Archive for the 'Archaeology' Category
Huaca del Pueblo, Peru
The International Herald Tribune of July 7 carried the news that archaeologists have found the intact tomb of an elite burial that might shed light on the Moche civilization (pre-Incan), which blossomed between 100 BC and 600 AD.
The original Reuters article: http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-34390320080706.
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Roman ships by the (half) dozen
I am not really into boat and ship archaeology; I have based the following on the blog by Peter Alaca (http://groups.google.com/group/sci.archaeology/browse_thread/thread/29c4a2423d95c5ed), with corrections and additions based on newspaper coverage.
During archaeological research at De Meern (part of the large-scale suburban development Leidsche Rijn, west of Utrecht), a wreck has been found of a hitherto unknown type of Roman ship. The excavated remnants show strong [...]
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Homer and astronomy
Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco have argued that the individual who described the killing of the suitors in the Odyssey (whom we know as Homer) has situated his story at a particular date, or rather at a specific moment in time, viz. a particular solar eclipse. I give you the authors’ abstract: ”Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in [...]
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Rome’s poor
Not every poor inhabitant in Rome spent his time at the games munching his free sandwich. The burial site of Ponte Galeria, excavated during the past year, has provided paleopathologists with a lot of evidence showing the back-breaking toil of those buried there, probably working in Ostia’s harbour. The Associated Press news item: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hKvgUclxefB2iLkkRP6K-nzmlSKQD916P4HG0.
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To build a fire
In a pre-press release, The Journal of Human Evolution has made available online an article by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and Richard Wrangham, titled “Great apes prefer cooked food”.
Below I quote the abstract that can be found at www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484 (go to: articles in the press). You can buy the whole article for PDF-download, if your [...]
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Continuity of worship
Underneath the church of Elst, Holland, which dates to the 15th century, there have been found the remains of a 8th-century church and of two Roman temples , dated to the 1st and 2nd c. A.D. It has always been thought that the 8th-c. church was built on what was considered at the time, and [...]
Filed under: Archaeology, Religion, Roman religion | Leave a Comment
Caesar surfaces, or did he?
There are now hundreds of references on the web to the discovery of a supposed bust of Julius Caesar, announced two days ago. Most of these are variants on the text distributed by the Associated Press. In fact, the bust was found between September and October 2007 in the River Rhone by divers of the [...]
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Hey, there are some guys stealing all this old stuff in Iraq, should we do something about it?
I quote from Peter Tompa’s web log Cultural Property Observer (post of April 30, 2008): “In an announcement presumably timed to coincide with the 5th Anniversary of the looting of the Iraq Museum, US Customs belatedly published “emergency import restrictions” on Iraqi archaeological and ethnological artifacts. The Federal Register notice that includes a designated list [...]
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Gianni Alemanno, only just elected mayor of Rome, immediately made headlines by announcing his attention to remove the Ara Pacis Museum, a modernist structure by Richard Meier, only openend in 2006, after an outlay of millions and 10 years of work (for several months for several years I have been working my way around hoardings [...]
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Obituary Albert Hofmann
This week Albert Hofmann died, the Swiss chemist who synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, the drug with extreme hallucinogenic properties. What was lacking in most news coverage was the fact that Albert Hofmann also had in interest in the history of drug use and of drug induced trances in a religious context, [...]
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