In a bid to bring more tourists to the town of Tiwanaku – some 64km north of Bolivia’s capital La Paz – the Bolivian Andes town put at risk it’s UNWorld Heritage Site status, and even put their Akapana Pyramid in the danger of collapse. They restored their pyramid with adobe – a clay mixture – instead of stone in what some experts are calling a renovation fiasco. Jose Luis Paz, appointed to assess the damage at the heritage site, told CourierMail the that the state National Archaeology Union erred in choosing to rebuild the pyramid using adobe, when it…
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Ancient choices made by Egyptians digging burial tombs may have led to today’s problems with damage and curation of these precious archaeological treasures, but photography and detailed geological mapping should help curators protect the sites, according to a Penn State researcher. “Previously, I noticed that some tomb entrances in the Valley of Kings, Luxor, Egypt, were aligned on fracture traces and their zones of fracture concentration,” said Katarin A. Parizek, instructor in digital photography, department of integrative arts. “From my observations, it seems that tomb builders may have intentionally exploited these avenues of less resistant limestone when creating tombs.” Fracture…
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American archaeologist specialising in cultural resource management Tom King is an American archaeologist who has gone beyond archaeology to practice in, and preach about, the evolving field of heritage or cultural resource management. His career includes the conduct of archaeological research in California and the Micronesian islands, management of academy-based and private cultural resource consulting organisations, helping establish government historic preservation systems in the freely associated states of Micronesia, oversight of US government project review for the federal government’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, service as a litigant and expert witness in heritage-related lawsuits, and extensive work as a consultant…
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Attribution: World Monuments Fund Batticaloa Sri Lanka Key Dates A Buddhist stupa and shatra from the Ruhuna Kingdom date back to the 1st Century BC. The Dutch developed a fort there in 1628. It was damaged in the 2004 tsunami. The Fort of Batticaloa is on a small island on the east coast of Sri Lanka, 69 miles south by south east of Trincomalee. Its local name is Mada Kalapuwa, which means “muddy lagoon” in Sinhala, after the inland lagoon over which it looks. Although the site gets its name from a Dutch settlement built there in 1628, it has…
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At the opening of the new Neues Museum in Berlin this week, it seems that one question is on everybody’s mind – will Germany return the bust of Nefertiti to Egypt? Dr Hawass of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities may be feeling a little more confident after obtaining an agreement from the Musee du Louvre for the return of the fragments from Tetiki’s tomb recently. There’s not much chance that Egypt would have received that reassuring phone call from President Sarkozy had the Louvre’s access to excavations at Saqqara not been threatened. These tough tactics have worked in this case.…
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An unheralded Cretan quarry could be the site of the legendary labyrinth in which Theseus killed the Minotaur, says an Anglo-Greek team of experts. The group claims the stone quarry, located just outside the tiny town of Gortyn, is just as likey to be the scene for one of Greek mythology‘s most famous tales as the better-known Palace of Knossos 20 miles away. 600,000 people pass through the palace ruins each year; nearly all of whom are told it is the place where King Minos built his fabled maze to house the fearsome Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature who feasted…
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The Neues Museum (New Museum), the latest museum to benefit from the renovation programme on the Museumsinsel, first opened in Berlin in 1850. Built to display a collection of Egyptian artefacts as well as ethnographic, prehistoric and early historic collections, it was at the time the solution to a lack of storage space in the Altes Museum (Old Museum). Wartime damage and economic shortage kept the building shut for decades, until its long-awaited re-opening tomorrow. Frederick William IV ordered the construction of the museum in 1841. Like the other four museums on the Island, it is a model of neoclassicism…
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Who hasn’t watched Gladiatorand then wondered why you don’t meet men like that down the local pub? The same goes for those bulging muscles of antiquity that we see in classical art galleries they’ve often made me think that, well, they don’t make ’em like they used to. Now it turns out that what we thought all along that men in ancient times were a darn sight fitter than their modern descendants – is actually true. What’s more, it seems that ancient man was also better looking and more intelligent. This is the controversial argument that Australian author Peter McAllister…
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Footprints left by the artists and workers who made the largest and most beautiful Roman-era mosaic in Israel 1,700 years ago have been discovered in the plaster underneath the mosaic. Archaeologists were in the process of conserving the famous Lod Mosaic when they found the imprints of bare feet and sandals shown clearly in the plaster bed onto which the mosaic was later laid. The conservation experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority were detaching each piece of the 180 square-metre mosaic before taking it to conservation laboratories in Jerusalem. Jacques Neguer, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s conservation branch, said:…
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Senwosret III probably isnt the first person you think of when it comes to the Nobel Prize, but this ancient Egyptian Pharoah was making a significant contribution to future archaeology long before Barack Obama stole the show by scooping this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The Egyptian pharaoh, who lived ca. 1870-1831 BC, launched several military campaigns into Nubia. As Egyptologist Gae Callender writes in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt these were brutal conquests. Nubian men were killed, their women and children enslaved, their fields burnt, and their wells poisoned. Not something Alfred Nobel would condone. Nevertheless, in an indirect…