited to John Lloyd Stephens, a New York Lawyer who travelled to the Yucatan and Central America in the 1840s, and Frederick Catherwood, an Englishman whose mission was to visually document the journey, a talent that has inspired many of us in becoming archaeologists.

Along with multi-leveled stepped pyramids, ball courts, plazas and freestanding monuments called Stelae, the Maya also literally told the stories of their parents, ancestors, founders, foes, captured enemies and military alliances. Maya writing is a unique feature of this culture that along with the perfection of their calendar has intrigued and mystified the world. Their texts are expressions of a ruling class, however, the question remains, are we reading history, political propaganda or both?
      Read More...
Info

Early Somali Life Depicted In Cave Paintings


Red Orbit
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:46 UTC
Image
© Abdullah Geelah/Wikipedia
Some of the paintings in the Laas Geel caves
Known today for its bloody conflicts and instability, Somalia's little known history can be found in the colorful cave paintings of animals and humans discovered in 2002 by a French archaeology team.

Laas Gaal, Somalia (also known as Laas Geel), just outside of Haregeisa, the capital of Somalia's self-declared Somaliland state, contains 10 caves that show vivid depictions of a pastoralist history which dates back to some 5,000 years or more, reports AFP.

A French archaeology team was sent in 2002 to survey Somalia in search of rock shelters and caves that might contain stratified archaeological infills that could document the period when production economy appeared in this part of the Horn of Africa, according to Wikipedia.

During the survey, the Laas Geel cave paintings were discovered. The paintings were in excellent condition, depicting ancient humans who lived in the area raising their hands and worshipping humpless cows with large lyre-shaped horns.

Although the paintings were known to the local Somali people for centuries, it was not advertised to the international community until a team of experts returned to the area in November 2003 to study the paintings and their prehistoric context in detail.

Even with the history of Somalia wars, natural weathering, animals and other factors, the paintings have been well preserved and have retained their clear outlines and vibrant colors.
      Read More...
Sherlock

Brain illness could have affected Stalin's actions, secret diaries reveal

Shaun Walker
The Independent
Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:56 UTC
Image
© Getty Images
One diary excerpt tells how Stalin was advised that the best way to win Churchill round was to get him drunk
Accounts by his inner circle give new insight into dictator's life.

It's one of the great questions of history, and indeed philosophy: what does it take to create a Hitler or a Stalin? What circumstances does it require to produce such evil? Newly released diaries from one of Joseph Stalin's personal doctors suggest that, in Stalin's case, illness could have helped to contribute to the paranoia and ruthlessness of his rule over the Soviet Union.

Alexander Myasnikov was one of the doctors called to Stalin's deathbed when the dictator fell ill in 1953, and, in diaries that have been kept secret up to now, he claims that Stalin suffered from a brain illness that could have impaired his decision-making.

"The major atherosclerosis in the brain, which we found at the autopsy, should raise the question of how much this illness - which had clearly been developing over a number of years - affected Stalin's health, his character and his actions," Dr Myasnikov wrote in his diaries, excerpts of which were published for the first time in the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets yesterday. "Stalin may have lost his sense of good and bad, healthy and dangerous, permissible and impermissible, friend and enemy. Character traits can become exaggerated, so that a suspicious person becomes paranoid," the doctor wrote.

Comment: Could Stalin's "brain illness" be in fact a frontal characteropathy, as described by Andrew M, Lobaczewski in Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)?
Comparative considerations also led the author to conclude that Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, also known as Stalin, should be included in the list of this particular ponerogenic characteropathy, which developed against the backdrop of perinatal damage to his brain's prefrontal fields. Literature and news about him abounds in indications: brutal, charismatic, snake-charming; issuing of irrevocable decisions; inhuman ruthlessness, pathological revengefulness directed at anyone who got in his way; and egotistical belief in his own genius on the part of a person whose mind was, in fact, only average.


      Read More...
Blackbox

Has the mystery of Easter Island finally been solved?


The Independent
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:53 UTC
Moais Easter Island Mystery
© EPA
The moai, giant stone statues that line the Easter Island coasT
A scientific battle over the fate of Easter Island's natives is ready to erupt this summer with the publication of a book challenging the notion that their Neolithic society committed ecological suicide.

The debate has a modern political dimension. At stake is the central example, cited by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, of the dire consequences that threaten if humans don't take care of the planet.

The archaeological argument revolves around the moai, hundreds of stone statues that line the coast of the now treeless South Pacific island, known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui.

The almost-naked natives discovered by a Dutch expedition on Easter Sunday 1722 were considered too impoverished to have carved and moved the statues themselves.

The accepted theory is that a more advanced civilisation, numbering some 15,000 people, must have erected the statues, with hundreds of men hauling them to the shore and whole industries devoted to making ropes, rollers and sledges while the rest struggled to feed the workers.

Comment: Sometimes the theories about "ecological suicide" are a way to avoid the possibility of cycles of cosmic and planetary catastrophes at all.

For more about this subject the reader might wish to read:
The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets
New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection
Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth?
Planet-X, Comets and Earth Changes by J.M. McCanney

And also it is interesting to notice the references about giants and cannibalism during times of changes and planet upheaval.

For more about that, read:
The Golden Age, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

      Read More...
Sherlock

The Celestial Computers of Ancient Greece

Evaggelos Vallianatos
Truthout
Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:07 UTC
The Antikythera Mechanism
© davelin66
The Antikythera Mechanism at the Boston Museum of Science.
Just before Easter 1900, Greek sponge-fishers were on their way to the waters of Tunisia when a violent storm threw their boats to Antikythera, a tiny island located north of Crete in the Aegean.

After the storm, the sponge-fishers explored the waters of Antikythera for sponges. One of the divers, Elias Stadiatis, discovered the remnants of an ancient ship full of statues - horses, men, women and vases.

Of several treasures, the most precious was a very small piece of metal with gears, which the archaeologists of the National Museum in Athens originally dubbed astrolabe, which in Greek means, "star catcher." Astrolabes helped figure out the position of the sun and the stars in the sky. Astrolabes were not complicated devices. However, the machine of Antikythera was complex and, eventually, Greek archaeologists renamed it the Antikythera Mechanism and dated it from 150 to 100 BCE.

The shipwreck probably happened in the middle of the first century BCE. The doomed Roman ship was sailing from Rhodes to Rome. It carried looted Greek treasure: more than 100 bronze and marble statues, amphorae and coins.
      Read More...
Magic Wand

Austrians hail a 'fairy-tale find' of medieval riches

George Jahn
MSNBC
Fri, 22 Apr 2011 01:18 UTC
Image
© Bettina Sidonie Neubauer-Pregl / BDA via AP
This photo provided by Austria's federal conservation authority shows a brooch that was unearthed in a backyard south of Vienna.
Authorities say 'Andreas K.' found jewels and ornaments in his backyard

A man turning dirt in his backyard stumbled onto buried treasure - hundreds of pieces of centuries-old jewelry and other precious objects that Austrian authorities described Friday as a fairy-tale find.

Austria's department in charge of national antiquities said the trove consists of more than 200 rings, brooches, ornate belt buckles, gold-plated silver plates and other pieces or fragments, many encrusted with pearls, fossilized coral and other ornaments. It said the objects are about 650 years old and are being evaluated for their provenance and worth.

While not assigning a monetary value to the buried bling, the enthusiastic language from the normally staid Federal Office for Memorials reflected the significance it attached to the discovery.

"Fairy tales still exist!" said its statement. "Private individual finds sensational treasure in garden."

It described the ornaments as "one of the qualitatively most significant discoveries of medieval treasure in Austria."
      Read More...
Arrow Down

Parts of ancient vessels discovered in Sri Lanka


Xinhua Net News
Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:05 UTC
Sri Lanka's National Archaeological Department has discovered the parts of 20 ancient vessels in the south of the country, an archaeologist said Thursday.

Sanath Karunarathne, an archaeologist with the National Archaeological Department said the ancient vessel parts were discovered as they were conducting a marine archaeological survey in the southern coastal belt.

Karunaratne said they have also been able to locate wreckage of a very ancient ship close to the historical Godavaya Port in the Hambantota District.
      Read More...
Revolt! T-shirts