AFP:

An archaeologist using radar technology said Monday he has found the outline of what he believes is a 1,000-year-old Viking longship under a pub car park in north-west England.

Professor Stephen Harding used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to trace the outline of a vessel matching the scale and shape of a longship, perhaps from the time Vikings settled in Meols, on the Wirral peninsula in Merseyside.

Meols has one of Britain’s best preserved Viking settlements, buried deep beneath the village and nearby coastal defences.

Harding, from the University of Nottingham in east central England, is now seeking funds to pay for an archaeological dig to search for the vessel which lies beneath two-to-three metres of waterlogged clay.

“The next stage is the big one. Using the GPR technique only cost 450 pounds but we have to think carefully about what to do next,” Harding said.

“Although we still don’t know what sort of vessel it is, it’s very old for sure and its Nordic clinker design, position and location suggests it may be a transport vessel from the Viking settlement period if not long afterwards.”

The ship was first uncovered in 1938 when the Railway Inn was demolished and rebuilt further away from the road, with the site of the old pub turned into a car park.

Workers unearthed part of an old clinker-built vessel but were told by the foreman to cover it over again to keep construction on course.

Harding said he believes it might be possible to access the vessel from the pub cellar, where the public could eventually view it.

Telegraph:

Two amateur treasure hunters are in line for a pay-out of up to £500,000 after a small pot they found buried in a field turned out to contain the most important hoard of Viking silver and gold found in this country for 150 years.

Packed inside the ornately carved 8th century silver gilt pot, experts at the British Museum found 617 coins, jewellery and ingots from as far afield as Samarkand, Afghanistan, Russia, France, and Ireland. The pot had been buried in a field near Harrogate in Yorkshire, probably in the year 927.

“This really is the world in a vessel,” said Jonathan Williams, the keeper of European pre-history at the British Museum, where the treasure was put on display yesterday. “It is a quite incredible find and a very special moment for us at the museum.”

The discovery was made in January – but kept secret until yesterday – by father and son David and Andrew Whelan, from Leeds. They had spent hundreds of hours over the past three years scouring local fields with metal detectors without finding anything of value.

After the North Yorkshire coroner yesterday declared the find to be treasure – entitling the Whelans to half its value and the farmer on whose land it was discovered to the other half – David Whelan, 51, described his moment of triumph as “a thing of dreams”.

Once cleaned, the pot was found to be silver gilt, possibly an ecclesiastical vessel plundered from northern France. It is carved with vines, leaves and six hunting scenes showing lions, stags and a horse.

The value of the hoard is to be determined by an independent tribunal, but yesterday it was conservatively put at £750,000, although some suggested that it might be worth more than £1 million.

Daily Mail:

Mr Whelan, of Leeds, who spends his weekends metal detecting with his son Andrew, 35, a surveyor, added: “It’s a thing of dreams to find something like this. If we had found one coin we would have been over the moon.”

Unveiled at the British Museum, the ‘Harrogate hoard’ includes a decorated gilt and silver cup, 617 silver coins, a solid gold arm ring, brooch pins and various lumps of unworked silver.

Experts said the five-inch cup – which is decorated with animal motifs – was made in northern France in the 9th Century and was probably used in church services.

The coins date from the 10th Century and come from all over Anglo-Saxon England as well as from parts of Asia.

The necklaces, one of which is made of solid gold, are evidence that the hoard belonged to a Viking noble.

Barry Ager, curator of European objects at the British Museum, said: “It is an extremely exciting find, not just because it is the biggest and best for 150 years. The fact that the items come from all over the world shows the huge extent of the Vikings’ commercial links.”

Mr Ager said the haul would have either been amassed through trade or may have been looted.

He said it is likely that its owner would have buried it for safekeeping in 927 when the Anglo-Saxons under King Athelstan drove the Vikings out of northern England.

My guess is that the “150 year” reference is to the Lewis chessmen found circa 1831.

The silver pot that contained the Viking hoard

————————

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Malibu Times reports a vexing case featuring unseemly conflict between the rights of the owner of a piece of astronomically expensive California private property and science.

The discovery of a Clovis spearhead, believed to be thousands of years old, at a local home construction site has the homeowner and an archeologist at odds on what should be done with the site. The property owner wants to finish her home and move in, the archeologist wants to preserve the site, called Farpoint, and be allowed to conduct further research.

In September of 2005, Gary Stickel was the archeologist of record at the Farpoint site, then being developed by the private homeowner, and hired to oversee excavation at what was known as an “architecturally sensitive site.”

“Other objects, scrapers and micro-tools, had been found on the property,” Stickel said. “So we knew it was a culturally sensitive site. Then we found the spear point.”

The approximately 8-inch long, stone spear point is a tool produced by the Clovis people, believed to be the first human inhabitants of the Americas.

Not only does that date the piece to more than 11,000 years ago, the site of its location is the farthest point west in North America that the Clovis tribes can be traced, thus the designation “Farpoint.”

Dennis Stanford, director of the Paleoindian/Paleoecology Program at the Smithsonian Institute, in a written affidavit that authenticated the spearhead, said “… until the discovery of the Clovis occupation level at the Farpoint site, no “in situ” Clovis age sites are known along the West Coast of the Americas.”

The property owner, who is not identified to protect her privacy and the integrity of the archeologically sensitive site, has been cooperative through the last few years of research, but is ready to occupy her new house. And, Stickel said, she has shut down any further excavation.

Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia: Clovis point article.

If that Clovis Point is a legitimate artifact, and was not simply planted by an enterprising neighbor who prefered the site undeveloped, then there is a significant public interest in investigating, possibly in preserving, the site. But satisfying that public interest is indubitably a taking, and if the public wants to dig in that land, or to own that land, it ought to pay for it, not simply pass some regulations.

The Times reported last Friday:

The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study.

The research, by materials scientists from national institutions, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs’ craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids.

Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist.

The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby quarries, heaved up huge ramps and set in place by armies of workers. Some dissenters say that levers or pulleys were used, even though the wheel had not been invented at that time.

Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.

But according to Professor Gilles Hug, of the French National Aerospace Research Agency (Onera), and Professor Michel Barsoum, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the covering of the great Pyramids at Giza consists of two types of stone: one from the quarries and one man-made.

“There’s no way around it. The chemistry is well and truly different,” Professor Hug told Science et Vie magazine. Their study is being published this month in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

Journal of the American Ceramic Society abstract

Archaologists puzzle and debate over how the ancient Britons managed to move, and erect, the enormous stones used to construct the megalithic monument at Stonehenge.

Wally Wallington can show them how.

video

Simple, isn’t it?

Wallington also has a web-site, TheForgottenTechnology.com, where he sells a one hour movie via download, or on DVD.

The South Wales Echo reports:

A 2,000-year-old city – one of the most important sites in British history – is believed to have been uncovered in South Wales.

According to experts from the Ancient British Historical Association (ABHA), a field at Mynydd y Gaer, near Pencoed, is the fabled fortress city of King Caradoc I, or Caractacus, who fought the Romans between 42 and 51 AD.

Historians Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett used old manuscripts to narrow their field of search and aerial photos from the Google Earth website, which provides detailed maps and satellite imagery, to find the exact spot.

Their findings have yet to be verified, but the team are now positive they have found the long-lost site.

Mr Wilson said: ‘What we have is a clearly-defined walled city in exactly the place the records tell us it should be.

News Wales

Recent excavations in a well discovered last fall at Jamestown, Virginia have produced a number of interesting artifacts from the earliest English settlement in North America. The well, located within the 1607 stockade, is believed to be the earliest at the Jamestown colony.

The finds included a brass Scottish pistol, a ceremonial lead halbard bearing the arms of Lord De la Warr, leather shoes, and a small lead tag bearing the stamped inscription “James Towne.”

Times Dispatch

Virginian Pilot

A backhoe operator excavating in a bog in the Irish midlands last week unearthed a medieval manuscript written around 800 A.D.

The 20-pages discovered represented a portion of a Psalter, a collection of the Psalms. The find represents the first discovery of a new medieval Irish manuscript in two centuries.

By a suitable coincidence, the manuscript was found open to a page containing (in Latin) Psalm 83, a prayer invoking God’s aid in defending Israel against enemy nations bent upon her destruction.

For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.

They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.

For they have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee: The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes; Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre; Assur also is joined with them: they have holpen the children of Lot. Selah.

Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kison: Which perished at Endor: they became as dung for the earth. Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb: yea, all their princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna: Who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession. O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind. As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire; So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm. Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD. Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish: That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.

–Psalm 83.

Courier Mail (Australia)

AP

The Antikythera Mechanism was a specialty of a good friend on the Yale faculty, the late Derek de Solla Price, and he often talked about the intriguing questions connected with the object recovered by sponge divers off the Greek Island of Antikythera in 1900, part of shipwreck dated to around 87 B.C.

Physorg.com reports that significant new progress has been made in reading the Greek inscriptions on the device.

A team of Greek and British scientists probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism has managed to decipher ancient Greek inscriptions unseen for over 2,000 years, members of the project say.

“Part of the text on the machine, over 1,000 characters, had already been deciphered, but we have succeeded in doubling this total,” said physician Yiannis Bitsakis, part of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from universities in Athens, Salonika and Cardiff, the Athens National Archaeological Museum and the Hewlett-Packard company.

“We have now deciphered 95 percent of the text,” he told AFP.

Scooped out of a Roman shipwreck located in 1900 by sponge divers near the southern Greek island of Antikythera, and kept at the Athens National Archaeological Museum, the Mechanism contains over 30 bronze wheels and dials, and is covered in astronomical inscriptions.

Probably operated by crank, it survives in three main pieces and some smaller fragments.

“(The device) could calculate the position of certain stars, at least the Sun and Moon, and perhaps predict astronomical phenomena,” said astrophysicist Xenophon Moussas of Athens University.

“It was probably rare, if not unique,” he added.

The rarity of the Antikythera Mechanism precluded its removal from the museum, so an eight-tonne ‘body scanner’ had to be assembled on-site for the privately-funded project, which used three-dimensional tomography to expose the unseen inscriptions.

The first appraisal of the Mechanism’s purpose was put forward in the 1960s by British science historian Derek Price.

Wikipedia

Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

Kathimerini reports:

Recent findings from a mass grave in the Ancient Cemetery of Kerameikos in central Athens show typhoid fever may have caused the plague of Athens, ending centuries of speculation about what kind of disease killed a third of the city’s population and contributed to the end of its Golden Age.

Examined by a group of Greek scientists coordinated by Dr Manolis Papagrigorakis of Athens University’s School of Dentistry, the findings provide clear evidence that Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi was present in the dental pulp of teeth recovered in remains from the mass grave.

The plague that decimated the population of Athens in 430-426 BC was a deciding factor in the outcome of the Peloponnesian Wars, ending the Golden Age of Pericles and Athens’s predominance in the Mediterranean.

Thucydides [2:47-54]:

In the first days of summer the Lacedaemonians and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica.., and sat down and laid waste the country. Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighborhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether.

It first began, it is said, in the parts of Ethiopia above Egypt, and thence descended into Egypt and Libya and into most of the king’s country. Suddenly falling upon Athens, it first attacked the population in Piraeus,–which was the occasion of their saying that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the reservoirs, there being as yet no wells there–and afterwards appeared in the upper city, when the deaths became much more frequent. All speculation as to its origin and its causes, if causes can be found adequate to produce so great a disturbance, I leave to other writers, whether lay or professional; for myself, I shall simply set down its nature, and explain the symptoms by which perhaps it may be recognized by the student, if it should ever break out again. This I can the better do, as I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others…

As a rule, however, there was no ostensible cause; but people in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough. When it fixed in the stomach, it upset it; and discharges of bile of every kind named by physicians ensued, accompanied by very great distress. In most cases also an ineffectual retching followed, producing violent spasms, which in some cases ceased soon after, in others much later. Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, nor pale in its appearance, but reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers. But internally it burned so that the patient could not bear to have on him clothing or linen even of the very lightest description; or indeed to be otherwise than stark naked. What they would have liked best would have been to throw themselves into cold water; as indeed was done by some of the neglected sick, who plunged into the rain-tanks in their agonies of unquenchable thirst; though it made no difference whether they drank little or much. Besides this, the miserable feeling of not being able to rest or sleep never ceased to torment them. The body meanwhile did not waste away so long as the distemper was at its height, but held out to a marvel against its ravages; so that when they succumbed, as in most cases, on the seventh or eighth day to the internal inflammation, they had still some strength in them. But if they passed this stage, and the disease descended further into the bowels, inducing a violent ulceration there accompanied by severe diarrhea, this brought on a weakness which was generally fatal. For the disorder first settled in the head, ran its course from thence through the whole of the body, and even where it did not prove mortal, it still left its mark on the extremities; for it settled in the privy parts, the fingers and the toes, and many escaped with the loss of these, some too with that of their eyes. Others again were seized with an entire loss of memory on their first recovery, and did not know either themselves or their friends.

But while the nature of the distemper was such as to baffle all description, and its attacks almost too grievous for human nature to endure, it was still in the following circumstance that its difference from all ordinary disorders was most clearly shown. All the birds and beasts that prey upon human bodies, either abstained from touching them (though there were many lying unburied), or died after tasting them. In proof of this, it was noticed that birds of this kind actually disappeared; they were not about the bodies, or indeed to be seen at all. But of course the effects which I have mentioned could best be studied in a domestic animal like the dog.

Such then, if we pass over the varieties of particular cases, which were many and peculiar, were the general features of the distemper. Meanwhile the town enjoyed an immunity from all the ordinary disorders; or if any case occurred, it ended in this. Some died in neglect, others in the midst of every attention. No remedy was found that could be used as a specific; for what did good in one case, did harm in another. Strong and weak constitutions proved equally incapable of resistance, all alike being swept away, although dieted with the utmost precaution. By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when anyone felt himself sickening, for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder; besides which, there was the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep, through having caught the infection in nursing each other. This caused the greatest mortality. On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from neglect; indeed many houses were emptied of their inmates for want of a nurse: on the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence. This was especially the case with such as made any pretensions to goodness: honor made them unsparing of themselves in their attendance in their friends’ houses, where even the members of the family were at last worn out by the moans of the dying, and succumbed to the force of the disaster. Yet it was with those who had recovered from the disease that the sick and the dying found most compassion. These knew what it was from experience, and had now no fear for themselves; for the same man was never attacked twice–never at least fatally. And such persons not only received the congratulations of others, but themselves also, in the elation of the moment, half entertained the vain hope that they were for the future safe from any disease whatsoever.

An aggravation of the existing calamity was the influx from the country into the city, and this was especially felt by the new arrivals. As there were no houses to receive them, they had to be lodged at the hot season of the year in stifling cabins, where the mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water. The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane. All the burial rites before in use were entirely upset, and they buried the bodies as best they could. Many from want of the proper appliances, through so many of their friends having died already, had recourse to the most shameless sepultures: sometimes getting the start of those who had raised a pile, they threw their own dead body upon the stranger’s pyre and ignited it; sometimes they tossed the corpse which they were carrying on the top of another that was burning, and so went off.

Nor was this the only form of lawless extravagance which owed its origin to the plague. Men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, and not just as they pleased, seeing the rapid transitions produced by persons in prosperity suddenly dying and those who before had nothing succeeding to their property. So they resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none, it was so uncertain whether they would be spared to attain the object; but it was settled that present enjoyment, and all that contributed to it, was both honorable and useful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offences, but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.

Such was the nature of the calamity, and heavily did it weigh on the Athenians.

New National Geographic article.

Previous

Archaeologists working in Bosnia are coming to accept local descriptions of a two thousand foot high hill in the vicinity of Visoko, northwest of Sarajevo, as a Bronze Age pyramid.

Archaeologists working in Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina, about 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo, discovered what might prove to be a European pyramid four times taller that the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

Bosnian archaeologist Semir Osmanagic, in an interview with the Associated Press, cautioned against jumping to conclusions, but preliminary investigations suggest some ancient culture, perhaps the Bronze Age Illyrian people, carved a natural hill into a pyramidal shape. The hill is 2,120 feet high and, according to Osmanagic, has “all the elements” of an artificial structure: “four perfectly shaped slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, a flat top and an entrance complex.”

Once the hill was shaped, it appears to have been faced with concretelike blocks made from an “unnatural mixture of gravel.”

Local residents long have referred to the hill as a pyramid, but no archaeologist seriously seems to have considered the possibility that the hill was in any way artificial until recently.