ADMIRAL Horatio Nelson’s favourite ship, on which he is said to have seduced Lady Hamilton and lost an eye in battle, has been found off the coast of Uruguay.
International treasure-divers said yesterday that they had found HMS Agamemnon, a 64-gun vessel which was the pride of Britain’s naval fleet when it went down in 1809.
Plans are now being made to lift the ship from its watery grave following the multi-million-pound deep-sea exploration.
Uruguayan millionaire Hector Bado, the operation’s backer, hailed the find as "akin to finding the Holy Grail". He said: "This is one of the most important maritime finds in history."
Erosion threatening Civil War earthworks
CHARLESTON, S.C., Mar 25, 2004 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Defensive earthworks built in the Civil War are slowly giving way to erosion, creating an outdoor laboratory for a U.S. geologist.
The earthen fortifications near Charleston, S.C., some up to 12 feet high and as wide as a football field, offer a unique opportunity to study the decay of large earthen constructions, because very detailed measurements are available from the war's end in 1865, said University of Cincinnati doctoral geology student Reuben Bullard Jr.
Fight! Fight! Honour at stake in Bannockburn rematch
A SECOND Battle of Bannockburn is raging but this time, rather than the massed ranks of English and Scots, the combatants are two television archaeologists and a museum curator.
The ‘rematch’ of this most celebrated victory of Scottish brains over English brawn is over three sharp wooden stakes that have long been regarded as the only known artefacts recovered from the battlefield.
The Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling has proudly displayed the stakes, which were discovered in 1923, for many years.
They are said to have been among those planted in shallow, covered pits with the intention of impaling English cavalry horses and their riders.
But carbon-dating tests of the spikes carried out during the making of the BBC archaeological programme Two Men in a Trench has produced a shock: they are more than 8,000 years old. That means the ‘stakes’ were in existence around 7,300 years before Robert the Bruce’s 1314 rout of the army of King Edward II.
This quote significant:
"The BBC team said they could not have been used as spikes because there were no markings on them to indicate the wood had been sharpened.
"But that does not mean to say they were not used because the wood might not have needed sharpening anyway. . ."
She has a point (heh. So to speak. . .) It is possible that old wood was actually used at the time. It's a problem in general for C-14 dating. What the technique actually dates is the isolation of the carbon reservoir. That is, crudely, when the entity (tree, animal) died. So theoretically a person could have picked up a couple of 8k year old sticks and used them as spikes.
This problem has cropped up before. In the debate over the first entry of humans into the Americas, the "Old Crow flesher" was initially thought to represent a bone tool that was dated to ca. 26-27,000 BP (considerably older than the 12k BP earliest date then known). Most have since agreed that the bone itself was, in fact, 26-27k years old, but only modified into an artifact much later. A paper dealing with these issues can be found here. (I think this is a freely available link)
The other aspect to take note of vis a vis what C-14 actually dates is contamination. The definition above specifically refers to the isolation of a carbon reservoir. That is, no new carbon enters the object. This is where contamination becomes an issue. If carbon (say, old carbon from nearby coal) enters the object, it is no longer isolated.
So remember when reading about C-14 or other dating methods: What you are really dating is a particular event in the life of the object, not the object itself, and the event that you date may not necessarily be the event you really want to date.
Speaking of which. . .Carbon dating tells tale of Lima Lake
Archaeologist Steven Tieken of Quincy spent five years carefully excavating material from a 30- by 60-foot patch of ground near Lima Lake in the northwest corner of Adams County.
Now, for the first time, he has scientific evidence to back up his contention that the site was occupied nearly 2,000 years ago by a Middle Woodland culture.
The evidence is in the form of carbon-14 dating performed by scientists with the Illinois State Geological Survey's Radiocarbon Department at the University of Illinois.
Tests conducted on material taken from two trash pits at the Lima Lake site showed one pit dates back to 78 A.D. and the other to 540 A.D.
The Middle Woodland period lasted from 200 B.C. to 300 A.D., while the Late Woodland period went from 300 to 550 A.D.
Tieken said the test results are significant because they identify a minimum range of dates that the site was occupied by a small band of Native Americans who lived off the land by hunting, fishing and gathering nuts and other natural foods.
Museum storage crunch damages artifacts
98 percent of collection in holding; lack of organization, cataloging compounds issue
With boxes of bones, fragments of fossils and crates of ceramics, the hundreds of thousands of objects tucked away in the labyrinthine basements below Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology appear to have come straight out of an Indiana Jones archaeological adventure.
However, unlike the Holy Grail from Indy's adventures which was displayed for the whole world to admire, many of Penn's valuable artifacts are relegated to subterranean basements and hidden storage rooms, where they are frequently damaged and often remain unseen by the general public for decades.
"Virtually none of the collection is on display," said one of the museum's former summer interns. "The storage areas are filled with absolutely beautiful vases, jewelry and other objects which will never be displayed and are sitting there, rotting and decaying in the same bags they have been in since they were excavated."
Women-Only Language Reemerges
March 29, 2004 — In late April, Chinese archivists will unveil a rare collection of items featuring Nushu, a mysterious ancient language created by, and exclusively for, women.
The exhibition, to be held at the provincial archive of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China, appears to be part of a growing effort within China to both recognize and preserve Nushu, which many scholars feared was on the verge of extinction.
Olympic flame lit ahead of Athens Games
ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece — The flame that will burn at the Athens Games was lighted Thursday amid the ruins of the ancient sanctuary where the Olympics were born 2,780 years ago.
In a ceremony held at an altar to Hera, a Greek goddess worshipped in Olympia during the original games, the torch was lit by a Greek actress playing the role of a high priestess.
Thalia Prokopiou, one of two dozen women that took part in the ceremony, placed a silver torch inside a burnished-steel concave mirror. The sun's rays then ignited the torch.
"Today the Olympic flame will be reborn yet again to enfold the whole world in its light. This is the day that all of us have been waiting for so eagerly," Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, president of the Athens organizing committee said.
Seems like an awful long way to carry the damn thing just to get it from Olympia to Athens. . . .