[John is slowly recovering from an accident at home and is unable to help me update the news pages at present. I am unable to update them myself for June 2017 as I am travelling abroad.
Any updates will be late and we apologise to visitors for the inconvenience - Polly]
"Where Did the Polynesians Really Come From?" Ancient Origins (Australia)
"Oceania was the last region to be settled by humans and the last part of Oceania to be settled by humans was Polynesia.
Polynesians are famous for their voyages to remote islands in distant parts of the Pacific.
Using outrigger canoes, they founded a society across islands stretching in a triangle from the Hawaiian Islands to Easter Island to New Zealand, that was reasonably well connected by trade, language, culture, and religion, for being distributed over such a large area.
One major question today is where did the Polynesians originally come from?
Several theories have been proposed over the years, but one which is gaining ground is that the Polynesians originated from Taiwan, parts of Papua New Guinea, and Southeast Asia."
[Read The Full Story]
[Another well-researched and in-depth article from Ancient Origins. It's well worth reading the full article and seeing the images - Ed.]
The mound, known locally as Montegrande, spans more than two acres at its base and stands as tall as a five-story building.
When archaeologist Quirino Olivera began excavating Montegrande ("big hill") in 2010, he discovered that it was not only bigger, but also much older, than anyone had imagined.
Once the vegetation had been cleared, he found pottery from a 1,000-year span of history near the surface.
But just a few feet down, the ceramics disappeared, and Olivera began seeing evidence of architecture on an enormous scale.
He uncovered sections of a long, semicircular wall, nine feet tall and coated in beige plaster, that was reached by a staircase made of boulders and packed earth.
The depth and form of the structure and the absence of ceramics signalled that the mound dates from the late preceramic era, some 3,000 years ago
It could only have been built by an organized, complex society with hierarchies of workers and an agricultural scheme robust enough to feed them."
[Read The Full Story]
[This in-depth article by Archaeology Magazine contributing editor, Roger Atwood, is the perfect example of what most excavations worldwide are showing - the deeper you dig the more likely you are to find magalithic architecture, and many designed with astronomical significance. It's freally well worth reading the full article and seeing the images - Ed.]
"Discovery during dig at church shows ancient sacred worship" Hereford Times (England)
"An archaeologist from Ledbury has discovered that the site of an early medieval church could be the oldest known continuously-used sacred site in Britain- dating back more than 4,000 years.
Janey Green, of Baskerville Archaeology Services, Ledbury, has found evidence to suggest that the site in Shropshire has been a sacred place from at least 2,000 years before Christ until the present day.
Carbon dating of a wooden post, which was extracted from the dig, has shown it was first placed in the ground in 2033 BC – a time when the ancient Egyptians were still building pyramids.
Archaeologists expected the post to turn out to be Anglo-Saxon, so were surprised to discover it dated from the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age period instead."
[Read The Full Story]
[A realy great discovery of continuous ancient usage of the site now underneath a medieval church. It's worth a visit to read the full story - Ed.]
[John is slowly recovering from an accident at home and is unable to help me update the news pages at present. I am unable to update them myself for May 2017 as I am travelling abroad.
Any updates will be late and we apologise to visitors for the inconvenience - Polly]
People began building the ceremonial structure, called Huaca Prieta, about 7800 years ago.
But according to a new study, the true surprise lies buried deep beneath the 30-meter-tall mound: stone tools, animal bones, and plant remains left behind by some of the earliest known Americans nearly 15,000 years ago.
That makes Huaca Prieta one of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas and suggests that the region's first migrants may have moved surprisingly slowly down the coast.
The evidence of early human occupation stunned Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who led the new study.
Initially, he was interested in examining the mound itself.
But geologists on his team wanted to study the landform under the mound, so 'we just kept going down', he says.
Radiocarbon dates from charcoal place the earliest human occupation at nearly 15,000 years ago."
[Read The Full Story]
[This an excellent story written by Science's Latin America correspondent, Lizzie Wade. This report of excavations under the pyramid at Huaca Prieta in northern Peru pushes back the timeline of humans in the Americas even further, and is well worth reading in full - Ed.]
"2,000-year-old town found in Uzbekistan" Daily Sabah (Turkey)
"An excavation group consisting of Chinese and Uzbek archaeologists unearthed ancient city dating back 2,000 years in Central Asia.
As a result of two years' excavation works conducted by the Institute of Archaeology of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Institute of Archaeology of Uzbekistan, an ancient city was unearthed.
The city, as large as Monaco, is located on Ming-Tepe in Ferghana Valley.
In light of the research, it is understood that Ming Tepe was an important city bound to Dayuan Kingdom, which is known for its Fergana horses raising facilities, located on the critical area of the Silk Road."
[Read The Full Story]
[Another new city found in Central Asia! How many more are out there just waiting to be properly excavated? And will they paint a much more accurate picture of ancient history than we get in the Euro-centric version generally taught in western academia? It is well worth reading in full - Ed.]
Researchers have long wondered whether some twisted and knotted cords from the Inca Empire, which ran from 1400 to 1532, represent a kind of writing about events and people.
Many scholars suspect that these textile artifacts, known as khipus, mainly recorded decimal numbers in an accounting system.
Yet Spanish colonial documents say that some Inca khipus contained messages that runners carried to various destinations.
Now a new twist in this knotty mystery comes from two late 18th century khipus stored in a wooden box at San Juan de Collata, a Peruvian village located high in the Andes Mountains."
[Read The Full Story]
[This new anaylysis of the corded artifacts of the Inca peoples demonstrates that there are many more methods of writing than the ways we modern peoples are used to. The ingenuity of ancient peoples relating to communication continue to astoud everyone as archaeologists have to admit that their older academic frames of reference and assessment are in contstant need of review. The full story is well worth reading - Ed.]
"Unique dragon found in Siberia" The Siberian Times (Russia)
"Creature with 'a typical serpentine pose' existed more than 2,000 years ago, say scientists.
Detailed analysis of belt buckles unearthed by a Soviet tractor driver in the modern day Republic of Khakassia proves the existence of a distinct dragon on the territory of modern Russia, according to experts.
The mythical creature is seen as distinct from other dragons, notably those famous in China.
'In China of that time, which was Han era, a set image of a dragon, later one the main symbols of the national identity, did not yet exist. Yet the same period in Siberia we have a formed composition of dragon images in a typical serpentine pose', said Andrei Borodovsky, a researcher from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, part of the Siberian branch of Russian Academy of Sciences
'Although at the end of the first millennium BC the territory of South Siberia was under very strong Chinese influence, the buckles depicting the Iyussky dragon were most likely were produced locally.
They were original, and not copies. It was an independent development of the image.'
'The dragon's figure is a symbol that allows us to say that Siberia has always had a set of particular, specific features as a cultural area.' "
[Read The Full Story]
[This is really is an amazing discovery in Siberia. The story, which is well worth reading in full, is accompanied by many hi-res images of the belt buckles, other artifacts and a map - Ed.]
30,000 years back, as the Lake Mungo finds suggested?
49,000 as indicated by Giles Hamm’s discovery, published last year?
Or even further back?
A revolution in understanding is underway: of genetics, dating, and analysis of human behaviour.
The Science Show brings it all together and traces the history of the first Australians."
[Read The Full Story]
[Well done ABC Radio National! This is an incredible piece of detective work based on the researches of many people over many years. The images are good and explain the transcript of the interviews, which should be read in full to appreciate this amazing work - Ed.]
Lake spillover is inferred to have caused breaching of a rock ridge at the Dover Strait, although this hypothesis remains untested.
Here we show that opening of the Strait involved at least two major episodes of erosion.
Sub-bottom records reveal a remarkable set of sediment-infilled depressions that are deeply incised into bedrock that we interpret as giant plunge pools.
These support a model of initial erosion of the Dover Strait by lake overspill, plunge pool erosion by waterfalls and subsequent dam breaching.
Cross-cutting of these landforms by a prominent bedrock-eroded valley that is characterized by features associated with catastrophic flooding indicates final breaching of the Strait by high-magnitude flows.
These events set-up conditions for island Britain during sea-level highstands and caused large-scale re-routing of NW European drainage."
[Read The Full Story]
[Some may regard this as a bit technical, but it's the clearest picture we have so far of the events that led to the separation of Britain from continental Europe, and it's well worth reading the full paper to see the many diagrams and fuller explanations - Ed.]
"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]
