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Something here on the trade in archaeological finds, centred on a rare sword:
Of course, as ever, all that looting destroys the context and diminishes archaeological knowledge.
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It's always interesting when mosaics are found in the ruins of ancient buildings. The building-stone will have been carried away a long time ago to build new things, but mosaics were no use to people, so they were just left in situ. Some that have been found are almost undamaged, although not this one:
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How things are forgotten about--I could well imagine that at the time these logbooks were put in storage, their stories were not considered nearly so remarkable as they are now:
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Some graphic info about the eruptions over Pompeii and Herculaneum. Don't read while you're eating:
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More on the murky world of looting archaeological sites and turning important finds into 'antiquities'.
Double-speak from his lawyers who got him off criminal charges:
In a statement, Steinhardt’s lawyers said: “Mr Steinhardt is pleased that the district attorney’s years-long investigation has concluded without any charges, and that items wrongfully taken by others will be returned to their native countries.”
All this stuff has to end up somewhere, and wealthy idiots like this are one of the main problems behind it.
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Some interesting work in the Netherlands on Roman military history:
I think the land has changed so much there that it's amazing this seems to be preserved so well. Quite a few issues with the article, though, e.g. there are two incorrect usages of Latin terms. Still, nice finds.
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I hope they do some more digging here:
There's bound to be more in those shipwrecks than those small items.
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And this, an interesting re-examination of human remains excavated in the Cotswolds in the 1980s:
The paper about the original excavations, linked to from the article, is fascinating, containing copious drawings and photographs, and well worth having a look at (but I haven't read it all, either):
However, as usual, I don't think that it's possible to date things like this so precisely (from the article):
The prehistoric group of people in question lived around 3700–3600BC and were some of Britain’s first farmers, with the tomb constructed about 100 years after cattle and cereal cultivation had been introduced from continental Europe. It would be another 700 years before construction started on the most famous neolithic legacy, Stonehenge.
I doubt very much there's enough evidence to firmly nail down when such significant changes as these kinds of farming came to Britain. I rather suspect that there are simply no earlier finds pointing to them having been practised earlier yet.
It's comforting to see the old Grauniad continuing to mis-spell URLs. :)
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This is an interesting find, mainly because of the antiquity of metalworking on show here:
I don't know much about metalworking (someone I know volunteers at archaeological digs in his retirement and was once at a very old metalworking site in Georgia (not US)), but I'd guess a lot of metal was re-used when it was still relatively scarce, so that finds like this must be especially rare.
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A good article about ancient Greek theatres, with a focus on Epidavros:
I think this theatre shows that the large one outside of town was probably a kind of festival theatre that had to accommodate much larger crowds than the one for the town itself.
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A longer article to advertise the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum that ranges over quite a few things:
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A fairly basic mistake to make when minting coins, I guess:
The coin features a portrait of the bearded and crowned Henry III on his throne, and about 52,000 of them were minted.
It became apparent they were financially unviable because the value of the coin was less than its weight in gold and almost all were melted down.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/24/devon-detectorist-13th-century-gold-coin-sold
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spanish village emerges from drying reservoir
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Another Dunwich, although probably a little smaller:
Obviously, it's nonsense to call it an 'Atlantis', as to the best of my knowledge that still isn't shorthand for any old sunken town, but quite possibly another example of how funding-starved archaeologists (in this case a sedimentologist in his day job) try to talk up their work in the hope of capturing the imagination of funders or tap funding sources.
Ravenser Odd seems to have been fatally damaged around the same time as Dunwich, although that hung around for a little longer, reaching further inland, and it took several bad storms to swallow most of it.
As I've mentioned before, there must be thousands and thousands of such sites around the world, the most famous one that has been excavated to an extent probably being Alexandria, and given that there are apparently hundreds of such sites around the Mediterranean alone, you imagine that there must be at least dozens around the North Sea.
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An interesting, if short, article on an area you don't generally see so much about unless you're looking. Quite staggering stuff really.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220704-a-mysterious-cult-that-predates-stonehenge
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-EN0YIBIg
Humans have existed for at least 200,000 years. Yet until recently, historians believed that cities, astronomy, architecture and numeracy did not arrive until agriculture emerged some 12,000 years ago. But what if that was wrong? What if cities existed before agriculture and our hunter gatherer ancestors enjoyed a far more complex existence than we thought? And if they did, then what are the implications for modern political theory - which justifies inequality on the basis that we live in a higher, more sophisticated form of society that was always inevitable? What if there were social revolutions before documented history? And what if humankind had engaged in innumerable experiments in how best to live - including ones that involved the rejection of what we would consider to be ‘civilisation’? Aaron Bastani discusses all of that, and more, with archaeologist and co-author of the bestselling ‘Dawn of Everything’ David Wengrow.
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I was looking up some information about the Colosseum and stumbled across this interesting article.
https://engineeringrome.org/ancient-structures-in-rome-the-colosseum-pantheon/
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On one of my favourite topics, how we find out that people got to places earlier and earlier than we think/thought:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/12/sloth-jewelry-human-arrive-americas
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This is also interesting, about how old some ingredients seem to be--hard to find evidence of that:
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Half-million-year-old wooden structure unearthed in Zambia
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Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history
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@Oliver Schick
Stonehenge again, or at least its near vicinity. A very interesting article, particularly the question of whether these pits had any kind of astronomical significance, and 'optically stimulated luminescence (OSL)', which I hadn't heard of before:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/23/new-tests-show-neolithic-pits-near-stonehenge-were-humanmade
OSL sounds really wild. I wonder how easily it is applied. If quite easily, then it should undoubtedly be the first thing done at any site.
I do wonder if this is going to have any impact on the decision to build a motorway tunnel near there. Still hoping that will be averted.