The skull of an ancient Egyptian mummy in Colchester is packed with ‘strange bones’, a CT-scan has revealed. The scan on 2,500-year-old Lady Ta-Hathor yesterday also revealed an odd bundle between her thighs, thought to be the remains of her organs. Full results from the scan, made ahead of Ta-Hathor’s display at Ipswich Museum’s new Egyptian Gallery, are expected only after an assessment by a team in Manchester. Yet it immediately showed she was healthy with no bone defects, and had died of natural causes aged in her mid-twenties – not far off the era’s life expectancy of 30. Ta-Hathor’s…
-
-
On Midsummers day, while more than 20,000 gathered at Stonehenge to celebrate the Summer Solstice,it was revealed a long-lost prehistoric documentwasdiscovered at Salisbury. The fragile deer hide document will put an end to all speculations asto the Neolithic monument’s purpose, revealing that theworld’s most famous stone circle was never a place of worship or a giant calendar. Rather, it was the centre of commerce for Britain’sBronze Agecivilization, as far as 5,000 years back. According to entertainment website ‘NewsBiscuit’, after extensive study, Oxford University archaeologists concluded that the document is in fact a 5000-year-old failed planning application for a vast covered…
-
‘Alexander‘ – even today, 23 centuries after his death, his name still has the power to inspire. His achievements have stood the test of time and remain amongst the most remarkable in the whole annals of military history. With an army of typically only around 40,000 men, he conquered the largest, richest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen; and all of this in less than a decade. When Alexander became king, his military career began when he launched a campaign against Macedonia’s northern neighbours. This is a campaign that we know little about, but we can assume…
-
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…
-
A team of archaeologists, working with the Kitchenuhmaykoosik Inninuwug First Nation, has discovered a 4,600-year-old burial at the mouth of the Bug River, on the south side of Big Trout Lake in Canada. Big Trout Lake is located in the far northwest of the province of Ontario. Even today its difficult to access. The provinces road system stops nearly 400 kilometres south of the area, making planes the most practical way to get in and out. The lake is located on the same latitude as Manchester, but the climate is far colder. In the winter the temperature can go down…
-
For the archaeologist and anthropologist, excarnation refers to a specific burial practice. It is the removal of the flesh off the skeleton, leaving only the bones to be buried, which could be allowed to occur naturally (by leaving the body out in the open, for example) or the process could be done physically, which can leave signs of scraping on the bones. So why is there the need to de-flesh bones and then dislocate them from the body in many prehistoric cultures? And which cultures in particular does this occur in? Mind the Fingers and Toes! Let’s pull up a…
-
All done and dusted! The first live lecture is now over (Watch it again here). The pain and the shakiness has subsided and I can relax! Thank you all for logging in: The chat in brief looked at four areas. First we looked at the Renaissance era and the overriding dependancy society had on God and religion as a framework for life. It was considered that other cultures, communities and societies of times gone by had been rudimentary and basic compared with that of pre-1680 Christian Europe. For years people had been fascinated by unusual objects and nature, but until…
-
Stonehenge summer solstice 2010 is to be marked by the debut of a 25ft-high steel statue. ‘The Ancestor’, created by local sculptors Andrew Rowlings and Michelle Topps with help from Druids and the local community, will sit 70m from the stone circle and provide an alternative focus of revelry and worship at sunrise, easing congestion within Stonehenge itself. The Ancestor is as tall as a double-decker bus, and weights a huge seven tons. It has been shrouded in secrecy until today to prevent a further swell of people visiting the already overcrowded event in Wiltshire, which tonight is thought to…
-
Evidence of an imperial Roman villa has been discovered in Gloucestershire, England – just hours before archaeologists were due to fill its trench back up. The remains, a large quantity of Roman wall plaster, were found last Friday (June 11) as a Bristol University team led by TV archaeologists Dr Stuart Prior and Prof Mark Horton were winding up work at the site, which has already offered proof of Saxon settlement. The remains, in the grounds of Berkeley’s Edward Jenner Museum, also include Roman coins and roof tiles. The villa is likely to date from the 3rd or 4th century…
-
While the golden kings exhibition has left Canada for southern climes, those in Vancouver will have an opportunity to learn more about him and more specifically how his artefacts reinforced his position as pharaoh. Professor Katja Goebs research looks at Egyptian pharaohs and the artefacts that cement their hold on power. Her most recent book Crowns in early Egyptian Funerary Literature: Royalty, Rebirth, and Destruction, examines the white and red crowns ofUpper and Lower Egypt. They possess a wide-ranging symbolism that transcends the terrestrial sphere to encompass the divine and the cosmos, death and rebirth, she wrote in the book…