The Greatest Pyramid Stories Ever Told

Mark Rose from Archaeology Magazine sends this across the EEF lists:

We at Archaeology magazine are taking a look at some of the strange ideas advanced over the years for how/when/by whom the Giza pyramids were built.
Perhaps you have a "favorite" crank theory, or while at Giza overheard a strange xplanation by a tourist or guide. If you are willing to share such Giza stories, please reply OFF LIST to mark@archaeology.org
If there are a sufficient number, I'll compile them and post.

The concrete pyramids theory is my current favorite.

Actually, a friend of mine from my last project in Egypt had it all figured out. Seems one day he was sitting outside the hotel having a smoke and idly suggested that making a little courtyard with benches would be a nice idea. And the next day a couple workers were out making a courtyard. Soooooooo:
Sneferu: "Y'know. . . .if we put a big artificial hill over in Saqqara, I could probably see my house from the top."

Non-archaeology post F Anyone's I, for any Sci Fi fans out there, especially those with a certain affection for 2001: A Space Odyssey, there's a great HAL 9000 screensaver. Whoever made it combed through the film and recreated all/most of the graphics displayed on the computer screens throughout. It's very nicely done. In fact, using it prompted me to redesign some of my database interfaces with some of the look-and-feel of the 2001-type displays. In actual fact, much of that redesign resulted in much more readable data than the default supplied by Access. The fonts used were difficult to recreate -- I had to go out and locate free fonts online and find one that was close to what is in the movie.

I've heard tell that Kubrick was incredibly detail-oriented so the displays were probably analyzed to death to make sure they were realistically informative. The screen saver has some quirks. . . .it's got an imitation HAL voice at the beginning that can be a bit shocking if you're not ready for it (it's, eh, reasonably close to the original). It also cuts off any sound from the rest of the machine, so if you have music playing it will stop when the saver kicks in. But it's still very neat and really captures the ambiance of the film.

Anyone see the sequel, 2010? I didn't think it was that bad, though it was made in 1984 so it was really heavy on the US/Soviet Union conflict and threw in a bunch of political junk that it didn't really need to tell the story. The reason behind HAL's bizarre behavior didn't really make much sense either. Still, the effects were very good; I remember reading some people getting so queasy they had to leave the theater during the part where the Discovery was rotating and John Lithgow was going over to it. A bit of it was outdated in retrospect, too. They used aerobraking, which was supposedly new at the time, but they've been using it for unmanned probes for years now. The Europa stuff -- life arising there -- was based on ideas from the Voyager probes, though it would have to be well beneath the ice, not on the surface like in the film (but hey, they had to be able to see it).

FWIW, I've had this screen saver running for years and it's not done anything wonky (or malicious) to my systems.

Indiana Jones update Harrison Ford Will Quit 'Indiana Jones 4' If He Can't Use Real Whip

Harrison Ford has threatened to quit the new Indiana Jones movie, unless he gets to use a real whip. The 64-year-old actor, who plays the daredevil archaeologist, was told the weapon would have to be computer generated because of new film safety rules. Harrison branded the rule "ridiculous" and said he would pull out of the film if he couldn't wield his whip.

This seems a bit. . . .urban legendy. Maybe it's true. I met the guy, David Morgan, who made the original movie whips. You can buy one here! My sister was out here and wanted to buy some outdoor wear from their factory store. Really good stuff there, if a bit pricey.

Historic site development fears

Experts and residents near an Anglesey archaeological site, earmarked for a hotel and commercial complex, claim it is in danger of being lost forever.

Enterprise Minister Andrew Davies has ordered the development of Ty Mawr on the outskirts of Holyhead, saying it is crucial to regeneration there.

But there are concerns that historical finds may still lie uncovered there.

The assembly government said the development was a "high priority" to counter job losses in the area.

Nero's Golden Palace to Partly Reopen

Nero's Golden Palace will partly reopen to visitors next week, offering rare insight into archaeologists' efforts to preserve the first-century imperial residence from decay and humidity.

Visitors will have access to half of the palace, wandering through a maze of underground passageways, officials said Wednesday. They can also climb a 43-foot scaffolding and take a close look at the building's frescoed vaulted ceilings, as restorers and archaeologists work to clean the paint.

CSI: Wilmslow

The anatomy of an Iron-Age murder

Now, it is time for the public of Wilmslow to pitch in with their our own thoughts and reflections about their infamous son.

As Lindow Man returns to Manchester Museum for the third time curators want to hear the views of local people about the find, where they were and how they remember the story unfolding.

A spokesman eagerly awaiting the exhibition due to start in April next year said: "We will not be telling one story but looking at Lindow Man from many different perspectives. We are very interested, for example, in gathering evidence of how Lindow Man is important to the local community.

This is the best part of the whole thing:
Public consultation prior to the exhibition is already underway and should rekindle memories of 1983 when the story began to unfold with the discovery of the severed head of a woman by commercial peat cutters operating near the ancient bog.

Police were called in and inquiries led a Wimslow man to confess to the murder of his wife. She had vanished near the bog some 20 years earlier and he had never quite convinced police he was innocent.

Confronted with what appeared to be the grisly evidence of his crime the man immediately confessed but the skull turned out to be that of a woman at least 1700 years older. A year later, a leg was found and the report led to the visit of archaeologists who quickly found a flap of skin emerging from a recently excavated section of peat.

Cultured Cousins?

Apes use tools. So what? What does that tell us about human evolution? As it turns out, observing our closest living relatives as they wield stone hammers and manipulate gadgets can show us how early humans may have been using artifacts. It may even hold the key to the origins of culture, but too much extrapolation in this direction leads to vehement debate within the field of primatology.

Chimpanzees in Ivory Coast's Tai National Park use stone hammers to exert the 1100 kg of force needed to crack open panda nuts, according to a 2002 Science study published by archaeologist Julio Mercader. The chimps find the stones, carry them to processing stations, lay the nut on an anvil and crack it. Chimps have been observed cracking 100 nuts a day, wearing down the stone hammers with pitting and flaking.

By excavating an abandoned nut-cracking area, Mercader was able to compare the chimps' accidentally produced flakes with Oldowan flakes produced by hominins. Their similarities suggest that the earliest hominins could have been using the same technology to eat hard objects. But more importantly, the flake by-products of percussive nut-cracking action could have become the first cutting tools.

It's actually a more extended discussion of possible cultural transmission among chimps, independent invention, etc. Seems more promising to use modern ape behavior to investigate these sorts of cultural transmission issues than to try to figure out what Oldowan tools were used for (equifinality and all that).

Way cool Gilded youth

Excavators from the Brooklyn Museum stumbled upon the unique lintel painted with five gilded deities during routine cleaning of the precinct enclosure wall of the temple. Topped with a cavetto cornice embellished with painted stripes, the lintel is well preserved. It is framed by rounded moulding and the decoration includes raised relief figures. The five gilded solar deities appear sitting on lotus blossoms against a blue backdrop, representing the sky, each with a finger in its mouth. The first and last are crowned with the sun disk, the second wears a double crown, the third a hem-hem crown and the fourth a two-plumed crown. The golden child gods sit before an offering table to the right of which are two figures, the first an ape, whose face still bears some gilding, wearing a modius and feather with his arms raised in a gesture of worship. Apes are often shown in connection with the sun. The second figure is of the goddess Taweret, crowned with cow's horns, a sun disk and two feathers.

Sabri Abdel-Aziz, head of the Ancient Egyptian Department at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, says early studies suggest the lintel may date from the late Intermediate Period. The newly discovered artefact is now being cleaned and restored.

That's the whole thing. There's a picture, but it doesn't enlarge, and there's very little gild (gilding?) left.

UPDATE: Also see Al-Ahram for an article on Alexander's Afghan gold.

Ancient homes found in road dig

Ancient settlements from Roman times and the Iron Age have been found by the side of a major road development.

Archaeologists were called in to survey the A66 in North Yorkshire to ensure nothing valuable would be destroyed.

Their work has now uncovered the remains of a roundhouse, square buildings, ditches and pits by the Melsonby crossroads, by Scotch Corner.

Egyptian Semitic text update Earliest Semitic Text Revealed In Egyptian Pyramid Inscription

The first public revelation of the earliest continuous Semitic text ever deciphered has taken place at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The presentation was made by Prof. Richard Steiner, professor of Semitic languages and literature at Yeshiva University in New York, in a lecture entitled "Proto-Canaanite Spells in the Pyramid Texts: a First Look at the History of Hebrew in the Third Millennium B.C.E." The lecture was sponsored by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in cooperation with the Hebrew University and the World Union of Jewish Studies.

There was a comment or two on the EEF lists about this, and doubts were expressed as to whether or not it really is Semitic. I didn't copy the post though.

Treasure! Emperor's treasures found

The lost treasure of Maxentius, the last preChristian Roman emperor, has been unearthed by archaeologists. Imperial standards, lances and glass spheres, right, were buried on the Palatine Hill by Maxentius before his battle with Constantine the Great in AD312.

Archaeologists believe that he planned to retrieve the treasure if he won. In the event, he and his closest aides were killed, so that no one knew where it was hidden.

That's the whole thing.

Wilcox a thorn in the side

he big metal gates that kept the world out of Waldo Wilcox's Range Creek Canyon cattle ranch for 50 years are now locked against him.

"If they don't want me there, it's their right," the 76-year-old Wilcox says of state officials and archaeologists. "They bought it. When I owned it, I changed the locks to keep people out too."

Wilcox is the celebrity curmudgeon of eastern Utah - a man who sold his remote 4,200-acre spread to the state in 2001 for $2.5 million and revealed to the world a treasure trove of hundreds of largely undisturbed ancient Indian sites.

Actually, a pretty good article.

Uncovering the past

Julia Lawson’s gloved hand moves with short, precise strokes, each pass of her scalpel kicking up a small cloud of ancient dust and rock particles.

Little by little, she reveals a piece of history underneath the rocky crust: a 4,500-year-old bronze knife blade from the cradle of civilization.

Spread on a table before her in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology are dozens of similar items — fragile bowls, arrowheads and tools from the Mesopotamian city of Ur.

Sacred Cave of Rome's Founders Discovered, Archaeologists Say

Archaeologists say they have unearthed Lupercale—the sacred cave where, according to legend, a she-wolf nursed the twin founders of Rome and where the city itself was born.

The long-lost underground chamber was found beneath the remains of Emperor Augustus' palace on the Palatine, a 230-foot-tall (70-meter-tall) hill in the center of the city.

Archaeologists from the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Rome Municipality came across the 50-foot-deep (15-meter-deep) cavity while working to restore the decaying palace.

Bit more detail than earlier stories.

EEK! Archaeologist digs for proof of Sasquatch

BY DAY SHE'S the Stanislaus National Forest's archaeologist. With a master's degree in anthropology, she makes sure prehistoric Native American sites in the woods are protected. She's also the forest's liaison with the Me-Wuk tribe.

But it's what Kathy Strain does in her spare time that separates her from Forest Service colleagues.

She's a Bigfooter. A student of Sasquatch. A yearner for Yeti. A true believer.

"A strong case can be made that Bigfoot exists," said Strain, whose Jamestown-area home includes a room full of books, videos, cast footprints, notes and reports on the creature. "I've seen things I have no other explanation for."

Yeah, if you've lost 95% of you critical faculty. . . . . .

4.5-ton slab falls from cliff, damages ancient dwelling at Mesa Verde National Park

Something looked different at the popular Square Tower House at Mesa Verde National Park when research archaeologist Julie Bell took visitors by the most photographed site at the park recently.

There was rubble where rubble should not be.

A 4.5-ton slab fell on the picturesque ruin sometime last month, smashing a storage room, rupturing the wall of a kiva and coming to rest inside a two-story room at the far end of the site.

"It pierced the kiva like a knife," Bell said. "Fortunately, it didn't get the tower."

A shame, but not unexpected. For some reason, I was under the impression that Threatening Rock at Pueblo Bonito had only recently fallen, but it appears to have followed up on its threat in 1941.

Discovering the pharmacy of the pharaohs

Scientists at The University of Manchester have teamed up with colleagues in Egypt in a bid to discover what medicines were used by the ancient Egyptians.

The KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Egyptian Medicinal Plant Conservation Project in St Katherine's, Sinai, have formed a partnership to research Egyptian pharmacy in the times of the pharaohs.

The 'Pharmacy in Ancient Egypt' collaboration, which is funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, will compare modern plant species common to the Sinai region with the remains of ancient plants found in tombs.

Ancient mystery solved? Taft man says ‘Murphy Mover' explains pyramids

James Murphy said his Apex Delivery and Lifting System - or Murphy Mover - is more than just an explanation. It's a nearly energy free way of lifting and moving large objects.

It doesn't take much power and doesn't need any major outside energy - just gravity.

. . .

Murphy came across his idea reminiscing about riding his swing set as a young boy. As he swung higher and higher, the swing set started moving -- frightening to a young boy, but a revelation to an inventor.

“I would swing so high that the back legs would come off the ground, then the front legs would come off the ground.”

Hmmmm. Picture of the model device:


I'm having trouble imagining how it works. Wish they had a little movie of it.

Workmen uncover leper grave

HUMAN bones, thought to be from medieval lepers, have been found during renovation work at a Coventry pub.

The grisly discovery was made by builders during excavations at the Four Provinces in Allesley Old Road, Chapelfields.

Work has now been halted while archaeologists probe the site.

Publican Kieran Connolly said: "The builders were digging up the foundations of the gents toilets and kitchen when they found the bones.

Research team discovers village

A team of researchers, led by Oregon State University anthropologist Deanna Kingston, has discovered a prehistoric village on a tiny island in the Bering Sea. The archaeological site, shown by carbon dating to be 800 to 900 years old, indicates that King Island, Alaska, was inhabited by Inupiat walrus hunters for at least a millennium.

The effort is part of a four-year study of the plants, birds, place names, dialect and culture of King Island, supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation, one for $540,000 and another for $23,000. Kingston — whose team includes an archaeologist, an ornithologist, a botanist, a linguist and 30 elder King Island volunteers — is working to preserve the traditional ecological knowledge of King Islanders, who today use their homeland only as a seasonal hunting camp.