A Decade Of Digging

[poliphilo]

World Archaeology Magazine is ten years old- and the anniversary issue contains a round-up of the developments of the past decade.

We keep pushing the origins of civilization further and further back, we've discovered two new species of hominid, we've decoded Mayan script, so moving that civilization from prehistory to history, we've had to rethink the "neolithic revolution" thanks to the uncovering of the extraordinary ritual site at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, we've found cave art in Britain for the first time- and so on.

The past just gets more and more interesting.

Comments

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

There was a show on PBS last night - that I missed because it was past my bedtime, called Skeletons of the Sahara:

Description: This film tells the story of scientist Paul Sereno's amazing discovery of a prehistoric human burial ground in the middle of one of the world's most forbidding desert. Like many great scientific discoveries, this one happens by accident. Sereno, one of the world's leading experts in finding fossils of dinosaurs and ancient crocodiles, is on an expedition to Niger, in Saharan Africa. Six weeks into a three-month journey, Sereno's team makes an unexpected discovery. They find bones all right, but these bones don't belong to prehistoric beasts -- they are human bones, the last remnants of a people who lived from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago when this now forbidding landscape was a thriving culture on the edge of a vast lake.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

I love anything with bones in it.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

'The past just gets more and more interesting'

So I have found having now been studying history for the best part of forty years! :o)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It never gets dull. There's always more. And in the case of ancient history it's continually coming out of the ground.