Ever wondered how a 7th century temple complex must have looked like?You can now find out, as the USBerkeley’s Architecture Department has launched what they call a ‘Digital Model of Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage’ of one of Cambodia’s earliest Khmer temple complexes. The team used a 3Dgame engine to bring their models of Sambor Prei Kuk alive, allowing you to walk amongst digital reconstructions of ancient ruins – they pre-date Angkor Wat by several centuries – whilst reciting your prayers. Architecture Professor Yehuda Kalay – head of the Virtual Sambor Prei Kuk project – is convinced that this project…
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Today was yet another glorious day, as I stumbled over quite a few small museums, universities and organisations that put their ‘heritage’ photographs online – on Flickr to be more precise – for the world to enjoy. Amongst today’s discoveries are the Manchester Museum (also check out their very museum 2.0 project ‘Manchester Hermit’), the Salisbury Museum (how to move an ancient Roman sarcophagus) and Wessex Archaeology. And then of course there are all those awesome ancient world photographs in ‘The Commons’. But you do not even need to be an institution specialising in archaeology to hold an interesting archive.…
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My name is Ansuman Biswas. I am an artist living in a Gothic Tower in the Manchester Museum, which is part of the University of Manchester, England. Over several months I have been exploring the museum stores and collecting my own little cabinet of curiosities.Each day over the next forty days I will choose an object from my collection and offer it up in a spirit of sacrifice. I will then destroy it. This destruction will inevitably take place unless someone cares for the object… . MUSTDEFINITELYSTAY!!! Brick Part of the Chinese Wall, this brick is not just Ancient History,…
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Although traces of nicotine and even of cocaine have been found on Egyptian mummies that date as long as 3000 years back -French scientists examining the stomach of the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II‘s mummy found fragments of tobacco leaves most likely used in the embalming process – and discussion is still ongoing on how these plants exactly got to Egypt without the help of the Spanish conquistadores – a 1997 Discovery Channel show suggests ancient international trade: a Pacific crossing and then delivery via the Silk Route. Regardless if the Pharaohs were junkies or not, we doubt if Queen Nefertiti…
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Lord Carnarvon, the man who funded the discovery of KV-62 – the tomb of Tutankhamun – and died five months later in mysterious circumstances before he could actually see the mummy’s face, was a superstitious man who wore the same lucky bow tie all his life. Such anecdotes are part of the ‘Egyptian Exhibition’ at Highclere Castle. Rising in the Berkshire Hampshire countryside south of Newbury, England, the castle kept many secrets on its own. As the old Earl did not want to talk about Egypt, the collection was hidden away until 1987. But the long-hidden collection of Egyptian antiquities…
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When recently the mummy formerly known as ‘Lady Hor’ underwent a scan, researchers were surprised to find that it should have been ‘Sir Hor’ from the start. Yet, this case of ‘gender confusion’ is not a unique one. The same happened to ‘The Daughter of Amunkhau’ – actually a son – from the Birmingham Museum Collection and according to curator Edward Bleiberg on the Brooklyn Museum’s blog, no less than three of the five male mummies from that museum – including Lady Hor – that were CT-scanned in the last eighteen months were at one time thought to be women.…
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Now, this must be the dream of every starting archaeologist: no longer hot – or worse, rainy – dig seasons, no more spending ages meticulously noting down every find’s smallest detail and never again being send to locations where they won’t even serve you a decent chilled pint. This is your chance to escape them all, as History Channel is looking for the next Top Archaeologist (or an anthropologist will do too). Regardless if you crawl out of a dig somewhere in Egypt, toss aside those recently finished final papers or want a break away from your students, this is…
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After 4 years of research – at a quite ‘sensitive’ and not-so-safe area, Imust admit – UNESCOfinally released it’s Final Report on Damage Assesment in Babylon by the International Coordination Committee for the Saveguarding of the Cultural Heritage of Iraq. Be the report not that world-shocking, we all know by now that both Saddam Hussein as well as the Coalition Forces are to blame, the report does clearly devide which damage was inflicted upon the Babylon archaeological area before the start of the Iraq war, and which was brought upon ‘Camp Alpha’ post-2003. Damage to the archaeological site that occurred…
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From ‘Mummy CSI‘, we jump to ‘CSIAncient Greece’. At least, according to the NewScientist. There Ewen Callaway reports on how Stephen Tracy – Greek scholar and epigrapher – makes good use of human intelligence and machine’s computing power to attribute 24 ancient Greek inscriptions to their individual masons. Together with Michail Panagopoulos and Constantin Papaodysseus – both computer scientists at the National Technical University of Athens – they succeeded at attributing the chisel marks to six different cutters, between the years 334BCand 134BC. How? Panagopoulos’ team determined what different cutters meant each letter to look like by overlaying digital scans…
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Not even a month after 4 brave mummies left the Brooklyn Museum to have themselves scanned, and ‘Lady Hor’ proved to be a male mummy – “scrotum and penis pretty well preserved”, another round of mummy CSIuncovered yet another case of ‘transgender’ behaviour amongst mummies. The Birmingham Museum took three mummies to the Stafford Hospital in a bid to understand how these ancient Egyptians, whose bodied were later mummified, died. One of the mummies, from the Namenkhetamun of the 26th Dynasty (664-525BC), was described as ‘the daughter of Amunkhau’ on the coffin lid. But the scan has revealed the mummy…