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Ancient book of Buddhism chantings found in Korean temple

September 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Seoul, September 16 (ANI): Archaeologists have uncovered an ancient Chinese book of Buddhism chantings in a Korean temple.

According to a report in Korea Times, the Hangeul copy of an ancient Chinese book, which contains the notes of the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910) scholar Kim Si-seup, was discovered at Baekryunam, Haein Temple.

The book was originally written by a Buddhist master from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and dates back to the 16th century.

“We discovered the ‘shiphyeondam eonhaebon’ while we were examining the library of Ven. Seong Cheol (1912-1993) at Baekryunam, Haein Temple, in April this year,” Ven. Won Taek said at a press conference at the Jogye Order, northern Seoul.

“It’s a rare book ? perhaps even the only copy ? that is not included in the Natural Treasures list nor on the lists of national libraries and university libraries,” he said.

An eonhae copy, or eonhaebon, is a book or writing that contains the literal translation of a sentence in Chinese to Hangeul, or Korean.

It is different from the normal translation books as it features a word-for-word translation, and is far removed from the Hangeul sentences used today.

‘Shiphyeondam’ refers to the 10 songs and poems made to praise Buddha’s teachings, written by Tang Dynasty Buddhist master Dongan Sangchal of the Jodong Order of Zen Buddhism, a sect of the religion in China.

The songs are comprised of seven Chinese characters and contain the traditions and the practices of the Jodong Order.

Ven. Won Taek explained that the discovery was meaningful as the book was from the 16th century. Most of the eonhaebons known today are from the 15th century.

“We found many precious ancient books and eonhaebons while examining the library and we will apply these artifacts as Natural Treasures after examining the value of them. We will also make photo prints of the eonhaebons for ancient hangeul and writing experts to use them as research material,” he said. (ANI)

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Ancient oceans yield clues to the origins of animal life on Earth

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 10 (ANI): Analysis of a rock type found only in the world’s oldest oceans has shed new light on how large animals first got a foothold on the Earth.

By analysing the isotopes of chromium in iron-rich sediments formed in the ancient oceans, a scientific team, led by Professor Robert Frei at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has found that a rise in atmospheric oxygen levels 580 million years ago was closely followed by the evolution of animal life.

The data offers new insight into how animal life – and ultimately humans – first came to roam the planet.

“Because animals evolved in the sea, most previous research has focussed on oceanic oxygen levels,” explained Newcastle University’s Dr Simon Poulton, one of the authors of the research paper.

“Our research confirms for the first time that a rise in atmospheric oxygen was the driving force for oxygenation of the oceans 580 million years ago, and that this was the catalyst for the evolution of large complex animals,” he added.

Distinctive chromium isotope signals occur when continental rocks are altered and weathered as a result of oxygen levels rising in the atmosphere.

The chromium released by this weathering is then washed into the seas and deposited in the deepest oceans – trapped in iron-rich rocks on the sea bed.

Using this new data, the research team has not only been able to establish the trigger for the evolution of animals, but have also demonstrated that oxygen began to pulse into the atmosphere earlier than previously thought.

“Oxygen levels actually began to rise 2.8 billion years ago,” explained Dr Poulton.

“But, instead of this rise being steady and gradual over time, what we saw in our data was a very unstable situation with short-lived episodes of free oxygen in the atmosphere early in Earth’s history, followed by plummeting levels around 2 billion years ago,” he said.

“It was not until a second rise in atmospheric oxygen 580 million years ago that larger complex animals were able to get a foothold on the Earth,” he added. (ANI)

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Ancient Egyptian temples followed astronomy to set their calendars

September 10, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, September 9 (ANI): A new study has indicated that ancient Egyptian temples were aligned so precisely with astronomical events that people could set their political, economic and religious calendars by them.

According to a report in New Scientist, the study was of 650 temples, some dating back to 3000 BC.

For example, New Year coincided with the moment that the winter-solstice sun hit the central sanctuary of the Karnak temple in present-day Luxor, according to archaeological astronomer Juan Belmonte of the Canaries Astrophysical Institute in Tenerife, Spain.

Hieroglyphs on temple walls have hinted at the use of astronomy in temple architecture, including depictions of the “stretching of the cord” ceremony in which the pharaoh marked out the alignment for the temple with string.

But there had been little evidence to support the drawings.

Belmonte and Mosalam Shaltout of the Helwan Observatory in Cairo found that the temples are all aligned according to an astronomically significant event, such as a solstice or equinox, or the rising of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

“Somebody would have had to go to the prospective site during a solar, stellar or lunar event – as we did – to mark out the position that the temple axis should take,” Belmonte said.

“For the most important temples, this may well have been the pharaoh, as the temple drawings show,” he added. (ANI)

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Ancient mystery of red hats on giant Easter Island statues solved

September 7, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, September 7 (ANI): A team of archaeologists has solved the ancient mystery of why the odd-looking statues on the Easter Island statues wear red hats.

Up to one thousand years ago, the islanders started putting giant red hats on the statues.

According to a report by BBC News, the research team, from the University of Manchester and University College London, believes that the hats were rolled down from an ancient volcano.

Dr Colin Richards and Dr Sue Hamilton are the first British archaeologists to work on the island since 1914. They pieced together a series of clues to discover how the statues got their red hats.

An axe, a road, and an ancient volcano led to their findings.

“We know the hats were rolled along the road made from a cement of compressed red scoria dust,” Dr Richards said.

Each hat, weighing several tonnes, was carved from volcanic rock. They were placed on the heads of the famous statues all around the coast of the island.

Precisely how and why the hats were attached is unknown.

An axe was found in pristine condition next to the hats. The scientists think it might be an ancient offering.

According to Dr Richards, “These hats run all the way down the side of the volcano into the valley. We can see they were carefully placed. The closer you get to the volcano, the greater the number.”

“It’s like a church; you can’t just walk straight to the altar,” he added.

“The Polynesians saw the landscape as a living thing, and after they carved the rock, the spirits entered the statues,” he said.

Dr Richards and Dr Hamilton will be working on the island over the next five years.

“We will look to date the earliest statues. Potentially this could rewrite Polynesian history, Dr Richards added. (ANI)

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Ancient Indus Valley script communicated language, determines computer modeling

September 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 2 (ANI): A team of mathematicians and scientists has rejected claims that the Indus Valley people were functionally illiterate, by employing computer modeling to prove that the Harappan script communicated language.

In 2004, perhaps out of befuddlement and frustration, a group of scholars declared that the ancient Indus Valley script marked only rudimentary pictograms and that the people during the Harappan period were functionally illiterate.

According to a report in the TIME, that hypothesis, which caused a minor uproar in the world of Indus Valley researchers, was recently rejected by a team of mathematicians and computer scientists assembled from institutions in the US and India.

They employed computer modeling to prove that the Harappan script communicated language, and has reinvigorated attempts to crack what is one of the lingering puzzles of ancient history.

The group examined hundreds of Harappan texts and tested their structure against other known languages using a computer program.

Every language, the scientists suggest, possesses what is known as “conditional entropy”: the degree of randomness in a given sequence.

In English, for example, the letter t can be found preceding a large variety of other letters, but instances of tx and tz are far more infrequent than th and ta.

“A written language comes about through this mix of built-in rules and flexible variables,” said Mayank Vahia, an astrophysicist at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai who worked on the study.

Quantifying this principle through computer probability tests, the scientists determined that the Harappan script had a similar measure of conditional entropy to other writing systems, including English, Sanskrit and Sumerian.

If it mathematically looked and acted like writing, they concluded, then surely it is writing.

But this is just a first step. Vahia and his colleagues hope to piece together a solid grammar from the sea of impenetrable Indus signs.

Their August research paper charted the likelihood of certain characters appearing in parts of a text – for example, a fish sign appeared most frequently in the middle of a sequence and a U-shaped jar sign toward the end.

Bit by bit, the structure of the script is coming into view.

“We want to find the bedrock against which all further interpretation of the language should be checked,” said Vahia.

Down the road, he imagines he could write in “flawless Harappan” – even though he may have no idea what the assembled sequences would mean. (ANI)

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Prime Minister’s daughter releases her book on history

August 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Kolkata, Aug 30 (ANI): Upinder Singh, daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and a professor of history in the Delhi University, released her book on Indian history in Kolkata.ddressing the gathering, Upinder Singh attributed her success to the support she received from her family.

“The fact that he (Manmohan Singh) has an academic background and the academics are valued in our family. Both had certainly made a difference to a kind of person I am today,” she said.

She added that her book would help the reader to visualize and understand the rich and varied remains of the Indian subcontinent’s ancient past.

Upinder’s new book ‘A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India from Stone Age to the 12th Century’ is a comprehensive book meant for students and general readers.

The book had taken five years for her to complete and offers an exhaustive overview of the subject. The book has over 350 photographs, maps, drawings and sketches. (ANI)

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Ancient Indus Valley script might soon be decoded by computer program

August 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Sydney, August 29 (ANI): A recent research has determined that an ancient, indecipherable text from the Indus Valley civilization is being decoded with the help of a computer program.

According to a report by ABC News, though it has yet to decrypt this mysterious language, the program may help to decipher other ancient texts whose meanings have been long since forgotten.

“The computer program operates on sequences of symbols, so it can be used to learn a statistical model of any set of unknown or known texts,” said Rajesh Rao, University of Washington professor of computer science and co-author of the research paper.

“In fact, such statistical models have been used to analyze a wide variety of sequences ranging from DNA and speech to economic data,” he added.

Roughly 5,000 seals, tablets and amulets, filled with about 500 different symbols, were created somewhere between 2600 and 1900 B.C. by a people living in the Indus River Valley.

Despite numerous attempts to decipher the symbols, a full translation has long eluded scientists.

In fact, one recent paper even cast doubt on whether the Indus Valley script was even a written text at all, but rather political or religious symbols.

To start the search for what meaning the text might hold, American and Indian scientists input the symbols into a computer program and ran a statistical analysis of the symbols and where they appear in the texts.

With that information, the program can do many things including creating new, hypothetical Indus Valley texts, fill in missing symbols in existing texts, and tell the scientist if a particular text has been generated by their computer model.

“We used the latter to show that the Indus texts that have been discovered in West Asia are statistically very different from the texts found in the Indus Valley, suggesting that the Indus people used their script to represent different content or language when living in a foreign land,” said Rao.

For now, however, the Indus Valley script, along with many other ancient texts, remains indecipherable, but scientists are hopeful that computers will eventually decode the symbols on them.

“I am however optimistic that given a few more years, we may be able to at least narrow down the language family of the script by using computer analysis to gain an in-depth understanding of the underlying grammar,” said Rao. (ANI)

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Cellphones may soon make alarm clocks history

August 26, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Aug 26 (ANI): Time is running out for the traditional alarm clock, thanks to the scientific miracle called mobile phone.

According to a UK poll of nearly 1,500 people, the timepiece that charts its origins back to Ancient China, is on its way to disappear from people’s bedside cabinets.

The study, carried out by Rightmobilephone.co.uk, found that, of those polled 82 per cent owned a mobile phone, with over half of them using it as an alarm clock, reports The Telegraph.

Robert Egan, a fellow of the British Horological Institute, has witnessed the slide in their popularity.

“It is a trend that we are seeing, people are even using mobiles instead of wrist watches now.

“It’s just another sign of modern technology taking over from mechanical things.

“I think in terms of travelling mobile phones are going to be the thing, these are changing times,” he said.

One in five British people used handsets for the Internet, organising their week, taking photos or films and waking up in the morning, the study found.

Neil McHugh, Co-managing director, said: “Phones have evolved from simple communication handsets to now provide us with a wealth of information on the go and schedule our social occasions.

“The advances in mobile technology may in the near future threaten such traditional stand alone devices such as cameras, music players and alarm clocks.” (ANI)

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Ancient Irish skeletons could help solve mystery of rare genetic bone disease

August 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Dublin, August 25 (ANI): Two ancient skeletons with a rare genetic bone disease unearthed from a medieval Irish graveyard may hold key insights for medical experts in solving the mysterious ailment.

The two skeletons – one around 800-years-old and the other 1,100-years-old – dug up along with the remains of more than 1,000 men, women and children from the Ballyhanna graveyard site at Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, have attracted the attention of international medical researchers.

There have only been 16 cases of the hereditary bone growth disorder, now known as multiple osteochondromas, identified in ancient remains worldwide.

Dr Eileen Murphy, an archaeology lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, believes that the discovery of the remains – afflicted by massive bone growths – could help modern-day clinicians glean more information about that unusual debilitating condition.

According to Dr Murphy, the two cases could “help inform clinicians” in understanding the disease.

“I think it is good for clinicians to look at how diseases change and the way they turn up in the body over time. Some of the Jericho cases (dating from the Middle Bronze Age) are very old and can show if it has progressed in any way or mutated,” said Dr Murphy, who is writing a paper on the two cases.

A sample of the 800-year-old remains from Skeleton 331 known as ‘Ballyhanna Man’ was sent to a genetics unit in Italy for further examination.

“We took a sample of the bone to send off to genetics units but the DNA in the bone was too degraded,” Dr Murphy explained.

However, the research team holds hopes that in the future, a specialized laboratory may be able to extract DNA of sufficient quality for analysis to provide clues as to the evolution of the disease, which is estimated to affect one in 50,000 people.

Researchers from the Institute of Technology in Sligo and Queen’s University Belfast are collaborating on the Ballyhanna project.

The 800-year-old remains of the worst-affected man, who died aged between 25 to 35 years old, showed he would have been physically disabled due to massive bony projections.

It is likely that he would have suffered from pain and have been recognized by others as having a physically debilitating condition from a young age.

The remains of the other man, who died a few hundred years earlier aged around 35-50 years, had less prominent growths.

In both cases, they were interred in the community graveyard, suggesting they were not shunned and treated as equals. (ANI)

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Pharaohs’ tombs in Egypt may disappear in 150yrs, warns head of antiquities

August 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, August 19 (ANI): Egypt’s head of antiquities Zahi Hawass has warned that the tombs of the pharaohs in Valley of the Kings may disappear within 150 to 500 years if they remain open to tourists.

The Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, where Ancient Egypt’s royalty was mummified, is home to the tombs of legendary pharaohs such as the boy king Tutenkhamun and Queen Nefertiti.

Hawass said that humidity and fungus were eating into the walls of the royal tombs in the huge necropolis on the west bank of the Nile across from Luxor.

Pointing out that several thousand tourists visit the place every day, he said that poor ventilation and the breath of the hordes of visitors were causing damage to the carvings and painted decorations inside the tombs.

He said so while on a tour of the royal necropolis with journalists on Monday. e also revealed that the authorities had decided to close some tombs to tourists, and replace them with replicas, including those of Tutenkhamun, Nefertiti and Seti I.

According to reports, the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities have already taken a series of measures to protect the tombs, including setting up new ventilation systems and restricting the number of visitors.

“The tombs which are open to visitors are facing severe damage to both colours and the engravings,” the Telegraph quoted Hawass as saying.

“The levels of humidity and fungus are increasing because of the breath of visitors and this means that the tombs could disappear between 150 and 500 years,” he added. (ANI)

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Comets, not asteroids, scarred Moon’s face about 4 billion years ago

July 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, July 28 (ANI): A new study of ancient rocks in Greenland has suggested that icy comets – not rocky asteroids – launched a dramatic assault on the Earth and moon around 3.85 billion years ago, thus causing the lunar surface to become scarred.

“We can see craters on the moon’s surface with the naked eye, but nobody actually knew what caused them – was it rocks, was it iron, was it ice?” Uffe Grae Jorgensen, an astronomer at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, told New Scientist.

“It’s exciting to find signs that it was actually ice,” he said.

Evidence suggests that the Earth and moon had both formed around 4.5 billion years ago.

But, almost all the craters on the moon date to a later period, the “Late Heavy Bombardment” 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago, when around 100 million billion tonnes of rock or ice crashed onto the lunar surface.

To find out whether asteroids or comets were the main culprits for the bombardment, Jorgensen decided to measure levels of the element iridium in ancient terrestrial rocks.

Iridium is rare on the Earth’s surface because almost all of it bound to iron and sank into the Earth’s core soon after the planet had formed. But iridium is relatively common in comets and meteorites.

His team calculated the amount of iridium that asteroids would leave on the Earth and moon compared to comets.

Because comets have more volatile elements and higher impact speeds due to their more elongated orbits around the sun, they would create giant plumes on impact, allowing more iridium to escape into space than during asteroid impacts.

The team predicted that asteroid bombardment would leave iridium levels of 18,000 and 10,000 parts per trillion in rocks on the Earth and moon respectively, while the same figures for comet bombardment would be about 130 and 10.

Ancient moon rocks returned by NASA’s Apollo missions have already confirmed that the lunar iridium levels are 10 parts per trillion or less.

To find out the terrestrial value, Jorgensen’s team sampled some of the world’s oldest rocks from Greenland, aged 3.8 billion years, and asked a Japanese laboratory to assess their iridium levels more accurately than ever before.

They contained iridium levels of 150 parts per trillion, which strongly suggests comets, rather than asteroids, caused the violent bombardment. (ANI)

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Ancient granaries preceded Agricultural Revolution

June 23, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 23 (ANI): A new study has determined that it apparently took a long time to get the Agricultural Revolution off the ground, with discoveries at a Jordan site indicating that ancient granaries, more than 11,000 years old, preceded the advent of modern agriculture.

Excavations at Dhra’ near the Dead Sea in Jordan have uncovered remnants of four sophisticated granaries built between 11,300 and 11,175 years ago, about a millennium before domesticated plants were known to have been cultivated there.

Radiocarbon measurements from charred wood indicate that each structure was used to store wild plants for no more than 50 years, the first beginning around 11,300 years ago and the second starting shortly after abandonment of the first.

The excavations were carried out by archaeologists Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame and Bill Finlayson of the Council for British Research in the Levant in Amman, Jordan.

Microscopic pieces of silica from barley husks were identified in one structure.

Though intact cereal grains have yet to be found, the granaries were situated between oval-shaped buildings where the researchers found stone tools for grinding wild plants.

Discoveries at Dhra’ represent the oldest known evidence for systematic storage of wild grains, according to the researchers.

A nearby site dating to at least 12,800 years ago contains pits that may have held wild plants, but no food remains have been found there.

Ancient residents of Dhra’ and several nearby settlements sowed wild cereals in fields and stored surplus food in granaries, making it possible to establish permanent communities before farming of domesticated plants began, Kuijt and Finlayson propose.

“The most important implication of our findings is that fundamental social changes occurred before plant domestication, including the establishment of fairly permanent settlements, with communal labor and storage, based on cultivated wild plants,” Kuijt said.

Researchers now generally accept that people in the Middle East and Asia must have cultivated wild plants for between 1,000 and 2,000 years, with annual harvests in the fall, before domesticated species appeared, remarked Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef.

“The discovery in Dhra’ provides us with one of the earliest well-built examples of a food-storage structure from before plants were domesticated,” Bar-Yosef said.

Storage structures there support the argument that the sowing of wild plants beginning as early as 14,000 to 15,000 years ago led to agriculture, according to archaeologist Mordechai Kislev of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. (ANI)

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Ancient Mars lake may have held as much water as Lake Champlain in US

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 20 (ANI): Scientists have found evidence of the remnants of an ancient lake nestled in a valley near the Martian equator, which may have held as much water as Lake Champlain.

According to a report in Disocvery News, the evidence was found by Gaetano di Achille and a team of researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US, in the form of an ancient shoreline ringing Shalbatana Vallis, a gash in Mars’ surface just east of the massive volcanic province, Tharsis Rise.

Though dry and frigid now, the traces it left behind hint at a water body younger than any other on the planet, and its sediments are a prime target for finding fossilized alien life.

When Mars coalesced billions of years ago it was much warmer, and probably wet. Features that appear to be eroded river deltas more than 3.7 billion years old dot parts of the planet’s surface.

Researchers have speculated they are evidence of lakes – and primitive life may have once existed on the surface.

Now, Gaetano’s team of researchers estimated from powerful images obtained using the powerful High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), that the ancient lake was 450 meters (1,476 feet) deep and nearly identical in volume to Lake Champlain in Vermont.

Even more intriguingly, it dried up around 3.4 billion years ago – 300 million years after the Red Planet’s “warm and wet” phase is thought to have ended.

Its deltas appear rich in fine-grained sediments, a sign that they have been relatively untouched by erosion.

“Deltas are high priority targets for exploration because they imply copious and long-lived water,” team member Brian Hynek of the University of Colorado in Boulder told Discovery News. “And the sedimentation process is very effective at burying and preserving organic material,” he said.

The lake is a tempting place to look for fossilized alien life forms.

“Life wouldn’t have arisen in this lake, but lakes on Earth provide many habitats for countless organisms,” said Patrick McGovern of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

“This lake could have helped sustain and proliferate life on Mars, if it ever arose,” he added. (ANI)

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Ancient humans’ teeth show they were predominately right-handed

May 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, May 24 (ANI): Studying the teeth of an ancestor of Neanderthals, known as Homo heidelbergensis, a team of Spanish researchers have come to the conclusion that “lefties” have been coping with a right-handed world for more than half a million years.

Marina Mosquera, a paleoanthropologist at Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, says that the study seems to suggest that the ancient humans were predominately right-handed.

“Finding that a hominin species as old as Homo heidelbergensis is already right-handed helps to trace back the chain of modernity concerning hand laterality,” New Scientist magazine quoted her as saying.

She says that the findings of her team’s study attain significance because determining when right-handedness first evolved may shed light on traits linked to lateralised brains, such as language and technology.

The researcher surmises that ancient humans probably used their teeth like a third hand, clenching onto meat and other objects to cut them with stone tools.

In the process, she adds, ancient humans might have grazed their incisors, creating diagonal marks.

Mosquera says that to ensure the safety of their noses, ancient humans probably moved their blade in a downward motion, causing right-handers to make tooth marks in one direction, left-handers in another.

She and her colleagues confirmed this bias by having some of their left and right-handed assistants to simulate the process while wearing mouth guards.

The research team later analysed 592 cut marks on 163 teeth found at Sima de los Huesos cave in northern Spain, which has produced a trove of Homo heidelbergensis remains.

Mosquera revealed that the vast majority of the marks looked to be made by right-handers.

She further revealed that 15 of the 19 individuals, to whom the teeth belonged, seemed to be right-handed.

She said that four individuals’ teeth contained mostly vertical marks, and thus could not be interpreted.

A research article on her team’s findings has been published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. (ANI)

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Ancient Mexicans used to smoke pipes and drink tequila

May 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 14 (ANI): Archaeologists have discovered an island for ancient elites in central Mexico, which has ruins where some artifacts have been found that indicate that the inhabitants used to smoke pipes and drink alcoholic drinks, such as tequila, from A.D. 1400 to 1520.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the island features ruins of a treasury and a small pyramid that may have been used for rituals.

The island, called Apupato, belonged to the powerful Tarascan Empire, which dominated much of western Mexico from A.D. 1400 to 1520, before the European conquest of the region.

The Purepecha people-named Tarascan by the Spanish-were formidable enemies with their neighbors, the Aztec.

From their powerful capital city and religious center Tzintzuntzan, the Tarascans successfully thwarted every attack by the Aztec.

Tarascan people valued such products as honey, cotton, feathers, and salt, and they often expanded into neighboring lands in search of these goods.

Fisher and colleagues found a square structure with a formal entrance that is believed to have been an imperial treasury.

Adjacent to the treasury is a small pyramid, which has large, open rooms that would have been suitable for ritual activity.

Pipe fragments were also found near the treasury. The pipe discoveries may bear out ritual descriptions on a previously found ancient Spanish scroll.

The scroll shows people smoking pipes and drinking pulque-a drink made of agave, a crucial crop used for alcoholic drinks, such as tequila, and syrup, according to Fisher.

The scroll also describes ritual treasury caches dedicated to specific gods.

“Toward the end of the island’s Tarascan occupation, the area was a “ritual center” where people of elite status lived and worked,” said Fisher.

The team identified a colonial-era chapel from the early 1500s, built in the first 20 years of the Spanish conquest.

“Evidence of crop cultivation also suggests that humans continuously occupied the site for 2,000 years,” Fisher said.

The entire island was covered in agricultural terraces, possibly to grow agave.

People created the terraces by digging sections of land about 6.6 feet (2 meters) wide, with earthen walls and a ditch on either side. (ANI)

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Ancient henna wooing Hollywood celebrities

May 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 2 (ANI): Henna, which has been playing a vital role in Hindu weddings since ancient times, is becoming popular with Hollywood and other celebrities.

Also known as mehndi, it is turning into an in-thing with celebrities as a trendy alternative to traditional tattoos. Although the final result is similar to tattoo, but the mehndi experience is delightful and painless, and the images are temporary, according to acclaimed Hindu statesman Rajan Zed.

Starting with actress Demi Moore and singer Gwen Stefani, many celebrities have been seen sporting this body art, including entertainer Madonna; actresses Drew Barrymore, Daryl Hannah, Angela Bassett, Laura Dern, Kathleen Robertson, Mira Sorvino, Naomi Campbell, Trudie Styler, Nicole Eggert, Justine Bateman, Yasmine Bleeth, Liv Tyler, and Barbara Hershey; musicians The Artist Formerly Known as Prince and Sting; singers Mayte Garcia and Erykah Badu; actors Elijah Wood and Laurence Fishburne; boxers Kassim Ouma, Michael Katsidis, and Bernard Hopkins; model Nell McAndrew.

Associated with joy, celebration, festivals, and weddings, it has a recent renaissance in Hollywood.

Some popular magazines and CD covers had been decorated with henna art, besides it being seen in some Hollywood movies.

Many henna themed parties involving celebrities, including birthdays, baby showers, bridal showers, nightclub events, are sometimes held in Hollywood.

Henna has reportedly been used for body art and hair dye since Bronze Age.

It finds references in India’s court records dating back to around 400 CE, in Rome during Roman Empire, in Spain during Convivienca, in medical texts of Ebers Papyrus, in Syria and Egypt in 14th century CE.

Henna as a ceremonial art form is said to have originated in ancient India. It can last anywhere from few days to few months depending on the type of the paste.

Mehndi plays a vital role in Hindu wedding and practically no marriage is considered complete without it. During earlier times, some bridal mehndi processes took four to five days to complete. It is also applied during various Hindu fasts like Karvachauth.

Rajan Zed, who is president of Universal Society of Hinduism, urged the henna loving celebrities to explore some rich philosophical thought of Hinduism, which is oldest religion of the world with moksha (liberation) as ultimate goal. (ANI)

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Ancient medieval buildings found beneath Cathedral Square in Britain

May 2, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, April 29 (ANI): Archaeologists excavating beneath Cathedral Square in Peterborough, UK, have found the remains of ancient medieval buildings.

Up to six archaeologists a day have been working on the site for several weeks in preparation for the main square improvement works, which are being delivered by Opportunity Peterborough and Peterborough City Council.

One of the buildings, which probably stood until the 17th Century, may be part of the old Butter Cross – a building in the market place where butter, eggs and meat were sold.

According to city archaeologist Ben Robinson, “The results so far are outstanding. We expected to find archaeological remains in Cathedral Square, but the range and quality of finds here is superb.”

“The archaeological team is tracing the previously unrecorded history of Peterborough’s ancient market place – literally peeling back the centuries to expose the surfaces and structures that would have been familiar to medieval citizens,” he said.

Beneath the modern pavement is a series of pitched limestone surfaces that were the market place, streets and gutters of earlier times.

Pieces of pottery, leather off-cuts, building materials, part of a bronze cauldron and animal remains dating back hundreds of years have also been uncovered.

“It’s not often we get a chance to dig holes in the middle of town. Our finds are significant in the development of Peterborough because there have been very few excavations in the historic core. We are carefully excavating and recording the remains that will be affected by the development,” said senior project officer Adam Yates.

Construction work in the Cathedral Square area is still aiming to be complete by Christmas while work to create the new square will continue until Easter 2010.

According to Steve Bowyer, director of growth at Opportunity Peterborough, “The project to improve Cathedral Square is a crucial investment for revitalising the city centre and taking it forward to a brighter future.”

“The archaeology we have found has provided a great insight into the city’s past that we would not have had without this project. Wherever possible we will adjust designs to ensure that the archaeology is protected as we deliver the scheme,” he said. (ANI)

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Ancient Mayans used rare clay to make blue pigment

April 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 21 (ANI): In a new research, scientists have determined that the ancient Maya civilization used a rare type of clay called “palygorskite” to produce Maya blue, a unique bright blue to greenish-blue pigment.

As part of the research, the Spanish research team defined the features of palygorskite clay on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

These findings will make it possible to ascertain the origin of the materials used to produce this pigment, which survives both time and chemical and environmental elements.

The team traced the route followed by the Maya to obtain palygorskite clay, one of the basic ingredients of Maya Blue.

“Our main objective was to determine whether the Maya obtained this clay from one place in particular,” said co-author of the study Manuel Sanchez del Rio, a physicist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble (France).

Palygorskite clay has been used in Mesoamerica since ancient times.

Numerous data suggest the Maya were aware of its properties and, what is more, this clay was closely related to socio-cultural aspects of the Mayan culture.

“Present day native communities on the Yucatan Peninsula are familiar with and use palygorskite clay for a variety of purposes, ranging from making candles on All Saints’ Day and household and artistic pottery to remedies for mumps, stomach and pregnancy pains and dysentery,” said Sanchez del Rio.

However, palygorskite was mostly used to make the Maya blue pigment, which is produced by mixing indigo, an organic dye obtained from the plant of the same name, with a base of palygorskite clay.

The resulting compound is extraordinarily resistant to chemical and environmental elements.

The researchers found samples of high-purity palygorskite clay in several locations on the Yucatan Peninsula, in a 40 km radius of the well-known Maya archaeological site of Uxmal.

Some of these locations are well documented, but others have been discovered for the first time during this expedition.

The fact that this clay was abundant among the samples collected confirms that the mineral is common on the peninsula.

Crystal-chemical analysis then enabled researchers to obtain the formula for the composition of Mayan palygorskite clay: (Si7.96Al0.07)O20 (Al1.59Fe3+0.20Mg2.25) (OH)2 (OH2)4Ca0.02Na0.02K0.04 4(H20).

These results will be useful for studying archaeological remains with Maya blue and to determine whether the palygorskite clay used in the pigment was taken from Uxmal or the surrounding area. (ANI)

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Temple in Turkey sheds light on so-called ‘Dark Age’

April 16, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Toronto, April 16 (ANI): A remarkably well-preserved monumental temple in Turkey, believed to be constructed during the time of King Solomon in the 10th/9th-centuries BC, is shedding light on the so-called Dark Age.

Uncovered by the University of Toronto’s Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) in the summer of 2008, the discovery casts doubt upon the traditional view that the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age was violent, sudden and culturally disruptive.

Ancient sources, such as the Homeric epics and the Hebrew Bible, depict an era of widespread famine, ethnic conflict and population movement, most famously including the migrations of the Sea Peoples (or biblical Philistines) and the Israelites.

This is thought to have precipitated a prolonged Dark Age marked by cultural decline and ethnic strife during the early centuries of the Iron Age.

But, recent discoveries – including the Tayinat excavations – have revealed that some ruling dynasties survived the collapse of the great Bronze Age powers.

“Our ongoing excavations have not only begun to uncover extensive remains from this Dark Age, but the emerging archaeological picture suggests that during this period Tayinat was the capital of a powerful kingdom, the ‘Land of Palastin’,” said Timothy Harrison, professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Toronto and the director of the project.

“Intriguingly, the early Iron Age settlement at Tayinat shows evidence of strong cultural connections, if not the direct presence of foreign settlers, from the Aegean world, the traditional homeland of the Sea Peoples,” he added.

Excavations uncovered the temple’s southern approach, which once faced a broad stone-paved courtyard, and consisted of a monumental staircase and porticoed-entrance, supported by a large, ornately carved basalt column base.

In addition, fragments of monumental stelae – stone slabs created for religious or other commemorative purposes – carved in Luwian (an extinct language once spoken in what is now Turkey) hieroglyphic script, were found.

They are thought to have once stood on stone platforms in the courtyard.

“The building’s central room was burned in an intense fire. It was filled with heavily charred brick and wood, as well as a substantial quantity of bronze metal, including riveted pieces and carved ivory fragments – clearly the remains of furniture or wall fixings. Fragments of gold and silver foil were also found along with the carved eye inlay from a human figure,” said Harrison.

The temple’s inner sanctuary will be the focus of the 2009 field season which begins on July 1. (ANI)

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Ancient Jews used human skulls in ceremonies despite ban

April 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Jerusalem, April 14 (ANI): New archaeological evidence has emerged which suggests that ancient Jews used human skulls in ceremonies, despite a strict prohibition on touching human remains.

According to a report in Haaretz News, British researcher Dan Levene from the University of Southampton published findings in Biblical Archaeological Review about the human skulls, known as incantation bowls, some of which bear inscriptions in Aramaic.

The skulls were unearthed in present-day Iraq (formerly Babylonia) and are believed to have been used during the Talmudic era. At least one of them appears to be that of an anonymous woman.

“When I presented these findings in Israel, people told me, ‘It is not possible that this is Jewish’,” said Levene. “But, it is certainly Jewish,” he added.

Levene added that, despite going against conventional wisdom, the talisman was likely used by someone desperate, and that there have been past cases of skulls being used to ward off increased ghosts or demons.

“The fact remains that belief in demons was widespread at this time among Jews as well as other peoples,” said Levene. “Incantation bowls are known not only from Jewish communities but from other communities as well,” he added.

To combat demons, people invoked numerous magic rites and formulas during that period. (ANI)

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