For Those Interested in Archaeology

"(ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, FEBRUARY 10 - Numerous archaeological excavations are underway at a huge site in Anatolia which will uncover an ancient and rich yet forgotten kingdom known as Tuwana from the darkness of history, which will be featured in an open-air museum. The news was reported by Lorenzo d'Alfonso, an Italian archaeologist leading the joint mission by the University of Pavia and NYU, who provided details on the excavation campaign in a press conference in Istanbul this month, during which the details of the Italian archaeological missions in Turkey were explained. This "new discovery" from the pre-classical age which "needs to be continued" in southern Cappadocia took place in Kinik Hoyuk, the scholar said, referring to a site mainly involving the beginning of the first millennium BC. The area is "fully" part of the "forgotten kingdom" of Tuwana, said d'Alfonso, known until now through hieroglyphics and from several sources from the Assyrian Empire, but "never studied archaeologically":"
Archaeology: Acropolis of forgotten kingdom uncovered - Turkey - ANSAMed.it



"NIXA, Mo. -- A team of researchers at Missouri State University is working to unearth a bit of invisible Ozarks history. Archaeologists and volunteers from the Delaware tribe dug into the ground in northern Christian County recently, and their efforts could make the sites eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
It's a search for history but this history isn't written in a book in the library. Instead, researchers searched for clues by sorting through layers of dirt."
MSU researchers unearth Delaware Tribe history - ky3.com

 

"A multi-million pound windfarm looks set to be scrapped after an ancient Stone Age monument was spotted on the site using Google Earth.
Workers had already begun installing 15 wind turbines on the mountain top in Wales when a walker stumbled upon a row of stones on the site and realised they were of historical interest.
Archaeologists then plotted the line of stones on Google Earth and decided the relics must be around 3,500 years old."
Multi-million pound windfarm set to be scrapped after walker finds 'line of ancient stones' | Mail Online

 

"Work on an 8,000-year-old Stone Age settlement under the surface of the Solent in Hampshire is throwing up evidence of clear parallels of the modern "high street", archaeologists say.
After 30 years of excavating the area around Bouldnor Cliff, a boatyard was uncovered last summer, which teams have been working on ever since.
Since The Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology spotted a swamped prehistoric forest in the 1980s, the Stone Age village was found by chance at the end of the last century."
BBC News - Solent's Stone Age village 'had modern high street links'

 

Four previously unknown shipwrecks have been discovered some 30 kilometers off the Bay of Irakleio, Crete, in recent underwater exploration conducted by the ephorate of underwater antiquities.

The new finds comprise two Roman era shipwrecks, one containing 1st and 2nd-century Cretan amphorae and the other containing 5th-7th century post-Roman era amphorae, and two shipwrecks containing Byzantine amphorae, dated from the 8th-9th century and later.

The finds, which were made south and east of the Dia islet, which lies 7 nautical miles north of Irakleio, were documented and taken ashore for further analysis.

"Three more recent shipwrecks were also discovered, as well as four other areas with archaeological material of various eras and origin which, due to their immense research interest, will be further explored in 2012 by the ephorate.
The exploration was conducted to locate and record underwater antiquities in the wider area of the bay of Irakleio, as well as the Gulf of Yera of Lesvos island and the island of Tilos. (AMNA, Athens News)"
Four unknown shipwrecks found | Athens News

 

"A seven-million-year-old trail of fossilised footprints in the Arabian desert was left by a herd of ancient elephants, according to scientists.
Researchers say the "trackways" reveal that animals that left them had a rich and complex social structure.
Just like modern elephant society, this consisted of family herds and of solitary male animals."
BBC Nature - Ancient tracks are elephant herd


"Archaeologists have discovered ruins of two huts at Kharaneh IV, one of the largest Late Pleistocene sites in southwest Asia, located about 70 km east of Jordan's capital Amman. Excavators are trying to find new perspectives about human settlements with the latest find.
The findings, published in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal PLoS One, suggest that the structural remains are about 20,000 years old, nearly 10,000 years before the Neolithic farmers settled in permanent villages and are located at a hunter-gatherer settlement of the Epipalaeolithic Period, which is marked by stone-built houses and more advanced tools."
Prehistoric Huts of Hunter-Gatherers Discovered in Jordan, Archaeologists Wonder How Humans Lived 20,000 Years Ago

 

"How did our species come to rule the planet? Rick Potts argues that environmental instability and disruption were decisive factors in the success of Homo sapiens: Alone among our primate tribe, we were able to cope with constant change and turn it to our advantage. Potts is director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and curator of the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opened at that museum last year. He also leads excavations in the East African Rift Valley and codirects projects in China that compare early human behavior and environments in eastern Africa with those in eastern Asia. Here Potts explains the reasoning behind his controversial idea.Why did our close relatives—from Neanderthals to their 
recently discovered cousins, the Denisovans, to the hobbit people of Indonesia—die out while we became a global success?
"
How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Out | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

 

"Neanderthals were already on the verge of extinction in Europe by the time modern humans arrived on the scene, a study suggests.
DNA analysis suggests most Neanderthals in western Europe died out as early as 50,000 years ago - thousands of years before our own species appeared.
A small group of Neanderthals then recolonised parts of Europe, surviving for 10,000 years before vanishing."
BBC News - DNA reveals Neanderthal extinction clues

 

"America was first discovered by Stone Age hunters from Europe, according to new archaeological evidence.Across six locations on the U.S. east coast, several dozen stone tools have been found.
After close analysis it was discovered that they were between 19,000 and 26,000 years old and were a European-style of tool.
The discovery suggests that the owners of the tools arrived 10,000 years before the ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World,
reported The Independent.Finding the tools is being heralded as one of the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades.
Archaeologists are hopeful that they will add another dimension to understanding the spread of humans across the world.
Three of the sites were discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware, while another one is in Pennsylvania and a fifth site is in Virginia.
Fishermen discovered a sixth on a seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast, which in prehistoric times would have been dry land."
Could tools belonging to Stone Age hunters found on U.S. east coast finally answer who really discovered America? | Mail Online

 

This one is going to cause all sorts of debates. Especially due to some of our current laws concerning archeological finds.

 

Oh God...Kennewick Man all over again?

 

Well maybe and maybe not. I'm not sure how the laws are written or who gets possession of the remains. If remains suggest European ancestory should Indian customs prevail? It would mean that there could be detailed "costody" battles which might well depend on in depth archeological and anthropological analysis.

 

Well, if hackers can materialise a Lancaster over Scampton on Google Earth....they can certainly do something useful and stop a bleedin' windfarm!

 

"When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: a dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp.
Forty years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here. "
Radical theory of first Americans places Stone Age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 years ago - The Washington Post

"VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Hand axes, small handheld stone tools used by ancient humans, could have served as the first commodity in the human world thanks to their durability and utility.
The axes may have been traded between human groups and would have served as a social cue to others, Mimi Lam, a researcher from the University of British Columbia, suggested in her talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting here on Feb. 18."
Tools Could Have Been First Money | Hand Axes, Money & Currency, First Commodity | LiveScience

"Peering up from the shore of Lake Kinneret, known to many as the Sea of Galilee, one can hardly detect any structures atop that imposing flat-topped mountain. But at its summit, twelve years of continuous archaeological excavations on the site of the ancient city of Antiochia Hippos, now known as Sussita, have unearthed a wealth of Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad structures erected during a period of a thousand years – from the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] century BCE to the 8[SUP]th[/SUP] century CE. Yet much excavation work still has to be done to reveal the city in all its former magnificence and glory."
Unearthing Sussita | Popular Archaeology - exploring the past

 

"PUNE: Researchers from the city-based Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute recently unearthed four megalithic burials at Hirapur in Chandrapur district, which, the researchers say, were used for more than just burying the dead. Material evidences unearthed at the excavation sites testify that these burials or 'megaliths', dating between the 3rd and the 2nd century BC, were also worshipped by the local rural communities, and guarded with Laterite protection walls. Archaeologists said this is perhaps the first time that a megalithic structure has been found to have been worshipped. Archaeologists said the megaliths might have been erected and protected during the Asmaka Janapada or in the Satavahana periods."
Megalithic burial site, also a place of worship, unearthed - The Times of India

 

"Using a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometer, surveys have revealed the settlement in Sandefjord in Gokstadhaugen, eastern Norway, has 15 buildings, an 80-metre long street and a port.
Archaeologists from Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History and the Norwegian Institute for Cultural heritage Research (NIKU) were among those that made the discovery, in cooperation with Vestfold County.
Work in Gokstadhaugen began in 2011 with drilling there, as well as experts making geophysical surveys from the sea a northwards in what is called Gokstad Valley (Gokstaddalen).
NIKU’s Knut Paashe told Aftenposten, “There is no doubt that we have encountered a market town-like structure from the Viking age with houses and streets.”
Further investigations of the area can now take place following archaeologists’ confirmation a Viking settlement is present."
New Norway Viking settlement discovered / News / The Foreigner — Norwegian News in English.


"Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian steppes stretching from the Black Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C.
As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. To their literate neighbors, they were the ubiquitous and mysterious Scythians or the Saka, perhaps one and the same people. In any case, these nomads were looked down on — the other often is — as an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town.

But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past.
These excavations dispel notions that nomadic societies were less developed than many sedentary ones. Grave goods from as early as the eighth century B.C. show that these people were prospering through a mobile pastoral strategy, maintaining networks of cultural exchange (not always peacefully) with powerful foreign neighbors like the Persians and later the Chinese. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/science/from-their-graves-ancient-nomads-speak.html?_r=2

 

Interesting given that the police force in Athens for a significant chunk of this period was composed of these same people.

 

"And so it begins. For years, evolutionary biologists have predicted that new human species would start popping up in Asia as we begin to look closely at fossilised bones found there. A new analysis of bones from south-west China suggests there's truth to the forecast.
The distinctive skull (pictured, right) was unearthed in 1979 in Longlin cave, Guangxi Province, but has only now been fully analysed. It has thick bones, prominent brow ridges, a short flat face and lacks a typically human chin. "In short, it is anatomically unique among all members of the human evolutionary tree," says Darren Curnoe at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
The skull, he says, presents an unusual mosaic of primitive features like those seen in our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago, with some modern traits similar to living people.
What's more, Curnoe and Ji Xueping of Yunnan University, China, have found more evidence of the new hominin at a second site – Malu cave in Yunnan Province. Curnoe has dubbed the new group the Red Deer Cave people because of their penchant for venison. "There is evidence that they cooked large deer in Malu cave," he says."
Chinese human fossils unlike any known species - life - 14 March 2012 - New Scientist

"IN THE final chapter of Lone Survivors, Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist specialising in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, tells the story of the Iwo Eleru skeleton. Found in Nigeria in 1965, its skull resembles those of some of the earliest modern humans - skulls that are more than 150,000 years old. But as Stringer showed last year, Iwo Eleru is less than one-tenth that age. Africa presents a rich anatomical and archaeological record of 15,000 years ago, near the dawn of agriculture."
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/c...-on-earth.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

 

Tried to post this yesterday, but there was a problem.
"Human and animal fossilised footprints that may be from the Bronze Age have been exposed on a Ceredigion beach.
Archaeologists are racing against changing tides to record and excavate the find in peat at Borth, which gives a snapshot of a time when the shore lay further west.
The team believes the footprints could be 3,000 to 4,000 years old."
BBC News - Ancient footprints found in peat at Borth beach

 

"Neolithic pottery excavated ahead of work on a £16m flood scheme has added to archaeologists' understanding of a city's past.
Pits containing fragments of ceramics were recovered from the site in the Culduthel area of Inverness.
Archaeologists were brought in ahead of construction of phase three of the city's south west flood relief channel.
Iron Age weapons and a Romano-British brooch have been found previously at other sites nearby.
Ross and Cromarty Archaeological Services carried out an assessment of the flood scheme site between December 2010 and January 2011.
The archaeologists' report on what they found has been published online.
Six Neolithic pots were identified and fragments of pottery from the early to middle Neolithic and later Neolithic grooved ware were recovered.
Other finds included a piece of polished stone axe, half of a stone ball and a possible fragment of an anvil stone."
BBC News - Neolithic pottery at Culduthel section of Inverness flood scheme

 

"Hidden in the landscape of the fertile crescent of the Middle East, scientists say, lurk overlooked networks of small settlements that hold vital clues to ancient civilizations.
Beyond the impressive mounds of earth, known as tells in Arabic, that mark lost cities, researchers have found a way to give archaeologists a broader perspective of the ancient landscape. By combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern multispectral images and digital maps of Earth's surface, the researchers have created a new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human settlement. The approach, used to map some 14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometres of northeastern Syria, is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[SUP]1."
Satellites expose 8,000 years of civilization : Nature News & Comment[/SUP]