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More on Indonesia:
I still think that most dates people currently have will continue to be revised backwards. I don't think we've nearly hit the bedrock of history yet.
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The San of the Kalahari Desert.. what will it take to preserve a culture of pre history that has existed for 150,000 years.. which incidentally remains greater than any civilisation on earth
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I've said this before, but why do people continue to consider Neanderthals a different species when there appears to be a lot of evidence that they 'interbred' (horrible word) with other humans and produced fertile offspring?
The definition of species is:
A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species
Ergo, Neanderthals (and probably other, somewhat different humans) must have been part of the same species.
Anyway, we clearly still know so very, very little about pre-history.
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Well, they don't call it pre-history for nothing.
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I always like refreshed thinking about urban history. When it comes to the burning of houses, I would at first assume that this would be related to burial rites. There are many, many sites in which evident urban organisation seems to be mixed with agriculture--early on, much growing was small-scale, as a much greater proportion of the population was preoccupied with subsistence farming.
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Here's something on how people digging for 'treasure' destroy the archaeological record:
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The Black Death still puts just about every illness that came after it into perspective, including the coronaviruses:
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Some interesting finds that seem to have been deposited just before the Little Ice Age hit:
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I was reading about Gilgamesh and stumbled across this old 2003 bbc article about the discovery of a tomb. Canāt find anything more recent, does anyone know more? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2982891.stm
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I remember that, but I don't think anything has come of it. The researcher quoted in the article, Fassbinder, is a remote senser specialising in magnetic sensing. These magnetograms are certainly very interesting, but jumping to conclusions from them isn't. If you want to know more, you have to excavate.
Obviously, 'this myth is true/has a core of truth! look at what we found when we followed it' or its slight variant 'look at what we've found! it corresponds to parts of the myth' has been a popular game ever since Schliemann, but even if he destroyed much of what he excavated, and perhaps faked finds, at least Schliemann did do excavations.
It's entirely possible that this structure is a royal tomb, and that there may indeed be a connection to the myth, but they simply won't know that until they dig there. Needless to say, archaeology has been a little difficult in Iraq since 2003, so if and when they or Iraqi archaeologists get round to it, they may well find something interesting. There are so many other conflicting priorities for funding, though, especially since remote sensing (mostly LIDAR) throws up so many fascinating things. I have no idea how highly Uruk would currently rank, since, after all, it has been extensively excavated before (still only to a small percentage of its size, but more than most other places), and it is certainly safer not to start anything in times of political instability, leaving it in the ground instead.
Fassbinder has kept writing about Uruk--here's a little article:
In it, he also summarises how the Iraq War put the kibosh on research and ushered in a time of looting.
Needless to say, you come across conspiracy shit around pretty much all archaeology and when searching for 'Gilgamesh's tomb', you won't take long to realise that all of these amazing finds that must have been discovered were suppressed by the Americans because Gilgamesh was really an alien, etc.
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A spectacular find of a 43-metre Ottoman ship (among lots of other wrecks) with loads of luxury goods for cargo:
The outfit that made the discovery seems to be one of those private treasure-hunting companies, though. I can't find anything on-line about the 'Centre for East-West Maritime Exploration' or 'Enigma Shipwrecks Project' except for the articles about this. It's mainly suggested by the evident concern for whether the wrecks are in Cyprus' territorial waters--it's obviously essential for treasure exploitation that they can just lift and flog it.
I don't like these private projects, but it has to be said that finding a ship that large is fairly incredible. There must be historical records about such a huge loss, but it's not named in the article, which further suggests that these people have either not done their research or are still keeping parts of the information they have secret so as not to be disturbed or pre-empted.
The more you read about archaeology, the more you realise how much looting there is, and these private expeditions are on the borderline; I just hope they'll do some serious archaeology with it all, much though that's obviously not as delicate underwater as it is on dry land.
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If you're bored and want to do a virtual look at some Egyptian sites--I've only looked at the tomb described in the article, which isn't that interesting architecturally:
Direct link to the 'tour':
https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=d42fuVA21To
I seem to remember reading something years, perhaps decades, ago when an important tomb was closed because of the damage done by visitors' breathing, that they were looking to develop such web-sites in the hope of keeping up interest in such things even though some of the best sites would not be accessible to the public.
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Here's a little piece, inevitably glossed with 'LEGO' on how some of the Stonehenge stones were put together:
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Last one for today--some reporting on what metal detectorists get up to:
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A much bigger vessel than the 16m length one featured in the Bodrum Castle museum.
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Missed this. On Bodrum Castle:
Construction workers were guaranteed a reservation in heaven by a Papal Decree of 1409.
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Came here to post something different. I think people are mostly fascinated by sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum, or Mayan cities, and so on. One of the things that are interesting about them is the aspect of force majeure, e.g. by nature through volcanic eruption, or the mystery of the 'Mayan disappearance' (when they didn't really disappear, being still around, but had to reconfigure their way of living, probably because of unsustainable population increase and consequent high-capacity agriculture that was made impossible by prolonged drought).
Quite often, however, things simply disappeared because people decided to make different use of the land, e.g. where cities were rebuilt and rebuilt, often with the old foundations left in the ground, where castles were razed by a victorious power, and so forth. Needless to say, that all still goes on. An interesting change in land use was with the Victorian Rosherville Gardens in Gravesend. I'd never heard of these until recently. They were Victorian pleasure gardens fed day-trippers from London by steamboat which eventually became unviable (in several stages, mainly through the expansion of possible destinations for Londoners via the railways, but also partly through the horrible SS Princess Alice disaster) and were destroyed, the land subsequently being put to industrial use. Part of the site is still in industrial use, but quite a lot of it now isn't. Some local campaigners have called for part of any new use of the site to make use of the few remaining features, mainly the 'central feature' of the Italian Garden, apparently still buried underground, the bear pit, which has been partly excavated, a 'hermit cave', the land entrance, and the river entrance. A full list of what survives, albeit in damaged form:
Whilst the Rosherville Gardens site has changed dramatically since its inception, a few traces of its splendid past survive amongst the dystopian industrial landscape of Northfleet. In the cliffs close to the W. T. Henley air raid shelters is a Grade II-listed clifftop entrance and tunnelled stairway which would have connected Rosherville ontop to the gardens below. The arched stucco-effect tunnelway has the appearance of something from Alice in Wonderland! Some of the original handrails survive although heavily corroded. Underneath the earth piled over the W. T. Henley workshop site is an original bear pit and Italian Garden central feature. There is also a hermit cave in a chalk grotto ā Iām not sure if this exists above ground today or is buried, although it could be two archways we found embedded into the base of the cliff. By the Thameside is also a draw-dock and quay which served as the river entrance to the gardens, complete with a massive āenigmatic cavernā where shops and ticket offices were based for arriving visitors. On this dock site is also a Second World War mine-watching post to observe parachute mines dropped from German planes down the Thames. All these structures are listed, and efforts are going into the unearthing and preservation of the hidden Rosherville remains.
http://www.beyondthepoint.co.uk/property/rosherville-gardens/
Here's some other material on all this--the first one is in classical local campaigner mode, with a lot of anger directed at the agency responsible (I make no judgement as to whether that anger is justified or not), but informative nonetheless:
https://sites.google.com/site/riverthamesheritageopportunity/rosherville-gardens-bear-pit
Some features are now listed:
Here's a little video showing some of the model that was made of the Gardens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaKiuR5oi8M
The 'central feature' and the bear pit simply seem to have been buried under additional soil piled on top when the land was developed for industrial use.
Here's someone doing an exploratory walk through the former land entrance tunnel cut into the cliffs surrounding the site:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEYO-2fIHYo
Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosherville_Gardens
A news article from 2012:
Another short history:
http://www.discovergravesham.co.uk/northfleet/rosherville-gardens.html
Anyway, an interesting little piece of history, and I hope that something with a local history resonance will be achieved in any future development of the site.
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It does! They built Abbott's Manor estate on top of it, amazing name for a pub... My Pimlico history is a little rusty but I seem to remember there was a much older tavern called The Monster over towards Chelsea Bridge before the train tracks... The trees around the site were decorated with lanterns in the shape of monster heads...
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I worked on another project for the company that 3d scanned and made a scale replica of this. There's been a few online 3D platforms-think the most high-end was Dassault Systems funded 'Giza 3D' which repurposes military software to visualise the whole of Giza plateau in collaboration with Harvard's visualisation lab.
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@OliverĀ Schick
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/11/earliest-known-cave-art-by-modern-humans-found-in-indonesia