Roughly 3,500 years ago, folding chairs remarkably similar to ones found in Egypt suddenly became must-have items in parts of northern Europe. . . . Tutankhamen‘s tomb included two of these folding chairs, one made of ebony with ivory inlays. In a few weeks I am heading to the King Tut exhibit at Pacific Science Center [...]
Archive for the ‘Archaeology’ Category
I am just enamored with one particular phrase from a blog post about archaeology. “Steward of the Past” While the writer is specifically addressing archaeologist types, I’d like to expand the concept to genealogists and family historians. Studying history is something I find critical to civilization. Let me adapt what Thomas Carlyle once said, “No man lives in vain. The [...]
1,000 Years of Solitude: A Viking Leader’s Burial Ship
Posted: October 18, 2011 in Archaeology, News, ScotlandAfter laying undisturbed for more than a millennium, the burial site of an important Viking, possibly a chieftain, has been excavated in Scotland. It is the first intact Viking ship burial found on the British mainland. He may have been a chieftain, a famous navigator, or renowned for his wisdom, but this man was clearly special to [...]
There’s a cool new blog post by someone at Discover magazine about genetics in the Caucasus region. Besides being the origin for the archaic word Caucasian , the region is proving to be a good place for doing research on humanity’s early history. There is a very tight correlation between language and genes in the [...]
Butter in a timber keg was discovered in an Irish bog a few days ago. It may be more than 2,000 years old. Bogs were viewed as a primitive form of refrigeration by people in the past as the peat creates a vacuum around buried material. The vessel “may have been hewn from a tree trunk and [...]
Two burial pots containing human remains, known as collared urns, have been found at the base of a standing stone in Scotland. Similar pots were used in early Bronze age cremation burials and these two could “easily” be 4,000 years old. After the Carlinwell Stone, also known as the Cairnwell Stone, toppled over earlier this winter, [...]
“For centuries, historians have puzzled over the disappearance of a legion of 5,000 battle-hardened Roman soldiers in northern Britain around 108 AD.” A “group of experts say the elite infantry force was indeed defeated by a band of ‘barbarians’ in a military catastrophe that shamed the empire, prompting a conspiracy of silence.” AJH
Researchers have been busy in Colorado, digging up fossils from a pit “where everything went right for paleontology and posterity.” It’s the Ziegler Reservoir, and it’s a “giant, oozing, squishy bog of malodorous peat, sticky clay and mud that can suck the boots off your feet.” Photos of the discoveries and the work are available at Flickr. [...]
Irish geneticists discover the plague’s origins The great waves of plague that twice devastated Europe and changed the course of history had their origins in China, according to a team of medical geneticists, The New York Times reported Oct. 31. In the latest issue of Nature Genetics, the team led by Mark Achtman of Ireland’s [...]
New research has revealed that 5,000 years ago Neolithic men used paint to brighten up their homes, similar to what folks do today. They used red, yellow and orange pigments from ground-up minerals and bound it with animal fat and eggs to make their paint, the new study from a Stone Age settlement on the [...]
