The final collapse of Byzantium

More than half of the Byzantine buildings in the Marmara region have been damaged, according to a report released yesterday by a volunteer group, the Archaeological Settlements of Turkey Project, or TAY.

There are 336 buildings in the area dating from Byzantium that have been severely damaged, TAY coordinator Oğuz Satıcı said in a press conference on the group’s report, "Archeological Destruction in Turkey, 2008, Marmara RegionĞByzantine Period." The region contains more than 450 buildings that were created the Byzantines. In Istanbul, Satıcı added, more than 160 buildings from the Byzantine period have been exposed to damage. The TAY team has found 36 buildings or remnants in the area that were not detected before.

TAY is composed of academics who voluntarily document and assess the damage done to archeological sites in Turkey. Around 20 volunteers worked for five years to document the data for the new report.

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New archaeological park in Athens

Culture Minister Antonis Samaras announced on Wednesday that work will soon begin on a new archaeological unification and 3.4-hectare archaeological park in downtown Athens, on the site once occupied by Aristotle's Lyceum in ancient Greece.

Samaras said that a protective canopy will be built over the antiquities in the palestra (wrestling arena) of the lyceum's gymnasium and they will also be linked with the Byzantine Museum.

The project was first initiated in 1996, when excavation works revealed the archaeological findings and the site. They started with restoration works on the site in 1997, followed by the announcement in 2002 of a tender for a technical study on building the canopy and associated works that is finally being carried out this year.

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Ancient medieval buildings found beneath Cathedral Square

Archaeologists excavating beneath Cathedral Square in Peterborough have found the remains of ancient medieval buildings.

One of the buildings, which probably stood until the 17th Century, may be part of the old Butter Cross – a building in the market place where butter, eggs and meat were sold.

Up to six archaeologists a day have been working on the site for several weeks in preparation for the main square improvement works, which are being delivered by Opportunity Peterborough and Peterborough City Council.

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Acropolis museum to open in June: minister

The ultra-modern Acropolis museum, situated below the ancient landmark that defines the Greek capital Athens, will belatedly open in June, Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said Sunday.

"We are preparing a jewel of a museum whose opening on June 20 will be a major, global event," said Samaras after giving European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso a guided tour of the venue.

The three-level museum, with a total area of 25,000 square metres (270,000 square feet), includes a section reserved for the disputed Parthenon Marbles, currently at the British Museum in London.

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Alan Vince

Archaeologist who transformed the study of Anglo-Saxon and medieval ceramics

Eschewing traditional art-historical approaches, Alan Vince, who has died of cancer aged 56, transformed the study of Saxon, medieval and early modern ceramics by applying geological and archaeological techniques. He examined the petrological composition of pots, comparing their constituents with rocks from known geological deposits. Working from microscope slides and later also with chemical analysis of the clay, he could deduce the geographical origin of the pot - sometimes even the precise kiln that had produced it centuries ago.

In many hands such information would be of purely academic value. But Alan compared tens of thousands of potsherds, from dozens of sites, deploying statistical techniques to transform understanding of conditions in English towns. In London it emerged that the Norman Conquest of 1066 made little difference to trade in pottery, to the types of vessel in use or, by inference, to the domestic way of life of most Londoners.

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Archaeologists keen to trace origins of Roman skeleton

A ROMAN skeleton which was found in Kingsholm is being investigated by archeologists who are keen to trace his origins.

The male skeleton was discovered in 1972, north of Kingsholm Square and ever since experts have wondered where he came from. Now, the Gloucester City Museum has had funding for the analysis of the skeleton using new technology to work out where he originated. Member and former president of The Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, Carolyn Heighway, said: "We believe he was a special person in the late Roman period in Gloucester, judging by his grand belt and buckles and that sort of thing.

"Subsequently it was judged by academics that he could have been of eastern European origin and was probably part of the Roman army."

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Archaeologists show off rare Roman find

Archaeologists excavating a site in East London have made an "extremely rare and unprecedented" find -- a delicately detailed dish made of hundreds of pieces of tiny glass petals, the Museum of London Docklands announced Wednesday.

The "millefiori" dish (the name means "thousand flowers") was found buried in the grave of a Roman Londoner, the museum said.

Based on the other grave goods found at the site, archaeologists believe the person buried there was wealthy, the museum said.

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Roman glass dish found in grave

A rare Roman millefiori dish has been unearthed by archaeologists from the grave of a wealthy Londoner.

The dish, which has gone on display at the Museum of London in Docklands, was found during excavations in Prescot Street, in Aldgate, east London.

It was pieced together from its many fragments.

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Church lot rock actually ancient runestone

An archaeologist says a rock used to mark a parking lot at a church in Sweden is actually a 1,000-year-old runestone.

Stockholm County Museum runic expert Lars Andersson said a rock used to help mark the lot's boundaries is thought to date back to the Viking Age in Sweden, The Local said Friday.

Andersson said in a museum statement the discovery of runic inscriptions on the rock thanks to rainy weather was akin to a "religious experience."

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Crannog festival offers a taste of the past

visitors flock to iron age settlement for food and drink event

NETTLE soup, spit-roasted lamb and clay-baked fish were on the menu for hundreds of visitors to Perthshire yesterday.

The Scottish Crannog Centre at Kenmore hosted its 10th annual Spring Celtic Food and Drink Festival which offers a culinary trip back in time.

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York Archaeological Trust wins charity challenge

A CHALLENGE to see which York organisation could raise the most money for a national charity saw contenders gather at an award ceremony to watch the top money-spinning team being crowned.

The Business Brains Teams raised more than £3,000 between them for Sue Ryder Care, with York Archaeological Trust emerging as winners after raising £1,075.

Among the teams gathered at York College for the award ceremony were Coral Betting, Cue Ball Snooker Club and business students from the college.

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4,300 mediaeval coins unearthed at Carevi Kuli

Total 4,300 mediaeval coins dating back to the second half of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th centuries have been unearthed at the Carevi Kuli archaeological site overlooking Strumica.

The coins contained in two ceramic bowls have made one of the largest and most important mediaeval findings so far, according to Archaeologist Zoran Rujak, the head of the ongoing archaeological excavations.

"According to previous knowledge, it is about three types of coins forged under Manojlo I Komnen and subsequent emperors," Rujak says.

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Detector finds declared treasure

FOUR finds by Island metal detector enthusiasts have been declared treasure.
The most ornate was a post-medieval dress hook, found by Cass Davis while metal-detecting in the Arreton area earlier this year.

The silver-gilt trefoil-shaped hook was said to be in very good condition, complete with its soldered bar at the back.

It could have been used to draw garments together or prevent clothes from trailing on the floor, said Frank Basford, finds liaison officer.

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No light at the end of the 'tunnel', confirms archaeologist

HOPES that a discovery made by construction workers on a site in Dungannon could be proof of the existence of the legendary "secret tunnels" leading from Hugh O'Neills castle, were dashed when an archaeologist confirmed the structure was a well dating from the late 1800s.

The find, which was made by contractors in the town's Irish Street on Wednesday morning, had created quite a stir in the local area, with rumours abounding that one of the ancient passageways had been uncovered.

Legend has it that a series of tunnels run the length of the town's main thoroughfare from Castle Hill, offering the ideal escape route for any impending attack on the medieval fortress.

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Exhibition opening 1 May: “Sea Stallion from Glendalough – from dream to reality

The entire exhibition area of the Viking Ship Museum will invite the public inside (and outside) to tell the story of the reconstruction of the Viking Ship Museum, the world’s longest sailing Viking longship.

The exhibition with provide insight, results and experiences from the entire history of the Sea Stallion, from its creation to its epic return voyage to Dublin 2007-08.

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Why do we have history and archaeology? In the light of our understanding of ‘deep time’ Daniel Lord Smail argues that it is high time that the two di

Though obscure in other respects, 1936 was an important year for the philosophy of the human past. This was the year in which the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe published Man Makes Himself, a book that became one of the most widely read works of archaeology ever published. In the same year, R.G. Collingwood, the Oxford don, sat down to pen 36 lectures later published as The Idea of History, a landmark in historiography.

There is nothing to suggest that Collingwood read Man Makes Himself while writing his lectures, though we know that Childe, in later years, read Collingwood. The books themselves could not be more different in form, in substance and in their intended audience. Yet both authors, in their very different ways, had things to say about the curious fragmentation that afflicts the science of the human past. For, when you come to think of it, why do we have history and archaeology? This was not a question that motivated either Childe or Collingwood. But today, more than 70 years on, it is a question that is causing more and more people to scratch their heads. With enough scratching the answer becomes clear: there is no logical way to defend any division of human history. It is high time to reunite archaeology and history.

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Kilns discovery could lead to a Romans rethink

THE DISCOVERY of two Roman structures in Otford could lead to a revaluation of their time in Britain.

The last two weeks of an archeological project to excavate a site in the village drew to a close earlier this month with experts believing they may have unearthed two pottery kilns, each around 4m in diameter.

Until now it had not been thought that the firing of pottery – a huge industry in Roman times – was carried out in this area.

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Mystery Of Horse Domestication Solved?

Wild horses were domesticated in the Ponto-Caspian steppe region (today Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Romania) in the 3rd millennium B.C. Despite the pivotal role horses have played in the history of human societies, the process of their domestication is not well understood.

In a new study published in the scientific journal Science, an analysis by German researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, the German Archaeological Institute, the Humboldt University Berlin, the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, in cooperation with American and Spanish scientists, has unravelled the mystery about the domestication of the horse.

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Neandertals Babies Didn't Do the Twist

Giving birth is more difficult--and dangerous--for modern humans than for any other primate. Not only do human mothers have to push out babies with unusually big heads, but infants also have to rotate to fit their heads through the narrow birth canal. Now, a new virtual reconstruction of the pelvis of a Neandertal woman suggests that Neandertal mothers also had a tough time giving birth to their big-headed infants--but the babies, at least, didn't have to rotate to get out.

Once upon a time, a major shift took place in the evolution of childbirth. Fossil female pelvises of a 1.2-million-year-old Homo erectus, a 3.1-million-year-old australopithecine, and a 500,000-year-old archaic modern human all contain oval birth canals that are widest transversely--from side to side--when viewed from the top. But modern women's birth canals, though also oval, change shape halfway down the birth canal so that they are widest from front to back at the bottom, near the pelvic outlet. This means that the baby has to rotate its head to fit as it moves through the birth canal. If a baby fails to rotate, another part of its body, such as its shoulders, hands, or feet, may obstruct the birth canal, which is painful and dangerous for the mother and infant.

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Controversial Hobbit Looks Tiny in Person

The Hobbit looks even smaller in real life.

A skeleton cast of tiny and controversial Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the Hobbit, went on public display for the first time Tuesday at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

The specimen, discovered in 2003 in Indonesia, is hotly debated among scientists. Some claim it represents a new diminutive hominin species, while others argue it is simply a modern human dwarfed by some medical condition.

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