How to use the GlobalXplorer satellite imaging by Sarah Parchak
Today is
August 2018 News Headlines
UPDATE August 201 2019 - Unfortunately John is no better a month on from his accident and I will continue to fill in for his work whenever I can. There will not be as much news updates as usual and we apologise for any inconvenience. Please bear with us - Polly
UPDATE July 27 2019 - Unfortunately our Web Editor, John, has had a nasty fall resulting in a dislocated shoulder, and is unable to contribute to updating the news pages for the foreseeable future. I am working in Germany and cannot get cluster access so there will be few updates until I can find a work-around solution. We apologise for any inconvenience. Please bear with us - Polly
A day of archaeological digging by the Associates for Biblical Research always begins with a reading of the Bible, the very text of which they are trying to demonstrate the historical reliability.
'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life', repeated the group of twenty ideologically-driven Evangelical Christians, mostly pro-Israel Americans on the white religious right of the faith at odds with many of its strands in the Middle East.
It is barely 5am in Jerusalem, and team members are just boarding a bus heading to Tel Shiloh, an archaeological site on private Palestinian land in Area C of the occupied West Bank, which is subjected to full Israeli control.
There, they say, may lie the remains of the tabernacle - the shrine that is believed to have hosted the Ark of the Covenant, a wooden chest said to have held the ten commandments on two stone tablets."
[Congratulations to The National, and author Amnon Gutman, for bringing this story of the continuous illegal trespassing on Palestinian lands by ultra right Amercan evangelical christians who believe they can prove that Israel has a right to those lands because the bible supposedly says so.
These people's attempts to show that their 'beliefs' allow them to behave in this way are nauseating. Should they find anything that would undermine their 'beliefs' they will either ignore the find, discard the evidence or simply 'lose' it. Cherry-picking evidence on god's behalf!!!!!
It really is well worth a visit to the site to read the full story so as to better understand how archaeology is being perverted for highly suspect religious reasons - Polly & Ed.]
"Pottery related to unknown culture was found in Ecuador" EurekAlert (USA)
"Archaeologists of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), Institute of Archeology and Ethnography SB RAS (Russia), Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) (Ecuador), and Tohoku University (Japan) found shards of ceramic vessels referred to the cultural sediments of early periods of Real Alto site.
Findings date back to 4640 - 4460 BC, this period borders with Valdivia, one of the oldest pottery-featured cultures in North and South America.
During the excavations at Real Alto site (Ecuador), Russian scientists found fragments of ceramic vessels at a depth of 75 cm to 1 meter.
They belong to the insufficiently studied San Pedro complex.
Radiocarbon analysis by mass spectrometer showed the pottery dates back to 4640-4460 BC.
This period borders or coincides with the first stages of Valdivia culture, the worldwide famous ceramic figures, a kind of symbol of Ecuador, relates to."
[Another good story from EurekAlert! Ecuador no doubt has much more to be discovered in it's remote regions, and a good explanation for the Japanese Jomon culture pottery found there has yet to emerge. It's worth a visit to the site to read the full story - Polly.]
After re-analyzing ceramic pots that earlier researchers believed were used to cook food, archaeologist Lisa-Marie Shillito concluded that many of those pots may have been used to collect fat that dripped off pigs as they were spit-roasted.
The grease would have been stored as lard or tallow and used to lubricate the sleds most archaeologists believe were used to move the stones.
'Until now, there has been a general assumption that the traces of animal fat absorbed by these pieces of pottery were related to the cooking and consumption of food, and this steered initial interpretations in that direction', Shillito said in a statement.
'But there may have been other things going on as well, and these residues could be tantalizing evidence of the greased sled theory.'"
[Another good story from Live Science! This unique explanation as to how the builders may have moved the massive megaliths is worthy of serious consideration. It's worth a visit to the site to read the full story - Polly.]
"The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project" Cardiff/Athens Universites (Cymru/Greece)
[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.
The rest of the artifacts, along with the shape of the boat, suggested a date around 2000 years ago, which made the find one of the most anomalous that had ever been recovered from the Greek seas. It became known as The Antikythera Mechanism.
In 2006 the journal "Nature" published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions and various cycles of the Moon - as seen from the Earth: - Ed]
"The 2300 BC Event takes a new look at an old puzzle: what happened at this date to cause the various advanced societies on the Earth to simultaneously collapse?
Civilizations in Anatolia and Greece, through Egypt and the Middle East, and eastward to India and Central Asia were at their height. The collapse of these civilizations due to earthquakes and climatic changes has been mirrored by similar interruptions on all continents, in the Arctic, and extending to the Pacific.
The discontinuities have long puzzled archaeologists and historians. New religions and accompanying mythologies appeared at this time in all cultural regions describing bombardment and flooding from the skies.
Strangely, the dominant aspect of the mythologies, however, is the observation and worship of a ring appearing to surround the Earth, oriented to the two Ursa (Bear) constellations."
"The Northern/Southern Taurid meteoroid stream is identified as the specific meteoroid stream that the Earth encountered at 2300 BC.
The Earth's encounter with a dense cluster of large objects would produce atmospheric phenomena very different from the pleasant and interesting night displays of meteor trails that are within our own experience.
The rain of objects would have generated extraordinary visual and auditory effects combined with ground vibrations; and under extreme conditions would bring about severe surface destruction and loss of life.
The overall event was associated by the people with powerful deities and formed the basis for major religions. The mythologies and traditions are, in large part, the residues of those religions."
"In IMHOTEP THE AFRICAN, Egyptologist, Robert Bauval, and astrophysicist, Thomas Brophy, uncover the mystery of Imhotep, ancient Egyptian superstar, pharaonic Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo and Newton all rolled into one.
Based on their research at the Step Pyramid Complex at Saqqara, Bauval and Brophy delve into observational astronomy to 'decode' the alignments and other design features of the Step Pyramid Complex, to uncover the true origins and genius of Imhotep."
