Hadrians Wall all 84 miles of it will be bathed in light for one night only in March. A spectacular line of light will run along the entire coast-to-coast Hadrians Wall Path National Trail on Saturday, March 13. Lights will be placed at 250m intervals along the route thats around 500 illuminated spots stretching from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway in Cumbria. The Romans built fortlets, known as milecastles, along the Wall at intervals of one Roman mile. Between each milecastle, and spaced one third of a Roman mile apart, were a series of turrets. The plan is to create a point…
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Dating work at Uluru Australias most famous ancient landmark is at risk following the revelation that tourists have been scattering the ashes of dead loved ones at the site. Mick Starkey, a spokesman for the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park, told ABCNews that human ashes had been discovered at two separate rock art sites over the past month. He said the practice could contaminate the sites and hinder efforts to date and record ancient art. “Obviously some people (have) been bringing and dropping their ashes off here,” he said, “and it’s going to cause a bit of problem…
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For the first time ever, a major Australian brand has used an ancient indigenous language as part of a mainstream marketing campaign. For a taste of how Australians sounded tens of thousands of years ago, check out the new Qantas ad screening down under. The ad sees 13-year-old Tyus Arndt sing the first verse of Peter Allens famous I Still Call Australia Home in the ancient dialect Kala Lagaw Ya, which is still spoken in the Torres Strait Islands. Tyus and his fellow choristers from the Gondwana National Indigenous Childrens Choir, the Australian Girls Choir and the National Boys Choir…
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Kashgar has for centuries been a destination for visitors from all over the world. Originally, it was a pivotal point on the ancient Silk Road trading routes, standing at the crossroads of the route linking Kyrgyzstan to Islamabad in Pakistan, and the one heading to modern-day Istanbul and Damascus from the larger Chinese cities to the east. Today, a team from the Asia Institute at Australia’s Monash University, working with Chinas Xinjiang Normal University, is hoping to help put Kashgar back on on the traveller’s map this time not as a trade destination, but as a tourist one. Monash’s Kashgar…
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Forget Oktoberfest – if you really want to combine culture with beer the place to be this month is the Penn Museum. The latest biomolecular archaeology techniques pioneered by the University of Pennsylvania have led to reproductions of ancient ales, which will be available to sample at an event on 8th October. The University’s Patrick McGovern, the worlds leading authority on ancient brewing, has worked with the innovative American brewer Dogfish Head to develop the beers, which are not too dissimilar to what it the ancients are thought to have enjoyed. Breathing New Life into Ancient Brews Based on evidence…
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The recession isnt being kind to the ancient world. Two leading publishers of history titles have just gone bust, and there are fears that more will follow. Italian publishers White Star have become the latest victim, following British publisher Thalamus into receivership last month. White Star, which opened in 1984, was one of Italys leading publishing house and one of Italian publishings star exporters. Its extensive multi-lingual catalogue features more than 600 titles ranging from archaeology, art and nature to technology, photography, ethnology, mountaineering and marine biology. Its impressive archaeology and civilisations collections alone carry something from every corner of…
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The fight goes on for the repatriation of Australian Aboriginal remains stored in museums across the world, with two artworks now added to the list of artifacts campaigers want returned Down Under. A delegation from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre in Hobart is in the UK this week to lobby institutions among them the Wellcome Trust, and Oxford and Cambridge universities to return the skulls, bones and other Aboriginal remains held in their collections. This follows their success earlier this month in having the remains of a skull from a Tasmanian Aborigine returned to Australia from the National Museum of Scotland.…
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The literary world is waiting for a bombshell. Controversial Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is about to release his latest historical fantasy tale – The Lost Symbol – on the public. But what does this mean for the history books industry at large, and should the work of Dan Brown be considered historical fiction at all, or merely fantasy? Judging by the healthy state of historical fiction at the moment, it could be that history pulp has helped stimulate readers’ and writers’ interest in proper historical fiction. In his review of Ben Kanes The Forgotten Legion, Roger Michael Kean…
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Tourists are taking the piss quite literally when it comes to Uluru, the sacred Aboriginal ‘rock’ in the middle of the Australian desert. Andrew Simpson is the general manager of Anangu Waai, an Aboriginal-owned company that runs culturally sensitive tours of the World Heritage-listed Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. He claims that tourists are not only disrespecting local heritage and beliefs by climbing Uluru in the first place, but they are “shitting on a sacred site” when they get to the top. Waiting half an hour to get to the bottom again, he says, is just too much of an effort…
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Travel writer and photographer Ethel Davies knows the Roman coast of North Africa better than most (see her top 10 sites here). We asked her to give us an insight into how her favourite image came about. “As a professional travel photographer, I accrued a great number of images over the course of the two years of intensive work and study for North Africa: The Roman Coast (not to mention the various trips I took before my research began),” says Ethel. “Its virtually impossible to choose a favourite, as each image represents a place, an experience and even a feeling.…