Free Republic

...we’ll be working for the next few weeks at the site of Aguas Buenas, located to north of the city of Juigalpa. The Central Nicaragua Archaeological Project is an ongoing archaeological investigation to shed light on the prehistory of Nicaragua, in particular its extraordinary indigenous tradition of monumental stone sculptures and its poorly understood ceremonial complexes. As part of this, the Aguas Buenas archaeological site holds special interest. Our recent explorations of the site have revealed its unequalled architectural characteristics and extraordinary number of mounds, spread out over the hilly Chontales landscape by means of wide concentric semi-circles. Current knowledge...

They say you should write what you know, but the greatest writer of all completely ignored the world on his doorstep. William Shakespeare set plays in Venice, Rome, Scotland and other locations around the world. Some of his plays revolve around the British Court, but he set almost nothing in the rough-and-tumble of 16th-century London or sleepy Stratford upon Avon, where he spent most of his life. This is all the more puzzling when, as a new exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA) proves, his life was so intimately bound up with the capital. The show commemorates the 400th...

An archaeological survey on the famous Scots isle of Iona -- where St Columba landed 1450 years ago to spread Christianity in Scotland -- has shown signs of ancient burials. This is the first geophysical investigation to be undertaken away from the core focus of the Columban monastic enclosure and the Benedictine Abbey... examined two areas in the fields to the south of the village - one close to the current village hall and south of the Nunnery and the other at Martyr’s Bay... where there is a mound beside the road where skeletal remains were excavated in the 1960s......

The peak period for baby-making sex in ancient Egypt was in July and August, when the weather was at its hottest. Researchers made this discovery at a cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt whose burials date back around 1,800 years. The oasis is located about 450 miles (720 kilometers) southwest of Cairo. The people buried in the cemetery lived in the ancient town of Kellis, with a population of at least several thousand. These people lived at a time when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt, when Christianity was spreading but also when traditional Egyptian religious beliefs were still strong....

Cairo, May 16 (EFE).- Archaeologists found the 1,400-year-old remains of a Nubian soldier in Aswan, a city in southern Egypt, Minister of State for Antiquities Ahmed Eisa said. The soldier's remains were discovered in a field that dates to the Late Roman Period and Early Middle Age near the border of Egypt and Nubia. The find shows that conflicts broke out periodically along the frontier between Egypt and Nubia, a region that covered parts of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The soldier's remains are in good condition and he appeared to be between 25 and 35 at the time of...

One of the most controversial proposed members of the human evolutionary family, considered an ancient ape by some skeptical scientists, is the real hominid deal, an analysis of a newly reconstructed skull base finds. By 4.4 million years ago, Ardipithecus ramidus already possessed a relatively short, broad skull base with a forward-placed opening for the spinal cord, an arrangement exclusive to ancient hominids and people today, William Kimbel of Arizona State University in Tempe reported on April 11 at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists annual meeting. Although features of the skull's floor evolved substantially in Homo species leading to...

The oldest known fossils of an ape and a monkey have been uncovered, providing an intriguing glimpse of a crucial time in primate evolution. The discoveries suggest that by 25 million years ago, two major groups of primates were distinct: one that today includes apes and humans and another that encompasses Old World monkeys such as baboons and macaques. Previous studies using living primates’ DNA suggested that ancient apes and Old World monkeys parted from a common ancestor between 25 million and 30 million years ago. The new ape and monkey fossils, from Tanzania’s Rukwa Rift Basin, suggest that the...

A 5,300-year-old man found sticking out of an Alpine glacier in 1991 possessed more genes in common with Neandertals than Europeans today do. The man’s Neandertal heritage is a preliminary sign that Stone Age interbreeding occurred more frequently than many scientists assume. Two researchers determined that the previously analyzed genome of Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman (SN: 3/24/12, p. 5) included roughly 4 to 4.5 percent Neandertal genes. Modern Europeans’ genetic library includes an average of 2.5 percent Neandertal genes. Human groups that migrated into Europe after 5,000 years ago mated with continental natives and diluted traces of Neandertal genetic ancestry...

Underneath the Honduran rain forests' dense canopy of trees, a team of researchers think they may have found the ruins of la Ciudad Blanca - the White City --- a legendary city of gold sought by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes. In a 1526 letter to Spanish Emperor Charles V, Cortes described an area in the interior of Honduras with riches far greater than those of Mexico. In 1839, according to a report by Nature World News, American diplomat and aspiring archaeologist John Lloyd Sturges went out in search of ruins in western Honduras and found the Mayan city of Copan,...

The results of an earlier round of sampling in El Castillo cave, published last June1, showed that the oldest of the paintings, a simple red spot, dates to at least 40,800 years ago, roughly when the first modern humans reached western Europe. Pike and his colleagues think that when they analyse the latest samples, the paintings may turn out to be older still, perhaps by thousands of years -- too old to have been made by modern humans. If so, the artists must have been Neanderthals, the brawny, archaic people who were already living in Europe... An early date for...

Maybe it was a teenager engaged in a Viking version of tagging a school desk. In any case, someone took out his knife, bent down and traced the outline of his foot on the deck of the Gokstad Ship. Today, 1,100 years later, researcher and storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad shows us a couple of deck planks that are among her favourite artefacts at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo... The Gokstad Ship was excavated in the late 1800s and is a permanent feature of the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo. For about a decade, from 890...

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Danish museum officials say that an archaeological dig last year has revealed 365 items from the Viking era, including 60 rare coins. Danish National Museum spokesman Jens Christian Moesgaard says the coins have a distinctive cross motif attributed to Norse King Harald Bluetooth, who is believed to have brought Christianity to Norway and Denmark. Sixteen-year-old Michael Stokbro Larsen found the coins and other items with a metal detector in a field in northern Denmark.

QUMRAN, West Bank — The discovery of a 2,000-year-old toilet at one of the world's most important archaeological sites is focusing renewed interest on a question that has preoccupied scholars for more than half a century: Who lived at Qumran? In a new study, three researchers say they have discovered the outdoor latrine used by the ancient residents of Qumran, on the barren banks of the Dead Sea. They say the find proves the people living here two millennia ago were Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that left Jerusalem to seek proximity to God in the desert. Qumran and its...

Second-century artifacts found From correspondents in Jerusalem, Israel November 19, 2002 A cave survey in Israel's Judean Desert has found papyrus scrolls, coins and arrow heads from the time of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans in the second century, archaeologists said. The scrolls, while believed to be less significant than the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the region in 1947, will shed light on the time of the revolt led by Simon Bar Kochba, said Zvika Tzuk, an archaeologist for the National Parks Authority. The artifacts were found in the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve, near the Dead Sea, by...

Biblical scholars have long argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the work of an ascetic and celibate Jewish community known as the Essenes, which flourished in the 1st century A.D. in the scorching desert canyons near the Dead Sea. Now, a prominent Israeli scholar, Rachel Elior, disputes that the Essenes ever existed at all - a claim that has shaken the bedrock of Biblical scholarship. Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, claims that the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian, Josephus Flavius, and that his faulty reporting was passed on as...

Click Video- Learn how DNA was able to sort out and match the DDS fragments

By Associated Press November 15, 2001, 10:56 AM EST NEW YORK -- The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating between 250 B.C. and A.D. 70, have nearly all been published 54 years after their discovery in caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea.The announcement of their publication was scheduled for Thursday at the New York Public Library by Emmanuel Tov, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the project's editor in chief.The 900 scrolls and commentaries in 37 volumes, primarily written in Hebrew and Aramaic on more than 15,000 leather and papyrus documents, were found between 1947 and ...

Academics from Britain and China claim to have found links between Neolithic cave paintings and the Dongba religion of Yunnan Province. The latest research establishes a pattern that reveals the origins of Dongba writings going back 7,000 years. This crucial evidence is now on display at the UK’s Northhampton University. For thousands of years, locked away in the mountainous province of Yunnan, Dongba has been the main religion of the Naxi people. Even today it uses an ancient pictograph–based language to document its culture – the world’s only surviving form of such a writing. Now studies of Neolithic cave paintings...

Officials in Belize say a construction company has destroyed one of the country's largest Mayan pyramids, reports. Head of the Belizean Institute of Archaeology Jaime Awe said the Noh Mul temple was leveled by a road-building company seeking gravel for road filler.

The Google Map of eastern Honduras is almost blank. A vast and virtually unexplored rainforest region known as the Mosquitia covers around 32,000 square miles, home to dense jungle, hostile terrain and the terrifying-sounding jumping viper. Legend has it that somewhere beneath the forest canopy lies the ancient city of Ciudad Blanca – and now archaeologists think they may have found it. Tomorrow in Cancun, Mexico, an interdisciplinary group of scientists from fields including archaeology, anthropology and geology will appear at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference to present the technology that has allowed them to discover a “lost world”...

The Cape of Cavalleria on the northern coast of Menorca provides a natural shelter for the port of Sanitja from the northern and northeastern winds. This natural port was first occupied as a military camp during the Roman conquest of the Balearic Islands by General Metelus between 123 and 121 BCE, and the harbour settlement grew over the following centuries. In 1996 the formal study of this area began, revealing one of the most important archaeological sites on the island of Menorca. The initial work between 1996 and 2008, revealed that the military camp had an unexpectedly long occupation of...

The so-called Elephant's Tomb in the Roman necropolis of Carmona (Seville, Spain) was not always used for burials. The original structure of the building and a window through which the sun shines directly in the equinoxes suggest that it was a temple of Mithraism, an unofficial religion in the Roman Empire. The position of Taurus and Scorpio during the equinoxes gives force to the theory... The origin and function of the construction have been the subject of much debate. Archaeologists from the University of Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain) have conducted a detailed analysis of the structure and now suggest...

Archaeologists are to explore the remains of a Roman naval base in Cumbria in the hope of finding evidence of a civilian settlement from more than 1,800 years ago. The fort, often referred to as Glannaventa, was built to protect the North West from Irish invasion and was occupied from AD 120 through to the 4th Century. Sited at the edge of an eroding cliff overlooking the River Esk, parts of the fort and settlement are believed to have been reused to build the village of Ravenglass and the early Muncaster Castle. Over the centuries the Roman remains have been...

"Tools were made by a specific canon of Neanderthals living in Central Europe. These items have a cutting edge on both sides, they are bifacial" - said Dr. Wisniewski. Tools, including bifaces and asymmetric blades, are made of siliceous rocks, commonly called flint. According to head researcher, Neanderthals made their tools with holders made of antlers, wood or other materials. This is evidenced by the results of the microscopic analysis of similar items discovered in Germany. Among the flint, archaeologists also found fragments of coarse grained crystalline rock used as pestles - support tools in the manufacture of other tools....

Malta's megalithic temples are slowly revealing secrets about a population that was clever, artistic, creative and talented with an eye for detail and a taste for the delicate and the exotic. Heritage Malta this evening surprised guests at the Malta Fashion Week with an exhibition entitled Jewellery through the times showing that Malta's first residents were not the aggressive, dirty individuals with unkempt hair which most imagine them to have been. The exhibition was followed by a fashion show of replica prehistoric jewellery, which preceded the main highlight: changing the misconception related to the image of prehistoric people by means...

Excavations by Environment Agency contractors creating a new bird reserve on Teesside have revealed Bronze and Iron Age artefacts -- and the remains of a former Roman settlement which was previously unknown. The discoveries at Greatham Creek are significant as they are the first such remains ever to be found next to the salt marsh on the north bank of the Tees Estuary... Among the finds are flint tools and pottery fragments, an arrowhead, jet jewellery, flint thumbnail scrapers, Bronze Age blades, ancient burial mounds and the remains of several Roman roundhouses... Much of the inter-tidal habitat around the Tees...

The Jamestown settlement in Virginia, which officially was started on May 14, 1607, was one of the first European colonies to last in North America, and was historically significant for hosting the first parliamentary assembly in America. But Jamestown barely survived, as recent headlines about the confirmation of cannibalism at the colony confirm. The adaption to the North American continent by the early Europeans was extremely problematic. The success of tobacco as an early cash crop helped Jamestown weather the loss of most early colonists to disease, starvation, and attacks by the resident population of Native Americans. A turning point...

Fig. 1. Map of the Harrat in Syria, Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Stephan F.J. Kempe1, Ahmad Al-Malbeh21: Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany; 2: Hashemite University Zarka, Jordan The eastern “panhandle” of the kingdom of Jordan is partly covered by a vast and rugged lava desert, the Harrat, covering about ca. 11.400 km2 (Fig. 1). Scoured by wind in winter and scorched dry by the sun in summer, the surface is covered by black basalt stones, making this area seem as uninviting, hostile and inaccessible as is imaginable.Nevertheless this modern day desolate desert proves to be as rich in archaeological heritage...

How The Bubonic Plague Actually Saved Europe In The 14th Century Sam Ro May 15, 2013, 1:31 PM Studying the history of financial crises can be quite enlightening. Deutsche Bank's Peter Hooper just published an interesting report considering crises going back to the Middle Ages. Referring to the work of Juesus Huerta de Soto, Geld, Bankkredit und Konjunkturzyklen, and Stuttgart, Hooper summarizes what happened during the European credit crisis of the 14th century. What's interesting is how the country got out of the crisis. From Hooper's note (emphasis added): In the early 14th century banks in Florence engaged in a...

Bulldozers and backhoes have essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids, which survived millennia of storms, rain and wind only to succumb to a construction company seeking gravel for road fill. The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology says the destruction was detected late last week, and only a small portion of the center of the pyramid mound was left standing, according to the Associated Press. 7Newsbelize.com, the website for TV channel 7 in the small Caribbean country, accompanied a handful of archaeologists to the site recent.

On Monday, March 21, 2011 the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta received word that the remains of either a plesiosaur or an ichthyosaur had been discovered in the Milllennium Mine operated by the petroleum company Suncor Inc. This mine is located about 30 km north of the town of Fort McMurray (population ~50,000) in northeastern Alberta (about 800km north of Drumheller), and is one of the places where bitumen rich sand is mined and refined into various petroleum products. On Wednesday, March 23, 2011 myself and technician Darren Tanke flew up to Fort McMurray expecting to see...

Archaeologists have unearthed what could be the earliest evidence of ancient human ancestors hunting and scavenging meat. Animal bones and thousands of stone tools used by ancient hominins suggest that early human ancestors were butchering and scavenging animals at least 2 million years ago.

When the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered the 4,000-year-old Palace of Minos on Crete in 1900, he saw the vestiges of a long-lost civilization whose artefacts set it apart from later Bronze-Age Greeks. The Minoans, as Evans named them, were refugees from Northern Egypt who had been expelled by invaders from the South about 5,000 years ago, he claimed. Modern archaeologists have questioned that version of events, and now ancient DNA recovered from Cretan caves suggests that the Minoan civilization emerged from the early farmers who settled the island thousands of years earlier....

   Summer 2000 (8.2) Scandinavian AncestryTracing Roots to Azerbaijan by Thor HeyerdahlAbove: Thor Heyerdahl with Peruvian children who still construct traditional boats made of reeds, the principle material that enabled early migrations on trans-oceanic voyages. Courtesy: Thor Heyerdahl.Archeologist and historian Thor Heyerdahl, 85, has visited Azerbaijan on several occasions during the past two decades. Each time, he garners more evidence to prove his tantalizing theory - that Scandinavian ancestry can be traced to the region now known as Azerbaijan.Heyerdahl first began forming this hypothesis after visiting Gobustan, an ancient cave dwelling found 30 miles west of Baku, which is ...

Archaeologists have uncovered an "extraordinary" mosaic that would've been used as the floor of a public building during the Byzantine Period in what is today Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.

Archaeologists have found more than 600 relics from a huge battle between a Roman army and Barbarians in the third century, long after historians believed Rome had given up control of northern Germany. "We have to write our history books new, because what we thought was that the activities of the Romans ended at nine or 10 (years) after Christ," said Lutz Stratmann, science minister for the German state of Lower Saxony. "Now we know that it must be 200 or 250 after that." For weeks, archeologist Petra Loenne and her team have been searching this area with metal detectors,...

The most extraordinary things about this truly incredible tale of World War II are that it hasn’t been told before in English, and that it hasn’t already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief...

Hellow man, Don`t mind my bad English. Firstly I want to make clear that the berber(we call oure self Amazigh) wich means free people are NOT Lybians!! There are berber tribes in Libia butt that is it. I am from berber origin (Atlas Mountains Morocco) now living in Holland. I am trying to search my identity. I red some artikels obout the Picts Living in Scotland that I found very interesting. I also red in another artikel written by a Scottish missionary, he wrote the article "The Berber oure distant cousins". I know that the Scottish people are a proud...

...The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, has been linked with at least two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded history. One, the Great Plague, which lasted from the 14th to 17th centuries, included the infamous epidemic known as the Black Death, which may have killed nearly two-thirds of Europe in the mid-1300s. Another, the Modern Plague, struck around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning in China in the mid-1800s and spreading to Africa, the Americas, Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia. Although past studies confirmed this germ was linked with both of these catastrophes,...

...Present day Dunwich is a village 14 miles south of Lowestoft in Suffolk, but it was once a thriving port -- similar in size to 14th Century London. Extreme storms forced coastal erosion and flooding that have almost completely wiped out this once prosperous town over the past seven centuries. This process began in 1286 when a huge storm swept much of the settlement into the sea and silted up the Dunwich River. This storm was followed by a succession of others that silted up the harbour and squeezed the economic life out of the town, leading to its eventual...

Until recently historians had believed that Fortriu -- one of the most powerful Kingdoms of the “painted people” -- had been based in Perthshire. But recent research has now placed the Pictish stronghold much further north to the Moray Firth area. And it was revealed today that a team of archaeologists from Aberdeen University are to embark on a series of excavations on the Tarbat peninsula in Ross-shire where archaeologists have already uncovered evidence of the only Pictish monastic settlement found in Scotland to date... The team of archaeologists also plan to examine the Pictish cross slabs found at Shandwick,...

One of the only well preserved dinosaur skin samples ever found is being tested at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron to determine skin colour and to explain why the fossilized specimen remained intact after 70-million years. University of Regina physicist Mauricio Barbi said the hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period (100-65 million years ago), was found close to a river bed near Grande Prairie, Alberta. The area has a robust "bone bed" but Barbi is not yet sure why the fossil preserved so well. "As we excavated the fossil, I thought that we were looking at...

Nestled behind a waterfall in western New York state is an eternal flame whose beauty is only surpassed by its mystery. It is one of a few hundred "natural" eternal flames around the world, fed by gas seeping to the Earth's surface from underground, said Arndt Schimmelmann, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind.

Scientists find cannibalism at American settlement WASHINGTON — Scientists say they have found the first solid archaeological evidence that some of the earliest American colonists survived harsh conditions by resorting to cannibalism. On Wednesday, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and archaeologists from Jamestown announced the discovery of the bones of a 14-year-old girl with clear signs that she was cannibalized. The human remains date back to the deadly winter of 1609-1610, known as the "starving time" in Jamestown, when hundreds of colonists died. Scientists have said the settlers arrived from England during the worst drought in 800 years....

Young Earth Creationists use Archbishop James Ussher’s chronology to date the age of the earth. They believe that the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 are chronological, enabling them to arrive at an approximate date of creation of the whole universe. They calculate the earth's age at 6000 years on the basis of ages assigned to these rulers. Ussher failed to recognize that the so-called "genealogies" are King Lists. These are not the first humans on earth, but rulers of the Afro-Asiatic Dominion. The Genesis 4 and 5 lists represent a time of kingdoms, laws, warriors, weapons, settlements, shrine cities...

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History recently acquired the remains, clothing and coffin of William Taylor White, a 15-year-old boy who was buried in Washington, D.C. in 1852. His coffin was unearthed in Washington's Columbia Heights neighborhood in April 2005 during a construction project at an apartment building. White, who was a student at Columbian College from Accomack County, Va., died of pneumonia and complications from a mitral heart defect. When his coffin was unearthed, his identity was a deep mystery. Only through the diligent work of a multi-disciplinary team of Smithsonian staff, student interns and external specialists was...

Wind erosion has lead to an incredible discovery through google maps. Comparable to the Nasca Lines in size, and even more impressive in intricacy, a potential massive lost city or site has been revealed in an area of the “verneukpan” an inhospitable area of salt flats in southern Africa . For over a year now, a young determined Dutchman has been using Google earth to map the world’s ancient sites, very much a crowd-sourced project, with over 900 place markers so far of sites that are known about and links to Wikipedia articles about them. Archeomaps is the brainchild of...

Nathaniel Philbrick's new book gets at the on-the-ground reality of the American Revolution, which the author writes began as 'a profoundly conservative movement.' John Trumbull's "Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill." (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Viking / May 12, 2013) It turns out the modern incarnation of the tea party may have more in common with the original Boston hell-raisers than people think. Americans have long romanticized the events leading to the Battle of Bunker Hill and the start of the American Revolution, most without really understanding what happened or what was at stake....

Virtual tour of Herculaneum, documenting the site, and the work of the Herculaneum Conservation Project. Click on the node-markers to view an interactive 360-degree panorama (in a new window). The plan above shows the locations of panoramas made mainly in 2001 (a few are from 1999), where the aim was to provide an overview of the site (as it was then), along with tours of a few selected houses. The menu of houses and other areas at left accesses additional, more recent coverage (including revisits to some houses and other structures) made from 2003 onward.

From Ireland to the Balkans, Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years, according to a new study of the DNA of people from across the continent. The study, co-authored by Graham Coop, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, will be published May 7 in the journal PLoS Biology. "What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago," Coop said. "This...