It’s a question that’s bamboozled archaeologists for centuries – just where did the Moai of Easter Island get those big red hats? The answer, two British experts have claimed this week, is one of sacred quarries, iconic top-knots and volcanic highways. Sounds a bit too far-fetched for reality? Bear in mind these are the thousand-plus statues which line the world’s remotest inhabited island, in a corner of Polynesia not even touched by Europeans until the eighteenth century, and the truth may seem a little easier to stomach. The University of Manchester’s Colin Richards and Sue Hamilton from University College London…
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The Heritage Key office may be bristling with excitement at the prospect of our own Virtual Stonehenge – the progress of which you can see right here each week.. errr.. starting next week. But the anticipation has clearly proved too much for this online architect, who thought he’d have a go at the megalithic masterpiece himself. Andreas Trunk’s Stonehenge reconstruction is the first in a series exploring circular buildings of the ancient world, the next being Delphi’s famous Marmaria, and we reckon this is a pretty good first shot. Taking the stones as they are today, Trunk attempts to explain…
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The Golden Mask of King Tutankhamun may just be the most stunning artefact from ancient times that archaeologists have ever excavated. The fact that King Tut was a mere minor Pharaoh leaves the funerary gifts offered to the great ones up to our imagination, insofar as imagining such splendour and richness both in value and craftsmanship. As the golden death mask is too fragile to travel, there is no way to see the famous mask unless you travel to Cairo – or is there? The closest you’ll get to experiencing the real thing online is a collection of amazingly detailed…
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Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer. Virtually all the features of the Stanford camera focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere. The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source, said computer…
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Although it seems that museums no longer have any kind of dress code these days, a young woman recently fell foul of the requirement to at least be wearing, like, something. A story in the UK’s Guardian newspaper tells the tale of woe of Kathleen “KC” Neill, who was arrested and charged with public lewdness for posing nude for photographer Zach Hyman in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hyman is making a collection of photographs of nudity in New York’s public spaces (check out images of gob-smacked commuters gazing at gorgeous naked models on the New York subway, captured…
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Each time I visit Pompeii I discover something new that I had not seen before. Likewise, with exhibits about Pompeii and the ancient Roman communities surrounding Mount Vesuvius, I learn something about Roman culture that I had not encountered before. Last week when I attended the exhibit, “Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around The Bay of Naples” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I was fascinated by information about and examples of archaeized Roman art of the 1st century BCE – 1st century CE. many indigenous looters had abandoned scrabbling in the dirt for authentic…
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It was hardly bling worthy of an East Coast rapper, but stashes of symbolic jewellery found recently in the desert of Morocco dating back 82,000 years are being hailed as vital discoveries in the scientific quest to establish the earliest juncture between human culture and cognition. Unearthed at four different spots, the items comprise 25 tiny marine shell beads, drilled with holes and showing evidence of pigment and frequent wear. They were found as part of the European Science Foundation‘s EUROCORES programme: Origin of Man, Language and Languages. So early humans had a little bit of fashion sense whats the…
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Long gone are the days of school children creating minor masterpieces in art class only to take them home for mum to pin on the fridge. Pioneered as part of a wider initiative to discover innovative ways of bringing new technologies and computer games-based learning into the classroom in Scotland, CANVAS (Childrens Art at the National Virtual Arena of Scotland) will allow Scottish school kids the chance to display their work to thousands of other pupils in a specially-designed, safe and secure online domain. Better still, theyll then be able to create their own avatars and discuss their creations in-world.…
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Fragments of a bronze statue of the Roman emperor Augustus on horseback only the second known equestrian statue of Augustus in existence – have been found in a river near the German town of Giessen, about 40km north of Frankfurt-am-Main. The statue is thought to date back 2,000 years and the discovery has been announced by the science ministry of Hessen state. According to a statement from the science ministry, reported in The Local, this is the most well preserved Roman artefact of quality to be found in Germany to date. The discovery took place on August 12, when a…
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Jakob Kainz, a young archaeologist working on the excavation of the Links of Noltland on the Orkney Island of Westray, has discovered what is being described as a eureka find Scotlands earliest representation of the human face. Crudely scraped into a flat piece of sandstone, and measuring just 3.5 centimetres by 3 centimetres, the so-called Orkney Venus might not look like much, but its got the phizzogs of all from leading heritage experts to the Scottish Culture Minister Mike Russell who called it a find of tremendous importance beaming from ear to ear. The tiny pendant dates from as far…