Behold the Wonderwerk cave in South Africa, yet another place on my travel bucket list and also an archaeological site giving evidence for one of the most important inventions humans ever came up with: cooking.Ashes and bone fragments from Wonderwerk have been found from a million years ago, suggesting that our distant relatives, Homo Erectus, […]
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66 million years ago, there was a Very Bad Day for nearly everyone on the planet. That’s when the asteroid responsible for ending the age of the dinosaurs crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula and destroyed about 78% of all species.This picture from Trinidad Lake State Park in Colorado shows one of the places where the
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Nine months ago (November 2020), archaeologists excavating a part of the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii found themselves in a rare Indiana Jones-esque situation. In a fancy villa to the north of the city, along this corridor, lay the burnt encasements of these two bodies.Figuring out what these two were doing in that fateful eruption
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The news of climate-deniers and people who think the COVID vaccine is a government plot can be hard to hear: how are these folks coming up with such ideas? (wait — maybe don’t answer that). The truth is, history is laden with people who have gravely misunderstood cause and effect, with sometimes horrifying consequences.Take the
Cause and Effect and Child Sacrifice? Read More »
I’ve got Troy on my mind lately, and thought I would do a post about the ancient city and the legendary war for which it is most famous. Located in modern-day Hisarlik, Turkey, the city of Troy was an actual inhabited place that got its start about 3600 BCE. Famously excavated by the German businessman
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Last on a series of posts on Victorian Egyptomania. One of the ways Victorians enjoyed themselves a good mummy was from the mummy unwrapping parties that became popular, beginning in 1821 when a man named Giovanni Belzoni did a highly publicized event near Piccadilly Circus that attracted over 2000 people. The fad took off from
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Here’s a reconstruction of the oldest European mummy, called Ötzi, named for a region where he was found in the Alps back in 1991. His body had been preserved by his glacial environment for 5,300 years, and has been extensively studied by scientists who have put together a fascinating picture of the Iceman and his
In the most remote parts of central Pennsylvania there are a string of state game lands that go by the name of “St Anthony’s Wilderness”. And on a mountain ridge, accessible only by hiking in, are the ruins of a small coal-mining community around the village known as Yellow Springs. An identifying sign along the
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What you see here is the Garden of Hercules, a very niche home discovered in the southeastern ruins of the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii. What makes it special is the fact that it had a large garden designed specifically for flower-growing, and the remains of small glass bottles, irrigation techniques, and pollen samples suggests
The Garden of Hercules for Perfume Manufacturing in Ancient Rome Read More »
These “Hero Twins” are two of the most important characters from Ancient Maya mythology, and now we can link their stories to an actual Maya practice of sacrificing boy children, especially twins, in the Classical Maya settlement of Chichén Itzá. The findings appeared this month in the journal _Nature_, co-authored by geneticist Rodrigo Barquera, which
Chichén Itzá Sacrificial Burial of Twin Boys from Hero Twin Myth Read More »
Here you see the Spider, one of the most important geoglyphs that form the Nazca Lines amid the arid coastal plain of southern Peru. The Nazca peoples constructed this and other shapes and lines between 500 BCE and 500 CE, in one of the world’s driest regions. Today the Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World
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In the second century of the Common Era, China’s Han Dynasty oversaw an unusually long period of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, military conflicts punctuated the era, and often the elite aristocratic families were involved. The Wu Family Shrines document such events, and featured prominently in one of the stone chambers there, amidst many other bas-relief
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How we treat the dead reflects much about what the living believe. In the Ancient Mediterranean, pagan cultures considered the proper burial of the deceased to be of critical importance: otherwise, the dead person’s spirit would have a restless afterlife. On the other hand, the world of the living was to be kept separate from
Death in the Mediterranean Read More »
Chariot-racing was one of the most popular sporting events in Ancient Rome. Throngs of people (up to 250,000 in Rome’s Circus Maximus) would crowd the stands, supporting their favorite teams (marked by the colors blue, green, red, and white) with fervorous shouting and cheers. The charioteers were much admired, and although some drivers could make
Take a moment to ingest the various components of this Late Roman artistic scene, because they’re really weird. This is just one small part of an enormous (36’x23′) floor mosaic discovered just last year during the COVID lockdowns on an English farm in Rutland. The discovery is quite the find: first, the enormous room
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This is the skeleton of 4926, who is the star subject of a recent excavation by Albion Archaeology in in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire, UK. You see him here, laid out as he was in his burial, a man between 25-35 years old. He was part of a small village in Late Roman Britain, and
Roman Crucifixion in Britain Read More »
It’s my tradition each year to celebrate the season with historically themed Christmas carols — and so here you go: “Baldwin, it’s cold outside!” Set to the tune of “Baby it’s cold outside,” by Frank Loesser, this cover deals with the first super bad Viking raid in Western Europe. In 793, the pagan Norsemen attacked
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The Ancient Greek art that most of us know features able-bodied people up-front: athletes with six-pack abs and fit and trim muscular physiques. But these images skew what we know to be the reality for many Ancient Greeks, and recent work by Dr. Debby Sneed aims to show that disabled people were not only commonplace,
The Bodies of Ancient Greeks Read More »
The magnificent ruins shown here are only some of the thousands of Ancient Puebloan structures found in southwestern Colorado’s Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. This particular site, found along the 6.5 mile Sand Canyon (loop) Trail, is similar to many of the region, with remarkable masonry that includes cliff dwellings, towers, public roofed
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To the northwest of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey, lie the ruins of one of the most important archaeological sites in human history: the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Only discovered in the 1990s (earlier archaeologists has thought the remains medieval), Göbekli Tepe sprawls over twenty acres
