Yay for settlements Archaeologists unearth major Buddhist settlement in Pak
Officials from Pakistan's Department of Archaeology and Museums have unearthed an entire Buddhist settlement at Takht Bhai in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province.
According to The News, the newly discovered ridge contains residential houses for monks, with the entire settlement comprised of ten houses having a special structure. The layout includes two storey buildings with each having a courtyard and two rooms built in them on a separate platform. Also all the houses are connected with each other through stairs, with each having stairs to its upper storey on the backside of the building. Each house also has a stupa built outside it.
We've got enough people digging up temples and tombs. We like it when settlements make the news.
Report from the %^#)* old west (&#*^ town of #@&%$(^% "Deadwood" Archaeologists find where Far East met Wild West
For three years, in a small lab in Rapid City, S.D., state archaeologists have been participating in the excavation of a 19th-century Chinese neighborhood buried under the fabled Wild West boomtown of Deadwood. In August, they closed down the dig and shipped the final boxloads of bone, wood, metal and glass to the state's lab for analysis.
The excavation is South Dakota's largest: a half-million-dollar project that began in May 2001, after a developer announced plans to tear down a former restaurant to build a parking lot. The city of Deadwood is a National Historic Landmark, so an archaeological assessment had to precede the demolition.
Heh. You have to be a tad familiar with the HBO series to get the above.
Ancient knife proves longer astronomical history
Archaeologists in northwest China's Qinghai province claimed that a 5,000-year-old stone knife with designs of constellations will extend China's history of astronomical observation by 1,000 years.
The finely-polished stone knife, six centimeters long and threecentimeters wide, was unearthed at the Laomao Ruins, a New Stone Age site nine kilometers west of Lamao Village in Qinghai.
Archaeologists also unearthed many other relics from the site including pottery pieces, stone and bone tools.
Okay! Pigs! Scientists weigh up pigs' lineage
Our Neolithic ancestors domesticated wild boars in at least seven regions, according to genetic analysis of 700 wild and farm pigs across Europe and Asia. Archaeologists had previously assumed that domestication occurred only in the ancient Near East (eastern Turkey) and China.
The study, led by scientists at Oxford and Durham universities in the UK, shows genetic fingerprints of independent domestication in five additional places: central Europe, Italy, India, northern India and south-east Asia.
Dang, only that brief blurb is available without subscription. We'll research more, or feel free to post more links in Comments.
Update: More from the BBC and the LA Times.
Last week's EEF news:
About the results of the scanning of Tutankhamun:
-- The SCA press release [submitted by Susan Cottman]:
http://www.guardians.net/hawass/press_release_tutankhamun_ct_scan_results.htm
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050307/tutscan.html
[The latter report adds that the results dismiss both the theory of Tutankhamun having Klippel-Feil and the theory of Denis Forbes. The hight of the boy-king is estimated at 1.70 m.]
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=560725&page=1
[The latter report, on the second page, goes into more detail about the cleft palate and overbite.]
-- Slideshow of photos:
http://snipurl.com/db21
Video:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4328903.stm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7128729/?GT1=6305
-- Press Release [submitted by Susan Cottman] of the University of Liverpool: "British physical anthropologist is helping analyze the CT scan data":
http://www.liv.ac.uk/newsroom/press_releases/2005/03/tutankhamen.htm
With some more info about the leg and chest damage (no proof for wound infection).
Press report: "Mummy receives high-tech face-lift"
"Computer generates lifelike appearance for ancient remains"
http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_3606387,00.html
[About the mummy nicknamed Bess in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.]
Picture of Bess:
)
Press report: "Stolen Pharaonic monuments handed over to Egypt's delegation in London"
http://www.sis.gov.eg/online/html12/o100325l.htm
The eight antiques that were stolen from the museum of the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, in 2002.
[Submitted by Michael Tilgner (Michael-Tilgner@t-online.de)]
Hymns to the Aten
a) The Great Hymn to the Aten in the tomb of Ay in Tell el-Amarna (no. 25) date: dyn. 18, reign of Amenophis IV / Akhenaton [date of composition]
-- Drawing in: Norman de G. Davies, The Rock Tombs of El Amarna, vol. VI: The Tombs of Parennefer, Tutu and Aÿ, London, 1908, pl. XXVII
http://www.sofiatopia.org/equiaeon/davies.htm
-- Same drawing (370 KB), hieroglyphic text (low resolution: 110 KB; high resolution: 1.1 MB)
http://rostau.org.uk/Aye/index.html
-- English translation by D. Winton Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times, London, 1958 in the libretto of Philip Glass's opera "Akhnaten" (1987) [Act II, Scene 4]
http://www.glasspages.org/akhnaten.html
-- English translation by James B. Pritchard (ed.), The Ancient Near East, vol. 1: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Princeton, New Jersey, 1958, pp. 227-230
http://touregypt.net/hymntoaten.htm
-- English translation [= Lichtheim II, 96-100]
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/virtual/reading/core4-01r03.htm
-- English translation by Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion of Light, Ithaca, 1999 in the Appendix of Leon F. "Skip" Rowland, Origins of Leadership: Akhenaten, Ancient Leadership and Sacred Texts, in: Selected Proceedings from the 2003 annual conference of the International Leadership Association, November 6-8, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico - 18 pp., pdf-file: 270 KB
http://www.academy.umd.edu/ila/Publications/Proceedings/2003/lrowland.pdf
Yare Egyptology (http://www.yare.org/egypt) is pleased to announce the availability of
"The Mayer Papyri A & B" by T. Eric Peet
on CD-ROM for PC and Mac.
These hieratic papyri are fully illustrated in plates with a transliteration into hieroglyphs and a translation. Peet was considerably assisted in the translation by Alan Gardiner.
In the latest 'American Scientist', Vol. 93, No. 2, of March-April 2005, there is this article, available online (in HTML):
Jean-Daniel Stanley - "The Near-Destruction of Giza. How a 19th-century French engineer saved the Egyptian pyramids from being dismantled"
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/40805
[Eds. We couldn't get this link to load. We read the article in the paper version, but can't comment on the factuality of it.]
The latest issue of 'Focus' magazine, no. 149, April 2005, has an article called "Egypt's Sunken Treasures", about archaeological work in Alexandria harbour. (Not available online)
http://www.focusmag.co.uk/currentIssue.asp
Online version of: Frank Rutten, Julian Henderson, David Briggs, Unlocking the secrets of ancient glass technology using ToF-SIMS, in: Spectroscopy Europe, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 24-30 (2005) - pdf-file: 0.5 MB
"Overall, the application of ToF-SIMS [= time of flight secondary ion mass spectroscopy] to ancient glass has the potential to provide important new information about the occurrence nd distribution of trace impurities in inclusions, which cannot be obtained using any other technique. This will hopefully enable us to differentiate between glass production technologies, aid the determination of provenance of this important and prestigious material and hence increase our knowledge of the glass trade in the ancient world."
http://www.spectroscopyeurope.com/Surface_17_1.pdf
Online version of: Art Burrows, Woodworking in Ancient Egypt. Part 1:
Workshops and the Palace, in: The Archaeological Diggings, December 2004 / January 2005, pp. 42-45 - pdf-file: 180 KB
http://www.skillspublish.com.au/Workshops%20and%20the%20Palace.pdf
Online version of chapter 1 "The Interpretative Framework" of Lynn Meskell, Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2001, pp. 1-16
"Ultimately, I suggest that the concept of private life provides one meaningful framework to access ancient social life."
-- HTML: http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7283.html
-- pdf (0.1 MB): http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7283.pdf
Carol Haigh, "Estimating Osteological Health in Ancient Egyptian Bone via Applications of Modern Radiological Technology", in: Assemblage , issue 5, April 2000, in HTML:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/assem/5/haigh.html
End of EEF news
More later. Our fingers are tired from all this linking and typing.