Serving up old news since A.D. 2004
{ Monthly Archives }
Massive Head Of Pharaoh Unearthed In Egypt
Archaeologists have unearthed the massive head of one Egypt’s most famous pharoahs who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities announced Sunday.
The head of Amenhotep III, which alone is about the height of a person, was found in the ruins of the pharaoh’s mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor.
Hunt for woolly mammoth reminds us of God’s artistic side
It all started when Michael, assistant editor of the Portage (Wis.) Daily Register, got a phone call from a man who said he’d found a large bone during a walk in the woods.
Sure, bring it to the newsroom, Michael said.
The man walked in carrying a 33-inch, 30-pound object. It sure looked like a giant bone — so much so that people from other departments of the newspaper gathered around it, gaped at it and took photos of it with their cell phones.
Byway dig reveals a colorful past
Trixie Edwards was as proud as she was good-looking. Stepping out onto the ramshackle patchwork of wooden planks that doubled as a boardwalk, she breathed in the morning air. Clean smells from the Chinese laundry mingled with wood smoke as bird song embroidered the edges of what promised to be a fine spring day.
Across the creek, to the west, there was nothing but forest. Here on the east side, a few homes and hotels huddled side-by-side with merchants’ storefronts and a train depot, forming a long line that was hugged on one flank by Sand Creek and on the other by a vast lake that bore the lovely French name of Pend d’Oreille.
On the southernmost tip of that line and a little apart from the rest of the town site — sitting like a dot at the bottom of an exclamation mark — was the collection of saloons, gambling halls and “rooms to let” where Trixie and a few other girls plied their trade.
Pretty neat article. More here, too.
Unearthing past before future bridge goes up
Archaeologists are digging into the buried remains of 19th century factories, working-class privies and ancient villages before the bulldozers move in to grind a path for the new Mississippi River bridge.
The archaeologists are working both sides of the river. In St. Louis, diggers at the sites of two long-gone factories stumbled on an old neighborhood trash dump with numerous surprises, including a child’s tea set. In Illinois, they unearthed a nearly 1,000-year-old village from Mound Builder days and found a chemist’s set of test tubes and beakers beneath an old neighborhood in East St. Louis.
I wonder how much of it they’ll be able to just leave in place. One would assume it’s all going to be pretty much destroyed (definitely under the piers) unless it’s pretty deep.
For the past three weeks, a team from the University of South Florida’s Alliance for Integrated Spatial Technologies – a network of archaeologists, geologists, historians and other disciplines – have been exploring the Guatemalan ruins of Tak’alik Abaj’, an ancient city where Mayan priests once conducted rituals.
Using some of the world’s most advanced scanning and photographic technology, the team is able to explore the ruins – considered some of the most fascinating ancient treasures in the world – without disturbing them in the site, which lies in southwest Guatemala, about 45 km from the border with Mexico.
Says they plan on making the data and reconstructions publicly available, so good on them.
Roman remains in York are ‘elite’ African woman
Archaeologists have revealed the remains of what they say was a “high status” woman of African origin who lived in York during Roman times.
Academics say the discovery goes against the common assumption that all Africans in Roman Britain were low status male slaves.
Remains of the Ivory Bangle Lady, as she has been named, were studied in Reading using forensic techniques.
They have a small photo of the reconstruction. I wonder how she got there. I’m guessing she married a Roman and went to York with him.
Archaeologist disproves widespread beliefs about the Dead Sea Scrolls
Jesus Christ did not live with the ancient people from the settlement near caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, even though some scholars have argued the contrary, an archaeologist said Thursday in a presentation sponsored by the Brite Divinity School.
Jodi Magness, an endowed archaeology professor from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focused on the Essenes, an apocalyptic group that lived in Qumran, near the 11 caves in which more than 900 scrolls were discovered. She said that one-fourth of the scrolls represent all but one of the books of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, all of which have at least one copy.
Did anyone argue that Jesus actually lived there?
What is it? (the U-shaped thing, not the obvious staple puller, aka Steel Rattlesnake)
UPDATE: Correct! Katy got it. Comments are not working for me though.
I don’t have much else to say about this car, except to brag that I didn’t mention the Dukes of Hazzard even once (in the post) [Ed., duh, because they used a Charger, not a Road Runner). It appeals to me because it’s pretty plain. I like that. All go, no show.
Back on this post was a study identifying arteriosclerosis in Egyptian mummies. Now there’s another one:
For the first time a team of scientists at The University of Manchester have combined a new translation of hieroglyphic inscriptions on Egyptian temple walls that give details of the food offered daily to the gods with computed tomography of the mummified remains of priests to assess their atherosclerosis.
They have found that the priests would offer the gods sumptuous meals of beef, wild fowl, bread, fruit, vegetables, cake, wine and beer at the temple three times a day, then take them back home to their families. They also found their mummified remains showed high levels of atheromatous plaques and vascular calcification; that is, blocked arteries.
Author Professor Rosalie David, of the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology in the Faculty of Life Sciences, said: “There couldn’t be a more evocative message: live like a God and you will pay with your health.
“It also shows that blocked arteries caused by rich diets are not just a modern malaise – the problem goes back to ancient civilisations.”
I think it’s a fairly big jump to go from showing disease in some mummies to concluding a cause, when the diet of those in question is largely circumstantial. Plus, there aren’t any ‘control’ mummies of poor folk to compare them against, so these 22 might be entirely typical in their disease condition. So, interesting, but not terribly conclusive.
