Tag Archives: archaeology
Hitting the Books: Searching for ancient cities from space
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and...
1960s aerial spy photos reveal hidden archaeological sites
Archaeologists use satellite photos to spot potential archaeological sites, but urban sprawl and other human development has erased many traces of ancient civilizations. To get around that, Harvard's Jason Urs and Emily Hammer from the University of...
Archaeologists Find Remains of Pompeii’s Unluckiest Victim
Way back in elementary school, we had to read a certain number of books each week and it seemed that all the good reads were always checked out. That’s when I took some initiative and meandered over to the non-fiction section and happened upon a book on historic natural disasters. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and the resulting destruction of Pompeii was one of the highlights of that book. I can’t imagine how terrible that was for the people living in the city, but third-grade me found the tale quite spectacular.
Fast forward many years and archaeologists have been studying the a new area of Pompeii’s remains, and have found something incredible. The image you see here might look like some Halloween decorator going for a laugh, but these are actual skeletal remains uncovered at the site. Apparently, this poor guy made it through the initial eruption of the volcano only to be crushed by a massive hunk of stone.
The scientists at the site think the massive stone was once part of a door and was flung into the air by explosive volcanic gasses during the eruption, when it landed on the guy’s head and chest. The pyroclastic flows then covered his remains leaving him entombed there to be discovered some 2,000 years later.
Scientists say the crushed figure was originally inside a building at the intersection of Vicolo delle Nozze d’Argento and the Vicolo dei Balconi, apparently roads in the ancient city. The discovery was made during excavations of the Royal V section of the city.
[via Boing Boing]
Ancient city’s LiDAR scans reveal as many buildings as Manhattan
When researchers surveyed the ruins of a Purépecha Empire city in Mexico the old-fashioned way a decade ago, it took them two seasons to explore two square kilometres. Good thing they decided to use LiDAR, because the city called Angamuco turn...
DNA in dirt can reveal where human ancestors lived
Stanford students recreated a 5,000-year-old Chinese beer
Homebrewing is a niche hobby today, but before the industrialization of the industry, a lot of beer was made in people's kitchens. Li Liu, a professor in Chinese archaeology at Stanford, was part of a team that recently discovered a 5,000-year-old...
Scientists Buy Amber with Feathered Dinosaur Tail Inside
In Myanmar, they have a mine where the haul out all sorts of amber with ancient bugs and plants trapped inside. These mined amber chunks apparently end up in a bazaar where they are sold to be used in jewelry. That’s where scientists found this chunk of amber that has a section of a feathered dinosaur’s tail inside it.
This is the first such specimen ever discovered. Detailed study of the amber revealed that the feathered tail has eight vertebrae inside and is thought to be the end or middle section a thin tail from a juvenile coelurosaur.
The team thinks that when alive the creature would have had a tail with about 25 vertebrae in it. When the team found the amber at the market, it has already been shaped for use in jewelry leaving me wondering how much of the animal did they hack off in shaping and if there was any more of the specimen in the mine.
[via National Geographic]
Scientists use 3D scans to ‘unwrap’ an ancient scroll
The scientific world is developing a knack for reading texts without opening them. Researchers in Israel and the US have conducted the first "virtual unwrapping" of a heavily damaged scroll, the En-Gedi scroll, to read its contents without destroyin...
Police could soon identify you by your hair proteins
Police and archaeologists regularly depend on DNA evidence for identification, but it has a serious flaw. DNA degrades under environmental conditions like heat and light, so it may be useless even if you have a ton of samples. However, Lawrence Live...