The East · Archaeology · Archive · Science
According to records from the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur (roughly 2112–2004 BC), the country's sheep population stood at about 320,000 head. One administrative document from Girsu mentions 74,533 sheep. Another lists 816 women weavers who worked under the command of overseers. The
Archaeology · Faith · Science · Nature
A fish diet can make radiocarbon dates of bones look older A Danish-Dutch team of scientists has checked the radiocarbon dating of 27 burials in medieval Danish monasteries. One would naturally suppose that monks and noble laymen could not have been buried at a monastery before the brethren had
Archaeology · Science · Education · Humour
Soviet researchers once asked themselves: could a Cro-Magnon have entered the Sorbonne? Recent events have given a perfectly definite answer to this rhetorical inquiry
The East · NB! · The Golden Age · Archaeology · Archive · Science
On the find of the ancient Chinese ape-man
Archive · Science · People · Ethnography
When Yuri Knorozov was refused an entry visa to Mexico in June 1956, his senior colleague Sergei Alexandrovich Tokarev, head of the Department of Ethnography at Moscow State University, explained to the young decipherer of the Maya script: "The Mexican government still obeys the Washington imperialists and assumes that
Archaeology · Faith · Science · Ethnography
The children whom the Incas offered in sacrifice were given alcohol and plant-based substances that dulled the senses before they died. This was shown by a toxicological analysis of the hair and nails of eight mummies from Peru and Argentina, which are about 500 years old. The sacrificial rite
Archaeology · Museums · Observations · Science
The first image shows a gold stater from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, struck under Verica, ruler of the British tribe of the Atrebates in the 1st century AD. Strange news about Verica appeared the other day. The archaeologist Miles Russell of Bournemouth University claims that Verica
Archaeology · Museums · Science
Off the coast of Wales, a sixteenth-century brass combination lock has been lifted from the seabed at the wreck site of the English merchant ship Anne Francis, which went down in a storm in 1583. Spanish silver coins were found beside the lock, which is why the researchers believe
Archive · Observations · Science · Society
I have been reading, in Sovetskaya etnografiya for 1969, a review headed "The Country Is Heading for a Split…". Its author is the Americanist Eduard Nitoburg (1918-2008). He examines the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which President Johnson set up in July 1967
Archaeology · Observations · Science · Education
I have come across an interesting idea about a connection between how intensively the stone tools of early Homo sapiens were reworked and how much food their landscape had to offer. A group of archaeologists from Kiel University studied material from the sites of Florisbad and Lombard's Drift
Archaeology · Archive · The East · Science · People
James Leslie Starkey is known to everyone who has had anything to do with biblical archaeology, and to almost no one outside it. In 1935 he found the "Lachish Letters", potsherds bearing the correspondence of a Judaean garrison on the eve of the Babylonian assault of 588 BC,
Archaeology · Museums · Heritage · Science · Society · Paris
In Pushkin's “Autumn” the grove sheds its last leaves; in France this October it was rather shop windows and town halls that were being shaken, and since this coincided with my customary Parisian holiday, a good part of the month in the channel passed to the sound of