1000-year-old coins found in Northern Territory may rewrite Australian history
REMEMBER when you were taught that Australia was discovered by James Cook in 1770 who promptly declared it “terra nullius” and claimed it for the British throne?
Turns out that could be completely and utterly wrong.
Five copper coins and a nearly 70-year-old map with an “X” might lead to a discovery that could rewrite Australia’s history.
Australian scientist Ian McIntosh, currently Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in the US, is planning an expedition in July that has stirred up the archaeological community.
The scientist wants to revisit the location where five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed.
I don’t find it all that out of bounds, but they’ll definitely have to come up with something besides the original coins; the provenance just isn’t very good. Well, it sucks actually.
Dog walker discovers shipwreck on Hartlepool beach
A DOG WALKER is “shocked and excited” after discovering a wooden structure on a Hartlepool beach which is almost certainly the remains of a rare shipwreck.
Joanne Shaw was taking her daily walk along Seaton Carew beach with her dog when she came across the wooden relic poking from beneath the sand opposite the dunes.
The 45-year-old history enthusiast stopped to investigate the find, took some pictures and sent them off to experts at Tees Archaeology who are almost certain that this is a new discovery.
Archaeologists: Skull confirms Jamestown colonists resorted to cannibalism
Jamestown’s colonists resorted to cannibalism during the “starving time” winter of 1609-10, archaeologists confirmed today.
In a briefing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, archaeologist Doug Owsley presented the reconstructed skull of a 14-year-old English girl, named “Jane” by the researchers, discovered at the site of the fort and bearing the marks of butchery.
This story has been making the rounds a lot and a lot of people are expressing some degree of shock at it, but that’s unwarranted in my view: We know that is what people have resorted to under extreme duress (cf., the Donner Party). Plus we’re finding that cannibalism in some form or another is, while not common, not exceptionally rare either, usually for ritual purposes or in starvation situations.
Wisconsin family discovers fully-stocked fallout shelter in their back yard 50 years after it was installed at the height of the Cold War
For more than a decade after they moved into their house in Neenah, Wisconsin, the Zwick family knew they had a Cold War bunker in their backyard.
It was not until 2010 that anyone thought to open the heavy steel hatch, climb down the ladder and explore the 8-foot-by-10-foot chamber that the home’s previous owner had built to protect his family from a nuclear attack.
Floating in five feet of water that had seemed into the bunker were sealed U.S. Army boxed packed with all of the supplies a family would need to survive two weeks underground.
Think there’s a glitch there in the type. . . .
That’s about 60 miles from where I grew up. Insty suggests the writer got it wrong about fallout (that there wouldn’t be much), but he may be correct since Neenah is northwest of Milwaukee and Chicago and the prevailing winds mostly blow west to east.
I like the telephone directory myself.
I have dreams like this sometimes and I always love them. Usually it’s finding a secret door in a house — such as my grandmother’s or even my own — and finding a fully intact room or rooms from the 1960s.
Family crypt of medieval knight discovered?
“This site just keeps getting more and more interesting, it is turning out to be a real treasure trove of archaeology,” Ross Murray, a former student at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement. “These new finds look likely to be the possible relations of the suspected Medieval knight we found earlier this year. The skull of the skeleton found immediately beneath the location of the knight looks like that of a female and the remains found on the other side of the ornate slab belong to an infant from the same period.”
Link to a photo gallery at LiveScience which has some interesting photos, but not the best descriptions. Two burials, for example, seem to be very close to each other, possibly the same burial event (though the one on the left seems higher up, stratigraphically), but the captions don’t say what they are.
Unmarked Graves Found in Lynchburg Cemetery
There was an incredible find Friday at Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg.
It’s way back from the Civil War Era. Archaeologists uncovered around 50 confederate soldier grave sites, and they expect to find dozen more.
“We are making discoveries in these last couple hours that have puzzled people for decades,” said Ted Delaney, assistant director of the cemetery.
Old City Cemetery is filled with graves, but most grave sites are not properly honored and marked.
There’s a video that goes with the text (mostly the same stuff), but it’s worth playing the vid as it gives at least some idea of how individual graves are being located, not by high-tech GPR, but simply by observing the changes in sediment character. Which you could probably do most anywhere except it means stripping off an awful lot of sod and dirt and is rather time intensive. Wonder who’s paying for it? It’s a nice idea though, since they have records that could/should allow identification.
UPDATE: WaPo story.
Funny, it has to do with convicts: Port Arthur dig uncovers more history
An archaeological dig at Port Arthur has uncovered a hidden history.
The discovery of a waterwheel at the site’s penitentiary will rewrite the story of the convict site.
The former jail, Port Arthur’s main building, was first built as a granary and mill in 1843.
But it has taken slow and careful digging by archaeologists to confirm the two operations were actually two separate buildings.
Video at the link. Interesting, but I had to bring up the convicts because, well, you know, it’s what one does.
Digging Into Hartland’s Past: Archaeologists Detail Cemetery Findings
A team of archaeologists hired by the president of VTel to exhume a cemetery located on his 173-acre estate have unearthed fragments of Upper Valley history nearly two centuries old, but not without dredging up some new questions too.
The relocation of the cemetery, which occupied land purchased by VTel CEO and President Michel Guite, stirred up resistance from residents and led to a three-year legal battle over the rights of descendents to access the burial plot.
The case went all the way to the state Supreme Court, which sided with Guite in late 2011. Jerome King, a Hanover resident who has since died and whose family owned the property for 33 years, sued to prevent the unearthing of the cemetery where the ashes of his cremated parents were laid to rest.
Now this seems to me to be what conservation archaeology ought to be all about. The landowner paid to have the work done properly (despite some controversy), the archaeologists got a good amount of information out of it, and involved the public in the results. Good on them.
It’s. . . .The ’80s!.
Can’t wait. Well, depends on what they do with it. If they harp on it being “The Decade of Greed” I’ll think it kind of a waste (to coin a phrase, in terms of greed, the ’90s made the ’80s look like the ’60s). Trouble is, most of these shows tell it almost completely from a New York/Los Angeles perspective. I remember one thing about “The ’70s” and fully half of it had to do with. . . .Studio 54. Yeah, because the majority of Americans in the 1970s were hanging out at Studio 54 doing lines of coke off of Mick Jagger’s naked ass. And in the ’80s everyone was driving a BMW.
So I dunno, we’ll see. I’m mostly an early-’80s guy because that’s when I was an undergrad and that is usually the time we remember best. Late teens and early 20s we kind of think of with the most nostalgia, I think. By the late ’80s I was submerged in grad school so I didn’t experience much of it.
