While creating the next instalment of our Ancient World in London video series on ancient astronomy, we came across an odd little artefact called the Ishango Bone. Exotic-sounding, it’s little more than a knobbled baboon’s fibula, but the 25,000-year-old notches along its length are much more than a caveman’s conquests. Discovered in the then-Belgian Congo by Jean Heinzelin de Braucourt in 1960, the bone was first thought to be around 10,000 years old. Yet later tests pushed its date back another 15,000 years, around 20 millennia before the first-ever civilizations sprang from the Middle East. Today it remains on display…
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Question: What does a gladiator wear on a night out? The answer, of course, is that he puts on his glad rags! Apologies for the terrible joke, but for those who want to know what a gladiator would really have worn, not on a night out in ancient Rome, but in combat in the arena, then an exhibition inside Rome’s Colosseum has opened to show us just that. The exhibition – Gladiatores – is displaying replica gladiatorial weapons, dress and armour made authentically according to nine years of historical research by Silvano Mattesini, a trained architect and expert in ancient…
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New research has shown that the symbols used by the ancient Picts were an actual written language not symbology. The Picts lived in Scotland from AD 300-843, and were a society ruled by kings. Historians know of them through the artefacts they left behind and via the writings of the people whom they had contact with, such as the Romans. In AD 843 they became incorporated into the larger Kingdom of Alba. There are only a few hundred surviving Pictish stones. Some of them have symbols carved onto them like a relief. Christian motifs, such as a cross, can also…
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Its that time of the year again. School is almost out, archaeological field seasons are about to begin and what comes in between? Huge conferences of course! Over the next month there will be three major archaeological conferences taking place in Canada and the US. The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) will hold their 61st annual meeting this month in California, and the Canadian Archaeological Association’s 2010 conference will round off the month in Alberta. The first, and biggest, conference is the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 75th Anniversary meeting in St. Louis Missouri from April 14-18. More than…
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Attribution: Sandro Vannini Kathleen Martinez Archaeologist Dr Kathleen Martinez, from the Dominican Republic, is an archaeologist and expert in Ancient Egypt. She is famous for her pioneering discoveries at Taposiris Magna, where she believes she has found the tomb of Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Martinez earned a law degree from her home country, but was fascinated from an early age with scholarly discussions about the life and times of Cleopatra. She became angry with the way Cleopatra had been portrayed through the ages, and was determined to find her mysterious tomb. “(Cleopatra) spoke nine languages, she was a…
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London is under attack! But don’t be alarmed, this is no April Fool: London’s always been under attack. For over two thousand years the city has been invaded, burnt, bridged and bombed. But while Boudicca, Caesar, Cnut and Hitler have been some of the city’s biggest enemies, today it’s the turn of climate change to have London scrambling her defences with the impressive Thames Barrier. Today the barrier’s iconic row of ‘sandals’ protect over a million Londoners from the perils of El Nio. But it’s just one of the places we visited as part of our defences tour down the…
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The promise of the four-day-long weekend and the neverending silly April Fools’ Day jokes have got us all in a relaxed happy mood, and wondering what’s on in London to entertain us. What better way to kick of the Easter weekend than with a pub quiz down the local? We would love you to join us at the Red Lion pub tonight for a fun quiz that’s all about London. If you are interested in London history and archaeology, know some important facts about London or just simply want to learn a bit more and have a couple pints with…
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5,000 years after they’ve helped construct the gigantic stone circle, aliens return to Stonehenge. Early this morning, the tourists standing in line to access the stones had a strange encounter:a little, green almost-human shaped extraterrestrial skipped the queue – the outrage! – and was the first thread on the almost sacred grass around the monument. When asked what took them so long to return, alien scout Verde Raymaker stated:”Well.. errr.. we kinda lost track of the coordinates. Until they unearthed Bluestonehenge, an amplifier doubled the strenght of the signals emitted by Stonehenge, we did not have a clue we we’ve…
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In April 2008 visual artists Khadim Ali and Jayce Salloum travelled from Karachi Pakistan to Kabul Afghanistan, and then into Bamiyan the region famous for its giant Buddha statues that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. We spoke to them about their unique experiences of the site. Ali is Hazara, the same background that many of the people who live in Bamiyan are from. His parents were born just to the south of the region. The Taliban treated the Hazara brutally, killing them and burying them in mass graves. Today the Taliban wage an insurgency in the south and…
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A new translation of a Roman victory stele, erected in April 29 BC, shows Octavian Augustus’s name inscribed in a cartouche (an oblong enclosure that surrounds a pharaoh’s name) – an honour normally reserved for an Egyptian pharaoh. Octavian’s forces defeated Cleopatra and Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. His forces captured Alexandria soon afterwards and Cleopatra committed suicide in 30 BC, marking the end of Egyptian rule. Historians believe that although Octavian ruled Egypt after the death of Cleopatra, he was never actually crowned as an Egyptian pharaoh. The stele was erected at a time when Octavian was still paying lip…