Today was yet another glorious day, as I stumbled over quite a few small museums, universities and organisations that put their ‘heritage’ photographs online – on Flickr to be more precise – for the world to enjoy. Amongst today’s discoveries are the Manchester Museum (also check out their very museum 2.0 project ‘Manchester Hermit’), the Salisbury Museum (how to move an ancient Roman sarcophagus) and Wessex Archaeology. And then of course there are all those awesome ancient world photographs in ‘The Commons’. But you do not even need to be an institution specialising in archaeology to hold an interesting archive.…
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My name is Ansuman Biswas. I am an artist living in a Gothic Tower in the Manchester Museum, which is part of the University of Manchester, England. Over several months I have been exploring the museum stores and collecting my own little cabinet of curiosities.Each day over the next forty days I will choose an object from my collection and offer it up in a spirit of sacrifice. I will then destroy it. This destruction will inevitably take place unless someone cares for the object… . MUSTDEFINITELYSTAY!!! Brick Part of the Chinese Wall, this brick is not just Ancient History,…
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Some 35,000 years before Stonehenge mysteriously appeared on the Salisbury Plains, there was human life Down Under, in the outback and in the bush. Before markings were made at Chauvet or Lascaux, before the pyramids and before Rome rose and fell, what is now known as Australia was inhabited by pockets of tribal hunter-gatherers. They went about their business, surviving one of the harshest environments on Earth, for thousands of years until the white man came along, thrusting them from an ancient world and into a modern one. For one of the oldest known (and surviving) civilisations, there is surprisingly…
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In September of 2008 a paper came out in the Journal of Applied Geophysics, which reported on a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey of the site of Le Pozze in Lonato, Northern Italy. Most of the findings were from the Roman period and include the discovery of a large villa and public building. The researchers estimate that the two structures combined extended over nearly 10,000 square meters of space. Here is the stopper the survey was done in 2004. It took four years until it appeared in a journal. A little known fact about archaeology is that the time period…
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Xi’an is a city which boasts many ancient relics, from the famous Terracotta Warriors, to the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. As one of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China, the city was fortified with one of the oldest and best preserved Chinese city walls. Chris Bryant’s photograph of the Xi’an City Walls shows the immense beauty of the scene. An image of still water captures a near perfect reflection of the bridge, and the vegetation looks richly green against the stone walls. Perhaps most telling in this photograph is the river extending to a vanishing point in the distance,…
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CBBC, the BBC’s children’s broadcaster, has announced a brand new kids’ quiz show, in which six contestants will pit their wits again guards and ‘ghosts’, as they spend a night in the British Museum unlocking the secrets of its most famous treasures. Relic will see the children dodging security and completing a number of interactive tasks, as they bid to become ‘guardians’ of the museum. However anyone failing the show will find themselves facing “incarceration in the museum forever”. A BBC release explains, “As the brave adventurers search the museum they must complete complex challenges and confront visions from the…
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The Ongoing Silvio Saga That Berlusconi is involved in a tangled web of political scandal and lurid details about his private life is nothing new. To date he’s been accused of bribery, an impropriety with an under-age girl, as well as involvement with the mafia, all with impunity (which makes me laugh, because in the UK all you need to make an MP resign is the whiff of a dodgy expense claims form). After all, Silvio is not stupid by any means, and at times when a problem has arisen, he has been known to conveniently have a law passed…
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Virtual Qumran designer Dr. Robert Cargill is at the forefront of a rapidly evolving discipline. He uses virtual reality as a tool to conduct archaeological research on Qumran, the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves. An archaeologist by training, Cargill has taken it upon himself to learn how to create a virtual reality model of a site, a skill most archaeologists haven’t picked up – yet. He generously took some time off from his busy schedule to talk to me about Virtual Qumran and how virtual reality is changing archaeology. Model Behaviour Archaeologists, Dr. Cargill points out, have…
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Although traces of nicotine and even of cocaine have been found on Egyptian mummies that date as long as 3000 years back -French scientists examining the stomach of the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II‘s mummy found fragments of tobacco leaves most likely used in the embalming process – and discussion is still ongoing on how these plants exactly got to Egypt without the help of the Spanish conquistadores – a 1997 Discovery Channel show suggests ancient international trade: a Pacific crossing and then delivery via the Silk Route. Regardless if the Pharaohs were junkies or not, we doubt if Queen Nefertiti…
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Lord Carnarvon, the man who funded the discovery of KV-62 – the tomb of Tutankhamun – and died five months later in mysterious circumstances before he could actually see the mummy’s face, was a superstitious man who wore the same lucky bow tie all his life. Such anecdotes are part of the ‘Egyptian Exhibition’ at Highclere Castle. Rising in the Berkshire Hampshire countryside south of Newbury, England, the castle kept many secrets on its own. As the old Earl did not want to talk about Egypt, the collection was hidden away until 1987. But the long-hidden collection of Egyptian antiquities…