Histories: Viking longships brought rape, pillage and cod

Just over a thousand years ago, a Viking chieftain named Ohthere paid a visit to England and the court of King Alfred. An intrepid mariner, Ohthere told the king about his homeland in Arctic Norway, and described long sea voyages around what are now Norway and Denmark. The learned king evidently listened intently, and instructed his scribe to note down the intelligence gathered from this visitor from the north. Today, the resulting late 9th-century manuscript, conserved in the British Library, is acknowledged to be the single most important contemporary account of a Scandinavian Viking-age traveller. But what inspired this rich chieftain to undertake risky voyages, and endure months at sea? If rape and pillage wasn't on this Viking's agenda, what was Ohthere up to?

"Crush your enemies, drive them before you, and hear the lamentation of the women. Oh, and bring cod, too."

Group hunts for, gathers state's past

Most of what's known about Stone Age Michiganders comes from a few large archaeological sites near the Great Lakes, Stafford said. But this site shows the state's interior was more important than some thought, he said.

The dig has unearthed an unusually high number of ancient tools without many flint chips that would indicate that the tools were being produced on the shores of Wabasis Creek. That, he said, indicates that the inhabitants, who lived there only in the spring and summer, were trading widely with other native people from Ohio and beyond.

Archaeologists claim forest find

Archaeologists and volunteers working at a Perthshire forest claim to have uncovered a "very exciting" find.

Excavations have revealed a stone entrance to the Black Spout enclosure, which workers believe indicates an important local person lived there.

Radiocarbon dating has also shown the site dates back to about 200 BC - it was originally though such homesteads were from the early centuries AD.

It's thunderstorming! We out here in the farfreluches of Seattle rarely get these things so I have to blog about it. A cell is passing overhead. Unlike Althouse I bravely continue typing even while the storm rages out my window.

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We get a lot of rain here, but it's mostly in the winter so enjoying a rainstorm with the windows open is rare. That's one thing I miss about the midwest: summer rain. Come July we get little rain for 2-3 months. So I shall enjoy the sound.

UPDATE, next day: Thunderboomers still continuing. Such a treat! As I mentioned, we get few thunderstorms largely because of the mountains. They continued on through the night and at one point I woke up to hear the rain and some thunder. I submit that one of the most pleasant things in life is waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the rain knowing that you can just go back to sleep.

Archaeologists discover Britain's first 'shopping centre' in Roman dig

One of Britain's very first shopping centres has been unearthed - a high street that was fashionable 1,800 years ago when togas were still in vogue.

A row of narrow shop buildings uncovered by archaeologists shows that the Romans in Britain had their very own well-heeled fashionistas.

The shop buildings used by the stylish Romans in ancient Britain were uncovered by archaeologists in fields at Monmouthshire, South Wales.

Archeologists dig up Washington's boyhood home

George Washington's boyhood home has finally been excavated in a project that may shed light on the formative years of the first U.S. president, archeologists said on Wednesday.

They say they will try to reconstruct the clapboard farmhouse, where the family moved in 1738, when Washington was 6 years old.

Earlier attempts to find the remains of the house at Ferry Farm, near Fredericksburg, Virginia had failed.

Archaeologist investigating who built ancient chapel

Restoration work at San Miguel Chapel could turn up new evidence about who built what is billed as the nation’s oldest church, says the group planning the restoration.

Tradition holds that Barrio de Analco, a neighborhood just south of the Santa Fe River, was founded by Tlaxcaltecan Indians – Christianized natives of Mexico who sided with the Spanish against the Aztecs in the 1500s and accompanied colonists north in the 1600s.

“The presence of Tlaxcaltecans in Santa Fe has long been assumed, but no evidence has ever been brought to light that undoubtedly proves their presence here,” says a statement issued by Cornerstones Community Partnerships, which recently began assessing the chapel’s condition. “Are they indeed the Indians who built San Miguel Chapel in Santa Fe?”

Port Tobacco's Hidden Tombs

Archaeologists uncovered four Colonial period graves and the remains of a fence that bounded the cemetery during a two week study of historic Port Tobacco. At least one of the graves is that of a child.

Volunteers from across Maryland, as well as from New York and New Jersey, participated in the excavation of four sites. The sites were identified during an archaeological survey of the Colonial town site last fall.

Museum of London's skeleton key to the bodies under city's streets

Tens of thousands of skeletons that lie hidden beneath the streets, houses and offices of London have been revealed for the first time on a map, in a collaboration between the Museum of London and The Times.

The electronic map allows readers to zoom in on streets to see how many bodies they walk over on the way to work. It pinpoints the location of many of the 37,000 skeletons the museum found in the capital. Curators have kept 17,000 of these in storage at the museum's headquarters in Central London, but reinterred the rest.

Interesting story and very cool interactive map. This is the best part and something I had not known about:

Archaeologists who unearth the skeletons occasionally take fright when they discover bodies. Mr White said: “At Christchurch in Spitalfields they found someone with smallpox scars in soft tissue. They dropped it and ran away. They sent it to one of the two laboratories in the world that can deal with smallpox.” The labs said that smallpox spores were present, but not enough to be a danger.

It is now routine to rebury unbreached lead-lined coffins without opening them in case the disease that killed the occupant is still a threat.

I had no idea. I don' take too seriously all the talk about deadly fungi and whatnot waiting to infect discoverers of tombs in Egypt, but this seems a bit more realistic.

A mammoth find Archaeology close to home: digging up mammoth fossil

Short of a time machine, your best chance to see a Columbian mammoth is on a hillside overlooking the Wenas Valley where anthropology students are excavating one that died an estimated 16,000 years ago.

Since the bones were discovered about three years ago, Central Washington University students and professors have uncovered ribs, a shoulder blade, vertebrae and several arm and leg bones of the creature that probably stood about 12 feet tall at the shoulder.

They said they feel like they're digging up the part of history about an animal that died off 4,500 years ago.

Archaeology bill may cost farmer £1,000s

A CUMBRIAN hill farmer who planned to build a sheep shelter in the fells, near Buttermere, may have to pay thousands of pounds for an archaeological dig after evidence of an 800-year-old dairy farm was discovered on the land.

Willie Richardson has been waiting eight months for a decision from the Lake District National Park Authority (LDNPA) on his plans for the 1,235 square metre shelter at Gatesgarth Farm, Buttermere.

Now the work has been delayed indefinitely after an archaeological officer visited the site in October and discovered the remains of a 1260 dairy farm.

Odd time frame going here. . . . .

The Great Human Migration

Over the years, he had identified and excavated nine sites on the property, none more than 6,500 years old, and was not at first interested in this cliffside cave a few miles from the South African town of Still Bay. What he would find there, however, would change the way scientists think about the evolution of modern humans and the factors that triggered perhaps the most important event in human prehistory, when Homo sapiens left their African homeland to colonize the world.

This great migration brought our species to a position of world dominance that it has never relinquished and signaled the extinction of whatever competitors remained—Neanderthals in Europe and Asia, some scattered pockets of Homo erectus in the Far East and, if scholars ultimately decide they are in fact a separate species, some diminutive people from the Indonesian island of Flores (see "Were 'Hobbits' Human?"). When the migration was complete, Homo sapiens was the last—and only—man standing.

Long article from Smithsonian. I've skimmed it but not read it in detail as yet.

Odyssey daing update: The PNAS paper is available here.

Magnetic fields used to date Indian artifacts

You might be surprised what you can learn from a campfire. A campfire that has been cold for, say, 300 years.

Stacey Lengyel hopes she can tell, within 30 years or so, when it was used.

Lengyel, a research associate in anthropology at the Illinois State Museum, is the country's leading authority on archeomagnetic dating, a process built around two phenomena: when heated, magnetic particles reorient themselves to magnetic north; and over time, magnetic north is, literally, all over the map.

Newcomer in Early Eurafrican Population?

A complete mandible of Homo erectus was discovered at the Thomas I quarry in Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led by Jean-Paul Raynal, CNRS senior researcher at the PACEA[1] laboratory (CNRS/Université Bordeaux 1/ Ministry of Culture and Communication). This mandible is the oldest human fossil uncovered from scientific excavations in Morocco. The discovery will help better define northern Africa's possible role in first populating southern Europe.

The Sirius lore

The place is the Isis-Hathor Temple of Denderah, where the priests hasten along the columned aisle to witness an important event. The principal temple is dedicated to Hathor, whereas a small adjacent one is dedicated to Isis in which a statue of the goddess is located at the end of the aisle.

It is a little before 5am on 22 July, 700 BC, the summer solstice; the priests wait to watch Sirius rise and its rays penetrate the temple to fall on Isis's gem. As they arrive the sun is still below the horizon, and they gaze impatiently for the apparent heliacal rising of the Dog Star. For the priests already knew that the appearance of Sepdet lasts only for a brief moment before Ra brightens the sky.

'Stylish' Roman life found on dig

The "stylish" lives of the affluent have been unearthed at one of the "best preserved" Roman towns in Britain by a TV archaeology team.

A bath house, villa and artefacts including a penknife were found at Caerwent, Monmouthshire by Channel 4's Time Team.

What are believed to be shop buildings on a Roman high street were also found during the dig by a team of 50.

Egypt archaeologists find ancient painted coffins

A team of Egyptian archaeologists have discovered several painted wooden coffins, including some dating back to the 13th century BC rule of pharaoh Ramses II.

"These coffins were found in the tombs of senior officials of the 18th and 19th dynasties," near Saqqara, Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Thursday.

"Some coloured unopened coffins dating back to the sixth century BC were found as well as some coffins dating back to the time of Ramses II," who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BC, he said.

Archaeologists uncover 5,000-year-old jewellery workshop

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have uncovered was appears to have been a jewellery workshop during excavations at the 5,000-year old Souskiou-Laona settlement.

According to the Antiquities Department, a dense concentration of the mineral picrolite in the west ridge of the cliff-top settlement indicates that the spot was a workshop for the production of the cruciform figurines and large pendants.

“The assemblage mainly consists of the raw picrolite material, possibly quarried from the Troodos Mountains rather than imported in pebble form from the Kouris River valley, many waste chips flaked from that raw material in order to reduce it to convenient form and a roughout for a probable figurine,” the Department said in a statement.

Dig shows Paris is 3,000 years older than first thought

Paris has long been known to be a very old city but its history as a settlement has just been extended by more than 3,000 years.

An archaeological dig, whose findings were revealed yesterday, moves back Paris's first known human occupation to about 7600BC, in the Mesolithic period between the two stone ages.

An area about the size of a football field on the south-western edge of the city, close to the banks of the river Seine, has yielded thousands of flint arrowheads and fragments of animal bone. The site, between the Paris ring road and the city's helicopter port, is believed by archaeologists to have been used, nearly 10,000 years ago, as a kind of sorting and finishing station for flint pebbles washed up on the banks of the river.