The city of Cahokia is the latest ancient site to go virtual, thanks to a reconstruction and online map published. Ancient Cahokia was a Mississippian city that flourished between 1000 -1400 AD. At its peak, in the early 13th century, it had a population between 10,000 and 20,000and covered nearly six square miles. This makes it larger than London ca. 1250 AD. It had about 120 mounds during this time, some used for burial, others for religious purposes. It also had palisades, communal plazas, houses and fields full of crops. The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, has an interesting online…
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One of Torontos most unique cultural getaways is a place dedicated to one small, but important, facet of human culture shoes. The Bata Shoe Museum, as its name suggests, is a museum dedicated to the history of shoes. It shows shoes ranging from 4,500 years ago to the modern day. Youcan find shoes worn by Anasazi, the ancient Egyptians and, yes, even Pamela Anderson all in the same building. Shoes in the ancient world are rare archaeological finds.An archaeologist can excavate a decent sized city and not find a single pair. As such the bulk of the museums collection postdates…
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An archaeological team, led by University of Toronto professor Tim Harrison, has uncovered a cache of tablets in a temple thatwas built duringthe ‘Dark Age’ period, after the collapse of several Bronze Age civilizations. The temple is at the site of Tayinat in southeastern Turkey. Tayinat has a long history, which stretches from the early Bronze Age (nearly 5,000 years ago) to the end of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago. The ‘Dark Age’ is a period that begins around the 12th century BC It sees the simultaneous collapse of several civilizations in Europe and the Middle East. In…
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This past a week I interviewed two archaeologists, Dr. Ron Williamson and Professor Neal Ferris, who are at the forefront of trying to solve a problem which has seen artefacts quite literally being tossed into landfills. Ontario, a province larger than the UK and France put together, has a rich archaeological history going back about 12,000 years. Its a history that includes early hunters who lived alongside mastodons, an agricultural revolution that started 1,500 years ago, and the construction of five hectare villages with 100 meter longhouses. What its recent history has not seen is an archaeological system capable of…
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Its an idea that has become conventional thinking. Pottery is a child of agriculture. There is no advantage for a society to produce ceramic technology unless it is at least partly agricultural. Hunter gatherers, who move around the landscape, wont produce it in any quantity because it is simply too much to lug around. Besides, if youre living this kind of lifestyle youre not storing more food than you can carry. Whats the problem with this idea? Quite simply, its not true! Research in the Great Lakes area of North America has confirmed that people were using pottery for nearly…
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A few years ago, a well-meaning person, who knew that I had an interest in archaeology, gave me a copy of a magazine called Ancient America. The magazine carries articles that, needless to say, I havent seen in any scholarly journals.Heres a sample from their last issue. Roman coins found along the Ohio RiverMinoan pendent found in OhioChinese treasure in California My first thought wow ancient Mediterranean civs really had a thing going for Ohio! Im not going to get into these claims except to say that I wouldnt put money on any of them standing up to scientific scrutiny.…
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In September of 2008 a paper came out in the Journal of Applied Geophysics, which reported on a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey of the site of Le Pozze in Lonato, Northern Italy. Most of the findings were from the Roman period and include the discovery of a large villa and public building. The researchers estimate that the two structures combined extended over nearly 10,000 square meters of space. Here is the stopper the survey was done in 2004. It took four years until it appeared in a journal. A little known fact about archaeology is that the time period…
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Residents of Leptiminus, a city in Roman occupied Tunisia, ate a diet heavy in vegetables and marine life (including Grouper). However they avoided millet and legumes, dietary staples in other parts of the Empire. They also avoided eating large amounts of the local fish sauce which they were trying to sell to other people. These are the findings of a Canadian science team that analyzed skeletons from the cemetery of Leptiminus. The scientists were led by Professor Anne Keenleyside of Trent University in Peterborough. The skeletons they analyzed date from the 2nd century A.D. to 5th century A.D. To determine…
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As this blog is being written a Canadian team is renewing excavations at the site of Madaba, a modern day Jordanian city that has at least 5,000 years of history behind it. The city is well known for its Byzantine mosaics including the 6th century AD ‘Madaba Map’, which is considered to be the oldest known map of the holy land. The Canadian excavations areled by Dr. Debra Foran and Professor Tim Harrison, both of the University of Toronto. Theyhave been taking place, off and on, for more than a decade. The theme of prosperity and collapse runs through the…
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The Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Koffler Centre for the Arts and the Julie M Gallery are presenting works by New York based abstract artist Joshua Neustein. His exhibition of works explores the themes and ideas mentioned in the scrolls. There was a time when biblical themes dominated western art. Indeed modern day galleries are full of renaissance and medieval European art that focussed on the stories presented in the Old and New Testaments. With a rich cultural context of religious art behind us, how do modern artists respond to a biblical brief? I…