Scanning Artifacts Up To Two Tons With Astounding Precision

A new facility opening later this year at the Diamond synchrotron is set to revolutionise world heritage science. A new research platform soon to be available at the leading UK science facility, Diamond Light Source, will help uncover ancient secrets that have been locked away for centuries. For the first time ever, cultural heritage scientists will be able to scan and image large relics and artifacts up to two tonnes in weight in incredible precision. They will no longer be restricted to examining small items.

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'Oldest English words' identified

Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.

Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

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Scientists meet to save Lascaux cave from fungus

PARIS – Geologists, biologists and other scientists convened Thursday in Paris to discuss how to stop the spread of fungus stains — aggravated by global warming — that threaten France's prehistoric Lascaux cave drawings.

Black stains have spread across the cave's prehistoric murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt the fungal creep.

Marc Gaulthier, who heads the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee, said the challenges facing the group are vast and global warming now poses an added problem.

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Stone Age finds delay Carlisle bypass again

Carlisle's proposed western bypass faces yet another delay after Stone Age artefacts were found on the route.

A potentially significant find from the Mesolithic age was unearthed during surveying work for the road, known as the Carlisle Northern Development Route (CNDR).

It has not been revealed what was found and where it was dug up, but it was on what is described as “a small plot”.

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Underground passageways discovered in Valletta

Preliminary archaeological studies in St George's Square, Valletta have uncovered an undocumented network of underground passageways, which could possibly connect to the Palace.

Studies are being undertaken in St George's Square in preparation for the building of a one-storey underground car park and the subsequent embellishment of the square.

The project, piloted by the Works Division and the Valletta Rehabilitation Project, still needs to be given the green light by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority.

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Biodiversity Hotspot Enabled Neanderthals To Survive Longer In South East Of Spain

Over 14,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene Ice Age, when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biodiversity. Today, plant fossil remains discovered in Gorham's Cave confirm this unique diversity and wealth of resources available in this area of the planet.

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Acropolis workers strike shuts down monument

Tourists who came to Athens on Thursday to see the Acropolis — one of Europe's most famous cultural sites — found themselves met at the gate by striking guards explaining why they had shut the place down.

The antiquities sites guards, who are temporary contract workers, are demanding permanent positions and the payment of wages they say are past due. Thursday was the first day of a strike the guards say will last three days, meaning Athens' signature tourist site will remain closed into the weekend.

"I'm very, very frustrated," said Paul Jones, a 27-year-old a New Yorker who is studying archaeology in Turkey.

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Hi-tech research shows Neolithic axes have travelled from the Alps

IT’S a mystery that could shed light on life in Hampshire 6,000 years ago.

Four Stone Age axes, dating from a time when people had stopped hunting woolly mammoths and sabretoothed tigers and turned to farming, are giving clues to the origins of settled human life in the county.

They were found at Hill Head and Titchfield, near Fareham, and at Beaulieu, in the New Forest, and Bartonon- Sea.

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Face-to-face with a brutal past

YORK’s Viking Festival reaches a spectacular finale tonight.

The five-day sell-out festival is the largest event of its kind in the UK, attracting over 40,000 visitors from around the world, many from the Scandinavian countries. It culminates with a sound and light battle at the Eye of York in the shadow of Clifford’s Tower. Entertainment starts from 4.45pm, with the battle starting at 5.45pm.

The huge number of visitors to the festival put a big strain on temporary traffic lights at the junction of Water End and Salisbury Terrace, and caused some traffic delays in the city.

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Trawlers are 'destroying history on the seabed'

Britain's love of seafood is helping to destroy the nation's maritime heritage. That is the stark warning of marine archaeologists who say hundreds of sunken ships, from Elizabethan warships to second world war submarines, are being torn apart by trawlers - fishing for scallops and flatfish - dragging chains and cables across the seabed.

Investigations using robot submarines have revealed that serious damage has been inflicted on vast numbers of the 32,000 pre-1945 ships whose wrecks litter Britain's coastal waters. Examples include the recently discovered 18th-century warship HMS Victory, which led Britain's fleet before Nelson's flagship of the same name. In 1744, Victory sank with all hands near the Channel Islands. Cannon hauled from the wreck showed it had suffered severe damage from trawlers.

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Bulgarian-British archeological team start working on Lower Danube

The Bulgarian government has granted permission to a Bulgarian-British archeological team to carry out research along the Lower Danube River, the press office of the cabinet announced, quoted by BNR.

The project is titled "The End of Antiquity along the Lower Danube. Nikopolis ad Istrum and its teritory from the end of Vth and the beginning of the VIIth century"

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Lost and found: palace of Robert the Bruce

Historians and archaeologists claim to have found the remains of King Robert the Bruce's palace, lost for more than 700 years.

The discovery is being hailed as one of the most important in decades as it pinpoints the location of a monument many believe is as important to Scotland's history as Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace.

Beneath the Pillanflatt in Renton, in a run-down area of West Dunbartonshire, historians claim to have found a number of artefacts and foundations matching descriptions in ancient documents about the location of the king's home.

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Farbiges Mittelalter?! - Tagung des Mediävistenverbandes an der Universität Bamberg

Der Mediävistenverband hält sein 13. Symposium vom 1. bis zum 5. März an der Universität Bamberg ab

Farbig - das ist wohl das letzte Attribut, das die öffentliche Einschätzung dem angeblich doch so finsteren Mittelalter zu attestieren gewillt wäre. Und dennoch: Farbe(n) bestimmen in wesentlicher Form den mittelalterlichen Alltag und insbesondere den künstlerischen Gestaltungswillen seiner kulturellen Eliten. Dies ist Thema des 13. Symposions des Mediävistenverbandes mit dem Titel "Farbiges Mittelalter?! Farbe als Materie, Zeichen und Projektion in der Welt des Mittelalters", die vom 1. bis 5. März 2009 an der Universität Bamberg stattfinden wird.

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High-tech tests allow anthropologists to track ancient hominids across the landscape

Dazzling new scientific techniques are allowing archaeologists to track the movements and menus of extinct hominids through the seasons and years as they ate their way across the African landscape, helping to illuminate the evolution of human diets.

Piecing together relationships between the diets of hominids several million years ago to that of early and modern humans is allowing scientists to see how diet relates to the evolution of cognitive abilities, social structures, locomotion and even disease, said University of Colorado at Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer. Sponheimer organised a session titled 'The Evolution of Human Diets' at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting 12-15 February in Chicago

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Hopes dashed as Google Ocean image of 'lost city of Atlantis' proves to be nothing of the sort

It was the picture that seemed to show that the mythical lost city of Atlantis, more than 9000 years after it sank beneath the ocean's waves.

An apparently amazing photo on the front page of The Sun this morning appeared to show a grid system etched onto the ocean bed about 620 miles off the west coast of Africa.
But today the hopes of scholars and romantics alike were cruelly dashed as it was revealed that the photo, taken using Google's latest gadget, Google Ocean, had nothing to do with fabled lost city at all.

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Computer technology plus archaeology equals enhanced knowledge of the past

Our knowledge of life in the Mediterranean region between 3500 and 2000 years ago has been enhanced by a combination of archaeological and computer technologies, as Professor Lin Foxhall will reveal at a public lecture at the University of Leicester on Tuesday 10th March.

How do we gather knowledge about how societies came to operate the way they do? And, how can this help us address pressing questions and issues we face today? We can't travel in time and observe how complex networks evolved, but we can collect, organise and interpret the remains of ancient networks.

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Well-known baths awash in hidden artifacts, rare finds

Excavations begin anew on first-century site

Excavations at an ancient Roman villa and bath complex in the outskirts of Rome have unearthed a wealth of surprisingly well-preserved artifacts, including the marble head of a Greek god, archeologists said on Wednesday.

The site of the Villa delle Vignacce, towards Ciampino airport south of Rome, was first explored by archeologists in 1780, who found statues that are now in the Vatican museum.

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Remains of the day

Three years ago, archaeologists at Bristol University embarked on a unique research project: the excavation of a 1991 Ford Transit van. After some background research, they carefully collected up all the dog hairs and sweet wrappers before stripping back the layers of carpet, plywood lining, metal and rust. Some of their discoveries were fairly trivial, such as the revelation that the van's roof was badly dented after serving as an impromptu diving board at a riotous Christmas party. But there were also intriguing insights into social history. After fingerprint dusting on the bodywork drew a blank, they learned that the van was one of the first vehicles in the country to be built entirely by robots, which coincided with a wave of redundancies at Ford's Southampton plant. Now the dismantled van has become the flagship project for a booming scholarly area, the archaeology of the "contemporary past".

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Orte des Geschehens

Vom 26. Februar bis zum 1. März 2009 wird in Heidelberg das 1. Altertumswissenschaftliche Studierendenkolloquium "orte des geschehens" stattfinden. Kernthema der Veranstaltung ist das Forschungsfeld der Urbanistik. Der thematische Schwerpunkt liegt auf Interaktionsräumen als konstitutive Elemente der antiken Stadt.

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Der größte Schatz ist unsere Geschichte

Museum in der Kaiserpfalz zeigt Funde aus der Sammlung Lütkemeyer

Der Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL) zeigt in seinem Museum in der Kaiserpfalz in Paderborn 50 ausgewählte archäologische Funde aus den untergegangenen Siedlungen Wietheim und Dedinghausen bei Bad Lippspringe (Kreis Paderborn). Reitersporne und Gewandschließen, verzierte Beschläge und Kruzifixe sind im Foyer des Museums zu sehen.

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