![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Explorator
Aug. 3rd, 2008 11:56 pmAncient Greek Ship Fished from the Sea
An ancient Greek ship returned to surface Monday some 2,500 years after it sank in the Mediterranean Sea and two decades after its wreck was discovered by divers off Sicily. A crane lifted from the waters what remains of the 21-metre-long wooden vessel. The ship’s 11-metre-long keel and part of the stern, both of which were preserved as the vessel lay buried for 25 centuries under clay below the sea floor, are to be transported to the Sicilian port of Gela. The archaeologists will place the wreckage in tanks filled with protective chemicals before transferring it to a laboratory in Portsmouth, Britain, where part of the ship’s prow recovered in 2004 is stored.
The ship, manufactured using a technique involving natural-rope bindings, was a merchant vessel believed to have sunk in a storm, while sailing from Sicily, then a Greek colony, back to Greece around 500 B.C. A small part of its haul of traditional ancient Greek vases as well as two rare examples of askoi - a type of ancient Greek pottery vessel used to pour small quantities of liquids such as oil - decorated with red figures, were retrieved after divers discovered the wreck in 1988.
Workings of ancient 'computer' deciphered
An ancient astronomical calculator appears to show the four-year cycle of the early Greek competitions that inspired today's Olympic Games. Newly uncovered inscriptions on the 2,100 year-old device reveal names linked to the Olympiad cycle of games once celebrated among ancient Greek city-states.
Rock Art in the UK
Anasazi remains threatened by oil exploration
The dusty documentation of the Anasazi Indians a thousand years ago, from their pit houses and kivas to the observatories from which they charted the heavens, lies thick in the ground at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Or so archaeologists believe. Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.
Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park’s eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument’s 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.
The consequences of energy exploration for wildlife and air quality have long been contentious in unspoiled corners of the West. But now with the urgent push for even more energy, there are new worries that history and prehistory — much of it still unexplored or unknown — could be lost.
At Nine Mile Canyon in central Utah, truck exhaust on a road to the gas fields is posing a threat, environmentalists and Indian tribes say, to 2,000 years of rock art and imagery. In Montana, a coal-fired power plant has been proposed near Great Falls on one of the last wild sections of the Lewis and Clark trail. In New Mexico, a mining company has proposed reopening a uranium mine on Mount Taylor, a national forest site sacred to numerous Indian tribes.
“We’re caught in the middle between traditional culture and archaeological research and the valid existing rights of the oil and gas leaseholders,” said LouAnn Jacobson, an archaeologist by training and the manager of both the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Anasazi Heritage Center here in the four-corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico touch.
Areas like the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area have become vulnerable to exploitation.
Art's Great Disasters
Venus de Milo
The sculpture of Venus or Aphrodite stands in state in Paris's Louvre, mesmerisingly beautiful despite her broken form. She was discovered by a Greek peasant on the island of Milos in 1820, broken into two large pieces, an apple in her left hand. As soon as French naval officers recognised the historical significance of the ancient sculpture, they set about hauling the marble bulk off the island. A fight broke out as Venus was dragged across rocks to a waiting ship and both arms were broken off. The exhausted sailors refused to retrace their steps and search for the body parts, so the goddess's left arm remained cut off at the shoulder and her right at breast level.
Unique medieval astrolabe saved by the British Museum
The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant is one of only eight instruments of this type known to have survived from the Middle Ages Photo: PA
The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant, thought to date from 1388, is the only one of its kind definitely made in England.
Astrolabes are sophisticated calculation instruments that enable their users to tell the time and determine their geographical latitude using the position of the sun and stars.
They were developed by Islamic mathematicians in the early Middle Ages before being adopted by Europeans.
An ancient Greek ship returned to surface Monday some 2,500 years after it sank in the Mediterranean Sea and two decades after its wreck was discovered by divers off Sicily. A crane lifted from the waters what remains of the 21-metre-long wooden vessel. The ship’s 11-metre-long keel and part of the stern, both of which were preserved as the vessel lay buried for 25 centuries under clay below the sea floor, are to be transported to the Sicilian port of Gela. The archaeologists will place the wreckage in tanks filled with protective chemicals before transferring it to a laboratory in Portsmouth, Britain, where part of the ship’s prow recovered in 2004 is stored.
The ship, manufactured using a technique involving natural-rope bindings, was a merchant vessel believed to have sunk in a storm, while sailing from Sicily, then a Greek colony, back to Greece around 500 B.C. A small part of its haul of traditional ancient Greek vases as well as two rare examples of askoi - a type of ancient Greek pottery vessel used to pour small quantities of liquids such as oil - decorated with red figures, were retrieved after divers discovered the wreck in 1988.
Workings of ancient 'computer' deciphered
An ancient astronomical calculator appears to show the four-year cycle of the early Greek competitions that inspired today's Olympic Games. Newly uncovered inscriptions on the 2,100 year-old device reveal names linked to the Olympiad cycle of games once celebrated among ancient Greek city-states.
Anasazi remains threatened by oil exploration
The dusty documentation of the Anasazi Indians a thousand years ago, from their pit houses and kivas to the observatories from which they charted the heavens, lies thick in the ground at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Or so archaeologists believe. Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.
Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park’s eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument’s 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.
The consequences of energy exploration for wildlife and air quality have long been contentious in unspoiled corners of the West. But now with the urgent push for even more energy, there are new worries that history and prehistory — much of it still unexplored or unknown — could be lost.
At Nine Mile Canyon in central Utah, truck exhaust on a road to the gas fields is posing a threat, environmentalists and Indian tribes say, to 2,000 years of rock art and imagery. In Montana, a coal-fired power plant has been proposed near Great Falls on one of the last wild sections of the Lewis and Clark trail. In New Mexico, a mining company has proposed reopening a uranium mine on Mount Taylor, a national forest site sacred to numerous Indian tribes.
“We’re caught in the middle between traditional culture and archaeological research and the valid existing rights of the oil and gas leaseholders,” said LouAnn Jacobson, an archaeologist by training and the manager of both the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Anasazi Heritage Center here in the four-corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico touch.
Areas like the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area have become vulnerable to exploitation.
Art's Great Disasters
Venus de Milo
The sculpture of Venus or Aphrodite stands in state in Paris's Louvre, mesmerisingly beautiful despite her broken form. She was discovered by a Greek peasant on the island of Milos in 1820, broken into two large pieces, an apple in her left hand. As soon as French naval officers recognised the historical significance of the ancient sculpture, they set about hauling the marble bulk off the island. A fight broke out as Venus was dragged across rocks to a waiting ship and both arms were broken off. The exhausted sailors refused to retrace their steps and search for the body parts, so the goddess's left arm remained cut off at the shoulder and her right at breast level.
Unique medieval astrolabe saved by the British Museum
The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant is one of only eight instruments of this type known to have survived from the Middle Ages Photo: PA
The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant, thought to date from 1388, is the only one of its kind definitely made in England.
Astrolabes are sophisticated calculation instruments that enable their users to tell the time and determine their geographical latitude using the position of the sun and stars.
They were developed by Islamic mathematicians in the early Middle Ages before being adopted by Europeans.
