– Terrestrial Archaeology, Marine Archaeology & Astro-Archaeology – News Headlines Archive – May 2011 – new archaeological discoveries on land and underwater – with emphasis on the ancient sciences reflected in astro-archaeology and archaeoastronomy from new discoveries revealing its practice in ancient societies under ancient skies
The events of July 16th – 22nd 1994, when the remnants of a fragmenting comet, P/Shoemaker-Levy 9, bombarded the
surface of Jupiter causing fireballs many times the size of our own planet, were an abrupt wake-up call even for those
who were aware of them. The historical sciences generally, and archæology in particular, have collectively painted
a picture of the past as if our planet ‘stands alone in empty space’. Nothing could be further from reality. Our resilient planet exists in a solar system that has had a very dynamic history over the past 20,000 years or so and it is only from this wider solar system perspective that the true history of human civilisation can ever
be fully understood. Therefore, The Morien Institute archive contains information from many disciplines
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“Underneath the crowded alleys and holy sites of old Jerusalem, hundreds of people are snaking at any given moment through tunnels, vaulted medieval chambers and Roman sewers in a rapidly expanding subterranean city invisible from the streets above.
At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.
Underground Jerusalem is different: Here the noise recedes, the fierce Middle Eastern sun disappears, and light comes from fluorescent bulbs. There is a smell of earth and mildew, and the geography recalls a Jewish city that existed 2,000 years ago.
Archaeological digs under the disputed Old City are a matter of immense sensitivity. For Israel, the tunnels are proof of the depth of Jewish roots here, and this has made the tunnels one of Jerusalem’s main tourist draws.
But many Palestinians, who reject Israel’s sovereignty in the city, see them as a threat to their own claims to Jerusalem. And some critics say they put an exaggerated focus on Jewish history.”
“Fractured human remains found on a German river bank could provide the first compelling evidence of a major Bronze Age battle.
Archaeological excavations of the Tollense Valley in northern Germany unearthed fractured skulls, wooden clubs and horse remains dating from around 1200 BC.
The injuries to the skulls suggest face-to-face combat in a battle perhaps fought between warring tribes, say the researchers
The paper, published in the journal “Antiquity”, is based primarily on an investigation begun in 2008 of the Tollense Valley site, which involved both ground excavations and surveys of the riverbed by divers.”
“Nearly half of the New Testament is a forgery, according to a provocative new book which charges that the Apostle Paul authored only a fraction of letters attributed to him, and the Apostle Peter just wrote nothing.
Written by Bart Ehrman, a former evangelical Christian and now agnostic professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the book claims to unveil ‘one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian tradition:’ the use of deception to promote the truth.
According to the biblical scholar, at least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries, while only seven of the 13 epistles attributed to Paul were probably written by him.”
“A Neanderthal-style toolkit found in the frigid far north of Russia’s Ural Mountains dates to 33,000 years ago and may mark the last refuge of Neanderthals before they went extinct, according to a new Science study.
Another possibility is that anatomically modern humans crafted the hefty tools using what’s known as Mousterian technology associated with Neanderthals, but anthropologists believe that’s unlikely.
‘We consider it overwhelmingly probable that the Mousterian technology we describe was performed by Neanderthals, and thus that they indeed survived longer, that is until 33,000 years ago, than most other scientists believe’, co-author Jan Mangerud, a professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bergen and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, told Discovery News.
Most anthropologists believe modern humans began to replace Neanderthals starting around 75,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Project leader Ludovic Slimak said the study suggests ‘that Neanderthals did not disappear due to climate shifts or cultural inferiority. It is clear that, showing such adaptability, the Mousterian cultures can no longer be considered as archaic.’”
“Researchers have new evidence that suggest Neanderthals died out much earlier than previously thought, and possibly before modern humans arrived.
Carbon-dated Neanderthal remains from a cave in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in Russia were found to be 10,000 years older than previous research had suggested.
The new evidence contradicts the popular theory that Neanderthals and modern humans interacted for thousands of years before the archaic species became extinct.
Instead, the researchers believe any co-existence between the two species is likely to have been far more restricted, perhaps at most a few hundred years.
It is quite possible in some areas Neanderthals became extinct before modern humans moved out of Africa.”
“Hailed by some Christian scholars as potentially the most significant discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls, 70 metal books are set to be the center of an international legal showdown of biblical proportions.
When a British team unveiled in March metal texts believed to date back to the final days of Christ, biblical scholars were abuzz with possibilities: early Christian diaries, secrets of the Bible, the sealed texts of the book of Revelation.
The question of ownership of the credit-card-sized books, which may bear the earliest likeness of Jesus Christ, and just how they ended up with an Israeli Bedouin truck driver have raised doubt over whether the messages allegedly sealed in lead some 2,000 years ago will ever be decoded.
A father of four from an Arab village in northern Israel, Hassan Saeda approached British experts four years ago with books that he claimed were inscribed in ancient Hebrew. After detecting religious symbols on the texts and a metallurgy report dating the books to the early 1st century AD, the books went from a probable hoax to potential treasure-trove, says David Elkington, author and member of the British team.
‘I fundamentally believe that what we have are the earliest-ever Christian documents.'”
“A stairway with Maya hieroglyphs was discovered at El Palmar Archaeological Zone, in southeast Campeche, by experts from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the University of Arizona (UA) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), revealing the preliminary decipherment that this Maya city maintained contact with Calakmul, in Campeche, and Copan, Honduras, almost 1300 years ago.
Leaders of the project Javier Lopez Camacho, from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) and Kenichiro Tsukamoto, from the University of Arizona (UA), announced that the 6-step stairway conserves 90 blocks with more than 130 glyphs that refer to events registered in the Classic Maya period (250-900 AD).
They remarked that although it is not the only hieroglyphic stairway discovered in the Maya Lowlands, (20 have been reported until now), the one at El Palmar is associated to the periphery of the site and to structures of modest dimensions; generally these stairways are linked to monumental buildings at the central area of the sites.”
[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.
The rest of the artifacts, along with the shape of the boat, suggested a date around 2000 years ago, which made the find one of the most anomalous that had ever been recovered from the Greek seas. It became known as The Antikythera Mechanism.
In 2006 the journal “Nature” published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions and various cycles of the Moon – as seen from the Earth: – Ed]
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