Crystal Skulls Deemed Fakes

In the spirit of “Indiana Jones,” I thought I would post this interesting article from Discovery News featuring crystal skulls.  Enjoy.

From: Crystal Skulls Deemed Fakes

Richard Ingham, AFP

July 9, 2008 — How about this for the next installment of the Indy franchise: “Indiana Jones and the Dodgy Antiques Dealer”?

Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery.

Scientists from those two prestigious institutions on Wednesday said their crystal skulls were cut, honed and polished by tools of the industrial age, not by Mesoamerican craftsmen of yore.

“The skulls under consideration are not pre-Columbian. They must surely be regarded as of relatively modern manufacture,” they say.

“Each skull was probably worked not more than a decade before it was first offered for sale.”

The skulls became star exhibits in all three museums long before the Indiana Jones movie, “The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” hit the movie screens this year.

The superstitious deemed them part of a collection of 12 skulls, endowed with healing or mystical powers, that dated back to the ancient culture of Central America.

Reuniting all 12 skulls, together with a putative 13th, would conjure up a massive power that would prevent the Earth from tipping over on December 21 2012, the “doomsday” in the Mayan calendar, according to one fable.

Read full article at Discovery News

Handwritten Typographers

As I am marrying a media-savvy journalist, this is really something I should have thought of before.  The “IMPACT” (this is a pun by the way, and If you are laughing, you are indeed a nerd of high caliber; I applaud you) of font on our culture and even our personal identity is undeniable.  I remember being in the 7th grade and agonizing over the font I would use with my instant messenger. After a long struggle I finally settled for Comic Sans as I thought it would show my quirky sense of humor.  We’ve all done this.  We have all sat down with a grunt and labored over picking a type-face which somehow represents our message, our tone and ultimately ourselves.

Rambling aside, I found this article very interesting.  I hope you do as well.

From: The Man in Blue

Cameron Adams

Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we – people in the digital age – are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: newspapers, SMSes, instant messages, emails, web pages, signs, posters, billboards; the list of purposes is endless.

In these days where looping strokes have been replaced by keyboard clickety-clack, typographers define the style and tone of our missives. Would you like to be elegant, modern, childish or … disturbed? Then you can choose between Garamond, Montag, Comic Sans, Zebraflesh, and a thousand more.

There’s great power in a typeface, but what’s always interested me more than the typeface is the designer behind it – why did they create the typeface? Where did their inspiration come from? How did they start?

Lately, I’ve been asking just one question, though. Something which has always intrigued me: these people that help us communicate … how do they themselves communicate?

(Continue reading article)

The Lost Archive

Now, This just sounds like a mystery novel waiting to happen. Each man on the origianl research project died under “mysterious circumstances” except Mr. Spitaler who hid the film in cigar boxes and cookie tins.  But from the sound of the article, it appears he lived the remainder of his life in fear.  Add to this that they all served the Nazis in WWII and you have yourself a page turner.

From the The Lost Archive

By ANDREW HIGGINS
January 12, 2008

– Munich, Germany

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God’s word. The wartime destruction made the project “outright impossible,” Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars — and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

“He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it,” says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic studies at Berlin’s Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the research. The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship that was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war effort. Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers, interrogators and linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as a translator, in the German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab volunteers to the Nazi cause, according to wartime records.

Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal

World’s Oldest Salad Dressing Found

This may seem like a small breakthrough, being able to determine the contents of ancient ceramic vessles, but consider why we all really get into archealogy in the first place: to get a better idea of the lives of those who came before.  While it may seem underwhelming to discover that some container once held nuts, discovering that ancient poeples in a region had a penchant for them speaks volumes about culture.  Kepp this in mind as you read this article and you may, as I have, “geek out.”

Bonus: could not stop thinking about my fiancee as I read this; the girl is a salad dressing demon.

From Discovery.com: Shipwreck Yields Salad Dressing

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

June 20, 2008 — Olive oil infused with fragrant herbs has been identified in an ancient Greek ceramic transport jar known as an amphora, along with another container of what could be the world’s oldest retsina-type wine, according to a recent Journal of Archaeological Science paper.

It is the first time DNA has been extracted from shipwrecked artifacts — the two large jars were recovered from a 2,400-year-old wrecked vessel off the Greek island of Chios. If the second jar indeed contained a retsina-like wine, which is preserved and flavored with a tree resin known as mastic, then the find would push back the known origins of mastic cultivation by 200 years.

“This (study) opens new possibilities for archaeologists — now perhaps we can figure out what was carried in almost every ‘empty’ jar we find in land excavations or shipwrecks,” researcher Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told Discovery News.

“Maybe we can even go back to the amphorae, jars and cooking pots previously excavated and now sitting in museum storerooms around the world and ask new questions of each artifact,” he added.

Read the full article at Discovery News

Ink May Have Poisoned Monks

This article spawned in me a very nerdy research binge.

Consider yourself warned.

From discovery.com: Biblical Text-Writing May Have Poisoned Monks.

June 27, 2008 — Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red.

The study, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, also describes a previously undocumented disease, called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions. Additionally, the researchers found that mercury-containing medicine had been administered to 79 percent of the interred individuals with leprosy and 35 percent with syphilis.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.

Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a University of Southern Denmark scientist at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, suspects that ink used in the abbey’s scriptorium was the culprit.

Continue reading at Discovery News

Also, be sure to take a look at the related links provided by the site.

Odysseus’ Bloody Homecoming Dated to 1178 B.C.

It has been quite a long time since I have found the time to post here, but when I found this article I felt a strong urge to brush the dust of the ol’ blog and continue sharing again.

This is pretty cool.  I love to see developments like this.  It always motivates me to pick up an old favorite and look at it in a new way.

“Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath.

Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca.

But interpreting clues in Homer’s “Odyssey” as references to the positions of stars and a total eclipse of the sun allowed them to determine when a particular set of conditions would have occurred.

“What we’d like to achieve is to get the reader to pick up the ‘Odyssey’ and read it again, and ponder,” said Magnasco. “And to realize that our understanding of these texts is quite imperfect, and even when entire libraries have been written about Homeric studies, there is still room for further investigation.”

Their study potentially adds…”

Full article at: Odysseus’ Bloody Homecoming Dated to 1178 B.C..