Deschutes National Forest, Newberry National Volcanic Monument is now taking reservations for the Time, Tracks and Trails archaeology program. The program is free of charge and open to students in grades 5-12.
Reservations are required and you will need to provide your own transportation. The program will be offered September 20-October 15, Tuesday through Friday, 9:30 to 12:45.
Time, Tracks and Trails is an outdoor education program located at Lava Lands Visitor Center that focuses on the science of archaeology. “The program is an innovative, hands-on opportunity for students to experience what it is like to be an archaeologist. Students gain new knowledge and respect for people and resources throughout history; setting the stage for students to become familiar with concepts of conservation and cultural resource management,” stated Sara Callies, Conservation Education Coordinator.
During your visit, students will set up archaeological study plots and perform an archaeological excavation to find artifacts. Students will explore a wickiup and a pioneer trunk and discover their cultural importance. Students make observations, create hypotheses, and report conclusions on their findings.
Local museum boasts rare finds
Buried in the basement of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Highland Park is a small archaeological treasure: The James L. Kelso Bible Lands Museum.
It is more staid than the upcoming touring exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but appeals to the same interests with rare finds of its own. In addition to pottery, jewelry and other items unearthed in the Holy Land, it features newly digitized films of early 20th-century digs. And it's free.
"This institution has not only taught archaeology, but it has been doing archaeology since the 1920s," said Ronald Tappy, professor of Bible and archaeology and director of the museum. Pittsburgh Theological Seminary stands alongside Harvard and the University of Chicago as schools that changed archaeology from the hobby of treasure seekers to a meticulous science.
Maybe they were just bored. . . Rock art stumps experts
Thousands of years ago, images of giraffe, antelope, elephant and rhino were scratched onto rock faces in the middle of a desert near Kalacha, in the extreme northeast of Kenya.
To this day there is no consensus on exactly why.
Almost every twist of the path along the base of the embellished hill offers another tableau.
"Hunters would come here, where they could look down at a sunken waterhole where animals came to drink. They just had to block the way out and would kill their prey with spears and arrows safely from their own sort of balcony," explained Worabu, a guide.
The animal images look like hunting trophies, or perhaps a score-card of kills, or some sort of prehistoric shopping list.
A lifelong devotion leads to an archaeological gift
For decades, Dick and Marjorie Johnson walked the fields of rural southern Anne Arundel County, visually scouring the dirt for stones and pottery shards that a plow's blade unearthed.
The Native American artifacts the couple amassed form a collection that experts consider archaeologically priceless. Last month, the Deale couple gave two dozen cartons of spear points, axes, pestles and other items to Anne Arundel County's archaeology program.
Experts hope studies of the artifacts will help them understand what life was like for Native Americans over thousands of years.
"This will be the primary collection of the Indians of the south side of the county for generations to come," said Wayne Clark, chief of the Maryland Office of Museum Services. "For decades to come, some of this may be the only collection because of development" and a shift toward no-till farming.
Ancient monument may be reclassified
An attempt will be made today to have a hill reclassified as a building to protect one of the most enigmatic prehistoric structures in Europe.
Ramblers may gain a theoretical entitlement to walk up the sides of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire if the largest manmade mound in Europe is classified as "open countryside" under the countryside and rights of way bill.
The highest profile objectors to the draft maps so far are celebrities including Madonna, anxious to protect their privacy.
Amateur dig strikes a Roman treasure
A ROMAN settlement full of fascinating artefacts has been uncovered near Burton Dassett. But funding is urgently needed if the local volunteer archaeologists are to complete the important excavation.
Volunteers from the Felden Archaeological Society have discovered an array of items dating as far back as 500 BC, including flints, pottery and metal clips believed to be from a toga.
Aerial photos and geophysical tests have shown evidence of a one km sq stone settlement between Northend and Burton Dassett lying underneath the earth.
The society, which was formed in 2000 and has 20 members from the local area, is now appealing for volunteers and £38,000 to enable it to complete the research in five years, resulting in a published survey of the site.
Finding a civilization: Glen Carbon dig unearths pre-Cahokia community
The glass and steel skyline of St. Louis rises just 10 miles from the excavation pits in Glen Carbon, where archaeologists are sifting through the soil for pottery shards and flint chips, clues to another civilization that vanished a millennium ago.
The 1 1/2-acre excavation site is one of only a few sites in the Metro East area dating to the end of the Woodland period. The village that archaeologists are poring over preceded the Mississippian culture, which produced the fabled Cahokia Mounds near Collinsville.
The end of the Woodland period is "a time period we don't know much about," said Thomas Emerson of Champaign, Ill., director of the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program, which is conducting the excavation. "The events that took place a bit before (Cahokia) are kind of a mystery to us."
Cahokia is probably one of the least known archaeological manifestations in North America (not that there are a lot of well-known ones anyway), but it is of major importance. Here are some links to learn more:
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/cahokia.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/march/12/cahokia.htm (Good overview)
http://www.mississippian-artifacts.com/ (more on Mississippian archaeology, but useful nonetheless)
Digging up the past
John Fiveash huddled over a clipboard yesterday, soaked in sweat, with dirt under his nails as he stood in a meadow near Annapolis.
Pencil in hand, he helped to translate what he and his comrades saw in the soil into a map on graph paper: a foot of dirt containing clues to what is believed to be the earliest Colonial-era tobacco pipe manufacturing operation in America.
Fiveash was among dozens of members of the Archeological Society of Maryland from around the state -- some professional archaeologists, some amateurs -- who have been laboring over the past week and a half at this site north of Severn River, where archaeologists hope to find the kiln of 17th-century pipe-maker Emanuel Drue.
That first sentence really nails the essence of field archaeology.
And yet another story on Troy The Real Trojan War
Legendary Troy, perched on a hilltop in what's now northwestern Turkey, draws thousands of visitors every year. And their overwhelming reaction is disappointment. "Most tourists get there and say, 'This is it?' " says Eric Cline, an archaeologist at George Washington University. The place of which Homer sang--a rich city with "lofty gates" and "fine towers," temples to Apollo and to Athena, the palace of King Priam with a grand throne room and 50 marble chambers, a land in which thousands of warriors defended the beautiful Helen against an invading Greek force--looks like a rude ruin on a dusty hill. Mostly, there's a fort with big walls, but they encircle an area only about 200 yards across. Around it are some scattered stones. Says Andrew Sherratt, an archaeologist at Oxford University: "It seems like pretty small beer."
This is actually a nice long article with much good information.
Iran update International Experts Back in Iran to Resume Archeological Studies
TEHTAN (CHN) -- International archeologists are set to return to Iran, a quarter of a century after they left in the wake of events that led to the Islamic Revolution. They are going to complete their unfinished explorations reports and present new ones based on their previous and novel findings in the historical sites in the country.
Under agreements reached, the international experts are expected to visit Iran in order to set up joint explorations teams with their Iranian counterparts.
This is simply an update of a continuing story we posted a while back. It looks very good for those whose archaeology careers were thrown into a tizzy because of the Islamist revolution.
Also note that cooperation with Iranian counterparts is emphasized. This is an increasingly common practice, which one can see happening in Egypt as well.