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Huge Ancient Roman Shipyard Unearthed in Italy

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:10 UTC
Roman Shipyard
© The Portus ProjectA computer-created image of the large Roman shipyard that has been uncovered at Portus — the ancient port of Rome. Researchers have uncovered the remains of a massive building close to the distinctive hexagonal basin or 'harbor,' at the center of the port complex.

A large Roman shipyard has been uncovered an ancient port in Rome called Portus, researchers reported yesterday (Sept. 22).

They found the remains of a massive building, dating to the second century, where ancient ships were likely built close to the distinctive hexagonal basin, or "harbor," at the center of the port complex.

"Few Roman Imperial shipyards have been discovered and, if our identification is correct, this would be the largest of its kind in Italy or the Mediterranean," dig director Simon Keay, of the University of Southampton, said in a statement.

Portus was a crucial trade gateway linking Rome to the Mediterranean during the Imperial period (27 B.C. to A.D. 565). The area was initially built during the time of Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98 to 117). Excavation at the site has revealed that it had many uses, including to store grain and as a defensive measure.
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Sherlock

Maya Royal Tombs Found With Rare Woman Ruler


National Geographic
Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:12 UTC
Maya Royal Burial

The roughly 2,000-year-old tomb was found underneath another, 1,300-year-old tomb filled with treasures such as jade gorgets - normally used to protect the throat - beads, and ceremonial knives.

The upper tomb's corpse had been badly destroyed by rodents within the last few centuries, but the body was clearly that of another Maya ruler - perhaps another female, based on the small size of a ring found in that tomb.

The royal burials are the first discovered in Nakum, once a densely packed Maya center. Study co-author Wiesław Koszkul and colleagues have been investigating Nakum's surroundings, known as the Cultural Triangle, for decades. (Explore an interactive map of key Maya sites.)

Image
© Wiesław Koszkul, Nakum Archaeological ProjectA woman ruler's skeleton—her head mysteriously placed between two bowls—is one of two royal burials recently found at the Maya ruins of Nakum in Guatemala.
"We think this structure was something like a mausoleum for the royal lineage for at least 400 years," said Koszkul, of the Jagiellonian University Institute of Archaeology in Krakow, Poland.

The Maya royal-tomb discoveries are described in the September issue of the journal Antiquity.
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Beaker

Lock of hair pins down early migration of Aborigines

Leila Battison
BBC News
Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:24 UTC
Lock of Aboriginal hair A lock of hair is all that is needed to decode the history of an entire race
© BBC News
Lock of Aboriginal hair A lock of hair is all that is needed to decode the history of an entire race

A lock of hair has helped scientists to piece together the genome of Australian Aborigines and rewrite the history of human dispersal around the world.

DNA from the hair demonstrates that indigenous Aboriginal Australians were the first to separate from other modern humans, around 70,000 years ago.

This challenges current theories of a single phase of dispersal from Africa.

An international team of researchers published their findings in the journal Science.
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Meteor

Old Fossils Solve Mystery of Earliest Bird Extinction

Leila Battison
BBC News
Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:03 UTC
Bird bone fragments
© Nicholas LongrichBird fossils are very rare because the bones are fragile and easily damaged.
Many early bird species suffered from the same catastrophic extinction as the dinosaurs, new research has shown.

The meteorite impact that coincided with the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, also saw a rapid decline in primitive bird species.

Only a few bird groups survived through the mass extinction, from which all modern birds are descended.

Researchers at Yale University have published their findings in PNAS this week.
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Blackbox

Alaska: Kodiak archaeology project unearths prehistoric questions

Wes Hanna
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner / Kodiak Daily Mirror
Sat, 17 Sep 2011 11:44 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Kodiak Daily Mirror, Wes HannaAlutiiq Museum curator Patrick Saltonstall holds up a 3,000-year-old stone bayonet point Sept. 13, 2011 at the museum in Kodiak, Alaska. The point was recovered during the Kodiak, Alaska community archaeology project.
Going into the community archaeology dig this summer, Alutiiq Museum curator Patrick Saltonstall hoped to find one of the oldest inhabited sites on the Kodiak archipelago.

What Saltonstall and a team of volunteers unearthed this year at the Amak site, near the Salonie Creek Rifle Range, was something different but no less important for understanding the people who lived on Kodiak Island thousands of years ago.

While the ocean is about a mile away from the site today, 3,000 years ago Womens Bay extended farther inland. The Amak site would have been overlooking a beach area at the head of the bay.

Saltonstall said instead of encountering a fishing camp or a winter site as he expected, the artifacts gathered at the site suggest a temporary hunting camp. It offers a glimpse into an aspect of the seasonal life of prehistoric Alutiiq people that has not been well understood or documented.
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Sherlock

Sada Mire: Uncovering Somalia's heritage


BBC News
Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:41 UTC
Sada Mire fled Somalia's civil war as a child, and lived as a refugee in Sweden. But now she is back in the Horn of Africa as an archaeologist, making some incredible discoveries.

Sada Mire is only 35, but she has already revealed a dozen sites that could be candidates for Unesco world heritage status.

Image
© Unknown

She has a fellowship in the department of art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is head of the department of antiquities in the breakaway territory of Somaliland, in the north-west region of Somalia. She is the only archaeologist working in the region.

It's a remarkable journey for a girl who fled Mogadishu in 1991, aged 14, as Somalia descended into the chaos of civil war.
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Sherlock

US: Wyoming - Archeologists digs into Jackson Hole's prehistoric past

Cory Hatch
JHNewsandGuide.com / Archaeology.org
Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:28 UTC
Image
© Trey Ratcliff
Some of more than 40,000 artifacts recently discovered at the mouth of Game Creek suggest prehistoric people might have lived in Jackson Hole year round, archeologists say.

Further, radio-carbon dating shows that some of the unearthed artifacts are thousands of years older than expected.

Archeologists began excavating the site last summer after the Wyoming Department of Transportation made plans to widen Highway 26/89/191.

Now, after two summers of digging, the artifacts are beginning to develop a picture of life at the site that ranges over thousands of years, from a roasting pit dated at 10,100 years old to a .38-caliber bullet that is likely from the early 1900s, said Michael Page, a senior archeologist with the Wyoming state archeologist office.

During some periods, the abundance of projectile points crafted from local sources could mean that people lived in the region year round, Page said. By contrast, projectile points from outside the area could suggest people migrated out of the region during some part of the year, most likely winter.
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Sherlock

Excavation of Islands Around Britain to Establish Origins of Neolithic Period


PhysOrg
Wed, 21 Sep 2011 08:00 UTC
Archaeologists at the University of Liverpool are investigating three island groups around Britain to further understanding of why, in approximately 4,000 BC, humans altered their lifestyle from hunting and gathering to farming the land.

Some scholars believe that this change occurred due to colonists from the continent moving into Britain, bringing farming and pottery-making skills with them, but others argue that the indigenous population of Britain adopted this new lifestyle gradually on their own terms.

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© University of Liverpool
To shed new light on the debate, archaeologists, in collaboration with the University of Southampton, are excavating three island groups in the western seaways and producing oceanographic models to understand what sailing across this area would have been like in 4,000 BC. The team will also construct a database of 5th and 4th millennium occupation sites.

The work aims to use evidence gathered from the seaways to answer significant questions about the processes and timing of the transition from a society that hunted wild animals to people that farmed the land as their primary means of survival.
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Sherlock

Ancient stone structures in the Middle East are reminiscent of the Nazca lines of Peru


New Scientist
Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:23 UTC
David Kennedy at the University of Western Australia in Perth is an armchair archaeologist. He has just found thousands of ancient stone structures in the Middle East that are reminiscent of the Nazca lines of Peru - simply by using Google Earth and vintage aerial photographs. New Scientist takes a virtual tour.

Grounded kite

Using Google Earth and aerial photographs taken in the 1920s, Kennedy uncovered over 2000 "kites" throughout the Arabian peninsula. These stony structures, each with a number of graceful "tails", were used as animal traps. Gazelle and oryx were funnelled between the tails towards the kite's "head". Kennedy says that once the head was packed with animals, the tail was blocked and the hunters killed the game. Found in Jordan, the head of this structure - the Safawi kite - is around 200 metres across, and its tails are 600, 900 and 1300 metres long.

Image
© Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East
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Info

North-South vs East-West Long-Distance Love

Tim Wall
Discovery News
Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:04 UTC
Indians in Tepee
© Wikimedia CommonsThe Interior of the Hut of a Mandan Dipäuch. Mixed media on paper by Karl Bodmer 1833 – 1834.

Indigenous Americans may have had a harder time making a long-distance love connection or returning to an ancestral homeland to marry the descendant of grandfather's girl-next-door because of the difficulty of traveling along the north to south axis of the Americas.

Human populations living on the east to west orientation of Eurasia, however, had better luck.

Evolutionary biologists at Brown and Stanford Universities found that genetic differences in indigenous American peoples were greater than those of indigenous Eurasian populations. This suggested that populations in the Americas tended to stay separated after moving north or south, and the researchers propose geography kept people apart.

Throughout history, people could hypothetically travel from Spain to China along a corridor of relatively similar climates.

But to travel from Cahokia in what is now Illinois to Cuzco, Peru, an indigenous American would have had to leave their accustomed temperate climate. They would then pass through thousands of miles of different environments before finding a climate like the one they left behind.
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