A runic inscription found in Dalgety Bay has provided evidence that Vikings could once have settled in Fife.
The inscribed slate, found by a walker 10 years ago, was brought to the attention of experts at last year’s archaeology fair in Dunfermline.
Fife Council archaeologist Douglas Spiers said he could not say for certain if the stone was left by raiders or settlers, but he thought it was probably made around the ninth century AD.
“It could be a copy of an original runic inscription, but my own gut feeling is that it is authentic,” he said.
“There’s no way of dating these items using scientific methods such as carbon dating, but we can look at the way the stone is cut. If it is weathered it is more likely to be authentic.
Note the difficulty in dating. Dashedly difficult for inscribed rocks. You can "date" the rock itself, but that will just tell you that the rock is 75 million years old or something. What you really want to date is the time the writing was applied. Very hard. Which is why they're so easy to forge.
Cannon corrosion being removed with unusual baking technique
An unusual restoration technique - baking - may be the answer to the expensive and time-consuming process of cleaning chunks of oxidized corrosion from artifacts hauled from the ocean.
This week, corrosion was chipped off a cannon that had cooked for two weeks in a 1,400-degree kiln at Dan Finch's pottery shop in Bailey.
Finch, who has a background in metallurgy, said when the iron is heated to a high temperature and turns cherry-red, the chlorides that corroded the cannon are driven out of the metal through a process called sublimation.
"Ohhhh yeah, that looks good," said Nathan Henry, conservator for the Office of State Archaeology's underwater division, as the carbon-encrusted cannon was revealed to him for the first time since it went into Finch's custom-made kiln.
Ancient palace may reveal emperor's secrets
Tokyo - Archeologists in western Japan have unearthed the remains of a wooden palace believed to be that of a seventh-century emperor who laid the foundations for the nation's centralised bureaucracy, a member of the team said Tuesday.
. . .
Previous digs had uncovered remains of walls, gates and other outlying parts of Temmu's palace, known as the Asuka Kiyomihara Palace, but never the emperor's residence itself, said Kiyohide Saito, a researcher with the Archaeological Institute of Kashihara-Nara.
Archeologists believe the courtyard, paved with more than 2 000 granite stones, and pond were part of a private garden adjoining a wooden palace that was 24 metres long and 12 metres wide.
Pretty boring "secrets" if you ask me.
'A once-in-a-lifetime discovery'
Exciting objects are emerging from beneath the mud in a Croatian river valley.
Being in the right place at the right time can be fortuitous in academia as in journalism. Had he not been one of the few foreign academics to be working in Croatia throughout the civil wars of the 1990s, Dr Vince Gaffney may never have got to hear about what he calls "the most remarkable site that I have, and will ever have, the privilege of being involved with - a once-in-a-lifetime discovery for any archaeologist".
Ten years ago, he was sitting outside a cafe on the island of Brach with colleagues from Birmingham University's field archaeology unit, watching distant military helicopters lifting injured Croatian soldiers from Split. "The national army had taken back some territory and there was a hell of a party that night," he recalls. "There was a lot of firing into the air. Then somebody pulled a pin out of a grenade and handed it to me."
! ! ! ! !
Oh yeah, happens to me all the time. Just sitting there in a cafe sipping a latte when someone hands me a grenade. I've discovered lots of stuff that way.
Roman treasure found in pond dig
A man unearthed a priceless hoard of 20,000 Roman coins as he dug a new fishpond in his back garden.
Experts say the money may date from the 4th Century and could be the biggest find of its kind in Britain.
The coins were crammed into a ceramic pot which broke up as it was dug out of the ground at Thornbury, Gloucestershire.
Forgotten city lies beneath Edinburgh
EDINBURGH (Reuters) - Deep beneath the cobbled streets of the Scottish capital lies a dank and forgotten realm where prostitutes once rubbed shoulders with body snatchers and the light of day never penetrated.
The thousands of subterranean citizens moved out long ago leaving the Edinburgh Vaults underneath the city's South Bridge alone with its multitude of ghosts until it was rediscovered in the 1980s and found new life as a tourist attraction.
"There are no written records of who lived in these vaults, although there is ample anecdotal evidence that thousands of people lived and died here, some probably never even seeing the outside world," said tour guide Jim Lennie.
Ancient gate restored in the heart of Cairo
Cairo - As soon as the fortified gate went up 900 years ago, travellers began wedging human teeth and other items in cracks for good luck. Some left handwritten notes, scrawled in an illegible, mystical script, for a saint long since dead.
The offerings were found during a five-year restoration of Cairo's oldest gate, Bab Zuweila, in the lively and historic neighbourhood known as Islamic Cairo.
Now, some of those artifacts are being displayed in cases near the gate and others can be seen on a door section that was too damaged to be restored and returned to its original place.
Bubonic Plague Traced to Ancient Egypt
The bubonic plague, or Black Death, may have originated in ancient Egypt, according to a new study.
"This is the first time the plague's origins in Egypt have been backed up by archaeological evidence," said Eva Panagiotakopulu, who made the discovery. Panagiotakopulu is an archaeologist and fossil-insect expert at the University of Sheffield, England.