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Ireland's high crosses: Medieval religion, art and engineering

Roger Stalley
The Irish Times
Sat, 25 Apr 2020 18:58 UTC
Ireland cross

Humour and anecdote adorn our ancient sculptures as details of craftsman creativity
The high crosses of Ireland, especially those adorned with figure sculpture, are such familiar features of our historic landscape that it is easy to take them for granted. While the meaning of the scenes depicted on the crosses have prompted intense debate, the carvings themselves have rarely been considered as works of art.

Little thought has been given to the craftsmen who made them or to the people who commissioned them. This is especially so with a group of monuments carved by the hand of a single sculptor, whose work includes the great cross at Monasterboice, erected, as an inscription explains, on the instructions of abbot Muiredach in the years before 924 AD. As so often in the middle ages, the sculptor's name remains unknown, but it seems appropriate to describe him as the "Muiredach master". His approach was remarkably naturalistic, the figures roundly modelled and the scenes full of attractive details - swords, drinking horns and ornate brooches. The sculptor's style is instantly recognisable and can be identified in five or six other crosses, notably at Kells, Clonmacnoise and Durrow (Offaly). This is an impressive oeuvre. It is not often in medieval art that we can follow the work of an individual sculptor in this way.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Blue Planet

Secrets of ancient British chieftan and shaman revealed by unearthed burial

David Keys
Independent
Fri, 24 Apr 2020 20:57 UTC
ancient england
© Historic England
The once monumental final resting place of a probable prehistoric chieftain and, potentially, his shaman has been discovered in southwest England.

It's one of the most fascinating archaeological discoveries in southern Britain in recent years. Significantly, the duo formed part of a remarkable social and political process which changed human history - and still shapes our world today.

The probable chieftain or prestigious leader - a man in his thirties or forties - had been interred underneath the centre of a large funerary mound which had been constructed specifically for him inside his own personal 20m diameter ditched enclosure.

The key evidence for his high status is the unusually fine material buried with him for his journey to the next life.

Comment: See also:

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Boat

New shipwrecks found near Cyprus point to unknown medieval trade route

Nick Theodoulou
Cyprus Mail
Tue, 21 Apr 2020 19:45 UTC
shipwreck goods cyprus
© Enigma Recoveries
Chinese porcelains goods dating to the Ming Dynasty
A string of ancient shipwrecks have been found nestled in the muddy waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, in what experts described as the archaeological "equivalent of finding a new planet."

Some of the artefacts which have been recovered are temporarily being looked after in Cyprus, from where the archaeologists based their operations.

It was initially thought that the site may lie within Cypriot waters but this has since been disproven.

Onboard the submerged ships were a trove of treasures.
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Fireball

'First ever' evidence of death by meteorite recorded in Iraq in 1888, archive digitization reveals

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Fri, 24 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
meteor
© NASA/Robert P. Moreno Jr
An exploding meteor.
Researchers have finally found credible records of someone being killed by a falling meteorite.

On 22 August 1888, according to multiple documents found in the General Directorate of State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, a falling meteorite hit and killed one man and paralysed another in what is now Sulaymaniyah in Iraq.

This constitutes, according to researchers, the first-ever known proof of death by meteorite strike. And it hints there could be more such records out there, hiding in archives, waiting to be discovered.

Comment: As will become clear in the following article, far from the above story being the 'first ever' incident report, there is actually a wealth of historical data and records, dating back thousands of years, that document Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls. The data also suggests that there are periods where there is a heightened risk and, judging by current reports, our own era has entered one of those periods.

See also: For a discussion on the above topics, check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

And for documentation of fireballs and much, much more occurring in our own time, watch SOTT's monthly documentary SOTT Earth Changes Summary - March 2020: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs:



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Coffee

Diet of Baltic hunter-gatherers 6500 years ago revealed through pottery analysis

University of York
Archaeology News Network
Wed, 22 Apr 2020 18:00 UTC
hunter–gatherer
© University of York
Figure 1. Map showing locations of hunter–gatherer (filled circles) and early agricultural sites (open circles) discussed in the text. Also shown is the extent of different hunter–gatherer cultural groups (red, Ertebølle; blue, Dąbki; yellow, Southeastern Baltic and Neman; green, Narva). Individual site names are listed in electronic supplementary material, table S1 and figure S1.
Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Baltic between seven and a half and six thousand years ago had culturally distinct cuisines, analysis of ancient pottery fragments has revealed.


An international team of researchers analysed over 500 hunter-gatherer vessels from 61 archaeological sites throughout the Baltic region.
They found striking contrasts in food preferences and culinary practices between different groups - even in areas where there was a similar availability of resources. Pots were used for storing and preparing foods ranging from marine fish, seal and beaver to wild boar, bear, deer, freshwater fish, hazelnuts and plants.

The findings suggest that the culinary tastes of ancient people were not solely dictated by the foods available in a particular area, but also influenced by the traditions and habits of cultural groups, the authors of the study say.

Comment: See also:

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Star of David

In remembrance: Israel's Qana massacres in Lebanon

Denijal Jegić
Mondoweiss
Wed, 22 Apr 2020 19:18 UTC
qana massacre lebanon Israel
© Hassan Siklawi/UN Photo
United Nations peacekeepers sanitize the site where more than 100 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli artillery while seeking refuge at the headquarters of the Fijian battalion of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Qana, South Lebanon on April 18, 1996.
As the Lebanese are commemorating the 1996 massacre of Qana in southern Lebanon, Israeli drones and jets continue to circle over Lebanese skies. Israel's brutal wars and illegal military occupation caused death and destruction. But Israel never left Lebanon. Today's threats and provocations follow the same narratives that were used to justify the Qana massacre.

The Qana Massacre

On April 18, 1996, Israeli forces fired artillery shells at a UN compound in Qana, a village in southern Lebanon. Around 800 had taken shelter at the compound which was clearly marked on Israeli maps. In the strikes 106 were killed, of whom half of them children, and 120 were injured including four UN workers.

Although Israel claimed it did not know that civilians had taken shelter in the UN compound, video evidence refuted this narrative. The UN believed that Israel acted deliberately. However, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and the State Department instead accused Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields.

Comment: Sleeping With The Enemy - The Answer To The "Why" Of War

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Nuke

The U.S. government's secret history of grisly experiments

John W. Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Wed, 22 Apr 2020 19:29 UTC
"They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late." — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
tuskegee experiment syphilis
I have never known any government to put the best interests of its people first, and this COVID-19 pandemic is no exception.

Now this isn't intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. Such crises can — and are — manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers. As such, it is possible for the virus to be both a genuine menace to public health and a menace to freedom.

Yet we can't afford to overlook the fact that governments the world over, including the U.S. government, have unleashed untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

While the U.S. government is currently looking into the possibility that the novel coronavirus spread from a Chinese laboratory rather than a market, the virus could just as easily have been created by the U.S. government or one of its allies.

After all, grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.
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Eagle

How the Red Army's spies found Hitler's remains


Sputnik
Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
Hitler greeting people
© Sputnik
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler and his longtime companion Eva Braun took their own lives in a Berlin bunker, as the Red Army approached within a few hundred meters of their position. The remaining Nazi leadership attempted to destroy their bodies, but thanks to the efforts of Soviet military counterintelligence, the Fuhrer's demise was confirmed.

Sunday marks the 77th anniversary of the creation of SMERSH, the umbrella organization of counter-intelligence bodies, a portmanteau of the Russian language phrase 'SMERt Shpionam' ('Death to Spies'), formed on April 19, 1943.

It was SMERSH's job in Berlin in the chaotic first few days of May 1945 to reliably establish that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had indeed killed himself and been cremated outside his Reich Chancellery bunker, and they accomplished their mission with flying colours, FSB Lt. Gen. (ret.) Alexander Zdanovich says.

Comment: Whether Hitler died in Berlin or escaped to South America is a popular subject of fictional novels, investigative publications and conspiracy theorists - and it overshadows the more important question of who funded the Nazis?.

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Pirates

Pirates once swashbuckled across the ancient Mediterranean

Mark Woolmer
National Geographic
Sun, 19 Apr 2020 19:15 UTC
bowl
© British Museum, London BRITISH MUSEUM/RMN-GRAND PALAIS
Merchant ships, such as that on the left of this sixth-century B.C. Greek bowl, were targets of pirates in antiquity. Naval warships, such as the one on the right, were periodically deployed to quash piracy.
Every child knows what a pirate looks like: a swashbuckler with an eye patch and a parrot perching on his sholder. This perception of pirates and piracy, which still deeply influences modern culture, was shaped by authors writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

These highly fanciful notions were inspired by the privateers and buccaneers of the "golden age" of piracy, which lasted roughly between 1650 and 1730. But pirates and piracy are much older than this era, and maritime banditry has been around for nearly as long as seafaring itself.

The origins of the modern term "piracy" can be traced back to the ancient Greek word peiráomai, meaning attempt (i.e., "attempt to steal"). Gradually this term morphed into a similar sounding term in Greek meaning "brigand," and from that to the Latin term pirata.
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Blue Planet

Ancient stone balls used by early humans may have been ideal tool to extract bone marrow

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Fri, 17 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
stone balls
© Assaf et al. PLOS One, 2020
Ancient archaeological sites across the Northern Hemisphere have been littered with a mystery. Where there were hominins, there too could often be found roughly rounded spheres of stone. Some have been dated back to over 2 million years ago, with marks suggesting that the balls had been deliberately shaped.

New research has discovered a plausible purpose for these strange tools: Our ancestors could have been using them to smash open bones - to get to the nutritious marrow inside.

An international team of researchers led by archaeologist Ella Assaf of Tel-Aviv University in Israel made a close examination of ten such stones found at Qesem Cave, a Lower Paleolithic site occupied by early humans between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Comment: See also:

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