Archaeological News

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2022/09/13/complete-dinosaur-skeleton-skin-mummy/10369447002/
 

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Researchers in Canada have discovered parts of what they believe to be a full "dinosaur mummy" lodged in a hillside, the University of Reading in the United Kingdom announced last week.

The two exposed fossils, a foot and part of a tail clad in fossilized skin, are believed to belong to a juvenile duck-billed Hadrosaur dinosaur that died somewhere between 77 million to 75 million years ago, roughly 10 million years before dinosaurs went extinct, researchers said. Scientists began excavation of the site to remove the entire remains from the hill.

“It’s so well preserved you can see the individual scales, we can see some tendons and it looks like there’s going to be skin over the entire animal,” Brian Pickles, a paleontologist and ecology professor at the University of Reading, told USA TODAY. “Which means, if we’re really lucky, then some of the other internal organs might have preserved as well.”

 

 

[rmgill]

I'm still waiting on the Holocene Megafauna to be cloned. We must right the wrongs of the early native Americans. 

https://www.dw.com/en/japanese-scientists-make-breakthrough-in-cloning-a-woolly-mammoth/a-48063060

Edited September 18, 2022 by rmgill

[bojan]

I want auroch steak.

Edited September 19, 2022 by bojan

[BansheeOne]

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Old testament battles confirmed in new study

Fred Schwaller

October 31, 2022

Matching the biblical narrative with historical evidence is a tricky business. New research suggests geomagnetic data could help pinpoint the dates of biblical military campaigns.

Memories are shaky things. Maybe you remember a family trip to the beach or learning to swim as a child. But could you name the exact date, or even the year, these events happened? Without the help of a daily diary, it’s nothing more than guesswork.

The same problem applies to cultural memories and history. And the further back in time you go, the more difficult it is to know when (or if) something actually happened.

The Iron Age Levant, which occurred 1200-500 B.C., is one example of a historical period of particularly murky chronology. It’s a time when many of the cultural histories of the Near East, North Africa and Europe were created, passed on through stories originally from the Hebrew Bible.

Matching events in the holy texts with actual history is a contentious issue among researchers.

"It’s called the Iron Age chronology debate. It’s a huge argument about the chronology of events in the bible," Yoav Vaknin, an archeologist at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told DW. 

Vaknin recently published a paper with colleagues that utilizes a new method called "geomagnetic dating" to piece together when certain events during the Iron Age Levant took place.

How history is pieced together

Historians and archeologists use two main sources of information to find out when, where and if historical events happened.

"We know a lot about the chronology of ancient Levant from the Hebrew bible [as well as] Assyrian and Egyptian texts," said Helen Gries, a curator at the Pergamon museum in Berlin.

However, texts are often written and adapted decades or hundreds of years after an event took place, making it difficult to verify their authenticity. 

Some texts, like the Triumphal Relief at Karnak Temple in Egypt, which depicts Pharaoh Shoshenq I conquering Judean lands around 900 B.C., might be little more than the vain boasts of a megalomaniacal king, for example. 

Researchers can also date events by examining pottery remnants from archeological sites, which have layers of debris and artifacts — the deeper you go, the further back in history you are. 

"But the problem is that this is relative chronology. We know what comes early and later, but it doesn’t tell us when things happened," Gries told DW.

Dating events with magnetism and fire

In Vaknin’s study, published in PNAS last week, authors described a new scientific trick to help date events — specifically ones involving fire.

The researchers facilitated a process called archaeomagnetic dating, a method using magnetism that they say offers more precise ways to date artifacts.

To explain how archaeomagnetic dating works, it’s first important to know that the Earth’s magnetic field changes over time. Second, when they are heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius, microscopic magnetic compounds in materials like clay align themselves with the Earth’s changing magnetic field.

"Cities at that time were built with sun-dried mud bricks. When they are heated up, like in a destructive fire, the ferromagnetic minerals inside the bricks align with a magnetic field like compass needles. When it cools, they become stuck – a time lock of when the fire took place," Vaknin explained.

By examining these "time locks", the researchers were able to better pinpoint when certain historical events happened.

Pharaoh Shoshenq may not have been bluffing after all

Originally, historians doubted whether Pharaoh Shoshenq I actually conquered the Levant with force around 900 B.C.

"Most historians think Shoshenq didn’t destroy anything when he invaded the Levant — instead they think Judean cities paid him to go away so he wouldn’t destroy anything," Vaknin said.

However, with the aid of the new archaeomagnetic dating method, Vaknin said the Pharaoh may have been telling the truth about his destructive tendencies after all.

Vaknin studied evidence of destruction in the Judean city Tel Beth-Shean. Excavators of the site originally suggested the city was destroyed sometime around 830 B.C. In the bible, this matches with a military campaign into the Kingdom of Judah led by Hazael, King of Aram Damascus.

Vaknin took samples of bricks from Tel Beth-Shean that were burned in some sort of fire. The geomagnetic data he was able to excavate from the samples suggests the city was actually destroyed eighty years earlier, around 900 B.C.

"This ruled out destruction by King Hazael. Instead, the timing of the fire does correspond with Shoshenq’s campaign," Vaknin said.

Vaknin and his co-authors say their work doesn’t prove that Shoshenq definitely destroyed Beth-Shean. Rather, they say, it provides an example of how archaeomagnetic dating can help improve understanding of when historical events took place and contribute to ongoing debates about the chronology of the rulers of Israel and Judah.

[...]

https://www.dw.com/en/old-testament-battles-confirmed-in-new-study/a-63586330

[Harold Jones]

Quote

Vaknin and his co-authors say their work doesn’t prove that Shoshenq definitely destroyed Beth-Shean. Rather, they say, it provides an example of how archaeomagnetic dating can help improve understanding of when historical events took place and contribute to ongoing debates about the chronology of the rulers of Israel and Judah

Dare we call it the Shoshenq redemption?

[sunday]

groan...

You could be worse than Shep!

[BansheeOne]

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

There is an interesting series of Podcasts on the BBC History magazine podcast website, all on the loss, the rediscovery and eventual recovery of the Mary Rose. Covers everything from probable cause of loss (they are begining to suspect enemy action) to the kind of objects they have recovered, and what the makeup of the crew says about Tudor England. Well worth spending your time listening to all 6 episodes.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-extra-podcast/id256580326

[Tim Sielbeck]

 

[JWB]

 

[lucklucky]

The end of Archaeology and the growth of Anonymous Archaeologist

 

https://www.samizdata.net/2022/12/a-speakeasy-for-archaeologists/

https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-rise-of-archaeologists-anonymous/

 

 

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In a quiet group chat in an obscure part of the internet, a small number of anonymous accounts are swapping references from academic publications and feverishly poring over complex graphs of DNA analysis. These are not your average trolls, but scholars, researchers and students who have come together online to discuss the latest findings in archaeology. Why would established academics not be having these conversations in a conference hall or a lecture theatre? The answer might surprise you.

The equation of anonymity on the internet with deviance, mischief and hate has become a central plank in the global war on “misinformation”. But for many of us, anonymity has allowed us to pursue our passion for scholarly research in a way that is simply impossible within the censorious confines of modern academia. And so, in these hidden places, professional geneticists, bioarchaeologists and physical anthropologists have created a network of counter-research. Using home-made software, spreadsheets and private servers, detailed and rigorous work is conducted away from prying eyes and hectoring voices.

 

 

Why do these academics seek to do in secret what they used to do openly in the universities? Because academic archaeology has changed:

Historian Wolf Liebeschuetz and archaeologist Sebastian Brather, to pick on just two, have both firmly insisted that archaeology must not, and cannot, be used to trace migrations or identify different ethnic groups in prehistory. To quote from Liebeschuetz’s 2015 book, East and West in Late Antiquity: “Archaeology can trace cultural diffusion, but it cannot be used to distinguish between peoples, and should not be used to trace migration. Arguments from language and etymology are irrelevant.”

At a stroke, this line of reasoning would essentially abolish several centuries of work unravelling the thread of movements and evolution of the Indo-European peoples and languages, not to mention the post-Roman Germanic Migration Period, Anglo-Saxon invasions, Polynesian and Bantu Expansions and almost all major changes in the human record.

and

This became clearer than ever following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which saw archaeology departments and professional bodies across the world fall over themselves to pledge curriculum “decolonisation” and an explicit commitment to politicising the discipline. To quote from the “’The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist’: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter”, published in American Antiquity:

“Consequently, Black archaeology has been and must remain purposeful in practice. It rejects research and practices defined in sterile, binary terms of objective-subjective positionality. Archaeology at historic Black sites must be conducted with an explicit politics… To the field of archaeology, it serves as a moral guide with the potential to elucidate historical wrongs and explore forms of contemporary redress.”

[sunday]

2 hours ago, lucklucky said:

The end of Archaeology and the growth of Anonymous Archaeologist

 

https://www.samizdata.net/2022/12/a-speakeasy-for-archaeologists/

https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-rise-of-archaeologists-anonymous/

 

 

 

Why do these academics seek to do in secret what they used to do openly in the universities? Because academic archaeology has changed:

Historian Wolf Liebeschuetz and archaeologist Sebastian Brather, to pick on just two, have both firmly insisted that archaeology must not, and cannot, be used to trace migrations or identify different ethnic groups in prehistory. To quote from Liebeschuetz’s 2015 book, East and West in Late Antiquity: “Archaeology can trace cultural diffusion, but it cannot be used to distinguish between peoples, and should not be used to trace migration. Arguments from language and etymology are irrelevant.”

At a stroke, this line of reasoning would essentially abolish several centuries of work unravelling the thread of movements and evolution of the Indo-European peoples and languages, not to mention the post-Roman Germanic Migration Period, Anglo-Saxon invasions, Polynesian and Bantu Expansions and almost all major changes in the human record.

and

This became clearer than ever following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which saw archaeology departments and professional bodies across the world fall over themselves to pledge curriculum “decolonisation” and an explicit commitment to politicising the discipline. To quote from the “’The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist’: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter”, published in American Antiquity:

“Consequently, Black archaeology has been and must remain purposeful in practice. It rejects research and practices defined in sterile, binary terms of objective-subjective positionality. Archaeology at historic Black sites must be conducted with an explicit politics… To the field of archaeology, it serves as a moral guide with the potential to elucidate historical wrongs and explore forms of contemporary redress.”

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko says Hi!

[DB]

The policy of disallowing research that shows we all are so intermingled and mixed throughout history can pnly serve to reinforce racial divisions.

We know which special interest groups that bolsters.

[bd1]

over here at least much bigger threat to future of archeology is metal detectors and ´black archeologists´ using them. it´s fine to sit in these ivory towers or chatrooms and discuss, but if things continue same way, in a decade there is nothing to  discuss .....

 

[DB]

In other news...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64162799

 

[lucklucky]

Seems a bit speculative.

[DB]

"Solves" is exaggerated. "Finds a plausible explanation that may be important" doesn't have the same headline pull.

[Sikkiyn]

How has ancient Roman cement stood test of time so well? Scientists finally have an answer after 2,000 years!

[JWB]

Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106

[JWB]

Just now, JWB said:

delete

 

[johnthejock]

Baltic sea wrecks facinating and emotive, esp about the childrens shoes 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2023/jan/13/new-photography-techniques-reveal-the-baltics-eerie-wrecks-in-pictures

 

[Sikkiyn]

Tunnug is Preparing to Present New Surprises to Archaeologists

[Sikkiyn]

And now, for something completely different, and absurdly humorous.

Russia Wants to Clone Ancient Scythian Warriors

[JWB]

Norway archaeologists find 'world's oldest runestone' (msn.com)