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Mysterious Rings Older Than the Amazon
Month: July 2014
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Unknown Culture Discovered in Peru
th – 7th century CE, and it literally indicates that the northern parts of the Atacama Desert were inhabited by civilizations and farming communities much before the Tiwanaku civilization came into Peru. The discovery was made during the Tambo Project, a project that has been carried out by the Institute of Archaeology since the year 2008. These burials were found in the Tambo river delta which is located in the northern parts of the Atacama Desert. According to Jozef Szykilski, the leader of the project, the graves were dug into the sand and without the presence of any stone structures, they were almost impossible to locate. As a result, they did not fall prey to robbers and managed to remain safe across centuries. Professor Szykulski also mentions that the burials were made by people about whom almost nothing is known. He believes that the items found in graves also indicate that the people had a clear cut social division as well. Archaeologists have discovered numerous artifacts, headgear made from llama wool, bodies wrapped in mats, bodies wrapped in cotton burial shrouds as well as bodies wrapped in nets. Archaeologists also mentioned that they found some arrows tipped with obsidian heads, bows and quivers. This in itself becomes an extremely rare find, because bows are considered to be rare in Peru. Another interesting discovery was the discovery of a llama. This proved that the animal was brought to the Tambo delta much earlier than was previously believed. Archaeologists have also discovered maces that contained copper or stone finials in a number of male graves. Professor Szykulski believes that these objects along with the bows were used to denote power. This also offers evidence that the culture of this long lost civilization had a stratified society where the elite were allowed to take power with them into their afterlife. Other goods found at the burial sites include objects made from tumbaga and copper, jewelry items, reed withes that were attached to the ears of the dead and protruded all the way to the surface and weaving tools. Archaeologists believe that these reed withes acted as ritualistic communication tools that allowed the living to communicate with the dead. Polish archaeologists had previously discovered the Tiwanaku civilization tombs in the Tambo river delta and dated them back to the 7th – 10th century CE. This makes the new discoveries even more sensational as civilization was not expected to have reached the area before the Tiwanaku. The presence of ceramic vessels, weapons and tools also denote that the society was quite advanced. Archaeological work continues to be carried out and the study area covers a span of almost 20000 sq. kms. With the scheduled work expected to continue for a few more years, we can certainly expect many more details about this previously unknown culture to emerge.]]>
‘star’ of King Henry VIII’s fleet took her last bow and went into the sea. She rested on the seabed for about 436 years before being successfully salvaged on 11 October 1982. Collective efforts from some hardcore enthusiasts had proven to attract plenty of attention, which laid the foundations for the eventual salvation of the Mary Rose. Today, she lies in a museum in Portsmouth, where her awe-inspiring remains continue to wow millions of visitors. The Mary Rose Museum has been the main contender for several awards including the Art Fund Museum of the Year award and the National Lottery Good Causes award in the Best Heritage category. ]]>
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Seahenge May Be the Same Age As Stonehenge
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Money Before Children
th century. The research pointed out evidence showing factory owners had deliberately falsified data in their effort to maximizing profits through child labour exploitation. The research was performed by Steven Toms and Alice Shepherd of Leeds University Business School. The duo looked at financial data presented to British parliament between 1833 and 1845 by renowned Lancashire mill owners including Holland Hoole, Robert Hyde Greg and Henry and Edmund Ashworth. Their analysis on the case is rooted in the comparison of the actual profits of the firms with the numbers they presented. From the analysis, they were able to detect some discrepancies that lead to two possibilities. The first possibility is an over-estimation of the fixed costs required by the businesses. The second possibility is an organized under-reporting of profits gained. The first possibility is the main key that added weight to arguments suggesting long working hours were needed to produce a reasonable rate of return. In an interview with BBC History Magazine, Steven Toms commented, “Even by modern standards of creative accounting, this was a pretty cynical attempt to head off regulation.” “These were among the leading businessmen of their time, and they worked to carefully co- ordinate the financial evidence presented to parliament to show that regulation would supposedly destroy their profits and ruin their trade. All were avowedly laissez-faire and opposed in principle to the factory reform movement led by labour reformer Richard Oastler, radical Tory MP Michael Sadler and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later Lord Shaftesbury,” He added. Emma Griffin, author of Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution says, “These findings are not difficult to believe. Child labour was widespread in the 1830s, and was in many people’s eyes just a normal part of life – these factory owners were certainly not the only ones who feared government regulation. She added, “The science of statistics was also in its infancy. Without well-established, widely understood accounting procedures, there was inevitably considerable scope for creative accounting of the kind that Toms and Shepherd have revealed.” Child labour was a normal part of life in 18th and 19th century. Despite being a driving force behind Britain’s industrial revolution and economic success, child labour carried with it some gruesome facts that violated human rights. Child workers were required to work in brutal conditions for a long period of time with minimal wages. Such harsh working conditions cost many children their lives or limbs. The cruel reality of child labour spurred concer ns among the masses, and debates about child labour came to light in the early 19th century. In 1833, the first version of the Ten Hours Bill was introduced. One of the proposal suggested by the bill was that people younger than 18 should not work more than 10 hours a day. The bill also proposed that factories should be barred from employing children under the age of nine. Despite the bill’s introduction, the working time of young workers were not reduced significantly due to lobbying from industrialists. It was only in mid 19th-century that the proposal was properly implemented and children’s working time were limited to a 12-hour day. This finding solidifies the already established facts of inhuman exploitation in child labour. Hopefully, it will also raise global awareness on the issue and put an end to child labour once and for all.]]>
nd July 1937 when her plane vanished from over the Pacific Ocean as she attempted to fly her plane around the world at the equator. Hope of finally finding proof of Amelia’s fate emerged as a handful of pictures of the Electra, Amelia’s twin engine Lockheed grabbed attention. These photos were taken in Miami, the 4th stop in Amelia’s journey around the globe. What makes them unique is that they show a distinctive patch of metal which was installed to replace the navigational window. According to the reports of the researchers working at the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), the metal sheeting perfectly matches a piece of aluminium which was recovered from the island of Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island lying in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Australia. Researchers state that they have been investigating the fateful flight taken by Amelia for years and a major breakthrough finally seems to have arrived. According to Ric Gillespie, the executive director at TIGHAR, if the photo enhancements manage to establish that the rivet patterns on the repair job match the piece of aluminium that was found on the Nikumaroro island, then it can be conclusively linked that the island was connected with Amelia’s disappearance in some way or the other. This discovery would finally prove that Amelia and Fred Noonan (Amelia’s navigator) had not succumbed in the Pacific Ocean because they ran out of fuel. In fact, if forensics can match the piece of aluminium to Amelia’s plane, it may be conclusive enough to state that Amelia was forced to land on the Nikumaroro island and live the rest of her life as a castaway before she finally succumbed to her death on an island located about 350 miles to the southeast of Howland Island. The researchers from TIGHAR have termed the sheet of aluminium as 2-2-V-1 and have made it the subject of extremely intense investigations ever since its discovery in Nikumaroro. This sheet is 10” wide and about 23” long. It has been made from a product that was introduced in the year 1933 by Alcoa Aluminium and was known as 24ST Alclad. However, the researchers at TIGHAR failed to fit the 2-2-V01 sheet anywhere on a Lockheed Electra even though it seems as if Amelia’s plane was skinned with this very material. Gillespie mentions that a series of researches were conducted in the month of March at the National Museum of the United States Air Force to try and match the sheet of aluminium to a Lockheed Electra. However, the researchers believed that the research and the sheet were inconclusive when it failed to fit into the original or the repaired parts of Amelia Earhart’s Electra. The investigation was said to have been renewed when Jeffery Nevile, an air mechanic and a TIGHAR researcher found that one particular part of Amelia’s aircraft wasn’t designed or built by Lockheed. In fact, it was a patch that was installed in Miami. Why this patch was used to replace the navigational window remains unknown. Another mysterious fact is that even though exhaustive evidence can be found of what Amelia Earhart did while she stayed in Miami for 80 days, not a single mention of replacing the window with a customized patch can be found anywhere.]]>
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Archaeoastronomy Steps on the Stage
Researchers presented their works to shed a brighter light on Archaeoastronomy Recently the field of archaeoastronomy gained a new level of attention when it was presented to the scientific community at the National Astronomy Meeting 2014 in Portsmouth. This is due to the growing evidences found by archaeo-astronomers around the world that shows people from prehistoric era were actually watching the Sun, Moon and stars. The evidences also show that prehistoric human, from the Neolithic and Bronze age period, managed to establish some level of understanding about the mechanic of celestial objects. Archaeoastronomy is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the study of ancient astronomical practices and structures. To put it in another words, it is the study that tries to relate the prehistoric and ancient societies’ understanding of celestial objects with the structures they built. Some scientists put it in much simpler terms when they described archaeoastronomy as “anthropology of astronomy”. The field began to gain attention when discoveries about Stonehenge came to light in 1960s. In the presentation of his work on 4000-year-old astronomically aligned standing stones at Gardom’s Edge, Dr. Daniel Brown of Nottingham Trent University however, stressed that archaeoastronomy encompassed more than just Stonehenge. He said “Modern archaeoastronomy encompasses many other research areas such as anthropology, ethno-astronomy and even educational research. It has stepped away from its speculative beginnings and placed itself solidly onto the foundation of statistical methods. However, this pure scientific approach has its own challenges that need to be overcome by embracing humanistic influences and putting the research into context with local cultures and landscape.” The term ‘archaeoastronomy’ owes its existence to Elizabeth Chesley Baity, the first person to use that term. As of late, some researchers believe a new term should be used considering the combination of several disciplines into it. ‘Skyscape Archaeology’ was the term proposed by some experts. Dr. Fabio Silva is among the people who agreed to that term and had even recently established the Journal of Skyscape Archaeology. “We have much to gain if the fields of astronomy and archaeology come together to a fuller and more balanced understanding of European megaliths and the societies that built them. Archaeologists will need to learn some basic observational astronomy, but archaeo-astronomers will also have to engage more with the archaeological record and ask different research questions. It is no longer enough to simply collect orientation data for a large number of monuments spread over vast regions and look for broad patterns. In addition, archaeo-astronomers cannot base their assumptions on modern concepts of precision and symmetry of axis, unless this can be independently demonstrated. To understand what alignments meant to prehistoric people and why they decided to incorporate them into their structures, we need to identify patterns and interactions between structures, landscape and skyscape,” said Dr. Silva. Experts are also in disagreement regarding the first person that launched archaeoastronomy into the fast track of scientific research. The disagreements exist because until this day, archaeoastronomy is still a loosely-defined term. According to Clive Ruggles, Heinrich Nissen who worked in the mid-nineteenth century was arguably the first archaeoastronomer. Clive Ruggles is the Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, in United Kingdom. His opinion was countered by Rolf Sinclair, the author of Current Studies in Archaeoastronomy, believes Norman Lockyer, who worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to be the ‘father of archaeoastronomy’. In contract to those two experts, Euan Mackie, a British anthropologist and archaeologist, put Alexander Thom who worked on the subject in Britain between the 1930s and the 1970s, to be the pioneer of archaeastronomy. Also presenting their work during the meeting were Pamela Armstrong of the University of Wales Trinity St David, Brian Sheen and Gary Cutts of the Roseland Observatory, Liz Henty of the University of Wales Trinity St David and Dr Frank Pendergast of Dublin Institute of Technology.]]>
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Ancient Cypriot City Discovered
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Saint George Versus the Dragon
The George and the Dragon story There are several versions of this story. Usually it is set in North Africa. One story recounts how the brave knight arrived in Libya after a very long and arduous trip by land and sea. Here he met a hermit who told him about a terrifying dragon that was terrifying the people of Libya. The dragon had an unpleasant habit of devouring young maidens. The problem the country faced was that all the young maidens had been eaten with the sole exception of the king’s daughter. It was her turn to be the dragon’s lunch tomorrow. The King of Egypt was offering his daughter in marriage to any brave knight willing to rid the land of this dragon. This was exactly the kind of challenge George was searching for. He galloped off the valley where the beast lived just in time to see the princess of Egypt being led to this grisly death. He comforted her with the news that he was off to kill the dragon and she need not fear. True to his words he rode on to the cave where the dragon lived. The huge beast with a fifty foot long tail and a huge head was understandably furious at this intrusion on its territory. It came out of its cave roaring like thunder. George charged at the dragon and speared it but its scales were so thick his spear broke. George was dismounted but found refuge under a magical tree conveniently on hand for some emergencies. The tree’s magical powers shielded him against the dragon’s poison. When he had recovered from the failure of the first attack he went after the dragon again with his sword. The dragon doused him in poison and his armour fell apart. Everything was almost lost but George noticed just in time that there were no scales under the wings of the beast. He struck it under its wings with his sword and at last succeeded in dispatching the monster. Interpretations On the most basic level George and the dragon is an attractive fairy story. We learn about the triumph of good over evil in a manner that leaves no room for alternative interpretations. On a deeper level it is easy to detect in the persona of the dragon a symbolic representation of our fears of the unknown, or situations we perceive as very threatening. The dragon can be seen as almost insurmountable obstacle or approaching terror threatening our very existence. The conquest of the dragon shows that we have the abilities to overcome our most dreaded enemies with sufficient determination and courage. These ideas appeal to individuals. They also clearly held appeal for an island nation fearing invasion from its more powerful Continental neighbours. If you want to connect the dragon slaying with some episode in early history, there is no evidence that Saint George is modelled on a person whom we know lived in a certain historical period. However, it is interesting to note that many cultures have stories featuring dragons. Some scholars suggest that one explanation for this maybe the survival of dinosaurs into a much later period than we used to believe. The theory has always been that dinosaurs died out before man came on the scene. These scholars postulate that early man might have seen dinosaurs and conceivably needed to defend himself against them. If this really was the case there may have been a real prototype for Saint George – an ancient warrior who fought and killed one of these prehistoric monsters. His exploits would have been talked and sung about for generations and so this story may have a germ of truth in its origins. More prosaically the stories of dragons may have been sparked by the discovery of dinosaur skeletons, which would certainly have the power to terrify a superstitious and uneducated farmer. In truth, we will probably never know. ]]>