The first people to settle Polynesia went to surprising lengths to honour their dead, archaeologists show.
Remains from the oldest cemetery in the Pacific suggest the Lapita people buried their dead in many different ways, some in "weird yoga positions", and removed their skulls for ceremonial purposes.
Dr Stuart Bedford and Professor Matthew Spriggs of the Australian National University reported their finds on the Lapita culture in Vanuatu at a recent seminar in Canberra.
"We found for the first time skulls buried in a pot, sealed by a flat bottomed ceramic dish that had been overturned and used as a lid on top of another pot," Dr Bedford said.
Recent Landslides In La Conchita, California Belong To Much Larger Prehistoric Slide
The deadly landslide that killed 10 people and destroyed approximately 30 homes in La Conchita, California last January is but a tiny part of a much larger slide, called the Rincon Mountain slide, discovered by Larry D. Gurrola, geologist and graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The slide started many thousands of years ago and will continue generating slides in the future, reported Gurrola at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America today in Salt Lake City.
Prehistoric slides present at Rincon Mountain cover an area of about 1,300 acres with a minimum volume of about 600 million cubic yards, said Edward A. Keller, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara. Keller analyzed the landslide complex with Gurrola and Tim Tierney, UCSB research scientist.
Archeological Dig Northwest Of Tucson Uncovers 2,800 Year-Old Settlement
Archeologists are finding the people who lived here three thousand years ago have more in common with us than we might think.
One thing that's fairly obvious, they came here because water was plentiful.
"You have water coming off of the slopes of the Tortolita and the Tucson Mountains, and this is where the Santa Cruz sort of spreads out, and so this would be a really prime place for agriculture," explains Michael Cook, Archeology Project Manager for Westland Resources, Inc.
Not too long of an article.
More looting Black Earth, Black Archeology, Black Times
Ukraine’s beleaguered and cash-starved archeologists were entitled to view Viktor Yushchenko’s election to the presidency either as a beacon of hope or a symbol of its problems.
Before he became president, it was Yushchenko’s hobby to spend his free time gluing ancient pots and plates together, which he would then hang on the walls of his house.
But this avid amateur archeologist could also have been seen as a symbol of the crimes of amateurism. Yushchenko admitted that once while visiting the Kazakh place of exile of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s greatest poet, he ripped off a stone from a local fortress as a memento.
Greenhouse effect occurred 5,000 years ago
It is common sense nowadays that excessive carbon dioxide in the air caused by excessive lumbering leads to global greenhouse effects.
But a team of archaeologists from China and the United States is saying that the greenhouse effect started about 5,000 years ago, much earlier than people might expect.
This is the conclusion reached by a group of Chinese and US archaeologists based on research on the relics excavated from the ruins of a Neolithic site in Rizhao City, east China's Shandong Province, over the past ten years.
The joint archaeological team of experts from Shandong University and US scholars began its survey at the ruins of the ancient Liangcheng Town in suburban Rizhao in 1995, focusing on the relationship between plants and human activity.
Kind of a weird, disjointed article. No doubt it will get much more play in the western media over the next few weeks.
Beer!
Stone Age Beer
Five years ago, Calagione and McGovern collaborated on Midas Touch, a beverage informed by the 2,700-year-old remains of a funerary feast discovered in central Turkey and believed to have been that of King Mita, the historical figure behind the Midas legend.
This morning they are pushing further into the murk of alcoholic prehistory. For the past few years McGovern has been analyzing scraps of pottery excavated from a site in central China. Last year he announced that he had detected traces of the oldest alcoholic beverage yet discovered, a Stone Age brew dating back 9,000 years.
THis is just the start of an article available to subscribers only. Pity, we'd like to see what the stuff consists of.
Not archaeology but cool The Map that Changed the World
ust two centuries ago, the world lacked a single geologic map. The chronology of the planet's history was unknown and effectively invisible to people despite the evidence of rock layers at cliffs and canyons.
Theological maps of the world then depicted such biblical concepts as the Garden of Eden. Some people believed that mountains grew organically like trees.
The study of nature and rocks was a novelty. Thinkers in the early 1800s disagreed over the age of the Earth, with some standing by Bible-based estimates of 6,000 years old.
Then along came the map that changed the world.
It's about William ("Strata") Smith's first geological map of Britain. Definitely worth looking at if you're in the neighborhood, and probably will be checked out by man, many geologists.