He added, “The linguists are going to be well excited about what they’re finding. But the historian is still, like, ‘Yeah, it’s good. You’ve got names. You’ve got lots and lots of names.’ ”

he province of archeology, a fictional archeologist once said, is the search for facts, not truth.

In 2013, Al-Jallad used the Safaitic database as he worked on an inscription containing several mysterious words: Maleh, Dhakar, and Amet. Earlier scholars had assumed that they were the names of unknown places. Al-Jallad, unconvinced, searched the database and discovered another inscription that contained all three. Both inscriptions discussed migrations in search of water, and a possibility occurred to him: if the words referred to seasons of migration, then they might be the names of constellations visible at those times.

Al-Jallad began pulling up every inscription that mentioned migrating in search of rain, and soon he had a long list of terms that had resisted translation. Comparing them with the Greek, Aramaic, and Babylonian zodiacs, he started making connections. Dhakar matched up nicely with dikra, the Aramaic word for Aries, and Amet was derived from an Arabic verb meaning “to measure or compute quantity”—a good bet for the scales of Libra. Hunting for Capricorn, the goat-fish constellation, Al-Jallad found the word ya’mur in Edward Lane’s “Arabic-English Lexicon,” whose translation read, “A certain beast of the sea, or . . . a kind of mountain-goat.” He stayed up all night, sifting the database and checking words against dictionaries of ancient Semitic languages. By morning, he had deciphered a complete, previously unknown Arabian zodiac. “We’d thought that they were place names, and, in a way, they were,” he told me. “They were places in the sky.”

he effort to decode the Safaitic texts began in the spring of 1857, when a young Scotsman named Cyril Graham set off from Jerusalem on a tour of Syria.

The history of Arabia just before the birth of Islam is a profound mystery, with few written sources describing the milieu in which Muhammad lived. Historians had long believed that the Bedouin nomads who lived in the area composed exquisite poetry to record the feats of their tribes but had no system for writing it down. In recent years, though, scholars have made profound advances in explaining how ancient speakers of early Arabic used the letters of other alphabets to transcribe their speech. These alphabets included Greek and Aramaic, and also Safaitic; Macdonald’s rock was one of more than fifty thousand such texts found in the deserts of the southern Levant. Safaitic glyphs look nothing like the cursive, legato flow of Arabic script. But when read aloud they are recognizable as a form of Arabic—archaic but largely intelligible to the modern speaker.

They collect artifacts, I collect histories.

StAugustine draws this same parallel when he writes to a communityof nuns, ‘let it not be only your mouth that takes food, but let yourears also drink in the word of God’.3

1956 0 88,500 88,500

Absalom set up a massebah for himself as a memorial for he said, “‘I have no son to keep my name in remembrance’; he called the massebah by his own name” (2 Samuel 18:18).

Israel was forbidden to set up sacred stones, pillars: “you shall not set up a pillar (massebah), which the LORD your God hates” (Deuteronomy 16:22).

3D scans of runestones enable researchers to gain a close-up view of traces of the carving process. This means they can tell the carving technique of the different rune stones apart. Every experienced stonemason holds his chisel at a certain angle and strikes the hammer with a specific force: this is visible in the angle of the traces of the carving and the distance between them. The motor function developed in such work is individual.

This paper supports arguments that the longevity of orality can exceed ten millennia,providing critical information essential to the further development of theoretical frameworksregarding the archaeology of orality.

“Our research suggests that Palawa oral traditions accurately recall the flooding of the land bridge between Tasmania and the mainland – showing that oral traditions can be passed down more than 400 successive generations while maintaining historical accuracy.”

These may occur on rock walls, but were commonly engraved onto robust bones since at least the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic and African Late Stone Age, where it is obvious they served as artificial memory systems (AMS) or external memory systems (EMS) to coin the terms used in Palaeolithic archaeology and cognitive science respectively, exosomatic devices in which number sense is clearly evident (for definitions see d’Errico Reference d'Errico1989; Reference d'Errico1995a,Reference d'Erricob; d'Errico & Cacho Reference d'Errico and Cacho1994; d'Errico et al. Reference d'Errico, Doyon and Colage2017; Hayden Reference Hayden2021).

The wealthy Egyptian Jacques Mosseri financed excavations in thevicinity of the Ben Ezra Synagogue and in the Basatin Cemetery at theend of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Hiscollection remained with the Mosseri family and was unavailable forscholars for many years. In 1970, scholars from the National Library ofIsrael were allowed to microfilm the collection, which resulted in the1990 catalog. In 2006, the Mosseri family loaned its collection toCambridge University for a twenty-year period during which thecollection would be conserved, digitized, and studied and then,conditions permitting, deposited in the National Library of Israel. ForMosseri’s account of how he obtained his collection, see his “A NewHoard of Jewish MSS in Cairo,” Jewish Review 4 (1913): 208–16. Formore information on the subsequent history of the collection, see theintroduction to the 1990 catalog; and http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/jmgc.

The story includes a detailed description of Goliath’s weaponry: acopper helmet, a coat of mail, a spear, a javelin, and leg guards. Goliath’sequipment has never been found in an archaeological context, and a largenumber of articles have attempted to establish the date of composition ofthe tradition based upon this weaponry. Some date it to Iron Age I (11th–10th centuries BCE), others to the 7th century BCE, and yet others to thePersian period (5th–4th century BCE).4

Petrie was also a eugenicist, who believed in the improvement of society through selective “breeding-out” of intellectually inferior races. While revealing evidence for the foundations of ancient Egypt, he attributed it on biometric grounds to a “New Race” of invaders from outside Africa, opening a space of the imagination that has since come to be filled by all manner of theories about the “alien” architects of ancient civilizations. It started with the “race science” that is part and parcel of archaeology’s own problematic history.

Published in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the paper also shows that the mice share similarities in mitochondrial DNA with Scandinavia and northern Germany, but not with mice found in Portugal.

After three centuries of popularity, roundels suddenly disappeared from the archaeological record around 4600 B.C. Archaeologists do not yet know why the roundels were abandoned. But considering over one-quarter of all roundels found to date are located in the Czech Republic, future research similar to the excavation at Vinoř may eventually help solve the mystery of the roundels.

"Whistling" or "screaming" arrows (shaojian) made by the horseback archers of the steppes were described by the Chinese chronicler Sima Qian in about 100 B.C. A small, perforated bone or wood sound chamber—the whistle—was attached to the shaft behind the arrowhead.

Vinzenz Brinkmann, Head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection in Frankfurt am Main, said when he first started researching polychromy 40 years ago, "no one had interest in this for years, no one collected the clearly visible evidence. Except for me. I collected the evidence like a stamp collection."

'I don't think it's anything—I mean, I don't think it was ever put to anyuse. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they'veforgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew howto read it.'

Archaeology of Reading project

Jean-Claude Gardin (3 April 1925 - 8 April 2013) was a French archaeologist who is recognized as being one of the founders of archaeological computing.

archaea what strata me which looked at how ancient civilizations understood

Wittry, Warren L. (1964). "An American Woodhenge". Cranbrook Institute of Science Newsletter. 33 (9): 102–107 – via Explorations into Cahokia Archaeology, Bulletin 7, Illinois Archaeological Survey, 1969. ^ Wittry, Warren L. "Discovering and Interpreting the Cahokia Woodhenges". The Wisconsin Archaeologist. 77 (3/4): 26–35.

Cowan, Frank (2005). "Stubbs Earthworks : An Ohio Hopewell "Woodhenge"". In Lepper, Bradley T. (ed.). Ohio Archaeology : An illustrated chronicle of Ohio's Ancient American Indian Cultures. Wilmington, Ohio: Orange Frazer Press. pp. 148–151. ISBN 978-1882203390.

"Josiah smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles and covered the sites with human bones" (2 Kings 23:14, New International Version)

Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a raregenetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type ofdwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous inhis community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitudehunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of hispathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health andnutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains tosupport this individual through infancy and into early adulthood,granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, andultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15

But ifall we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosenthe much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (afterthe Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a momentto consider what it would mean if we did this.

‘What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that theycouldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’

political self-consciousness sort of 00:55:29 receding as one goes further back in time there was a book published in 1946 by the Dutch archaeologist Henry Frank Ford's called befall philosophy which 00:55:42 was about the the ancient Middle East Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that sort of thing but he wasn't actually arguing that these people didn't have the capacity for philosophy he was simply 00:55:55 pointing out that they didn't have an explicit written tradition of speculative thought like that of the ancient Greeks so that when they did speculate they did it in other ways 00:56:07 through images through discourse on the nonhuman world etc etc to find the idea that there have actually ever been individuals who didn't possess any capacity for philosophical reflection

They claim that recent evidence suggests how the people who built Stonehenge had abandoned the cultivation of many important crops, and reverted back to gathering for significant aspects of their diet (I think they put a lot of emphasis on hazelnuts if I remember correctly – so they were not 100% hunter-gatherers, no; but they had decided to revert back to more hunting and gathering and to scale down their commitment to agriculture. But they also claim that many scholars staunchly ignore this research/evidence. Why, are they wrong?

I have no doubt that the cup marks reflect memory locations. There is some recent research showing that they mark pathways. I need to get that report.

The word dolmen entered archaeology when Théophile Corret de la Tour d’Auvergne used it to describe megalithic tombs in his Origines gauloises (1796).

There was no ancient poet called “Homer,” he argued. Nor were the poems attributed to him “written” by any single individual. Rather, they were the product of a centuries-long tradition of poet-performers.

“The scroll is written in code, but its actual content is simple and well-known, and there was no reason to conceal it,” they write in the Journal of Biblical Literature. “This practice is also found in many places outside the land of Israel, where leaders write in secret code even when discussing universally known matters, as a reflection of their status. The custom was intended to show that the author was familiar with the code, while others were not.”

When asked for his views on which classic works to include among the Great Books, the science historian George Sarton pronounced the exercise futile: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view.”

The objects, which he describes as cylinders, are clay tubes about the size and shape of a little finger—like elongated beads. Because of their shape, and because they were found near pottery vessels inside the tomb, he suspects they might have served as tags that could be strung on the vessels to identify something about them, whether their contents, their owner, or their origin or destination. If that is the case, he speculates that the writing could denote names, or descriptions of property.

The generally accepted origin story of the alphabet as we know it holds that in 1800 BCE, Semitic speakers in Egypt, aware of the Egyptian writing system's mix of characters that stood for words and symbols that stood for sounds, wanted a system of their own and borrowed the Egyptians' alphabetic portion. Semitic languages are the predecessors of most of today's Middle Eastern languages.

I had always assumed – without realising the assumption – that the ancient knowledge keepers would have progressed around the henge posts or stones much as I do around a memory palace. It hadn’t occurred to me that there may be experts on each topic, ‘owning’ each post or stone and the knowledge it represented. Is there any way the archaeology could ever tell us if this is the case?

In 2019, an unusually dry summer caused the waters of the Valdecañas Reservoir to recede, revealing a monument that has come to be referred to as the “Spanish Stonehenge.” NASA satellites captured images of the exposed stones known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, which experts suspect may have been built sometime in the second or third millennium BCE.

Firstly, an entire tribe moving from Wales to the Salisbury Plain took their encyclopaedia with them. This would require the circle to be erected in the same order as in Wales and oriented in the same direction. In effect, these people were taking their database of knowledge with them, the structure in the stones, and the data in their memories. Secondly, a different tribe conquering those in Wales might identify just how effective this memory technique is and steal only the technology. Essentially, they stole the database structure and filled it with their own data. The bluestones are particularly suited to a mnemonic purpose due to the blotches and blobs in their material makeup.

Equally, Waun Mawn did not become the core of a monument complexof the kind known around other great stone circles, such as the Ring of Brodgar, Aveburyand Stonehenge. Its development as a major centre in the earlier Neolithic (seeFigure 1)appears to have been curtailed by early dismantling. Although the region was probably notentirely evacuated—the four remaining stones at Waun Mawn possibly symbolise the iden-tities of those groups who remained local—it may have been extensively depopulated. Onlyfurther research into settlement and land-use employing other lines of evidence, such as paly-nology, will provide answers.

The four surviving stones at Waun Mawn are of unspotted dolerite, and possibly derive fromoutcrops 3km to the south-east at Cerrigmarchogion on the Preseli ridge (Bevinset al.2014).

As some of these samples could alsohave been either residual or intrusive, we propose that the stone circle was erected inc. 3600–3000 cal BC.This date would place Waun Mawn amongst the earliest stone circles in Britain, alongsideLong Meg and her Daughters in Cumbria (109m diameter) and the stone circle beneath thepassage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey (18m diameter).

To resolve this, radiocarbon dating of these samples fromWaun Mawn was conducted in conjunction with optically stimulated luminescence (OSL)dating of sediment from within the packing deposits that were contemporaneous with themonoliths’erection, and fromfilled-in sockets (from after the monoliths’removal). OSL dat-ing determines the burial age of sediments, with the dating signals being reset by light expos-ure immediately prior to deposition (Smedley2018).

geologist Herbert Thomas,who established that the spotted dolerite bluestones at Stonehenge originated in the PreseliHills of west Wales, where, he suspected, they had originally formed a“venerated stone-circle”(Thomas1923: 258).

Strongly influenced by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, the British anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917), and his American counterpart Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), both published important works in the 1870s arguing that human societies had evolved from a state of savagery (primitive hunting) through barbarism (simple farming) to civilization (the highest form of society). Morgan’s book, Ancient Society (1877), was partly based on his great knowledge of living Native Americans.

It was a French customs inspector, Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868), working in the gravel quarries of the Somme river, who in 1841 pub-lished convincing evidence for the association there of human artifacts (of chipped stone, what we would today call “hand-axes” or “bifaces”) and the bones of extinct animals

In the same period, around 1675, the first archaeological excavation of the New World – a tunnel dug into Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Moon – was carried out by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.

The main thing to remember is that every view of the past is a product of its own time: ideas and theories are constantly evolving, and so are methods.

It could be argued that the whole philosophy of archaeology is implied in the questions we ask and the form in which we frame them.

Chairman Mao coined the slogan “Let the past serve the present,” but that was sometimes used as an excuse for the deliberate destruction of ancient things.

surviving fragments of the Berlin Wall which once divided East from West Germany but which was opened and torn down in 1989.

Plotting the find sites on a map shows that these petrospheres were often located in the vicinity of Neolithic recumbent stone circles.

This painting was discovered in the Bulu Sipong cave on Sulawesi in 2016 and recent analysis has shown that it is the “oldest pictorial record of storytelling” and the “earliest figurative artwork in the world”, and is at least 43,900 years old. (The oldest known drawing in the world, a 73,000-year-old abstract scribble, was found in South Africa in 2018.)

Reverse engineering a bronze cannon from theLaBelleshipwreck

slighted to clear access to the drove way

Open to Exploration

The crayon, or perhaps more accurately “crayon-like object”, is 22-milimetres long and seven-millimetres wide, an elongated structure comprised primarily of haematitite, although with some small hard pieces of other minerals embedded.

ethics of video games in archaeology

The 74 pieces, acquired legally at the time by the former Spanish ambassador to Ecuador, were given to the Museo de América for restoration on the condition that they be returned when asked.

Peru seeks repatriation of 400 cultural artifacts from New York

A Historic Manuscript on Aztec Life Is “Virtually Repatriated

Cusco strike: Archaeology-concession decree repealed

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9,000-Year-Old Decapitated Skull Found under Amputated Hands

Ancient tunnels discovered underneath Mexican city of Puebla

How Peru is using drones to protect its archaeological treasures

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