CATALHÖYÜK update (with video) CATALHÖYÜK First excavated in the 1960s by British archaeologist James Mellaart, the Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was reopened by an international team led by Ian Hodder for an ambitious 25-year project beginning in 1993. One of the world's largest settlements 9000 years ago, this town housed 10,000 farmers at a time when most people on Earth were hunter-gatherers. The site is famous for its sculptures and wall paintings, residential mud-brick architecture, burials beneath house floors, bull heads plastered in house walls, and mother goddess figurines.
The Time Team makes another discovery
Time team discover a Bronze and Iron Age settlement
ARCHAEOLOGISTS working ahead of contractors building the Linslade/Stoke Hammond bypass have uncovered the remains of an ancient settlement overlooking the town.
The team of 10, led by Martin Lightfoot of Buckingham-based Network Archaeology Ltd, have been painstakingly excavating three sites along the route of the new road and evidence shows that people were living there during the late Bronze Age and into the Iron Age.
Among the artefacts prised from the clay, and Martin's favourite piece, is pottery clearly showing the fingerprints of whoever made it more than 3,000 years ago.
Update on the Dmanisi skull Georgians Claim to Unearth Ancient Skull
Archaeologists in the former Soviet republic of Georgia have unearthed a skull they say is 1.8 million years old — part of a find that holds the oldest traces of humankind's closest ancestors ever found in Europe.
ADVERTISEMENT
The skull from an early member of the genus Homo was found Aug. 6 and unearthed Sunday in Dmanisi, an area about 60 miles southeast of the capital, Tbilisi, said David Lortkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum, who took part in the dig.
In total, five bones or fragments believed to be about the same age have been found in the area, including a jawbone discovered in 1991, Lortkipanidze said by telephone. The skull, however, was in the best condition of the five, and was sent to the museum for further study.
Archaeology in Iceland Secrets of Ancient Iceland: Dispatch 1: Digging into the Viking Age
"Science is at the junction between the expected and the real," Penn State anthropologist Paul Durrenberger told me. "The whole point of it is figuring out what's real and what's not."
I am standing in a hayfield in Iceland in a gale-force wind, one of six volunteers holding down a 100-meter measuring tape with our toes. Bundled in raincoats and stocking caps, we are feeling fortunate that at least the sun is shining. Tourists visiting the Glaumbaer Folk Museum, a collection of historic buildings up on the hill, stop and stare down at us.
"A lot of people asked me," said Sigridur Sigurdardottir, the museum curator, "'What are those crazy people doing out there in your hayfield?'"
That's a pretty common question.
Peruvian pyramids rival the pharaohs'
RUINS on Peru’s desert coast dated to some 4,700 years ago suggest an earlier focus of civilisation than any so far identified in the New World. The site of Caral, in the Supe Valley north of Lima, covers 66 hectares (165 acres) and includes pyramids 21m (70ft) high arranged around a large plaza.
“What really sets Caral apart is its age,” Roger Atwood reports in Archaeology. “Carbon dating has revealed that its pyramids are contemporary with those of Egypt and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia.” These are among the earliest monumental architecture in the Old World. Surveys and excavations in neighbouring valleys, Atwood says, suggest that Caral “stood at the centre of the first society in the Americas to build cities and engage in trade on a large scale”.
This is a short article summarizing the work at Caral and environs and, happily, makes no mention of the feud between Shady and Creamer/Haas. Nothing much new if you've followed that story.
Mexico digs up Aztec sacrificial stone
Mexican archeologists have dug past phone lines, electricity cables and a traffic light under chaotic city streets to excavate a large sculptured stone that was part of an Aztec sacrificial temple.
The Templo Mayor museum said on Friday the stone, dating from the 15th or 16th centuries and shaped like a round "biznaga" cactus, was discovered last October in the center of Mexico City.
It took 10 months to receive permission from a telephone company, a electricity utility, city hall and archeological authorities to dig under the road to reach the stone, which is 77cm high and 56cm in diameter.
The Aztecs, conquered by the Spanish in the early 16th century, would sacrifice victims, often prisoners of war, by cutting their hearts out to placate angry gods.
That's the whole thing.