Canterbury council keeps museums open after re-think

Three visitor attractions in Kent have been saved from closure following a re-think by the city council.

The Roman Museum, Westgate Tower and Herne Bay Museum were among those at risk as Canterbury City Council looked at ways of saving £3m over two years.

The proposals sparked a public campaign to keep them open, with more than 2,000 people signing an online petition.

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Gladiator Stabbed, Tossed as Trash?

The bones of a Roman man, who was stabbed to death and left to rot with the rubbish, have revealed gruesome details of what appears to be a gladiator combat, according to British researchers who have examined the skeletal remains.

Unearthed in January only 12 inches under the grass the Yorkshire Museum’s gardens, in York, England, the bones show that the man, most likely a disgraced gladiator, met a violent and bloody death.

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Crumbling Pompeii sparks outrage

One of Italy’s most important archaeological sites is disintegrating, sparking concern that lack of government attention and money could be letting the country's cultural heritage fall into ruin. Tara Cleary reports.

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Pompeii skeletons reveal secrets of Roman family life

The remains of the Roman town of Pompeii destroyed by a volcanic eruption in AD79 continue to provide intriguing and unexpected insights into Roman life - from diet and health care to the gap between rich and poor.

The basement storeroom under a large agricultural depot in the little suburb of Oplontis was full of pomegranates. To many of the Pompeiians trying to find shelter from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, it must have seemed strong and safe.

About 50 people took cover there. We know they did because archaeologists in the 1980s found their skeletons, well preserved.

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Archaeologist Studies Ancient Food for Thought

Natalie Munro is a zooarchaeologist, that is, an archaeologist who studies the remains of animals collected by humans in the archaeological record. Her data includes animal skeletal remains (bones and teeth) that most often represent the garbage of past human meals. She uses ecological models to study the interactions between humans and animals in the past. In particular she investigates human hunting strategies, human impacts on past animal populations and animals in human burial contexts. The core of her research program investigates humanity’s transition to agriculture (ca. 12,000-8,000 years ago). In particular, she seeks to understand the conditions that existed at the very beginning of the transition to agriculture to understand the triggers for this important process. Her most important recent research projects include: documenting changes in human dietary breadth across the transition to agriculture as a measure of human population size, resource stress and site-use intensity and investigating human ritual practice at a burial cave in Israel.

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Murder Beneath the Yorkshire Museum ma y Reveal Location of Eboracum's Amphitheatre

The skeleton of a huge Roman who was stabbed to death could be a clue in the search for York’s Roman amphitheatre. Experts have revealed the skeleton found beneath the Yorkshire Museum during its refurbishment is that of a powerful, athletic male who was stabbed at least six times in a fatal attack, including a powerful sword blow to the back of the head.

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Roman Museum Saved In Canterbury, Kent, UK

The fight to save the Roman Museum has been won thanks to public support and better marketing.

Canterbury council sparked outrage last year when it said three of the city’s museums, including the Roman Museum in Butchery Lane, would have to close as part of a round of budget cuts.

But the museum is now safe from closure thanks to better promotion and new ideas from supporters in the district.

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Pompeii faces ruin for a second time

It was destroyed 2,000 years ago, but now Italy's ancient Roman city of Pompeii is facing ruin once again.

Not by a volcanic eruption like the one that buried the city in 79 AD, but by years of "neglect" and "mediocre" management by the Italian government, according to heritage groups and archaeologists.

The UNESCO World Heritage site came under scrutiny in early November, when one of its archaeological treasures, the "House of the Gladiators," crumbled.

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The Antikythera Mechanism

This is what I want for Christmas!

Two years ago, a paper was published in Nature describing the function of the oldest known scientific computer, a device built in Greece around 100 BCE. Recovered in 1901 from a shipwreck near the island of Antikythera, this mechanism had been lost and unknown for 2000 years. It took one century for scientists to understand its purpose: it is an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. In 2010, a fully-functional replica was constructed out of Lego.

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Archaeologists warn of climate threat to past treasures

Mummies decaying in Siberia, pyramids vanishing under the sand in Sudan, Maya temples collapsing: climate change risks destroying countless treasures from our shared past, archaeologists warn.

Melting ice can unlock ancient secrets from the ground, as with the discovery in 1991 of "Oetzi", a 5,300-year-old warrior whose body had been preserved through the millennia inside an Alpine glacier.

But as ice caps melt, deserts spread, ocean levels rise and hurricanes intensify -- all forecast effects of man-made global warming -- Henri-Paul Francfort of the CNRS research institute fears a heavy toll on world heritage.

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Was Medieval England more Merrie than thought?

Maybe being a serf or a villein in the Middle Ages was not such a grim existence as it seems.

Medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today, according to new research.

Living standards in medieval England were far above the "bare bones subsistence" experience of people in many of today's poor countries, a study says.

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Giant fossil bird found on 'hobbit' island of Flores

A giant marabou stork has been discovered on an island once home to human-like 'hobbits'.

Fossils of the bird were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores, a place previously famed for the discovery of Homo floresiensis, a small hominin species closely related to modern humans.

The stork may have been capable of hunting and eating juvenile members of this hominin species, say researchers who made the discovery, though there is no direct evidence the birds did so.

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Archaeologists to explore new findings near Abbey

ARCHaEOLOGISTS will use electric currents to explore findings near Whitby Abbey.

Contractors for Yorkshire Water have had to stop work immediately after it came to light they were working in an area known as the ‘Donkey Field’ without permission from English Heritage.

Stone which is potentially medieval, pottery and a clay pipe have been unearthed during the works to connect water supply to a holiday cottage.

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Worth their weight in gold: Portable Antiquities Scheme launches the Treasure Annual Report

The Portable Antiquities Scheme has unearthed enough finds to make Time Team seethe with jealousy since being set up in 1997.

Just in case proof were needed, at one end of a table at the British Museum sits a box containing some of the 52,503 coins found in the Somerset town of Frome in April. Comprising the largest Roman coin hoard ever found in a single container in Britain, their nicks, mottled depictions of Emperors and silver edges are illuminated under an arc of spotlights.

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Medieval England Twice as Well Off as Today’s Poorest Nations

New research led by economists at the University of Warwick reveals that medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today.

In a paper entitled British Economic Growth 1270-1870 published by the University of Warwick's Centre on Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) the researchers find that living standards in medieval England were far above the "bare bones subsistence" experience of people in many of today's poor countries.

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Neanderthals: how needles and skins gave us the edge on our kissing cousins

The Neanderthal genome tells us we were very similar: in fact we interbred. But intellect and invention meant that we lived while they perished, says Robin McKie

On the ground floor of the Natural History Museum in London, arrays of Formica-covered cabinets stretch from floor to ceiling and from one end of the great building to the other. Some of nature's finest glories are stored here: pygmy hippo bones from Sicily, mammoth tusks from Siberia and skulls of giant sloths from South America.

Many treasures compete for attention, but there is one sample, kept in a small plywood box, that deserves especial interest: the Swanscombe skull. Found near Gravesend last century, it is made up of three pieces of the brain case of a 400,000-year-old female and is one of only half-a-dozen bits of skeleton that can be traced to men and women who lived in Britain before the end of the last ice age. Human remains do not get more precious than this.

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Important archaeological find preserved in Scotland thanks to slow motion tree felling

A pre-historic archaeological find in the Scottish Highlands has been secured for future investigation – thanks to some inventive ‘slow-mo’ tree felling.

The find – a late prehistoric galleried dun – was discovered at a site in Strath Glass, near Cannich, during checks carried out by Forestry Commission Scotland staff of a forest block of mature Douglas fir that was due to be felled.

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Burnham hoard uncovered

Earlier this year a rare Bronze Age founders hoard, buried within a pot in an Essex field, was excavated by archaeologists after being discovered by metal detectorists. The excavation was recorded by 360Production in the following video.

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Global Sea-Level Rise at the End of the Last Ice Age Interrupted by Rapid 'Jumps'

Southampton researchers have estimated that sea-level rose by an average of about 1 metre per century at the end of the last Ice Age, interrupted by rapid 'jumps' during which it rose by up to 2.5 metres per century. The findings, published in Global and Planetary Change, will help unravel the responses of ocean circulation and climate to large inputs of ice-sheet meltwater to the world ocean.

Global sea level rose by a total of more than 120 metres as the vast ice sheets of the last Ice Age melted back. This melt-back lasted from about 19,000 to about 6,000 years ago, meaning that the average rate of sea-level rise was roughly 1 metre per century.

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Colonia3D jetzt im RGM zu sehen

Nach dem erfolgreichen Testlauf und sehr guter Publikumsresonanz wird Colonia3D nun Bestandteil der Dauerausstellung des Römisch Germanischen Museum (RGM) in Köln und wurde heute von der Geschäftsführerin der RheinEnergieStiftung Jugend/Beruf, Wissenschaft und dem Präsidenten der Fachhochschule Köln dem Museum übergeben.

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