Discovery News: Archaeorama News

Older than believed, Stonehenge was a cremation cemetry, not healing centre

New discoveries at Stonehenge suggest its stones were erected in 3,000 BC -- - almost 500 years earlier than originally thought -- and used for cremation burial throughout their history and not for healing.

According to Mike Pitts, one of the authors of the study and editor of British Archaelogy, the latest evidence overturned previous theory over Stonehenge, revealing that the monument was celebrating death rather than life.

"Stonehenge was always about death and ancestors and burial and not healing," he said.

Here is the full story from the Daily Telegraph.

Object Of The Month

Each month the Egypt Centre at the University of Wales, Swansea, UK, runs an interesting Object Of The Month display.

This month the puzzling object from the collection's storeroom is this "mysterious" red clay item:

The object is 299mm long, 157mm wide and 107mm high and it is vaguely catalogued as an "offering tray." Does any one know what this is?

Pictures: courtesy of Egypt Centre/University of Wales.

Archaeologists Unveil Roman Ruins That Rival Riches of Pompeii

From the New York Times : Four second-century housing complexes decorated with frescoes have been restored in Ostia Antica, the harbour city of ancient Rome.

The dwellings will be opened to the public soon (officials have yet to work out the details). Meanwhile, the New York Times has an interesting slideshow on the restored frescoes.

Egyptomania: Original Photos From King Tut's Tomb For Sale

The Griffith Institute, which has "the largest specialized Egyptological archive in the world," is selling prints of photographs taken by Harry Burton in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Burton was the only photographer allowed to take photographs inside the tomb of Egypt's Boy King when it was discovered in November 1922.

Over the following ten years, Burton photographed many of the more than 5,000 objects found in the burial on some 1,400 glass-plate negatives.

The black&white glossy contact prints on sale have been printed from these original glass negatives, and have been made in the photographic studio of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford sometime during the past fifty years.

“There are no plans to print more of them in the future, so this opportunity is unlikely to occur again,” the Griffin Institute states on its website

The price is reasonable: £20 for one 10 by 8 in. (25 by 20 cm) photograph -- VAT and postage included. Each additional print costs £10.

Here is a gallery of photos which are being offered for sale; to buy them you have to email: griffith.institute@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Picture: Rossella Lorenzi

Archaeorama And The Treasure of The Cucuteni

An egalitarian Neolithic Eden filled with unique, geometric art, flourished some 7,000 years ago in Eastern Europe, according to hundreds of artifacts on display at the Vatican.

Running until the end of October at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in the Vatican, the exhibition, "Cucuteni-Trypillia: A Great Civilization of Old Europe ," introduces a mysterious Neolithic people who are now believed to have forged Europe's first civilization.

This fascinating Neolithic civilization has inspired me to create an "Archaeorama Comic Strip". Just click on the image below to read it!

Pictures: courtesy of Rosi Fontana/Rossella Lorenzi

King Tut's Grandaddy Gets His Eye Back

It's good news: looted artifacts are returning home these days.

Last week the looted Axum obelisk was returned to Ethiopia after a 70-year exile in Rome. Today Egypt's culture minister Faruk Hosni announced that Switzerland has agreed to return a pharaoh's eye.

The eye was stolen 36 years ago from the statue of Amenhotep III, the 18th dinasty pharaoh who was most likely Tutankhamun's grandfather.

About 50cm long, the eye was removed from Amenhotep III's statue when a a fire broke out in the King's temple in Luxor.

"The thieves sold it to an American antiquities dealer who then auctioned it at Sotheby's," Hosni said.

The eye was then bought by a Swiss antiquities dealer. In 2002, it ended up in the Antikenmuseum in Basel, Switzerland.

Following a two year negotiation, the Swiss museum unconditionally accepted to return Amenhotep III's eye back to Egypt within four weeks.

The Monumental Museum of Egypt Is Taking Shape

World Architecture News has an interesting update on the Grand Egyptian Museum:

"The Grand Museum of Egypt’s design team, consisting of international multi disciplinary engineering consultancy Buro Happold, architects Hparc and Arup, has completed the submission of 5,000 drawings to form the construction documentation for this major Egyptian artefact conservation project... The Museum will house 50,000 exhibits including the whole of Carter’s Tutankhamen collection, with the total number of exhibits rising to 100,000 in the future. To house the collection, the gallery floor area will take up 25,000 sq m out of a total of 100,000 sq m built area..."

Most interesting are the rendering images provided by the architects:

Museum from the outside

Another view

Podcast: A Greek Mummy

"A Greek Mummy," a new episode of "One The Phone: Archaeorama interview podcast series", is available on the iTunes Store and on this blog.

Archaeorama's friend Dan Kirsch joined me in this production as I interviewed Dr. Frank Rühli, head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich and one of the world's top mummy experts.

In this podcast, we talk about the first real piece of evidence of embalming in ancient Greece. Dating to 300 A.D., when the Romans ruled Greece, the partially mummified remains belong to a middle-aged woman who led a privileged life.

A GREEK MUMMY -- Length: 00:07:00 -- Rossella Lorenzi and Dr. Frank Rühli, head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich and one of the world's top mummy researchers, talk about a middle aged woman whose mummy is the first real piece of evidence of embalming in ancient Greece.

Written and produced by Rossella Lorenzi. Narrated by Dan Kirsch.

Image courtesy of Christina Papageorgopoulou

Listen:

 

 

 

Download audio file (just right click on this link)

 

Subscribe to Archaeorama Podcast, and you'll be kept up-to-date about the latest archaeology news.

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Secrets of the Parthenon

How has the Parthenon in Athens managed to retain its magnificent structure and survive several major earthquakes since it was built in the fifth century B.C., asks the Daily Yomiuri, Japan's largest English-language newspaper.

To find the right answer, a team of Japanese scientists will next month look into seismic resistance secrets in the design of the 2,500-year-old monument.

Perennially clad in constructors' scaffolding, the Parthenon "had great resilience to earthquakes, as did most classical Greek temples," said Maria Ioannidou, the archaeologist in charge of conservation of the ancient Acropolis citadel where the Parthenon stands.

"The ancient Greeks apparently had very good knowledge of quake behaviour and excellent construction quality," Ioannidou said.

Here is the full story.

Photo courtesy of Kim O'Connor

New Technology Helps Reassemble Fragments Of Lost Past

For decades archaeologists in Greece have been trying to reconstruct wall paintings from Thera -- now known as Santorini-- an island civilization that was buried under volcanic ash more than 3,500 years ago.

The Herculean task -- more than a century of further work at the current rate -- soon may get much easier, thanks to an automated system that works like a ''virtual archaeologist.''

Developed by a research team from Princeton University, in the US, the technology has been presented this week at the Association of Computing Machinery's annual SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles.

While other computer systems rely on expensive equipment that had to be operated by computer experts, the new technology uses inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware and is designed to be operated by archaeologists and conservators rather than computer scientists.

The system employs a combination of powerful computer algorithms and a processing system that mirrors the procedures traditionally followed by archaeologists.

"We mimic the archaeologists' methods as much as possible, so that they can really use our system as a tool," said Szymon Rusinkiewicz, an associate professor of computer science whose research team led the Princeton effort.

The system is still being perfected, but it already has yielded promising results on real-world examples: when tested on some fragments from a large wall painting, it found 10 out of 12 known matches, and two more previously unknown.

"When fully developed, this system could reduce the time needed to reconstruct a wall from years to months. It could free up archaeologists for other valuable tasks such as restoration and ethnographic study," Rusinkiewicz said.

To watch a video about this technology, just click on this picture of Santorini's water- filled volcanic caldera (photo courtesy of Kim O'Connor)

Source: Princeton University.