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Sudan: Remains of Ancient Palace Discovered

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Fri, 05 Aug 2011 12:04 UTC
Ancient Palace
© Royal Ontario MuseumOnly a small portion of the structure, possibly an ancient palace, has been excavated so far (part of it can be seen in the photo's bottom foreground) in central Sudan beneath another ancient palace. The structure may be the oldest building ever found in the ancient city of Meroë.

Hidden beneath an ancient palace in what is now central Sudan, archaeologists have discovered the oldest building in the city of Meroë, a structure that also may have housed royalty.

The capital of a vast empire that flourished around 2,000 years ago, Meroë was centered on the Nile River. At its height, the city was controlled by a dynasty of kings who ruled about 900 miles (1,500 kilometers) of territory that stretched from southern Egypt to areas south of modern-day Khartoum.

People of Meroë built palaces and small pyramids, and developed a writing system that scholars still can't fully translate today. Although Meroë has been excavated off and on for more than 150 years, archaeologists are not yet clear on how it came to be. The city seems to have emerged out of nowhere.

"In the region of central Sudan, we have an interesting research problem," said team leader Krzysztof Grzymski, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada.

"We are acquainted with the prehistory cultures, from Stone Age all the way through Neolithic, let's say until about 3000 (or) 2500 B.C." But after that "we have nothing, then out of the blue in 800 B.C., we have Meroë culture," Grzymski told LiveScience.

In addition to filling this gap, the presence of such an ancient building at Meroë suggests that an early temple dedicated to Amun, a highly regarded Egyptian god, may have existed as well. Archaeologists have speculated on its existence but have never actually found it.
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Info

England's Western-Most Roman Town Uncovered

Louise Ord
BBC News
Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:34 UTC
Image
© unknownRoman coins found by two local men led to the discovery of a town
A chance discovery of coins has led to the bigger find of a Roman town, further west than it was previously thought Romans had settled in England.

The town was found under fields a number of miles west of Exeter, Devon.

Nearly 100 Roman coins were initially uncovered there by two amateur archaeological enthusiasts.

It had been thought that fierce resistance from local tribes to Roman culture stopped the Romans from moving so far into the county.

Sam Moorhead, national finds adviser for Iron Age and Roman coins for the PAS at the British Museum, said it was one of the most significant Roman discoveries in the country for many decades.
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Blackbox

Fate of Indian village abandoned in 1200 puzzles Tennessee scientists

Michael Loller
The Republic
Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:55 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Here once was the home of American Indians with a culture far removed from the tepees, wigs and wigwams of TV Indians.

A village slowly being unearthed on the Ames Plantation was a distant neighbor to Memphis' Chucalissa Indian Village. The residents were among hundreds of Mississippian Culture villages along the waterways of the Mississippi River Valley.

"In many ways their surroundings would be like a church today," says Ames cultural resource manager Jamie Evans.

A multitheistic society, the American Indians worshipped the sun, trees, land and water. In the end, they may have been punished by the same forces and driven away.

Their fate is one of the questions University of Memphis archaeology professor Andrew Mickelson ponders when he brings students to the site beside the north fork of the Wolf River for field work each summer. The students dig, scrape and filter soil through mesh screens in search of any shard or fragment that might hold a clue to how the Indians lived and why they left.

The eight-acre site had been used for cash crops at Ames until Mickelson asked to visit in 2009. He knew of a mound complex with four mounds discovered at the site in the 1960s and suspected there must be more.
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Sherlock

US: Blackbeard's anchor recovered off North Carolina coast

Martha Waggoner
MSNBC / Associated Press
Fri, 27 May 2011 15:26 UTC
Archaeologists say artifact belongs to Queen Anne's Revenge, which sank in 1718

Archaeologists recovered the first anchor from what's believed to be the wreck of the pirate Blackbeard's flagship off the North Carolina coast Friday, a move that might change plans about how to save the rest of the almost 300-year-old artifacts from the central part of the ship.

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Sherlock

Panama: Captain Morgan's Lost Fleet Found?

Alan Boyle
MSNBC / Cosmic Log
Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:14 UTC
It may not be a $500 million golden hoard, but underwater archaeologists are nevertheless excited about finding what they believe are traces of the five ships that British privateer Henry Morgan lost off the coast of Panama in 1671.

The discovery was made at the mouth of Panama's Chagres River, near another underwater site where six iron cannons were found. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the three-century-old story of Captain Morgan's lost fleet is finally near its conclusion.

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Pharoah

Company Claims to Decode King Tut's DNA By Watching the Discovery Channel

Stephanie Pappas
Discovery News
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:40 UTC
King Tut
© Live Science

A personal genomics company in Switzerland says they've reconstructed a DNA profile of King Tutankhamen that shows the pharaoh's male lineage by watching the Discovery Channel, but researchers who worked to decode Tut's genome in the first place say the claim is "unscientific."

Swiss genomics company iGENEA has launched a Tutankhamen DNA project based on what they say are genetic markers that appeared on a computer screen during a Discovery Channel special on the famous pharaoh's genetic lineage.

"Maybe they didn't know what they showed, but we got 16 markers from the Y chromosome from these pharaohs," Roman Schultz, the managing director of iGENEA, told LiveScience.

If the claims were true, it would put King Tut in a genetic profile group shared by more than half of Western European men. That would make those men relatives - albeit distant ones - of the pharaoh.

But Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at Germany's University of Tubingen who was part of the team that unraveled Tut's DNA from samples taken from his mummy and mummies of his family members, said that iGENEA's claims are "simply impossible." Pusch and his colleagues published part of their results, though not the Y-chromosome DNA, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2010. The Y chromosome is the sex chromosome found only in males, and looking at the genes in this chromosome would show Tut's male lineage.
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Attention

Russia: Ancient Dog Skull from 33,000 Years Ago Discovered in Siberia


The Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:54 UTC
Scientists have uncovered a 33,000-year-old dog skull that illustrates some of the earliest evidence of domestication of the animal.

The well-preserved skull was found in a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains by an international team of archaeologists.

The specimen comes from an animal that was alive shortly before the last ice age, and shows very few characteristics of modern dogs.

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© UnknownDiscovery: This 33,000-year-old dog skull illustrates some of the earliest evidence of domestication of the animal and was found in the Siberian mountains

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© UnknownDifferences: The archaeologists say the dog's snout is is similar in size to that of Greenland dogs found 1,000 years ago and it has teeth that would have resembled wild European wolves

The archaeologists have detected that while its snout is similar in size to that of Greenland dogs found 1,000 years ago, it has teeth that would have resembled wild European wolves.
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Gear

Best of the Web: Farming: A Terrible Idea? Yes, It Is!

Michaael Hanlon
The Daily Mail
Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:40 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Progress, we tend to assume is, well, a Good Thing. Things that are new, and better, come to dominate and sweep aside old technologies. When they invented the car, the horse was rendered instantly obsolete. Ditto the firearm and the longbow, the steamship and the clipper, the turbojet and the prop. It's called the 'better mousetrap' theory of history - that change is driven by the invention of superior technologies.

Except it really isn't that simple. Sometimes a new invention, even if obviously 'better' than what came before takes a surprising amount of time to become established.

The first automobiles were clumsy, unreliable and expensive brutes that were worse in nearly all respects than the horses they were supposed to replace. The first muskets were less accurate and took longer to reload than the long- and crossbows which had reached their design zenith in medieval Europe. The last of the clippers were far faster than the first steam packets designed to replace them.

Comment: Actually, Jared Diamond is right, and agriculture is indeed the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Historical evidence also shows that it's not only temporal or that agriculture's benefits will be appreciated in the future. What's really been happening, that from the onset of farming human species have experienced a gradual degradation. We are on a fast track toward self-destruction on all levels.

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Sherlock

The ancient city that survived the Middle East crash

Owen Jarus
Live Science
Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:02 UTC
As ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought about 4,200 years ago, archaeologists have discovered that one settlement in Syria not only survived, but expanded.

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© Tell Qarqur ExpeditionThe site of Tell Qarqur in northwest Syria was occupied for nearly 10,000 years. The debris that people left behind accumulated into a human-made mound known as a tell. Archaeologists have determined that 4,200 years ago, at a time when cities and civilizations were collapsing in the Middle East, Tell Qarqur actually grew
Their next question is - why did Tell Qarqur, a site in northwest Syria, grow at a time when cities across the Middle East were being abandoned?
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Pharoah

Egyptian tomb mystery may be world's first protractor

Jo Marchant
New Scientist
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:11 UTC
Image
© Jane Maria HamiltonA new angle
The bizarre object to the right was found in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian architect. For over 100 years, it has languished while archaeologists debated its function.

Now, a physicist has thrown her hat into the ring, arguing that it is the world's first known protractor. The intriguing suggestion - which has drawn scepticism from archaeologists - is based on the numbers encoded within the carvings on its surface.

The architect Kha helped to build pharaohs' tombs during the 18th dynasty, around 1400 BC. His own tomb was discovered intact in 1906 by archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli in Deir-al-Medina, near the Valley of the Kings. Among Kha's belongings were measuring instruments including cubit rods, a levelling device that resembles a modern set square, and what appeared to be an oddly shaped empty wooden case with a hinged lid.

Schiaparelli thought this last object had held another levelling instrument. The museum in Turin, Italy, where the items are now exhibited identifies it as the case of a balancing scale.
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