tagged w/ Archeology
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* The site contains 100 buildings, forming a ’temple precinct’
* Stonehenge may not have been the centre of Neolithic culture after all
* It could take decades to fully explore and examine
A 5000-year-old temple in Orkney could be more important than Stonehenge, according to archaeologists.
The site, known as the Ness of Brodgar, was investigated by BBC2 documentary A History of Ancient Britain, with presenter Neil Oliver describing it as ‘the discovery of a lifetime’.
So far the remains of 14 Stone Age buildings have been excavated, but thermal geophysics technology has revealed that there are 100 altogether, forming a kind of temple precinct.
Until now Stonehenge was considered to have been the centre of Neolithic culture, but that title may now go to the Orkney site, which contains Britain’s earliest known wall paintings.
Oliver said: ‘The excavation of a vast network of buildings on Orkney is allowing us to recreate an entire Stone Age world.
‘It’s opening a window onto the mysteries of Neolithic religion.’...
Continued at:
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=18105* The site contains 100 buildings, forming a ’temple precinct’
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Dagum
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29 days ago
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Ancient Andean crops and farming methods are revived as Peruvians struggle to deal with the effects of climate change.
Story from PRI's The World. Listen to audio above for full report.
To get to some of Peru's most remote Andean communities, you head out over pockmarked dirt roads from a small town already 10,000 feet up. Up – up – up — past llamas and alpacas and sheep and cows. The vegetation thins out and the air becomes even thinner. Your lungs clamor for oxygen and you're offered coca leaves to help adjust to the altitude.
And then, after four hypnotic hours, you've arrived – at a patch of sparse farmland near the town of Pomacocha, at 13,000 feet an outpost at pretty much the upper limits of agriculture.
For centuries, Pomacocha's thousand or so residents have grown corn in the fertile valleys below the town and potatoes on slopes that push against the sky above, fed by seasonal rains and glacial streams.
But climate change is hitting the high Andes hard. Temperature and precipitation swings are becoming more extreme, the glaciers are shrinking fast, and a tough place to farm is becoming even tougher.
So to help them deal with an uncertain future, residents are looking back in time—to before the arrival of Europeans.
From a field of brown soil, Pomacocha resident Mariano Ccaccya unearths a small, pink potato—a huaña, one of the first to be grown here in decades. The huaña is the native potato in this part of Peru, but Ccaccya says it had fallen out of favor in recent decades and was about to disappear.
Huaña are bitter, Ccaccya says, and it takes a lot of work to make them palatable. But he says there are good reasons to grow them in times of increasing uncertainty.
Ccaccya, who's the local head of a nonprofit group that's leading an effort to revive ancient Andean crops, says huañas can be stored for two or three years, more than four times as long as most other potatoes. Ccaccya's colleague Adripino Jayo says huañas also resist frost, hail, extreme rain and drought.
"It's very, very strong," Jayo says. "Now that we're in the crisis of climate change, it's worth recovering these potatoes."
Others think so too. Jayo and Ccaccya's organization, Cusichaca Andina, recently won a grant from the World Bank to further its efforts to promote a variety of resilient ancient Andean crops, including quinoa, amaranth, and different types of potatoes and squashes.
But changing what's grown here is only part of the plan. Cusichaca Andina is also looking to the past to try to change how crops are grown.
On a steep slope in a valley about two hours from the potato fields, Jayo pulls away a stand of brush to reveal an overgrown rock wall. He says the stones are part of a long-abandoned system of agricultural terraces, built into Peru's mountains by the Incas more than 500 years ago.
Terraces like these once blanketed thousands of square miles of the Andes, and were described in the 17th century book The Royal Commentaries of the Incas, by Garcilaso de la Vega.
"They built level terraces on the mountains and hillsides, wherever the soil was good," De la Vega wrote. "And these are to be seen today in Cusco and in the whole of Peru."
Just a small fraction of the terraces are still used today. After the European conquest, Spanish crops and agricultural systems largely displaced traditional ones.
But here in Pomacocha, old terraces are being restored, and new ones are being built.
Ccaccya says they have a lot of benefits. The terraces help channel water for irrigation while avoiding erosion. They can hold water for months, which is crucial in a place with only intermittent access to water. And plants grown on them are more productive, he says.
Cusichaca Andina is also working on reviving another ancient technology for holding and transporting scarce water—Incan irrigation systems that Garcilaso de la Vega called "extraordinary."
"The Cisterns, or Conservatories, were about twelve foot deep, in channels made of hewn stone," de la Vega wrote, "and rammed in with earth so hard, that no water could pass between… But the Spaniards little regarded the convenience of these works, but rather out of a scornful and disdaining humor, have suffered them unto ruin, beyond all recovery."
Centuries later, the digging and hammering of a handful of men near Pomacocha suggests that the ruin of the Incan irrigation channels was perhaps not quite beyond all recovery. The workers are chiseling and lining up stones along a long-abandoned canal once used to divert water from a nearby spring.
"It's always been here," Jayo says, pointing at the stone canal. "It's probably from pre-Incan times, but it's still useful for irrigation, with a little help."
Cusichaca Andina and other groups in the Andes have recovered these and other ancient agricultural treasures through a combination of archaeology and exploring local traditions. And they're teaching communities throughout the Peruvian high Andes how to rebuild and use them, along with other ancient agricultural techniques.
It's all part of an effort to increase the resilience and food security.
But the leaders of Cusichaca Andina realize they can only make a small dent in a vast need. Jayo says the Peruvian government has a big role to play as well.
"We see the difficulties in the national context," Jayo says. He says the group wants politicians in Lima to apply what it's doing across all of the Andes.
So far national politicians haven't picked up that slack.
But the work here may have relevance to mountainous regions beyond Peru. For instance Cusichaca Andina's founder, British archaeologist Ann Kendall, recently traveled to China. The world's largest country faces huge challenges from climate change and water shortages. And it also happens to have its own system of ancient mountain terraces that Kendall thinks may just be waiting to be revived.
Read the rest of this story and view a slideshow of Pomacocha farmers on The World website.
more at the link.Ancient Andean crops and farming methods are revived as Peruvians struggle to deal... more
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A team of anthropologists found a mysterious burial in the jungle near the city of Kigali Rwanda (Central Africa). The remains belong to gigantic creatures that bear little resemblance to humans. Head of research group believes that they could be visitors from another planet who died as a result of a catastrophe.
According to the scientists, they were buried at least 500 years ago. At first, researchers thought that they came across the remains of ancient settlements, but no signs of human life have been found nearby.
The 40 communal graves had approximately 200 bodies in them, all perfectly preserved. The creatures were tall - approximately 7 feet. Their heads were disproportionately large and they had no mouth, nose or eyes.
The anthropologists believe that the creatures were members of an alien landing, possibly destroyed by some terrestrial virus to which they had no immunity. However, no traces of the landing of the spacecraft or its fragments were discovered.
This is not the first such finding. In the summer of 1937 a group of Chinese scientists led by Professor Chi Putei surveyed the caves of Mount Bayan-Kara-Ula. Inside they found skeletons with excessively large heads and puny bodies. Nearby there were 176 stone plates. In the center of each plate there was a hole from which a spiral groove spread out to the perimeter with some characters on it.
In addition, the cave walls were covered with pictures of the rising sun, moon and stars, with many painted dots or small items, slowly approaching the mountains and the earth's surface.
Experts in deciphering ancient written characters have been puzzled over the disclosure of the secret spirals from the cave Bayan-Kara-Ula for two decades. Finally, the professor of Beijing University Zum Umniu deciphered several inscriptions.
The grooved letters narrated that approximately 12 thousand years ago some flying objects crashed in these mountains. Chinese archaeologists found a mention of the peoples who lived in the mountainous caves of Bayan-Kara-Ula.
A corpse of another "alien" was found by Turkish cavers. A mummy of the ice age was resting in a sarcophagus made of crystalline material. The height of the humanoid male creature did not exceed 1 meter 20 centimeters, his skin was light green, and he had large transparent wings on his sides.
According to the researchers, in spite of the unusual appearance the creature looked more like a person rather than an animal. His nose, lips, ears, hands, feet, nails, were very similar to human. Only his eyes were very different, three times bigger than those of a human, and colorless, like reptile's eyes.
Not that long ago in one of the ancient Egyptian tombs a mummy of a man 2.5 meters tall was found. It had no nose or ears, and its mouth was very wide and had no tongue.
According to archaeologist Gaston de Villars, the age of the Mummy is approximately 4 thousand years. It was buried as an Egyptian nobleman - carefully mummified and surrounded by servants, food and art objects designed for the afterlife. However, as it was discovered, not all objects around the finding belong to the Egyptian or even Earth's culture. For example, among the finds was a round polished metal disk covered with strange characters, a costume made of metal with the remnants of something resembling plastic shoes, and many stone tablets filled with images of stars, planets and strange machines. The Shrine where a strange mummy was found also looks unusual. The burial was made of the material unknown in antiquity. The stone was literally carved from the rock so that the walls were smooth, like polished marble. It looked as if it was cut by a laser. Incidentally, the stone's surface was fused. The tomb was decorated with a substance resembling lead.
However, the "alien" theory is not the only one. According to some researchers, the "giants" and "dwarfs" could be a mere side branch of humanity that once lived on Earth, but for some reason became extinct.
Margarita Troitsina
Yoki
more at link...
Nephilim? Annunaki?A team of anthropologists found a mysterious burial in the jungle near the city of... more
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Civilizations built 10s of thousands of years ago is more like it!
May 28, 2011
When you think archeology, you think shovels, brushes, brooms and other time-honored tools used to uncover archeological treasures. Now a new way to peer beneath the Earth's surface may have made an exciting find: more pyramids, buried deep under an ancient Egyptian city.
By studying infrared images taken by NASA satellites, Sarah Parcak and her team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham identified the suspected pyramids in Tanis, Egypt. The ancient city, abandoned centuries ago, is famous as the fictional home of the Lost Ark from the Indiana Jones movies. Satellite images also showed other lost structures, like tombstones and houses, buried for thousands of years.
"What these satellites do is they record light radiation that's reflected off the surface of the Earth in different parts of the light spectrum," Parcak explains to NPR's Rachel Martin. "We use false color imaging to try to tease out these very subtle differences on the ground."
Those subtle differences are an archaeologist's clues to what might lie under a rice paddy or a city street. "You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible," Parcak says. "You're actually able to see settlements and tombs — and even things like buried pyramids — that you might not otherwise be able to see."
What Parcak's team actually found was 17 structures that had a similar size, shape and orientation to other pyramids in the area. Initial excavations indicate that at least two of the structures are most likely pyramids, but Parcak warns, "we're not going to be able to say with a 100-percent certainty that they are pyramids until they're excavated."
That would be the fun part for most archaeologists — getting dirty. "You can theorize as much as you want about what you think you're seeing, but until you get out there and dig," Parcak says, "you can't tell exactly what it is."
Her team left their computer screens in Birmingham to meet up with an excavation team onsite in Egypt. They found the excavated structure matched the satellite images almost perfectly — a big win for a new technology that could rescue ancient treasures before the human population spread buries them forever.
"We only have a limited amount of time left before many archaeological sites all over the world are destroyed," Parcak says. "So we have to be really selective about where we dig." The new tools might just buy archaeologists a little more time.
"We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone."Civilizations built 10s of thousands of years ago is more like it!
May 28, 2011... more
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Archaeologists have unearthed the 5,000-year-old remains of what they believe may have been the world's oldest known gay caveman.
(read all about it at link)Archaeologists have unearthed the 5,000-year-old remains of what they believe may have... more
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In a dusty, ancient burial site in northern Jordan, archaeologists have made a startling discovery: a fox buried alongside human remains.
It seems some 16,000 years ago, several millennia before any animals were domesticated, humans may have been making an early attempt to keep pets. Red foxes, to be precise.
(click on the link for the full story)In a dusty, ancient burial site in northern Jordan, archaeologists have made a... more
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A tiny relative of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered in China boasting only a single claw on each hand.Linhenykus monodactylus wouldn't have weighed more than a parrot and was found in sediments between 84 and 75 million years old.The dinosaur belongs to a sub-branch of the theropods, the dinosaur group which includes T.rex and Velociraptor, and which gave rise to modern birds.The new species was named after the Chinese city of Linhe in inner Mongolia, near where its fossilised remains was uncovered. The international team of scientists found a partial skeleton, including bones of the vertebrae, forelimb, hind limbs, and a partial pelvis.It's part of the Alvarezsauroidea family of theropods, a group of small, long-legged dinosaurs, known for their strange and tiny arms.Michael Pittman of University College London, who was part of the team, says the animal would hardly have been intimidating."You'd see a very small animal, probably below your hip height, with a very small skull. It's not very threatening because its teeth are very small compared to other carnivorous dinosaurs and there's some evidence it may have been an insectivore," he told the BBC.What is striking and slightly special looking is the animal's unusual claws."Non-avian theropods start with five fingers but evolved to have only three fingers in later forms," he says. "Tyrannosaurs were unusual in having just two fingers but the one-fingered Linhenykus shows how extensive and complex theropod hand modifications really were."
Why do the fingers disappear?
The suggestion is that this mono-digit theropod may represent the end of one evolutionary pathway, in which unused digits disappear as part of a process of natural selection.Professor Xu Xing, who led the international team of researchers said the discovery showed that the evolution of theropods was more complex than originally thought. Some species had a big finger and two small ones. Experts had surmised that the creatures used the large one to dig with and that it became stronger over time while the smaller ones were not used and were eventually lost.
A tiny relative of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex has been discovered in China... more
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In the olden days, before the internet, the only true way to learn archaeology was through a dig or a visit to a museum. Nowadays, many archaeologists, students, and other experts keep a blog.
link: http://www.engineeringdegreeonline.org/top-50-archeologist-bloggersIn the olden days, before the internet, the only true way to learn archaeology was... more
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eva2
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1 year ago
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"For a long time, Darwinists assumed that anyone who argued seriously against their theory of human evolution must be a Christian creationist. Perhaps that’s why my book Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race came as such a surprise.
In a review of Forbidden Archaeology published in Geoarchaeology (1994, 9:337-340), Kenneth Feder wrote: “The book … represents something perhaps not seen before; we can fairly call
it ‘Krishna creationism’ with no disrespect intended. The basic
premises of the authors are breathtaking…: The prevailing para
digm of human evolution … is wholly untenable. There is what
amounts to a passive conspiracy (the authors call it a “knowledge
filter”) to suppress a huge body of data that contradicts our prevailing paradigm … this purported evidence indicates that “be
ings quite like ourselves have been around as far back as we care to look—in the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene and beyond.”
Interesting perspective...
http://www.disinfo.com/2010/10/christian-creationism-krishna-creationism-and-the-origin-of-the-human-species/"For a long time, Darwinists assumed that anyone who argued seriously against... more
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seifip
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1 year ago
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Workers excavating the World Trade Centre site have unearthed the 10-metre hull of a ship believed to have been buried in the 18th century.
The vessel was probably used along with other debris to fill in land to extend lower Manhattan into the Hudson river, archaeologists have said.
It was hoped the artefact could be retrieved by the end of today, said archaeologist Molly McDonald. A boat specialist was going to the Ground Zero site to examine the find.
McDonald said she wanted to at least salvage some timbers; it was unclear if any large portions could be lifted intact.
"We're mostly clearing it by hand because it's fragile," she said. Construction equipment may be used later in the process.
McDonald and Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist, were at the site of the 11 September 2001 attacks when the hull was discovered on Tuesday morning.
"We noticed curved timbers that a back hoe brought up," McDonald said. "We quickly found the rib of a vessel and continued to clear it away and expose the hull.
"We're going to send timber samples to a laboratory to do dendrochronology to help us get a sense of when the boat was constructed." Dendrochronology is the science that uses tree rings to determine dates and chronological order.
A 45kg (100lb) anchor was found a few yards from the hull on Wednesday but the experts are not sure if it belongs to the ship. The anchor was about a metre across, McDonald said.
The archaeologists are racing to record and analyse the vessel before exposure to air makes the delicate wood deteriorate.
"I kept thinking of how closely it came to being destroyed," Pappalardo said.Workers excavating the World Trade Centre site have unearthed the 10-metre hull of a... more
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A team of Chinese and Turkish archeologists reported that they have found strong evidence that the ruins located in Mount Ararat in modern day Turkey belong to the Noah’s Ark. This new development may shake the history of science, technology and religion.
The archeologists have stated that they have carbon tested the wooden parts found buried under ground where the ruins are located and the woods date 4800 years back. The pieces of wood are found at an altitude of 4,000 meters. There has never been a discovery of civilization above 3,500 meters before.
However, Yeung Wing-Cheung, a team member and a documentary producer from Hong Kong said : ” We are not 100% sure that these pieces belong to the Noah’s Ark, but we are 99,9% sure. This discovery is going to make a major change in many religious beliefs. We have only found bones of horses and we have counted a total of 1347 horses. We have not come accross any other animal bones so far”. He also added surprisingly that they have made an interesting discovery too, a marine engine label showing the power as 1347 hp, which is the exact number of horses they have counted in the ruins. The evidence has been sent to New York Archeology Musueum for further analysis.
Marine Engine Label Found During The Excavations
Hakan Osmanoglu, the team leader and professor at Istanbul University said they have also found a general arrangement plan showing 2 master bedroms, 6 guest rooms, a flybridge jacuzzi, a large galley, sauna and a theatre located in the decks of the ark. However, he stated that none of the furniture or appliances has been found as the area have been looted by the crusaders in the late 9th century.
The research report will be made public in the following months when all the pieces are analyzed. We have been given the opportunity to read some of the drafts. The report argues the religious beliefs and re-writes the history of civilizations.
Read More Here ... http://www.gpexaminer.com/?p=101A team of Chinese and Turkish archeologists reported that they have found strong... more
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A newly discovered valley of the Pyramids in the Balkans may be the second oldest culture in Europe. Yet, the international scientific community does not want to take it seriously. Semir Osmanagic who discovered the Valley, shows us around in this short film.A newly discovered valley of the Pyramids in the Balkans may be the second oldest... more
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The Alps from space. Could they be a relatively new mountain range and not millions of years old?
It is a commonly held belief that events on Earth progress according to cycles.
One of the principle tenets of Electric Universe theory is that Earth and the Solar System have experienced catastrophic reordering and resurfacing perhaps as little as 5000 years ago. The time varies, but most adherents to the theory consider 10,000 years ago to be as far back as we need to look for the events to have occurred.
Prevailing geological theories state that it took millions, if not billions, of years to arrange the scenery on our planet. Mountains rise in response to mechanisms that are so slow as to be undetectable over all the millennia of human history: the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Rocky Mountains, for example, retain the shapes that were visible to ancient nomadic tribes that wandered the continents in ages past.
The seas, it is said, have not left their basins in time spans that have no meaning to the human mind. The Atlantic Ocean has bridged the distance between Africa, Europe, and the Americas for a period greater than the human species has existed on Earth.
Rivers, deserts, canyons—all appear to our modern eyes just as they would have appeared to Alexander the Great, Goyathlay, Sargon, or Khufu. The cyclic processes of erosion or sediment deposition are the same today as they were long ago. Most of the current methods for dating artifacts, geologic layers, or fossils are dependent on that hypothesis of gradual, uniform action.
What if the uniformitarian hypothesis is incorrect? What would be the ramifications if carbon dating, potassium-argon, or the so-called "geologic column" were not reliable windows to the past? What if the topography of Earth was created in a period of time so short that ancient civilizations were able to record it? What meaning would the Neolithic, or the Jurassic, or the Precambrian eras have?
Coal beds cover millions of square kilometers all over the world. Insects, leaves, trees, rocks, and animal bones are found inside them, although hardly any intact forms exist. The majority are disarticulated, shredded, or crushed. Carbonized trees are sometimes found standing upright in a few coal seams, extending down through many layers that are said to progress through eons of time, 250 to 500 million years. Mineralized trees, called "petrified wood," cover large areas of the American prairie. The prairie, itself, rests on top of gravel deposits in some cases hundreds of meters deep. There are trilobites, pterosaurs, palm trees, fir trees, dragonflies—all preserved for what is said to be millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions of years in a variety of minerals. Some are entangled in mountain-high piles, with multitudes of different species from every era mixed together in a splintered mass.
When did these plants and animals, all strong, all "fit," all perfectly adapted to their environments, meet their dooms? What caused the forests to burn, or freeze, and then succumb to petrification?
Once again, the primary assumption in the development of dating systems is that the Earth is an isolated planet that does not interact with other celestial bodies. Planetary scientists do say that there have been meteor impacts of staggering size, but nothing like that has taken place for the aforementioned millions of years. The large craters, such as Popigai or Chicxulub, date back to the Jurassic Age.
An additional aspect to the uniformitarian hypothesis is that radioactive decay rates have never changed since the radioactive elements were formed, and no alteration to Earth's electric or magnetic fields have taken place. Geologists rely on a smooth, continuous clock ticking off the millennia at a measurable rate. If that is not the case, then the Age of the Dinosaurs, or the formation of the ocean basins, could have occurred at any point in the past, or over any length of time.
It seems possible that plasma interactions with Earth and other charged bodies in space or the impact on our biosphere from ion beams could disrupt all the elemental changes that are used to date rocks. Earth could be much younger than the billions of years commonly ascribed to it, or much older. If Electric Universe concepts are found to be more reasonable than previous theories, that cataclysmic events completely overturned the familiar environment that older peoples experienced, then we have no "clocks" and no "calendars" to use, except those that came into being a mere 100 generations ago.
The Big Bang, Global Warming, Black Holes...its all b%llsh#t.
Check out the Electric Universe Theory and find out why the scientists are lying.The Alps from space. Could they be a relatively new mountain range and not millions of... more
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Obagam
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2 years ago
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