Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history

Apart from looting, add deep-sea trawling to the list of threats to archaeological sites. Trawling is a horrible industry in any case, destroying ecosystems on the sea floor wherever it happens, but here's a case of trawling destroying a very significant human/inhuman site. This one is also relevant to #blacklivesmatter.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/11/wreck-of-the-worlds-oldest-slave-ship-at-risk-of-destruction

All that stuff about Africa is incredibly interesting. I'm convinced that there are huge archaeological treasures to be unearthed there, and I've long considered Timbuktu one of the most fascinating places on Earth. The cultures that existed in this area were displaced by climate change that caused desert advancement, and, I think, probably particularly the loss of 'Lake Mega-Chad':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Basin

You can't help but wonder if large human populations wouldn't have clustered around this lake much earlier than the current state of the archaeology that's been done there indicates. There is also evidence of other large lakes in what is now the Sahara that only disappeared well into the period when humans would have been ubiquitous there.

A lot of speculation, to be sure, but I do think that human populations were much larger back then than we estimate today, and that North Africa in particular would have been a very busy place, and while climate change was undoubtedly the major factor, I suspect that human activity, e.g. unsustainable agriculture, was probably also an important cause of its desertification. Coastal Mediterranean North Africa must still have been more fertile than it is today in the time of the Romans, when it exported large amounts of grain to Rome.

The earlier (long pre-Medieval) Malian civilisations were probably so rich and famous in part because they grew with climate refugees and became diverse and culturally fertile. Later, some if its cities, including Timbuktu, were important points for the caravan trade across the Sahara.

One of the most fascinating things to me is that families in Timbuktu hold amazing heirlooms of large numbers of ancient books of history and lots of other topics. These treasures have still not been studied adequately, despite quite recently being occupied by iconoclastic forces.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/22/islamic-extremist-pleads-guilty-at-icc-to-timbuktu-cultural-destruction

It seems that many books were successfully hidden or taken out of the city, but there was still considerable material loss:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts

If anything can advance our understanding of African history, it is this trove of inestimable value, and I do hope that things become catalogued and archived before another wave of war engulfs the city.

A nice little feelgood story:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/12/machu-picchu-peru-opens-one-tourist

Or Vauxhall Gardens which stood on the south bank til the mid 1800s... One of my favourite lost London spots is The Monster, a pub on Ebury Bridge that was bombed out in WW2... I definitely would've been a regular there...

Or Vauxhall Gardens which stood on the south bank til the mid 1800s... One of my favourite lost London spots is The Monster, a pub on Ebury Bridge that was bombed out in WW2... I definitely would've been a regular there...

I've been meaning to follow up on teenslain's mention of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in reply to my post about Rosherville Gardens a couple of months ago.

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/15254282/

Here's a nice article about them:

https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/vauxhall-pleasure-gardens

In case anyone mistakenly thought that all large petroglyphs were high art, errrm ...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/18/huge-cat-found-etched-desert-nazca-lines-peru

If this had come out on the 1st of April, I would have taken it for an April Fool's joke.

I'd like to see the quality of your drawing when 37 meters long with only tools from 200bc

Well, I think there are much better such images, and ones which are vast in size.

https://www.savacations.com/animal-geoglyphs-nazca-lines-hummingbird-whale/

Quite abstract, but successful in that, I think, and rising above the level of cartoons. It's probably just a case of there having been different artists in different eras; perhaps this one, which is thought to be earlier than those above, was done by a lesser artist before someone perfected the technique and created lots in a short space of time:

But yeah, I certainly wouldn't make a very good fist of creating one of those. :)

The area in question is here, by the way:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Desert+Lines/@-14.7010481,-75.1301324,5411m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x91141fa2b343d2f9:0x12d9feb56b9ff2c9!8m2!3d-14.8216935!4d-74.935941

Zoom in to find tags that people have made for the individual figures.

Egypt has been publicising finds like this this year:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/14/nearly-100-coffins-buried-over-2500-years-ago-found-in-egypt

I wonder if they're going to add much to our understanding of history, as they're probably burials of much less significant individuals than in royal tombs.

The one I'm still on tenterhooks about is whether they're really going to find that Tutankhamun's tomb is actually the antechambers of Nefertiti's (because he had to be buried in haste). It's only a conspiracy theory at the moment, but that would be one of the most significant finds for decades.

I don't think there's much here yet--they seem to have done some underwater mapping of the (trawler-ravaged) North Sea bed--but it would be hugely interesting to know more about the nature of life in Doggerland all those millennia ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/01/evidence-life-on-doggerland-after-devastating-tsunamis-study

Often in archaeology it's the time capsules that are the most interesting, e.g. if something collapsed and was preserved in the state it was in a long time ago and not in a constantly-updated fashion like towns lived in for thousands of years, where lots of small remnants of the past can be seen among the new, but where the whole picture of the history, and indeed how far back it goes, is obscured.

With Doggerland, there might well be such time capsules, all while considering how hugely difficult underwater archaeology is, but of course remote sensing can enable a certain glimpse into whatever may still be there, e.g. any structures that might still stand proud of the ground, such as stone circles. (I know that's fantasising, but it would be intriguing.)

I highly recommend the BBC In Our Time episode on Doggerland - it was my first introduction to the idea and I found it fascinating and very digestible

Thanks! I'll see if I can find it on-line.

Greenpeace have been busy dumping bolders on dogger bank to discourage anymore destructive dredging

This looks amazing, incredible these sites are still out there to be 'discovered'
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest

Oh, excellent. That looks utterly fantastic. It also does one of my favourite things, which is that it seemingly confirms that humans got there earlier than previously suspected. As I've said many times, I think we'll continue to have to push back the chronology much further than where it stands at present. In Australia, we're up to about 60,000 years ago by some estimates, and I expect that people have been in the Americas for much longer than we have so far assumed.

This is a nice little gallery of prehistoric rock art, some about as big as this latest discovery:

https://imagesdanslapierre.mcq.org/en/discover/where/

As you imply with your '' around 'discovered', the site will have been very well known to local people.

There's also an amazing site in North-east Brazil whose name I can't remember right now. It's a rock pillar that used to stand in a lake, and it's also covered in carvings.

wow incredible. looking forward to the c4 program about it.

Greenpeace have been busy dumping bolders on dogger bank to discourage anymore destructive dredging

There's also this, which I meant to post a while ago but forgot about:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/17/underwater-museum-how-paolo-the-fisherman-made-the-meds-strangest-sight

Great story and what a man.

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I highly recommend the BBC In Our Time episode on Doggerland - it was my first introduction to the idea and I found it fascinating and very digestible

Indeed a good listen, thanks again. It's on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcubRlMqaEs

Here it is on the BBC web-site:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006707

Plenty of links on there to explore.

Here's a 2007 paper co-authored by one of the speakers in the podcast, Vincent Gaffney:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247936451_Mapping_Doggerland_The_Mesolithic_Landscapes_of_the_Southern_North_Sea

This is his page on the University of Bradford site:

https://www.bradford.ac.uk/archaeological-forensic-sciences/research/europes-lost-frontiers/

Beware, it seems to be a bit of a rabbit hole that I think I'll leave for another time. Plus, as I said earlier, despite the recent surge in available data I think this hasn't advanced that far yet. In the podcast, Vincent Gaffney said that they were close to pinpointing 'cultural sites' for more detailed exploration, but that hasn't happened yet. It'll undoubtedly be very interesting when it does.

Also, when archaeologists seek publicity, it's often to attract funding, so I hope this gives them some.

Doggerland fans should look up Bouldnor Cliff; it’s perhaps the most significant submerged prehistoric sight in Europe and is just in the Solent!

You remind me that I once met an archaeologist who had worked there. I remember what he told me as very interesting.

I think that the significance of sites is always determined by their status within what we have found. I'm sure that Bouldnor Cliff is a rich site, but the wealth of archaeological deposits pretty much everywhere is so vast (you just have to look at the stuff on rock art a little further up) that in areas of little knowledge, which includes most of underwater archaeology, I prefer to think of sites as primarily graded by their accessibility, and only secondarily by their significance in relation to the overall. I mean, today the best-known archaeologically-explored civilisations are probably ancient Egypt and the Maya, but even in land-based stuff we don't know yet whether we might find something even more spectacular.

Vincent Gaffney asks a rhetorical question in the above podcast: 'Where else could you find ancient river systems and a lost landscape?' (paraphrasing slightly) Quite simply--on land, e.g. under the current Sahara. I found this quite intriguing considering that Dogger Bank is a mass of sediment heaped up over an ancient landscape, just as the sand in the Sahara is heaped up over what is now beginning to be explored more by means of remote sensing (and where evidence of ancient rivers and a probably fertile landscape has been found), just like Doggerland.

Anyway, it's all uncountable little mosaic pieces to put together.

@Oliver Schick
on Monday our tunnelling specialist gave us a lecture about the river Thames, the tyburn delta around Westminster Abbey (Thorney Island), evolution of terracing North and South of the river that forms our Valley, history of our main river before it flowed through modem day London with vast lakes around Windsor, prehistoric hippo bones and teeth, that the old thames was once a tributary north of the Chilterns to the mighty Rhine that joined beyond East Anglia above the land bridge connection to the continent .

Finally our engineers gave us an insight to their intervention to protect Elizabeth tower, bridge street and Westminster bridge during the construction of the jubilee line extension. I think you would have enjoyed it.

When you look back as far as nine ice ages, our 150 year look ahead seems a mere blink..

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