Time Team to feature South Dorset Ridgeway

 

Looking west along the southern flank of Maiden Castle iron age hillfort in Dorset, towards the Hardy Monument. The ditches are not as deep as they once were, and the ramparts were once topped with wooden pallisades. Source Wikimedia Commons

Image credit Jim Champion

 

 

Writing in the Dorset Echo yesterday, Rachael Burnett reports on Time Team’s forthcoming television programme on the South Dorset Ridgeway.

 

TIME Team’s Tony Robinson has come to Dorset to reveal what lies beneath the South Dorset Ridgeway. A film crew from the long-running Channel 4 archaeology TV series visited Dorset County Museum in Dorchester yesterday afternoon for their first day of filming. Tony Robinson and his team will be filming in the area for another 11 days as they unearth the secrets of the Ridgeway.

 

Actor and presenter of the series, Mr Robinson, said he will be exploring Dorset’s rich prehistoric past. He said: “We’re making a Time Team special about the South Dorset Ridgeway. “We’ll be having a look at what it’s made of, why it’s 1,000 feet up in the air when it used to be at the bottom of a seabed and why it was so attractive to ancient people and what they used it for.”

The Ridgeway is a ridge of high land separating Weymouth and Dorchester and Mr Robinson and his team will be investigating the various theories surrounding its origins.

Full article here.

 

 

Tess…

Stonehenge © Richard Misrach

The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless.

In the far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the earth’s edge the coming day, against which the towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still.

From Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy.

 

30,000 year-old flower blooms again

The Sylene stenophylla in bloom: Image credit Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Though somewhat outside the remit of The Heritage Trust, we thought the Sky News’ report yesterday that, “…fruit and seeds hidden in an Ice Age squirrel’s burrow in Siberian permafrost have been resurrected into a flower by Russian scientists” worthy of a mention.

Using a pioneering experiment, the Sylene stenophylla has become the oldest plant ever to be regrown and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. The seeds date back 30,000 to 32,000 years and raise hopes that iconic Ice Age mammals like the woolly mammoth could also eventually be resurrected.

The researchers, who published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, said the results prove that permafrost serves a natural depository for ancient life forms. “We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface,” the scientists said in the article. Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows.

Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia. The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. They were firmly cemented together and often totally filled with ice, making any water infiltration impossible – creating a natural freezing chamber fully isolated from the surface. The burrows were located 125ft (38m) below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer.

“The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,” said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study, who spent years rummaging through the area for squirrel burrows. “It’s a natural cryobank. If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue,” said Mr Gubin. “And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth.”

Article here.

 

Encasing the Magna Carta

National Archives Conservation Lab in Washington. Image credit Hill/NARA

A team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been working for the National Archives in Washington, USA to design and build a state-of-the-art encasement and transport cart to protect the Archive’s prized copy of the 1297 Magna Carta. Their work – and the freshly conserved Magna Carta – were on display at a special “behind-the-scenes” showing at the National Archives Conservation Lab. The enclosure is designed to visually enhance the parchment document while maintaining the interior environment so it does not degrade the document.

The owner of this rare copy of the Magna Carta (one of only four surviving charters), David M. Rubinstein, loaned the document to the National Archives and paid for its restoration and encasement.

 

Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Sir Aurel Stein

 

Sir Aurel Stein

(1912)

 

An  extraordinary individual who advanced human knowledge on many fronts, Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943) pursued dramatic adventures with scientific purpose. Trained as an orientalists, Stein exerted a decisive influence on a wide spectrum of scholarly disciplines. His investigations touched on the neolithic to medieval periods and spanned the area from the Persian Gulf to the pacific watershed.

 

Sir Aurel Stein was one of a small, scholarly band of pioneers who expanded knowledge to include the European landmass and the interactions between each of its four high civilizations: the Mediterranean West, the Indian, the Iranian and the Chinese. Central Asia, the region with which Stein’s name is most notably associated, was a crossroads between East and West for commerce, and culture, religion, arts and peoples. Stein rediscovered the ancient Silk Route between China and the West and unearthed dozens of sites long buried in the sands of Central Asia. His recovery of the library at Tung-Huang (the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas) [see The International Dunhuang Project below] is comparable to that of the Dead Sea scrolls: and his excavations in Turfan, Nija, Miran, and other places provided important materials for the studies of Buddhism, for linguistics, for Han and T’ang history, law and administration, popular literature, painting, sculpture, and many other disciplines.

 

Source: Jacket introduction to Jeannette Mirsky’s Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

 

 

Jacket cover to Jeannette Mirsky’s Sir Aurel Stein

Two passports used by Sir Aurel Stein and the banner given his caravan to identify and safeguard it on its way from Turfan to Kashgar in 1915
Image credit James Ballard

 

 

The International Dunhuang Project (IDP)

The Diamond Sutra from The International Dunhuang Project Newsletter Issue 38

The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) The Silk Road Online, is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang (敦煌) and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

Boddhisattva, Guide of Souls. Tang Dynasty, late 9th century
©
The British Museum

Background

Little was known of the remarkable heritage of the Silk Road until explorers and archaeologists of the early twentieth century uncovered the ruins of ancient cities in the desert sands, revealing astonishing sculptures, murals and manuscripts. One of the most notable discoveries was the Buddhist cave library near the oasis town of Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi desert in western China. The cave had been sealed and hidden at the end of the first millennium AD and only re-discovered in 1900. Forty thousand manuscripts, paintings and printed documents on paper and silk were found in the cave itself. Tens of thousands more items were excavated from other Silk Road archaeological sites. These unique items have fascinating stories to tell of life on this great trade route from 100 BC to AD 1400. Yet most were dispersed to institutions worldwide in the early 1900s, making access difficult.

國際敦煌項目：絲綢之路在綫

IDP是一個開創性的國際性協作項目，目標是使敦煌及絲綢之路東段其他考古遺址出土的寫本、繪畫、紡織品以及藝術品的信息與圖像能在互聯網上自由地獲取，並通過教育與研究項目鼓勵使用者利用這些資源。

Suggested reading:

Inoue, Jasushi, Tun-huang: A Novel. Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International Ltd, 1978.
Mirsky, Jeannette, Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Whitfield, Roderick, The Art of Central Asia: The Stein Collection in the British Museum. Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd, 1982-5.

 

Felling The Ancient Oaks

Felling The Ancient Oaks by John Martin Robinson

Writing in The Blackpool Gazette, Pam Norfolk reviews the new book by historian John Martin Robinson, Felling The Ancient Oaks, How England Lost Its Great Country Estates -

For some of England’s most historic estates, the current imperative to preserve our past has come far too late. Felling the Ancient Oaks offers a stunning and heartbreaking visual record of our most spectacular and scenic country estates which have been broken up for sale and lost forever, often to be replaced with an endless sprawl of light industry and soulless suburbia. [It] reminds us of how our landscape looked before death duties, mining subsidence and sometimes the recklessness and incompetence of the black sheep in the family took their toll and forced the break-up of so many historic landed estates.

Highclere Castle. Source Wikimedia Commons. Image credit JBUK_Planet

One stately house that has survived is Highclere Castle, a country house in the Jacobean style, with a park designed by Capability Brown and the country seat of the Earl of Carnarvon. It is estimated however that a third of England’s historic estates, with their stately homes, parks, farms and churches have been lost.

Full review of the book here. See also a selection of photographs showing some of England’s lost stately houses here.

 

The Archaeology of Skomer and Skokholm

 

 

Heritage of Wales News has announced details of a forthcoming lecture by Dr Oliver Davies on the Archaeology of Skomer and Skokholm at the Five Valleys Conference Centre, Nailworth, Gloucestershire on 19 February 2012. The lecture begins at 15:30 and will be based on the Royal Commission of Wales’s recent high-tech survey of the island and its ground-breaking results.

 

Manylion pellach:

 

Ddydd Sul, 19 Chwefror am 3.30pm, bydd y Dr Oliver Davies, un o archeolegwyr y Comisiwn Brenhinol, yn rhoi darlith yn Aduniad Cyfeillion Sgomer a Skokholm yng Nghanolfan Gynadledda’r Five Valleys yn Nailworth, Swydd Gaerloyw. Teitl y sgwrs fydd The Archaeology of Skomer and Skokholm a bydd yn seiliedig ar arolwg uwch-dechnoleg diweddar y Comisiwn Brenhinol o’r ynys a’r canlyniadau arloesol.
 

More here.

 

 

A road trip with a difference…

Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer

In this morning’s BBC Radio 4 The Life Scientific series Jim Al-Khalili meets leading paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer to find who our ancestors were.

As a post graduate Chris went on a road trip with a difference, driving round Europe in an old Morris Minor measuring Neanderthal skulls. After being thrown out of several countries, the results of his analysis led to a controversial theory which ran counter to what many people thought at the time. Chris suggested that our most recent relative originated in Africa. He also reveals how genetics has transformed his work and talks about his own unconventional origins.

That there were cannibals in Somerset is one of the more surprising findings of Chris’ work on early man in Britain and Jim discovers what it’s like to work on an archaeological dig.

Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Listen Again here.

 

 

First Neanderthal cave paintings discovered in Spain?

 

The Nerja seal paintings

 

Writing in The New Scientist on the 10 February, Fergal MacErlean reports that -

 

Cave paintings in Malaga, Spain, could be the oldest yet found – and the first to have been created by Neanderthals.

Looking oddly akin to the DNA double helix, the images in fact depict the seals that the locals would have eaten, says José Luis Sanchidrián at the University of Cordoba, Spain. They have “no parallel in Palaeolithic art”, he adds. His team say that charcoal remains found beside six of the paintings – preserved in Spain’s Nerja caves – have been radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and 42,300 years old. That suggests the paintings may be substantially older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in south-east France, thought to be the earliest example of Palaeolithic cave art. The next step is to date the paint pigments. If they are confirmed as being of similar age, this raises the real possibility that the paintings were the handiwork of Neanderthals – an “academic bombshell”, says Sanchidrián, because all other cave paintings are thought to have been produced by modern humans.

Dating of the Nerja seal paintings’ pigments will not take place until after 2013. Further excavations in the extensive cave system – discovered by a group of boys hunting bats in 1959 – is ongoing.

Full article here. See also the comments in the earlier Daily Mail feature which cast some doubt on the authenticity of the paintings.

 

Lone curator helps save Japanese tsunami-damaged artefacts

 

Masaru Kumagai examines fossils recovered from the Rikuzentakata City Museum, Iwate Prefecture Image credit The Mainichi Daily News

 

The Mainichi Daily News reports today that -

 

When the Iwate Prefecture city of Rikuzentakata was hit by a deadly quake on March 11, 2011, hundreds of thousands of items at local museums were engulfed by the tsunami waves. Now, however, the efforts of the city’s only surviving curator have sparked hope that many items will be restored and put back on display. Masaru Kumagai, a 45-year-old curator at the Sea and Shell Museum, has teamed up with people including retired museum workers to help restore the museums’ damaged specimens. “I won’t let the riches of my hometown be lost,” Kumagai says.

 

Over 440,000 items from the city museum and other locations were swallowed by the tsunami waves. Following the magnitude-9.0 earthquake in March 2011, Kumagai fled from his workplace in the city to the roof of the city hall, located about two kilometers away. However, most of the city’s employees who were knowledgeable about the museum’s cultural properties, including the head of the city museum, died in the tsunami.

Work to collect the scattered articles began in April. Researchers and museum workers from around the country, as well as Self-Defense Forces helped to uncover them. By mid-June they had recovered around 310,000 items. However, Kumagai says that what is more important is how many can be restored to good condition. The quality of articles soiled by seawater and mud degrades over time, so speed is needed for the restoration work. Workers must be thorough, sterilizing, drying, and cataloging the items.

Full article here.

陸前高田の博物館：標本守れ、復元急ぐ…生存の学芸員奮闘

東日本大震災で甚大な被害を受けた岩手県陸前高田市では、市立博物館などに収められていた標本や文献など４４万点以上が大津波にのみ込まれた。震災から１１カ月、生き残ったスタッフが「古里の財産を失わせない」と収蔵品の復元に取り組み、将来の博物館の再生を目指している。縄文時代の土器、サンゴの化石、三陸の動植物の標本、三陸海岸で使われてきた漁具、古い家電、掛け軸、マンガ－－。同市郊外の旧生出（おいで）小（１１年３月閉校）の体育館と教室に保管している津波被害にあった収蔵品だ。「これは震災後、博物館で保管してほしいと寄贈されました」。同市でただ一人生き残った学芸員、熊谷賢さん（４５）が指さす先には、針が２時４６分で止まった古い柱時計があった。

 

Father Time at Stonehenge

 

Credit Father Time stonehenge animation from Jac-Y-Do on Vimeo

 

What is Stonehenge?

 

What is Stonehenge?
It is the roofless past;
Man’s ruinous myth; his uninterred adoring
Of the unknown in sunrise cold and red;
His quest of stars that arch his doomed exploring.
And what is Time but shadows that were cast
By these storm-sculptured stones while centuries fled?
The stones remain; their stillness can outlast
The skies of history hurrying overhead.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

 

The Parkers of Heytesbury: The First Field Archaeologists

 

Barrow digging (the Parkers at work, being supervised by Cunnington and Colt Hoare)

©

Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes

 

A lecture by  Dr Paul Everill entitled The Parkers of Heytesbury: The First Field Archaeologists, will be held in the Lecture Hall, Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum, on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 from 19:30.

 

Histories of archaeology often focus on the role of wealthy, educated men and women in the development of the field techniques and the production of knowledge. While it is undeniable that these individuals were, in many senses, the instigators of archaeological endeavour and interest, traditional histories of the discipline ignore the central contribution of the ordinary excavators. Principal amongst these forgotten pioneers must be Stephen and John Parker of Heytesbury, the two labourers employed by William Cunnington on all his excavations between 1801 and his death at the end of 1810. This lecture uses evidence from the original letters and documents held at Devizes Museum to illuminate the role of the Parkers, and argues that the two men should be given greater credit for their contribution to the fledgling discipline of archaeology.

 

More here.

 

 

Objects in space

 

Britain’s largest meteorite and tumulus artefact? Image credit The Open University

 

Objects in space is the title of an exhibition now running at the The Royal Society in London until 30 March 2012. The exhibition, “…showcases what is believed to be Britain’s largest meteorite, never previously seen in public, alongside letters and books charting the history of scientific interest in meteorites.”

 

The meteorite in question fell to earth some 30,000 years ago, measures some 0.5 metres across and weighs an incredible 93 kilograms. The meteorite has been kept at Lake House in Wiltshire (formerly the house owned by the Duke family until the widow of the Rev. Edward Duke (1814–95) an archaeologist and colleague of Richard Colt Hoare, also an archaeologist, sold it). Dr Colin Pillinger, professor of planetary sciences at the Open University and Michael Faraday Prize lecturer this year, has suggested that, “The men whose house this [the meteorite] was found at spent a lot of time opening… burial sites 200 years ago for purposes of excavating them. Our hypothesis is that the stone probably came out of one of those burial chambers.”

 

If that is the case it may be the only known example of a meteorite being found in a tumulus in Britain. Meteorites however, “…have been found in Egyptian tombs and the hieroglyphic symbol for meteorites has been translated as siderite, or “iron from heaven”. A dagger of meteoritic iron was found in King Tutankhamen’s burial chamber. When a meteorite fell near Phrygia in about 2000 B.C., it was revered as a divine object for years. According to Titus Livius, the stone was later transported to Rome and worshipped for another 500 years.

 

“The occurrence of meteorites on archaeological sites in North America has been known since the early 19th century. While searching for the northwest passage in 1818, John Ross discovered a previously unknown band of Eskimo on the northwest coast of Greenland using a variety of cutting tools with blades of meteoritic iron. That same year a `plate’ of iron from Ohio was the first of a series of meteoritical iron artefacts found on Hopewellian (200 B.C. – A.D. 500) sites in the eastern United States.

“The Camp Verde and Bloody Basin meteorites are thought to be transported specimens from Meteor Crater in north central Arizona. Both meteorites were discovered on sites located approximately 100 km southwest of the crater. Camp Verde was found on top of a mesa in the corner of an ancient dwelling. The meteorite had been wrapped in feather-cloth and placed upon a stone cyst. Stone cysts were sometimes used for child burial. Both Bloody Basin and a meteorite from Mesa Verde in Colorado were found in dwellings with apparently little or no special significance attached to them by the inhabitants. Two meteorites from Chihuahua, Mexico were located inside ruins that may have been constructed around the stones. The Huizopa iron weighed 108 kg when it was discovered in 1907, and the 1545 kg Casas Grandes was found wrapped in mummy cloth similar to the burials located nearby.”

Quoted from The Prehistoric Use of Meteorites in North America by Glen Akridge. Glen Akridge is a member of the Cosmochemistry Group at the University of Arkansas. See also the feature in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.