Archaeology

SB: Richard Leakey, your son, was scheduled to speak at Yale in 2003 on "Wildlife Wars." The announcement mentioned that he and his team, The Hominid Gang, had found more than 200 fossils since Richard took part in his first expedition in 1967. I must apologize for my first name basis here. There are several Leakey names that I would like to bring up.

Leakey: You are a darling! First, my interview occurs on Halloween. Second, you start with Richard, my pride and joy. He is a good boy. He found the "Turkana Boy" in 1984 near Kenya's Lake Turkana -- a complete skeleton. One of the rare finds, you know.

Test Feed.

The buried town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk is one of the most important, though least understood, Roman sites in Britain.

Caistor lies in the former territory of the Iceni, the tribe of Boudica Celts who famously rebelled against Roman rule in AD 60/61.

The survey revealed numerous circular features that apparently predate the Roman town.  These are probably of prehistoric date, and suggest that Caistor was the site of a large settlement before the Roman town was built. This had always been suspected because of numerous chance finds of late Iron Age coins and metalwork, but until the survey was carried out there had never been any evidence of buildings.

There's been a surprising archaeological discovery at Tel Dor in Israel, a place that was only on the periphery of the Hellenistic world; a gemstone engraved with a portrait of Alexander the Great.

Alexander was probably the first Greek to commission artists to depict his image – as part of a personality cult that was transformed into a propaganda tool. Rulers and dictators have implemented this form of propaganda ever since.   The excavations were done by an archaeological team directed by Dr. Ayelet Gilboa of the University of Haifa and Dr. Ilan Sharon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Michael Cosmopoulos was raised in Athens but has been in St. Louis since 2001.  Yet his heart and his science never left Greece.   Since 1999, he has been working at a site in Pylos and he recently came across a real-life palace dating back to the time of the Trojan War.

The Trojan War is just a story, of course (though if you don't think so, which figure from Homer's historical work do you think I am?)(1) but historians debate what kernels of truth may be in there.
 

A group of archaeologists and paleobiologists say they have discovered flax fibers in a cave in the Republic of Georgia that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to have been used by humans.

The flax, which would have been collected from the wild and not farmed, could have been used to make linen and thread, they say. The cloth and thread could then have been used to fashion garments for warmth, sew leather pieces, make cloths, or tie together packs that might have aided the mobility of our ancient ancestors from one camp to another.

The Bar-Kokhba revolt of the Jews against the Romans was the third and last, establishing a new Jewish state for two years before the Romans crushed it.   Along with a massacre in approximately 136 AD, the Romans renamed the region Syria Palaestina out of spite, which has caused no end to problems since (and demonstrates 'colonialism' is only bad when it's not being used in your favor) and they banned religious practices.

This link http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/christopherhowse/100002162/stone-ag... shows an interesting piece of stone age ware from Northern Spain that has been investigated by the University of Zaragoza.  Even to my beady Hedgehog eyes, the pattern labelled "relief design" looks remarkably like a fish.

But look at the article and comments.  Please tell me, O Human Hank, why are the columnists and readers of such a conservative newspaper so "snotty" about science?   To save youall the bother of registering, the Hedgehog would be glad to receive your comments and feed them back to the author.

Unless the writing is completely legible and usually modern, even advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems give rise to transcription problems and provide results with many errors that need to be edited afterwards, a time-consuming process.

The Computational Perception and Learning Research Group in the Computer Languages and Systems Department at the Universitat Jaume I, in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, have developed a new assisted system for the transcription of written text called 'State',  a transcription system that integrates a series of tools with which images can be processed in order to remove noise and clean up the original image.

Archaeologists have used stone tools to answer many questions about human ancestors in both the distant and near past and now they are analyzing the origin of obsidian flakes to better understand how people settled and interacted in the inhospitable Kuril Islands.

Using X-ray fluorescence spectrometers, archaeologists from the University of Washington and the Smithsonian Institution have found the origin of 131 flakes of obsidian, a volcanic glass. These small flakes were discarded after stone tools were made from obsidian and were found at 18 sites on eight islands in the Kurils. The flakes were found with other artifacts that were dated over a time period spanning about 1,750 years, from 2500 to 750 years before the present.