N.C. bill would check criminal backgrounds before archaeology
Excavators who search North Carolina's waters and substrates for historical artifacts should be checked for criminal backgrounds to make sure they aren't likely to pilfer relics, the state's chief said Thursday.
His requests earned the support of a Senate judiciary committee, which unanimously approved a bill allowing state archaeologist Stephen Claggett to demand criminal background checks before issuing a permit to anyone who wants to dig or dive for artifacts.
The state Department of Cultural Resources is now only able to judge whether an archaeologist is professionally qualified, not whether he's a crook, Claggett said.
More stiffs More graves discovered on U.Va. land
More than a decade after the discovery of a 19th-century cemetery on U.Va.-owned land, archaeologists have found two more graves and more artifacts that likely belonged to free blacks, the university announced yesterday.
"This is a significant archaeological site in my opinion," said Benjamin Ford, an archaeologist with Rivanna Archaeological Services, which is exploring the site for the University of Virginia. "We want to know where all the graves are and identify their locations."
And still MORE Workers find skeletal remains
Some Colonie town workers dug up more than just dirt on the job.
The town historian said that while digging for a waterline on Route 32 near the Menands border, workers found human skeletal remains.
Archaeologists were brought in to take a closer look. It was determined that the location near Schuyler Flatts is a burial site dating back several hundred years.
This isn't the first time remains have been found in that area. It also happened back in 1998.
As of right now, the sewer project is on hold.
That's the whole thing. Try clicking the video link for the actual video of the story, but no more info is in it.
And now. . . .the weekly news from the EEF
So much for a glorious immortality. . . . Press report: "Grime in Egyptian jar is the remains of long-dead priest"
http://snipurl.com/fg9s
"For the past 36 years, an Egyptian jar has stood in the collection of the Royal Pump Room Museum, in Harrogate (...). Experts at York University, led by Dr Stephen Buckley, have established the residue in the canopic jar is cholesterol from human remains. (...) The hieroglyphs mention a priest called Djediufankh. The testing also confirmed the Egyptians had sterilised the body and entrails using alcohol as an antiseptic. And for the first time, science has been able to show that the alcohol used was date palm wine, confirming descriptions given by classical authors such as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus."
Press report: "Stolen relics to return"
http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/gazette/2/1.asp
"Switzerland has recently become party to an international agreement on the prevention of antiquity smuggling. (..) Hawass explains that in the course of the next few weeks the Egyptian government is due to take measures to retrieve Egyptian antiquities that had been smuggled to Switzerland in the past."
Press report: "Lifting the lid on ancient Egypt"
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20050609woa1.htm
"Fuyuki Matsumura, curator of the Nagoya City Museum, (..) explained that by keeping a stock of standardized sculptures of body parts handy, Egyptian artisans could create statuary on demand. If they were carving on a massive scale, they could use
grids to project the idealized shapes of the small models onto their monumental finished products."
[Eds. This makes sense. A lot (most?) of their art work was fairly uniform and in a sense utilitarian. So it seems reasonable that much of the production would be standardized.]
Online version of: Shin Maekawa (ed.), Oxygen-Free Museum Cases, The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, CA, 1998. xii, 71 pp. - pdf-file: 1.7 MB
http://snipurl.com/fg9x
"... the Getty Conservation Institute has been involved in projects that deal with oxygen-free environments as a means of preventing the deterioration of sensitive organic materials. The royal mummies of Egypt, the original documents of the Constitution of India, and the Royal Proclamation Charter for Hudson's Bay Company, Toronto, are the most notable examples of cultural objects conserved in this way ... This book covers the results of that research and its applications presented by several of the principal participants in the project." Some chapters deal with the
conservation of AE mummies.
Online version of: Stuart Tyson Smith, Uncovering an Extraordinary World.
Archaeologists in Sudan excavate with laser precision, in: Point of Beginning, November, 2003, pp. 22-25
pdf-file (2 MB): http://snipurl.com/fga1
html: http://snipurl.com/fg9z
"As lead archaeologist for an expedition to excavate this site, I had the rare opportunity to make some exciting discoveries and just as importantly demonstrate the power of today's most advanced laser and infrared surveying devices in some of the most challenging conditions. The ruggedness and efficiency of these tools has changed the way I and my team do our jobs - offering new capabilities that allow us to work smarter, more accurately and with less disturbance to the site."
Online version of: William R. Thompson, Trade Pulsations, Collapse, and Reorientation in the Ancient World, Paper prepared for the annual meeting of American Schools of Oriental Research, Denver, Colorado, November, 2001. - 44 pp., pdf-file: 190 KB
http://www.longtermchange.net/downloads/denver2001trade.pdf
"This analysis focuses on two hypothesized patterns of the longer stripe - one is about millennium-long movements toward and away from center concentration and center deconcentration while the other addresses the implications of slightly shorter, periodic crises in the ancient world ... As usual, the problem reduces to the typical social science problem: how well do the hypothesized patterns seem to fit the observed data?"
Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Egyptian Fractions Revisited, Technical Report UTEP-CS-05-01, January 2005 [University of Texas at El Paso, Department of Computer Science] - 6 pp., pdf-file: 115 KB
http://www.cs.utep.edu/vladik/2005/tr05-01.pdf
"It is well known that the ancient Egyptians represented each fraction as a sum of unit fractions - i.e., fractions with unit numerators; this is how they, e.g., divided loaves of bread. What is not clear is why they used this representation. In this paper, we propose a new explanation: crudely speaking, that the main idea behind the Egyptian fractions provides an optimal way of dividing the loaves. We also analyze the related properties of fractions."
Press report: "Matthew Kelly to star as strongman for Egypt adventure series"
http://snipurl.com/fga3
"Matthew Kelly is to star as Italian circus strongman and explorer The Great Belzoni in a new drama-documentary series about Egypt for BBC1 this autumn." [Eds. We mostly can't stand docudramas.]
End of EEF news