The 1,600-Year-Old Goblet and How Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers

Researchers have finally found out why the jade-green cup (showed bellow) appears red when lit from behind.
The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a super­sensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints.

«The Romans may have first come across the colorful potential of nanoparticles by accident, but they seem to have perfected it.»

The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing, «an amazing feat», says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

The ancient nanotech works something like this: When hit with light, electrons belonging to the metal flecks vibrate in ways that alter the color depending on the observer’s position. Gang Logan Liu, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has long focused on using nanotechnology to diagnose disease, and his colleagues realized that this effect offered untapped potential. «The Romans knew how to make and use nanoparticles for beautiful art», Liu says. «We wanted to see if this could have scientific applications».

When various fluids filled the cup, Liu suspected, they would change how the vibrating electrons in the glass interacted, and thus the color. (Today’s home pregnancy tests exploit a separate nano-based phenomenon to turn a white line pink).

Since the researchers couldn’t put liquid into the precious artifact itself, they instead imprinted billions of tiny wells onto a plastic plate about the size of a postage stamp and sprayed the wells with gold or silver nanoparticles, essentially creating an array with billions of ultra-miniature Lycurgus Cups. When water, oil, sugar solutions and salt solutions were poured into the wells, they displayed a range of easy-to-distinguish colors—light green for water and red for oil, for example. The proto­type was 100 times more sensitive to altered levels of salt in solution than current commercial sensors using similar techniques. It may one day make its way into handheld devices for detecting pathogens in samples of saliva or urine, or for thwarting terrorists trying to carry dangerous liquids onto airplanes.

The original fourth-century C.E. Lycurgus Cup, probably taken out only for special occasions, depicts King Lycurgus ensnared in a tangle of grapevines, presumably for evil acts committed against Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. If inventors manage to develop a new detection tool from this ancient technology, it’ll be Lycurgus’ turn to do the ensnaring.

Source:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/This-1600-Year-Old-Goblet-Shows-that-the-Romans-Were-Nanotechnology-Pioneers-220563661.html

Diving in a Cenote (Mayan sacred cave)

A cenote is a deep natural pit or sinkhole, created as result from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater underneath, these natural formations are associated with the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and some nearby Caribbean islands.
Cenotes were sometimes used by the ancient Maya for sacrificial offerings, the term derives from a word used by the low-land Yucatec Maya, "Ts'onot" to refer to any location with accessible groundwater. Major Maya settlements required access to adequate water supplies and therefore cities, including the famous Chichén Itzá, were built around these natural wells.

Some cenotes, like the Sacred Cenote in Chichén Itzá, played an important role in Mayan rites, it was believed that these pools were gateways to the afterlife, so no surprise why mayans sometimes used to threw valuable items into them.

The discovery of golden sacrificial artefacts and skeletons in some cenotes led to the archaeological exploration in the first part of the 20th century.

The Cave of Altamira: First Prehistoric Cave Paintings

The Cave of Altamira is located near the town of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain. The cave was declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985 and it is famous for its Upper Paleolithic cave paintings featuring drawings and poly-chrome rock paintings of wild mammals and human hands.

The site's special relevance comes from the fact that it was the first cave in which prehistoric cave paintings were discovered. When the discovery was first made public in 1880, it led to a bitter public controversy between experts, which continued into the early 20th century, as many of them did not believe prehistoric man had the intellectual capacity to produce any kind of artistic expression. The acknowledgement of the authenticity of the paintings, which finally came in 1902, changed forever the perception of prehistoric human beings.

Marcelino de Sautuola

In 1879, amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovered the cave drawings. The cave was excavated by Sautuola and the archaeologist Juan Vilanova y Piera from the University of Madrid, resulting in a much acclaimed publication in 1880 which interpreted the paintings as Paleolithic in origin.

The French specialists, led by Gabriel de Mortillet and Emile Cartailhac, were particularly adamant in rejecting the hypothesis of Sautuola and Piera, causing their findings being loudly ridiculed at the 1880 Prehistorical Congress in Lisbon, due to the supreme artistic quality, and the exceptional state of conservation of the paintings, Sautuola was even accused of forgery and fraud. A fellow countryman maintained that the paintings had been produced by a contemporary artist on Sautuola's orders.

It was not until 1902, when several other findings of prehistoric paintings had served to render the hypothesis of the extreme antiquity of the Altamira paintings less offensive, that the scientific society retracted their opposition to the Spaniards. That year, Emile Cartailhac emphatically admitted his mistake in the famous article, "Mea culpa d'un sceptique", published in the journal L'Anthropologie. Sautuola, having died 14 years earlier, did not live to enjoy his rehabilitation and his triumph against the skeptics.

In 2012, further uranium-thorium dating research was published, supporting an older age for portions of the art, including one claviform image at 35,600 years old.

Further information: http://museodealtamira.mcu.es/

The Antikythera Mechanism: History and Explanation (Ancient Astronomical Clock)

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analog computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1900–1901 from a shipwreck in the region of Antikythera, Greece, nonetheless its significance and complexity were not understood until a century later.

Jacques Cousteau visited the wreck site in 1978, but although he found new dating evidence, he did not find any additional remains of the Antikythera mechanism, the construction has been dated to the early 1st century BCE.
Technological artifacts approaching its complexity and workmanship did not appear again until the 14th century CE, when mechanical astronomical clocks began to be built in Western Europe.

The Antikythera mechanism is kept at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. It is now displayed at the temporary exhibition about the Antikythera Shipwreck, accompanied by reconstructions made by Ioannis Theofanidis, Derek de Solla Price, Michael Wright, the Thessaloniki University and Dionysios Kriaris. Other reconstructions are on display at the American Computer Museum in Bozeman - Montana, at the Children's Museum of Manhattan in New York and at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

Yonaguni: The Underwater Mysterious Ruins

The Yonaguni Monument is a massive underwater rock formation off the coast of Yonaguni, the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, in Japan. There is a debate about whether the site is completely natural, is a natural site that has been modified, or is a human-made artifact. For these reasons, the site is also known in Japanese as the Yonaguni (Island) Submarine Ruins.

The flat parallel faces, sharp edges, and mostly right angles of the formation have led many people, including many of the underwater photographers and divers who have visited the site and some scholars, to the opinion that those features are human-made. These people include Gary and Cecilia Hagland and Tom Holden, who went on underwater expeditions to study and photograph the site. These features include a trench that has two internal 90° angles as well as the twin megaliths that appear to have been placed there. These megaliths have straight edges and square corners. However, sea currents have been known to move large rocks on a regular basis. Some of those who see the formations as being largely natural claim that they may have been modified by human hands. The semi-regular terraces of the Monument have been compared to other examples of megalithic architecture, such as the rock-hewn terraces seen at Sacsayhuaman. The formations have also been compared to the Okinawa Tomb, a rock-hewn structure of uncertain age.

Ancient Egyptian Statue Mysteriously Rotates - Manchester Museum

The Manchester Museum is getting a lot of press this week. It released a time-lapse footage of an ancient Egyptian statue slowly rotating in its sealed case. The statue, of an official named Neb-senu, dates back to around 1,800 BC, and was given to the museum 80 years ago. In all those decades, this is the first time that anyone has seen it spin. 

Scientists Prove Viking's Mystical Sunstone is Real

The Mystery of the "Swiss Watch" found in a Sealed Ming Dinasty Tomb

Archaeologists are stumped after finding a 100-year-old Swiss watch in an ancient tomb that was sealed more than 400 years ago. They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant's funeral, but inside they uncovered a miniature watch in the shape of a ring marked "Swiss" that is thought to be just a century old.

The mysterious timepiece was encrusted in mud and rock and had stopped at 10:06 am. Watches were not around at the time of the Ming Dynasty and Switzerland did not even exist as a country, an expert pointed out.

The archaeologists were filming a documentary with two journalists when they made the puzzling discovery. "When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with metallic sound" said Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Museum. "We picked up the object, and found it was a ring. After removing the covering soil and examining it further, we were shocked to see it was a watch" he added.

The Ming Dynasty or The Empire of the Great Ming was the ruling dynasty in China from 1368 to 1644.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1096959/Mystery-century-old-Swiss-watch-discovered-ancient-tomb-sealed-400-years.html

Mummy Head Reveals Advanced Medieval Science

In the second century, an ethnically Greek Roman named Galen became doctor to the gladiators. His glimpses into the human body via these warriors' wounds, combined with much more systematic dissections of animals, became the basis of Islamic and European medicine for centuries.

Galen's texts wouldn't be challenged for anatomical supremacy until the Renaissance, when human dissections — often in public — surged in popularity. But doctors in medieval Europe weren't as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals.

 The gruesome specimen, now in a private collection, consists of a human head and shoulders with the top of the skull and brain removed. Rodent nibbles and insect larvae trails mar the face. The arteries are filled with a red "metal wax" compound that helped preserve the body. 

The preparation of the specimen was surprisingly advanced. Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, an era once considered part of Europe's anti-scientific "Dark Ages." In fact, said study researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist at University Hospital R. Poincare in France, the new specimen suggests surprising anatomical expertise during this time period.   

"It's state-of-the-art," Charlier told LiveScience. "I suppose that the preparator did not do this just one time, but several times, to be so good at this."

Myths of the middle ages

Historians in the 1800s referred to the Dark Ages as a time of illiteracy and barbarianism, generally pinpointing the time period as between the fall of the Roman Empire and somewhere in the Middle Ages. To some, the Dark Ages didn't end until the 1400s, at the advent of the Renaissance.

But modern historians see the Middle Ages quite differently. That's because continued scholarship has found that the medieval period wasn't so ignorant after all.

"There was considerable scientific progress in the later Middle Ages, in particular from the 13th century onward," said James Hannam, an historian and author of "The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution" (Regnery Publishing, 2011).

For centuries, the advancements of the Middle Ages were forgotten, Hannam told LiveScience. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became an "intellectual fad," he said, for thinkers to cite ancient Greek and Roman sources rather than scientists of the Middle Ages. In some cases, this involved straight-up fudging. Renaissance mathematician Copernicus, for example, took some of his thinking on the motion of the Earth from Jean Buridan, a French priest who lived between about 1300 and 1358, Hannam said. But Copernicus credited the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his inspiration.

Much of this selective memory stemmed from anti-Catholic feelings by Protestants, who split from the church in the 1500s.

As a result, "there was lots of propaganda about how the Catholic Church had been holding back human progress, and it was great that we were all Protestants now," Hannam said. 

Anatomical dark ages?

From this anti-Catholic sentiment arose a great many myths, such as the idea that everyone believed the world to be flat until Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas. ("They thought nothing of the sort," Hannam said.)

Similarly, Renaissance propagandists spread the rumor that the Medieval Christian church banned autopsy and human dissection, holding back medical progress.

In fact, Hannam said, many societies have banned or limited the carving up of human corpses, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to early Europeans (that's why Galen was stuck dissecting animals and peering into gladiator wounds). But autopsies and dissection were not under a blanket church ban in the Middle Ages. In fact, the church sometimes ordered autopsies, often for the purpose of looking for signs of holiness in the body of a supposedly saintly person.

The first example of one of these "holy autopsies" came in 1308, when nuns conducted a dissection of the body of Chiara of Montefalco, an abbess who would be canonized as a saint in 1881. The nuns reported finding a tiny crucifix in the abbess' heart, as well as three gallstones in her gallbladder, which they saw as symbolic of the Holy Trinity.

Other autopsies were entirely secular. In 1286, an Italian physician conducted autopsies in order to pinpoint the origin of an epidemic, according to Charlier and his colleagues.

Some of the belief that the church frowned on autopsies may have come from a misinterpretation of a papal edict from 1299, in which the Pope forbade the boiling of the bones of dead Crusaders. That practice ensured Crusaders' bones could be shipped back home for burial, but the Pope declared the soldiers should be buried where they fell.

"That was interpreted in the 19th century as actually being a stricture against human dissection, which would have surprised the Pope," Hannam said.

Well-studied head

While more investigation of the body was going on in the Middle Ages than previously realized, the 1200s remain the "dark ages" in the sense that little is known about human anatomical dissections during this time period, Charlier said. When he and his colleagues began examining the head-and-shoulders specimen, they suspected it would be from the 1400s or 1500s.

"We did not think it was so antique," Charlier said. 

But radiocarbon dating put the specimen firmly in the 1200s, making it the oldest European anatomical preparation known. Most surprisingly, Charlier said, the veins and arteries are filled with a mixture of beeswax, lime and cinnabar mercury. This would have helped preserve the body as well as give the circulatory system some color, as cinnabar mercury has a red tint.  

Thus, the man's body was not simply dissected and tossed away; it was preserved, possibly for continued medical education, Charlier said. The man's identity, however, is forever lost. He could have been a prisoner, an institutionalized person, or perhaps a pauper whose body was never claimed, the researchers write this month in the journal Archives of Medical Science.

The specimen, which is in private hands, is set to go on display at the Parisian Museum of the History of Medicine, Charlier said.  

"This is really interesting from a historical and archaeological point of view," Charlier said, adding, "We really have a lack of skeletons and anthropological pieces."

Source: http://www.livescience.com/27624-mummy-head-middle-ages-anatomy.html

3D Animation-reconstruction: The Greek City of Syracuse

Scientists Create Automated "Time Machine" for Languages

Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated "time machine," of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

In a compelling example of how "big data" and machine learning are beginning to make a significant impact on all facets of knowledge, researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program that can rapidly reconstruct "proto-languages" -- the linguistic ancestors from which all modern languages have evolved. These earliest-known languages include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic and, in this case, Proto-Austronesian, which gave rise to languages spoken in Southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia, Australasia and the Pacific. 

"What excites me about this system is that it takes so many of the great ideas that linguists have had about historical reconstruction, and it automates them at a new scale: more data, more words, more languages, but less time," said Dan Klein, an associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper published online Feb. 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team's computational model uses probabilistic reasoning -- which explores logic and statistics to predict an outcome -- to reconstruct more than 600 Proto-Austronesian languages from an existing database of more than 140,000 words, replicating with 85 percent accuracy what linguists had done manually. While manual reconstruction is a meticulous process that can take years, this system can perform a large-scale reconstruction in a matter of days or even hours, researchers said.
Not only will this program speed up the ability of linguists to rebuild the world's proto-languages on a large scale, boosting our understanding of ancient civilizations based on their vocabularies, but it can also provide clues to how languages might change years from now.
"Our statistical model can be used to answer scientific questions about languages over time, not only to make inferences about the past, but also to extrapolate how language might change in the future," said Tom Griffiths, associate professor of psychology, director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science Lab and another co-author of the paper.
The discovery advances UC Berkeley's mission to make sense of big data and to use new technology to document and maintain endangered languages as critical resources for preserving cultures and knowledge. For example, researchers plan to use the same computational model to reconstruct indigenous North American proto-languages.

Humans' earliest written records date back less than 6,000 years, long after the advent of many proto-languages. While archeologists can catch direct glimpses of ancient languages in written form, linguists typically use what is known as the "comparative method" to probe the past. This method establishes relationships between languages, identifying sounds that change with regularity over time to determine whether they share a common mother language. 

"To understand how language changes -- which sounds are more likely to change and what they will become -- requires reconstructing and analyzing massive amounts of ancestral word forms, which is where automatic reconstructions play an important role," said Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study, which he started while a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

The UC Berkeley computational model is based on the established linguistic theory that words evolve along the branches of a family tree -- much like a genealogical tree -- reflecting linguistic relationships that evolve over time, with the roots and nodes representing proto-languages and the leaves representing modern languages. 

Using an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, the program sorted through sets of cognates, words in different languages that share a common sound, history and origin, to calculate the odds of which set is derived from which proto-language. At each step, it stored a hypothesized reconstruction for each cognate and each ancestral language.

"Because the sound changes and reconstructions are closely linked, our system uses them to repeatedly improve each other," Klein said. "It first fixes its predicted sound changes and deduces better reconstructions of the ancient forms. It then fixes the reconstructions and re-analyzes the sound changes. These steps are repeated, and both predictions gradually improve as the underlying structure emerges over time."

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130212112025.htm

Göbekli Tepe: The 12,000 Years Old Unexplained Structure

Göbekli Tepe Turkish: [ɡøbe̞kli te̞pɛ] ("Potbelly Hill") is an early Neolithic sanctuary located at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa. It includes massive stones carved about 11,000 years ago by people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery.

The "tell" (hill) has a height of 15m (49ft) and is about 300m (984ft) in diameter. It is approximately 760m (2,493ft) above sea level. It was first noted in a survey conducted by Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1964. The survey recognized that the rise could not entirely be a natural feature, but postulated that a Byzantine cemetery lay beneath. The survey noted a large number of flints and the presence of limestone slabs thought to be grave markers. The hill had long been under agricultural cultivation and generations of local inhabitants had frequently moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles, possibly destroying much archaeological evidence in the process.

Klaus Schmidt, chief archaeologist of Göbekli Tepe, is of the view that religion and the mobilization of labor behind the building of religious centers like Göbekli Tepe were the chief factors driving the development of civilization and the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic ages.

Biggest Roman find since 1920's (The Hadrian's Arts Centre)

Archaeologists who have completed the excavation of a 900-seat arts centre under one of Rome’s busiest roundabouts are calling it the most important Roman discovery in 80 years. 

 

Archaeologists who have completed the excavation of a 900-seat arts centre under one of Rome’s busiest roundabouts are calling it the most important Roman discovery in 80 years. The centre, built by the emperor Hadrian in 123, offered three massive halls where Roman nobles flocked to hear poetry, speeches and philosophy tracts while reclining on terraced marble seating.

With the dig now completed, the terracing and the hulking brick walls of the complex, as well as stretches of the elegant grey and yellow marble flooring, are newly visible at bottom of a 5.5 metre (18ft) hole in Piazza Venezia, where police officers wearing white gloves direct chaotic traffic like orchestra conductors and where Mussolini harangued thousands of followers from his balcony.

“Hadrian’s auditorium is the biggest find in Rome since the Forum was uncovered in the 1920s” said Rossella Rea, the archaeologist running the dig.

The excavations, which are now due to open to the public, are next to a taxi rank and squeezed between a baroque church and the Vittoriano, an imposing monument to Italy’s defunct monarchy, which is nicknamed the Typewriter by locals.

The complex was only unearthed thanks to excavations to build a new underground railway line which will cross the heart of Rome. “We don’t have funds for these kind of digs so this has come to light thanks to the new line,” said Rea. Archaeologists keeping a careful eye on what gets dug up have proved to be a mixed blessing for railway engineers, who have had to scrap plans for two stations in the heart of the centre of Rome when it was discovered their exits to the surface cut straight through Roman remains.

 

With the discovery of Hadrian’s complex at Piazza Venezia, the line risked losing its last stop in the centre and being forced to run into the heart of Rome from the suburbs and straight out the other side without stopping. But Rea said the station and the ruins could coexist. “I believe we can run one of the exits from the station along the original corridor of the complex where Romans entered the halls,” she said. The site sheds new light on Hadrian’s love of poetry – he wrote his own verse in Latin and Greek – and his taste for bold architecture – an 11-metre-high (36ft) arched ceiling once towered over the poets in the central hall.

Today the performing space is riddled with pits dug for fires, revealing how after three centuries of celebrating the arts, the halls fell into disrepair with the collapse of the Roman empire and were used for smelting ingots.

At the centre of the main hall, like a prop from a disaster movie, is a massive, nine-by-five-metre chunk of the monumental roof which came crashing down during an earthquake in 848 after standing for seven centuries. Following the quake, the halls were gradually covered over until a hospital built on top in the 16th century dug down for cellar space. “We found pots lobbed down a well after the patients using them died” said Rea. “We could date them because the designs on the glaze were the same we see on implements in Caravaggio paintings"

Sources: 

http://www.heritagedaily.com/2012/12/hadrians-hall-archaeologists-finish-excavation-of-roman-arts-centre/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/27/hadrian-auditorium-ancient-roman-arts-center_n_2370106.html

The Unreachable Secret Tomb of China's 1st Emperor

An army of clay warriors guards the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210 BC. The tomb is still under excavation near Xi'an, China. CREDIT: Clara Moskowitz/LiveScience

Buried deep under a hill in central China, surrounded by an underground moat of poisonous mercury, lies an entombed emperor who's been undisturbed for more than two millennia.

The tomb holds the secrets of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died on Sept. 10, 210 B.C., after conquering six warring states to create the first unified nation of China.

The answers to a number of historical mysteries may lie buried inside that tomb, but whether modern people will ever see inside this mausoleum depends not just on the Chinese government, but on science.

 

"The big hill, where the emperor is buried — nobody's been in there," said archaeologist Kristin Romey, curatorial consultant for the Terracotta Warrior exhibition at New York City’s Discovery Times Square. "Partly it's out of respect for the elders, but they also realize that nobody in the world right now has the technology to properly go in and excavate it.".

The warring states:

Qin Shi Huang (pronounced "chin shuh hwang") was born in 259 B.C., first son to the king of Qin, one of six independent kingdoms inside modern China. These kingdoms had been warring for more than 200 years, but through a combination of military strength, strategy and natural disasters, Qin Shi Huang conquered them all, proclaiming himself not just a king, but also an emperor — the first of China.

Scholars still debate the details of how this occurred, and what unique tactics allowed the Qin emperor to achieve what no one had managed before.

When he died, Qin Shi Huang was buried in the most opulent tomb complex ever constructed in China, a sprawling, city-size collection of underground caverns containing everything the emperor would need for the afterlife. The ancient Chinese, along with many cultures including ancient Egyptians, believed that items and even people buried with a person could be taken with him to the afterlife.

But instead of burying his armies, concubines, administrators and servants with him, the Qin emperor came up with an alternative: clay reproductions.

Shocking discovery:

In 1974, a group of farmers digging wells near Xi'an in China, stumbled upon one of the most shocking archaeological discoveries of all time. The life-size terracotta solider they dug out of the ground turned out to be just one of an army of thousands, each utterly unique, with individual clothing, hair and facial features.

For almost four decades, archaeologists have been excavating the site. So far, they've uncovered about 2,000 clay soldiers, but experts estimate there are more than 8,000 in total.

"They're going to be digging there for centuries," Romey predicted.

Still, scientists have yet to touch the central tomb, which holds a palace containing the body of Qin Shi Huang.

"It's really smart what the Chinese government is doing," said Romey. "When we went into [Egyptian King] Tut's tomb, think about all the information we lost just based on the excavation techniques of the 1930s. There's so much additional that we could have learned, but the techniques back then weren’t what we have now.". "Even though we may think we have great archaeological excavation techniques right now," she said, "who knows, a century down the road if we open this tomb, what they're going to say?"

Even though they number in the thousands, each terracotta soldier has painstakingly detailed armor, facial features, hair and clothing.
CREDIT: Clara Moskowitz/LiveScience

To open the tomb?

The decision whether to explore the tomb anytime soon, or ever, is up to the government of China. That decision will likely be influenced by the pace of technological progress.

"In archaeological conservation, every year you have major new developments," Romey said. "When we began excavating [the soldiers] in the '70s, the minute they were exposed to air and sunlight, the pigment just flaked off. Now they’ve figured out a new technique where they can actually preserve the paint as they excavate."

Perhaps, if science advances enough, that excavation wouldn't cause serious damage to the burial site, and the tomb will finally be opened.

"I wouldn’t be surprised if you had some sort of robotic visual survey going in there at some point," Romey said.

And despite their desire to protect the treasures of antiquity, archaeologists are itching with curiosity to find out what's inside Qin Shi Huang's central tomb.

Rivers of mercury:

Ancient writings say the emperor created an entire underground kingdom and palace, complete with a ceiling mimicking the night sky, set with pearls as stars. Pits full of terracotta concubines have never been discovered, though experts predict they exist somewhere in the complex.

And Qin Shi Huang's tomb is also thought to be encircled with rivers of liquid mercury, which the ancient Chinese believed could bestow immortality.

"It's kind of ironic" Romey said. "This is probably how he died, by ingesting mercury. He was taking all these mercury pills because he wanted to live forever and it killed him by the age of 39."

That moat of mercury also presents another reason why archaeologists are loath to explore the tomb just yet — doing so would likely be very dangerous, according to soil samples around the tomb, which indicate extremely high levels of mercury contamination.

In the end, scientists and historians must always weigh their desire to know more with the damage such inquiry would cause.

"Archaeology, ultimately, is a destructive science" Romey said. "You have to destroy stuff in order to learn about it."

Source:  http://www.livescience.com/22454-ancient-chinese-tomb-terracotta-warriors.html

Archaeologists found Mona Lisa model's remains

Archeologists are uncovering the remains of what they believe is the model behind Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa". Source: AdelaideNow

IT'S the face that launched a thousand imitations. Now, archaeologists are convinced they've found the body of the real Mona Lisa.

Buried in a crypt beneath a convent in Florence, Italy, archaeologists believe they have uncovered the skeleton belonging to the model who posed for Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece in 1504.

The wife of a rich silk merchant, Lisa Gheradini, is generally accepted by historians to be the woman with the mysterious smile.

Lisa Gheradini, whose married name was Giocondo, became a nun after her husband's death. She was buried in the grounds of the Convent of Saint Ursula where she died in 1542, aged 63.

The burial site of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, the model who inspired Leonardo da Vinci's painting "The Mona Lisa". Picture: AFP / CLAUDIO GIOVANNINI Source: AFP

Archaeologists had to dig through thick concrete laid as part of an effort to turn the convent into barracks for soldiers.

But they quickly unearthed a female-sized human skull, along with fragments of vertebrae and ribs.

It was right where ancient maps and documents had led them to believe Lisa's body had been placed: a crypt reached via a gate and staircase.

Archaeologists work on the excavation of a grave inside the medieval Convent of Saint Ursula in Florence. Picture: AFP / CLAUDIO GIOVANNINI Source: AFP

The dig was suspended after the archaeologists ran out of funds, but work began again last month.

They have since unearthed a large part of a human skeleton.

However, archeologist Silvano Vinceti, who is in charge of the dig, said it was not certain if the bones belonged to the same individual.

An archaeologist works on the excavation of a grave inside the medieval Convent of Saint Ursula in Florence. Picture: AFP / CLAUDIO GIOVANNINI Source: AFP

DNA will be extracted from the bones and compared with the remains of Lisa's children, who were buried nearby.

Once her identity is verified, archeologists will use reconstruction techniques on the skull to see how it compares to the face on da Vinci's idyllic painting.

Professor Vincenti claimed last year that hidden initials could be found in the eyes of the Mona Lisa when examined under a high-powered microscope.

A human skeleton is seen at the excavation of a grave inside the medieval Convent of Saint Ursula in Florence. Archaeologists are searching the burial site for Lisa Gherardini, wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, the model who inspired Leonardo da Vinci's painting "The Mona Lisa". AFP / CLAUDIO GIOVANNINI Source: AFP

Source: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/archeologists-uncover-mona-lisa-models-remains/story-fnddckzi-1226428689373

The truth about the "Swiss/Roman Army Knife"

«Most people have a natural tendency to look at ancient civilizations as primitive and sometimes inferior, but once in a while stories like this one hits us, letting us thinking about.»

The Roman Army Knife...
...Or how the ingenuity of the Swiss was beaten by 1,800 years

The world's first Swiss Army knife' has been revealed - made 1,800 years before its modern counterpart. An intricately designed Roman implement, which dates back to 200AD, it is made from silver but has an iron blade, it features a spoon, fork as well as a retractable spike, spatula and small tooth-pick.

Experts believe the spike may have been used by the Romans to extract meat from snails, it is thought the spatula would have offered a means of poking cooking sauce out of narrow-necked bottles.

The 3in x 6in (8cm x 15cm) knife was excavated from the Mediterranean area more than 20 years ago and was obtained by the museum in 1991. The unique item is among dozens of artifacts exhibited in a newly refurbished Greek and Roman antiquities gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge.

Experts believe it may have been carried by a wealthy traveller, who will have had the item custom made. A spokesman said: "This was probably made between AD 200 and AD 300, when the Roman empire was a great imperial power."

The expansion of Rome (which, before 500 BC, had just been a small central Italian state) made some individuals, perhaps like our knife-owner, personally very wealthy, this could have been directly from the fruits of conquests, or indirectly, from the business opportunities the empire offered.

We know almost nothing about the person who owned this ingenious knife, but perhaps he was one of those who profited from the vast expansion of Rome, he would have been wealthy to have such a real luxury item and perhaps he was a traveller, who required a practical compound utensil like this on his journeys. The spokesman added: "While many less elaborate folding knives survive in bronze, this one's complexity and the fact that it is made of silver suggest it is a luxury item".

Modern Swiss Army knives originated in Ibach Schwyz, Switzerland, in 1897 and were created by Karl Elsener. The knives, which provide soldiers with a battlefield toolkit, have since become standard issue for many modern day fighting forces thanks to their toughness and quality. Nationalist Elsener decided to design the knives after he realized the Swiss army were being issued with blades manufactured in neighboring Germany.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247230/The-Roman-Army-Knife-Or-ingenuity-Swiss-beaten-1-800-years.html

Jason Martell: Ancient Technology

Jason Martell is an alien investigator who is very well known in the paranormal circles, appearing on shows on the Discovery Channel and History Channel, along with the web and radio shows, talking about UFOs, the Sumerian Culture and ancient technology artifacts.

Egypt: Mystery of the temple of Seti

Take a look at the following photographs…

What did you see? An helicopter? An airplane? Some strange vehicle?

• If yes: you will be thinking about Photoshop (as I did), but no, these hieroglyphs are really carved on stone. The explanations for this (the skeptical explanations we must say…) are that these figures came as the result of modern creative people, or that the hieroglyphs were made above old ones and with the passing of time these figures were created (…an amazing coincidence! we must say). Well, simply nobody knows, because no one has published yet, a convincing explanation for it.

• If no: you have no imagination