A school in Edinburgh, Scotland, has developed an innovative alternative to the rigmarole of loading kids onto a bus for a visit to the museum bringing the museum to the kids. Developed with 10,000 from the Big Lottery Fund, the Living Links Museum at South Queensferrys Echline Primary School will represent the only in-school museum of its kind in Scotland, and feature displays relating to the Vikings and the ancient Egyptians and Africans. The museum will be housed in an old library. Exhibits will come from an extensive collection built up by the school over the past few years, via…
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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…
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Tourism is a massive industry in Egypt, thanks to the countrys venerable past it accounts for 11% of GDP, and creates jobs for around 12% of the total national workforce. Chief among Egypts antiquarian attractions are the tombs of the pharaohs, the vast network of lavishly decorative burial chambers for its ancient rulers spread across the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, such as KV62 the final resting place of Tutankhamun. So why, then, is the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities calling for them to be closed? The Council have been faced with an almighty catch-22. The tombs are extremely…
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Cherchen Man, who died around 1000 BC, appears to be as Scottish as square sausage tall, dark-haired, clad in a red tunic and tartan leggings and sporting a beard as ginger as a burning fox. His DNA attests to his Celtic origins. So why on earth, then, was his mummified corpse discovered buried in the barren sands of the Taklamakan Desert, in the far-flung Xinjiang region of western China? Its a question that still has experts scratching their heads, especially since Cherchen Man is just one of hundreds of ancient desiccated corpses of European origin found in the Tarim Basin…
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A Scottish castle ransacked by government soldiers after the Battle of Culloden has been rebuilt in the online virtual reality domain Second Life. Virtual reality tours are now being offered of Invergarry Castle, in Glengarry in the Highlands, which has been cloned in two different forms the intact 1740 version, and the modern ruined remains, which are in such a state of disrepair theyre almost inaccessible. The project is a publicity initiative by the My Glengarry Conservation Trust an organisation who are attempting to raise money for the preservation of the Glengarry area, by selling off legal deeds to plots…
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The public are being invited to have their voices heard at an open session in Newcastle, England of a major congress of experts in the field of Roman history and archaeology, on the subject of the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Titled ‘Presenting the Roman Frontiers Communicating the Evidence’, it’ll take place at Newcastle University on August 21. Newcastle lies just south of the line of Hadrians Wall, the huge fortification built across northern England and southern Scotland by the Romans in the 2nd century AD at the northernmost extreme of their empire, to keep out marauding Picts. International specialists…
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In an adventurous and decidedly tall tale swarming with giant bats and poison spiders and strewn with places called exotic things like The Well of the Soul and the Hidden Realm of Sokar (the words Jones, Indiana and too much spring to mind), British explorer Andrew Collins will next month tell the full story of what he claims to be his discovery of the long lost subterranean realm of the Egyptian pharaohs. How much hard fact will be contained in his new book Beneath the Pyramids: Egypts Great Secret Uncovered (due for release in September) seems dubious, but it should…
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As well, presumably, as a few meticulously dug escape tunnels, archaeologists excavating adjacent to Belmarsh Prison in Plumstead, Greenwich, have discovered what theyre describing as Londons earliest timber structure. Comprising a wooden platform or trackway, buried 4.7 metres deep in a peat bog, its been radiocarbon-dated at 6,000 years old. Thats 500 years earlier than Stonehenge, and about 700 years earlier than the previous oldest-known example the timber trackway discovered at Silverton dating to around 3340-2910 BC. Whats so special about a very old plank of wood, you ask? For prehistoric Londoners, the wetlands surrounding the River Thames were a…
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A team of archaeologists, archaeology students and volunteers have made a major discovery in rural Perthshire, Scotland, and are opening it up to the public this Sunday. The removal of a four ton sandstone slab, discovered last summer at Forteviot, revealed a meticulously constructed Bronze Age-period burial chamber, containing a number of metal and crucially organic remains. The tomb is thought to have belonged to a dignitary of significant importance who lived between around 2300 and 2100 BC, in a region rich with historical connections stretching from the Neolithic period through to medieval times. The dig was headed up by…
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A heated cross-border dispute has been rumbling the last few days over the origins of the humble haggis Scotlands national dish, famously memorialised as the great chieftain o the puddin race in Robert Burns 1787 Address To The Haggis. Its been sparked by historian Catherine Brown, who has attributed the delicacys origins to the Scots auld enemy, the English, on the basis of references to the dish shes recently discovered in a book called The English Hus-Wife, which was written in 1615 and thus predates Burns homage to stomach-cooked sheeps organs by 171 years. Well, the Scots who in questions…