Monday, December 27, 2004

The latest blockbuster archaeology program from Discovery Pompeii: The Last Day

Scheduled for broadcast on Sunday, Jan. 30. We believe there is a web site devoted to this program (besides the Discovery Channel link above), but can't find it anywhere. Well, we only saw a brief advertisement for it once, so it may be largely mythical.

Kind of a neat site. Check out the Recent Discoveries link on that page.

Another lost city. . .found! Archeologists find ancient village near Tel-Aviv

Archeologists have discovered a village near the Mediterranean coast dating from the 4th century B.C., the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Sunday - a rare find.

The discovery provides an unusual insight into a turbulent period when there were intense struggles for control over the area, said Uzi Ad, who led the dig.

During this period the region was under the rule of the Egyptian Ptolemy empire and then the Selucid Greeks from Syria before it was conquered by the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty in the second century B.C.


Yet another Homo hobbitus update Indonesian 'hobbit' legends may be factual

Mount Ebulo, Indonesia - Nellis Kua is too old to remember his exact age, but his eyes light up when he talks of the gang of hobbit-like creatures his grandparents told him once lived in the forest on the slopes of this still smoking Indonesian volcano.

"They had these big eyes, hair all over their body and spoke in a strange language," said Kua, his skin leathered by a lifetime tending coffee and chilli pepper crops under the harsh tropical sun.

"They stole our crops, our fruit and moonshine. They were so greedy they even ate the plates!"


Drunken little Australopithecines. . . .we are at a loss to contemplate anything quite so humorous.

This would be bad Conversations: Hunting Fakes

Jane Walsh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, is best known for her work with museum collections and for exposing several crystal skulls, once thought to be Precolumbian, as nineteenth-century German fakes. She is now working with several museums to create a database that can be used to identify bogus Precolumbian jade, crystal, and other stone artifacts. She talked to ARCHAEOLOGY about why you shouldn't always trust what you see at museums.


More from Scotland Arthur's Seat arrow pinpoints Bronze Age living

A YOUNG brother and sister who discovered an ancient arrowhead on Arthur’s Seat were praised today for helping piece together Scotland’s "ancient historical jigsaw".

Robert Simon, 12, and his ten-year-old sister Kirsty found what they thought was an odd-shaped stone on a path above Dunsapie Loch.

They handed it over to the Museum of Scotland, where staff identified the stone as an early Bronze Age flint arrowhead, dating from as long ago as 2000BC. It has now been donated to the Museum of Edinburgh on the Royal Mile.


Ivory Punica granatum update Ivory pomegranate 'not Solomon's'

An ancient ivory pomegranate thought to be the only relic of King Solomon's Temple is from a different period, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem has said.

The museum had regarded the thumb-sized artefact, thought part of a sceptre, as one of its most precious possessions.

However, Israeli experts conducting an investigation discovered the artefact was much older than believed.