Awesome Archeology

[DanaC]

Archeology is awesome. To be able to dig into the past and bring it back to us in the here and now. The wild and wonderful treasures, and the even more compelling ordinariness of the broken and discarded detritus of lives lived. Buried cities, and forgotten hoards, lost necklaces and the once revered dead.

And always playing against time, against erosion or destruction, against the farmers plough or motorway construction. As techniques improve more is learned but for all that is learned how much drops out of our reach as they dig?

This is a thread for those little news stories that offer a quick glimpse of a distant and unreachable past. The ones that maybe don't need a thread of their own. Not worldshaking, just fascinating.

Here's what prompted me to post:

Eight 4,000-year-old boats found in a quarry in Cambridgeshire are being preserved with the same techniques used on the Mary Rose Tudor warship.

The vessels were discovered by archaeologists as they excavated a section of a quarry at Must Farm near Peterborough in 2011.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...shire-22764318

The boats are being kept in cold storage at Flag Fen, where they will be sprayed with a special wax.

The two-year project will stop the ancient timbers from degrading.

The technique prevents the boats from drying out too quickly and enables them to be kept in one piece.

Previously log boats have been cut into pieces for conservation.

It is hoped the process will reveal more about the Must Farm log boats, one of which is almost 30ft (9m) long.

[Chocolatl]

Dana, have you heard of Coursera? It's a website that gives online college courses for free. I'm currently taking a class called "Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets." It started last week and has been really interesting so far -- I was thinking of linking to some of the articles, but wasn't quite sure where to put them. Thanks for this thread!

[Chocolatl]

A 2011 article from the New Yorker about Gobekli Tepe in Turkey

There are a number of unsettling things about Göbekli Tepe. It’s estimated to be eleven thousand years old—six and a half thousand years older than the Great Pyramid, five and a half thousand years older than the earliest known cuneiform texts, and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho, formerly believed to be the world’s most ancient monumental structure. The site comprises more than sixty multi-ton T-shaped limestone pillars, most of them engraved with bas-reliefs of dangerous animals: not the docile, edible bison and deer featured in Paleolithic cave paintings but ominous configurations of lions, foxes, boars, vultures, scorpions, spiders, and snakes. The site has yielded no traces of habitation—no trash pits, no water source, no houses, no hearths, no roofs, no domestic plant or animal remains—and is therefore believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers, who used it as a religious sanctuary. Comparisons of iconography from similar sites indicate that different groups congregated there from up to sixty miles away. Mysteriously, the pillars appear to have been buried, deliberately and all at once, around 8200 B.C., some thirteen hundred years after their construction.

I found it a fascinating read!

[ZenGum]

Very interesting. Even practical structures like houses and defensive works are impressive, but this is really something. It involved a huge investment of effort for ... something very intangible. Why? What motivated this apparently impractical effort? What were they thinking?

If you have time, try The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. He attempts archeo-psychology, speculating about what (and how) people were thinking 3,000 to 2,000 years ago. Not absolutely convincing, but utterly fascinating.

[Griff]

You both have pointed to interesting things. My youngest has an interest in archeology, what a cool career path that could be...

[Chocolatl]

Griff, I can't recall how old your youngest is, but here's the link to the Coursera class I'm taking, "Archaeology's Dirty Little Secrets" by Sue Alcock of Brown University.

It's free, there's no requirement to actually complete any of the assignments or quizzes, and one can spend as much or as little time with it as one likes. It's certainly academic in nature, but so far it's been really interesting. There are videos to watch and recommended readings, all online and again, for free.

[Griff]

Thanks! She's a high school junior.