Remains of Roman bathhouse unearthed
THE rich Roman heritage of Britain's oldest recorded town has been enhanced by the discovery of a “beautifully preserved” room from a bathhouse.
A single 2,000-year-old room was discovered beneath Colchester Sixth Form College during work to build a fire access road near the college's information technology block.
A leading archaeologist said yesterday it was one of the finest finds of its kind. The room from the bathhouse may now be preserved as an attraction.
Eh, not all THAT old. . . Ancient human remains found in mountainous province
A set of human remains, believed to be of a primitive man dating back 10,000-15,000 years, has been found in northern mountainous Tuyen Quang province.
Dr. Trinh Nang Chung, Deputy Head of the Viet Nam Institute of Archaeology's Viet Nam Stone Age Research Department, said that the scull, set of teeth and bones were discovered in Phya Vai cave, Coc Ngan village, Xuan Tan commune of Na Hang district.
That's the whole thing.
Mycenaean port of Athens found?
Archaeologists in the capital’s southern coastal suburb of Palaio Faliro have uncovered what appear to be traces of ancient Athens’s first port before the city’s naval and shipping center was moved to Piraeus, a report said yesterday.
A rescue excavation on a plot earmarked for development has revealed artifacts and light structures dating, with intervals, from Mycenaean times to the fifth century BC, when the port of Phaleron — after which the modern suburb was named — was superseded by Piraeus, according to Ta Nea daily.
“This is a port associated with two myths — Theseus and the Argonauts — and an historic event, the Trojan War,” archaeologist Constantina Kaza was quoted as saying. Theseus is believed to have been a Late Bronze Age king of Athens whose successors sent a contingent to fight in Troy.
The site, some 350 meters from the modern coastline, contained pottery, tracks from the carts that would have served the port, and makeshift fireplaces where travelers waiting to take ship would have cooked and kept warm.
That also is the whole thing.
New evidence challenges hypothesis of modern human origins
Chinese archaeologists said newly found evidence proves that a valley of Qingjiang River, a tributary on the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, might be one of the regions where Homo sapiens, or modern man, originated.
The finding challenges the "Out-of-Africa" hypothesis of modern human origins, according to which about 100,000 years ago modern humans originated in Africa, migrated to other continents, and replaced populations of archaic humans across the globe.
The finding comes from a large-scale excavation launched in the Qingjiang River Valley in 1980s when construction began on a rangeof hydropower stations on the Qingjiang River, a fellow researcher with the Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.
Tourism And Archaeology
PEOPLE have often said that tourism is the enemy of archaeology. The problem in the past has been that the tourist authorities seldom talked to the antiquities authorities. Scholars from all over the world have begun saying that the great monuments of the world could be gone within 200 years, and the damage caused by mass tourism to man-made and natural sites is now well documented.
Many good ideas in this essay, and the first paragraph highlights the most important problem: the conflicting interests of archaeologists vs. just about everyone else. When the tourist industry is your single largest source of income, a lot of people are going to want a slice of the pie and there is tremendous pressure to keep the money flowing. The tombs can probably be viewed by large numbers of people without damage, but it would require a large amount of money to install the proper ventilation and climate control equipment.