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August digest covering archaeology, art, heritage, science and nature

Marcus Aurelius advised retreating into oneself, for nowhere does a man withdraw more quietly. In the digest, for my part, I try to gather what has been published over the month while the memories are still fresh. So, the main things on the channel for August. The section on archaeology

Archaeology · Faith · The East · Science

Ring from Herodium inscribed ΠΙΛΑΤΟ probably did not belong to Pontius Pilate

A cheap copper-alloy ring, dug up in the 1960s at Herodium, King Herod's fortress-palace in the Judaean Desert, bearing the image of a vessel and the Greek letters ΠΙΛΑΤΟ. Despite suggestions that the signet might have belonged to the most famous official in history, Pontius Pilate,

Archaeology · Science

Egyptian blue proved more complex in composition and required precise control of heating

It turns out that the so-called "Egyptian blue", the first synthetic pigment in history, is far more intricately made than previously thought. The paint is not a homogeneous crystal: its blue crystals were fused with a glassy mass and several kinds of quartz particles, and so the

Archaeology · Museums · Observations · Heritage

Treasure of the 13th century BC found near Alicante in 1963 stolen from the MUVI museum

The Villena Treasure, one of the greatest Bronze Age hoards, stolen in Spain. Fifty-nine objects, ten kilograms of gold and almost seven hundred grams of silver, which lay in the bed of a dried-up river near Alicante from the thirteenth century BC until December 1963, when the archaeologist

Archaeology · Museums · Science

Chamber burial with a horse and a dog found at the Gnezdilovo burial ground near Suzdal

The Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the State Historical Museum are working for a seventh season at the Gnezdilovo burial ground near Suzdal. This year they found a wooden burial chamber measuring 3.1 by 2.7 metres, the roof of which had collapsed by

Archaeology · Science

If you, too, have ever heard reels-scholars speak of Neanderthal women as hostages to a narrow pelvis that condemned them to difficult births, this claim can now safely be moved to the category of refuted myths

A team of researchers from the University of Zurich and the Institute for Basic Science in Busan has digitised and reconstructed the pelvic bones of four Neanderthals of different ages and sexes: an infant of one and a half years from Dederiyeh Cave in Syria, a young woman from Sima

Archaeology · Faith · Science

One could speak of the antiquities of Bulgaria at length: the oldest worked gold in the world, the oldest solar calendar in Europe in the Magura Cave, Europe's largest Neolithic necropolis at Durankulak with the oldest stone building on the continent…

And now, near the village of Člebi in the Nymburk District of Central Bohemia, archaeologists from the University of West Bohemia have unearthed a monumental structure more than 6,500 years old, identified as one of the oldest ritual centres in Central Europe. The building is an almost circular enclosure

Archaeology · Architecture · The East · Science

At Göbekli Tepe, the world's oldest megalithic temple complex, more than 11,500 years old, rectangular buildings have been found that may have served as dwellings

The site is being surveyed by means of geomagnetic mapping, ground-penetrating radar and lidar scanning. The head of the excavation reports that the new rectangular structures are concentrated chiefly in the eastern and southern parts of the hill and lie next to the already known circular monumental buildings with

Archaeology · The East · Science

Midianite pottery as a trademark, distributed from an oasis to the Levant and Arabia

An analysis of several dozen Bronze Age vessels from the Qurayyah oasis in north-western Arabia may have identified the first branded goods in human history. The two-colour painted pottery of this region has long been known to specialists as "Midianite", and its origin remained a matter

Archaeology · Museums · Education

Archaeologists find older mound beneath Grønhaug barrow containing ninth-century ship burial

In Norway, beneath the Grønhaug mound, 30 metres across and 4 metres high, on the island of Karmøy, an oak ship some 15 metres long was buried. This has been known since the excavations of 1902. In August of this year, archaeologists of the Museum of Archaeology at the University

Archaeology · Museums

HER HVILUR

A stone bearing a runic inscription, set into the floor of a building around the year 1000 in the Faroe Islands. The inscription is poorly legible; all that can be made out is "her hvilur", "here lies", which is to say that it is most probably

Archaeology · Observations · Science · Humour

Bones from the Penghu Strait seabed attributed to Denisovans up to 190 cm tall

Call Drobyshevsky! Just joking, he has known all this for ages. A Japanese-Taiwanese research group has analysed a femur and a tibia from the bed of the Penghu Channel off Taiwan and determined that they belonged to Denisovans who lived about 45,000 years ago. But judging by the