It was with odd reluctance that I took the hand of a pretty young girl in Room 17 of the British Museum on Saturday afternoon as she dragged me to the opposite side of the hall containing the stunning Nereid Monument, but through her broken English, she assured me I wasn’t about to meet my maker as she placed me in position in a crowd slowly forming a circle. I’ve visited the British Museum in Bloomsbury, London countless number of times, but I’d never seen what was about to happen next. It took me a moment to realise the girl…
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News that King Tut’s chariot will leave Egyptto join the final leg of the ‘Tuankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs’ exhibition in New York its first trip abroad has been confirmed by an SCA press release. In the same release Dr Hawass and his team say they continue to stand behind the findings published in JAMA earlier;King Tut died of complications from malaria and Kohlers disease. Mr. Farouk Hosni, Minister of Culture, confirmed that one of King Tuts chariotsis travelingto New York City, the first time that a chariot from Tutankhamun’stomb will be allowed out of Egypt. The…
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More than 300 looted antiquities, estimated to be worth more than EUR15 million, were displayed to the press this morning in Rome, having been repatriated to Italy after they were discovered in a warehouse in Switzerland. It was a scene slightly reminiscent of a Victorian detective novel, in which the robber and his looted candlesticks is unveiled before an impressed gathering of country house guests. Only today’s unveiling took place inside the Colosseum rather than on the pages of a 19th century novel and while there was no criminal present, there was plenty of loot, which consisted of objects such…
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A unique piece of 4,500-year-old rock art has been unearthed in the Cambridgeshire village of Over. The prehistoric slab of sandstone is unlike anything previously found in Eastern England. The hand-sized neolithic artefact, which possible dates back as far as 2,500 BC, was found at Needingworth Quarry by Open University student Susie Sinclair. Intothe stone’ssurface, two pair of concentric circles are etched, typical of late Neolithic ‘Grooved Ware’ art. Researchers do not know if the motif represents a type of meaningful art, or if it is nothing more than Neolithic doodling. Examples of similar Grooved Ware art have been discovered…
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The Tunit made our country habitable. They built the line of boulder cairns that guide caribou to the river-crossings where they can be ambushed by hunters, and they furnished the rivers with fish-weirs. An Inuit story, from Ancient People of the Arctic by Dr. Robert McGhee Today archaeologists believe that the Tunit, who are mentioned in Inuit stories, flourished in the arctic during ancient times, vanishing around the 14th century AD. Archaeologists first encountered their remains in 1925 at a place called Cape Dorset on Baffin Island. They gave them the name Dorset culture, a term that is still used…
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On Tuesday this week public offices in Rome shut down as the city celebrated the feast-day of two of its patron saints, Peter and Paul. So it was an appropriate time for Rome’s archaeological superintendency to announce some of the findings of an archaeological investigation at the Mamertine prison, in which Peter and Paul were allegedly imprisoned during the first century AD. The recent excavation established that the Carcer Tullianum was the site of a religious cult from the fifth century BC, according to Dr Patrizia Fortini, an archaeologist from the Superintendency for Archaeological Heritage in Rome, who worked on…
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My award for archaeology’s equivalent of an IgNoble prize goes to boffins at Cambridge University and Austria’s Sankt Poelten University, who have triumphantly announced that rock engravings from the Copper Age in Europe were ancient movies (as opposed to doodles). Was this not a hopelessly obvious conclusion? Not to Cambridge’s Frederick Baker yesterday (June 29): “The cliff engravings…in our opinion are not just pictures but are part of an audiovisual performance.” “There was still no moving image but (the pictures) created sequences like in animation,” adds Baker. “This was not just a treat for the eyes but also for the…
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Taiwan will get a taste of China’s Terracotta Warriors this Saturday, as 400 chocolate miniatures make their way from a popular show in Beijing. ‘World Chocolate Wonderland’, at Taipei’s National Taiwan Science Education Center, also features a chocolate-hewn Great Wall of China. It attracted over 400,000 visitors in the Chinese capital, not least for the pint-sized ancient warriors, who measure just 35cm each. Each exhibit at the show must be kept in temperature-controlled rooms to avoid melting. Taiwan baker Lee Kyo-yi battled fine margins to create his chocolate Taipei 101, Taiwan’s, and at one point the planet’s, tallest skyscraper. “The…
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A Toronto newspaper is reporting that Chinese President Hu Jintao may kick-off the Terracotta Warriors exhibit, at the Royal Ontario Museum, on June 26. It will be the largest Terracotta Warriors show ever displayed in North America featuring 250 artefacts in total including 16 human terracotta figures. It’s opening day coincides with the start of the G20 summit in Toronto, which the president will be attending. The Toronto Starreports that the president and his wife Liu Yongqing have been formally invited by the museum. Were hoping, but we know there are lots of things on their agenda, exhibit curator Dr.…
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It was announced at a press conference yesterday in Rome that the oldest known images of the apostles Peter, Andrew and John have been uncovered in one of the city’s Christian catacombs. The images date from the late fourth century AD and were found in the underground chambers of the catacombs of Santa Tecla, in the south of the city near San Paolo Fuori le Mura on via Ostiense. Professor Fabrizio Bisconti, a university professor at lUniversit Roma Tre and an expert in christian and medieval iconography, told me: Last year the earliest image of Saint Paul was discovered at…