Massacre of the cranes

A whooping crane was spotted alive on Sunday after it was believed killed with 17 others in severe Florida storms, according to an organizer of a migratory project.

Organizers received a signal from a transmitter on the young male crane on Saturday night and again on Sunday near where the endangered birds were kept in Citrus County, Fla. Later Sunday, they saw the survivor with two sandhill cranes, said Rachel Levin, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"We are just so relieved to have found him alive — one small ray of hope for this disaster in the crane project," Levin said.

From Discovery News.

Lost in space

One of the more insightful commentaries on the astronaut-gone-wild story has just been posted by Rand Simberg.

Spanish antiquities raids

Spanish police have arrested 52 people and seized 300,000 archaeological artefacts they describe as "of great historic and economic value".

Officers say the items were seized in 68 raids across Spain at 31 sites of Iberian, Roman, Visigoth and Arab cultures.

The raids uncovered objects like bronze statues, ancient coins and columns from digs across the south.

Lots and lots of smaller items, as well -- of the sort that is easy to sell, and not distinctive enough to draw attention. From the BBC.

You know repatriation is all the rage . . .

. . . when you see a story like this:

British museums have become used to requests that foreign treasures be repatriated. Greece has persistently requested the return of the Parthenon marbles, while some administrators have agreed to return the remains of Australian Aborigines. Now the pressure is coming from closer to home.

British pagan groups are increasingly asking for human remains and grave goods from pre-Christian burials to be returned to them as well.

Grave goods? Like this?

The presence of what they see as their ancestors in dusty drawers or under harsh display lights is an affront to their religion. To them, the bones are living beings, whose existence is bound up with their religious descendants and the sacred land.

I'd feel a bit more sympathetic if there was an iota of evidence for religious continuity here. The issue is confused more than a little by our post-Christian tendency to lump together a host of extremely diverse religions and religious practices under the catch-all label of "paganism". So even if a modern British pagan group could trace its existence back more than a few decades, what is to say that they should be given a say over the handling of archeological finds belonging to people who may have practiced an entirely different religion? And if control should be given according to religion, should one discount the religious preferences of the pagans' descendents? Britain was eventually quite effectively Christianized. Does that mean the church should be given its say over all ancient British burials, and if so, which church? Or, if one is to take seriously the de-Christianization of modern Britain, the successor religion might be taken to be secular humanism, in which case we can safely leave the matter to the anthropologists and archeologists. Not necessarily the curators, however:

But requests from pagans for reburials are becoming more common. The Natural History Museum, British Museum, Leicester Museum, Manchester Museum, Devizes Museum and Duckworth Laboratory at Cambridge University have all been in dialogue with pagan groups. Last week, the Council of British Druid Orders demonstrated outside the Alexander Keiller Museum in Wiltshire for the reburial of a child skeleton excavated from Windmill Hill in 1929. The council is in dialogue with English Heritage and the National Trust about the issue.

"We would like people to reconsider their relationship with the bones," said Paul Davies, reburial officer for the council. "We view them as living people and therefore they have rights as people. Because the ancestors can't give their consent in this way, the council speaks for the ancestors."

What a load of pompous twaddle. Modern pagans, too, don't seem to appreciate the diversity of ancient religion: their worldview is essentially an inverted Christian universalism projected onto the past. Nonetheless, they seem to have won some sympathy -- perhaps from those with private fantasies of returning everything from the Elgin Marbles to Maori heads in a paroxysm of postcolonial expiation, but who have been stuck with disappointingly unproblematical dead Brit bits instead.

Some in the museum community say it is unfair for scientists to impose their world view on pagans. "We think that there is actually an intellectual argument for pagan claims to be taken seriously," said Prof Bienkowski [deputy director of the Manchester Museum], "It is a different world view which, actually, like the scientific world view can be neither proved nor disproved.

How does one get to be deputy director of a major museum without believing in science, and without understanding that provability is the defining essence of science? Dr. Piotr Bienkowski's profile is here.

Nelson Polsby obit

Heard the news last night via Jonathan Adler's post at the Volokh Conspiracy. I regret to say I don't remember meeting the man, even though my younger sisters played with his daughters when they were little. Growing up in Berkeley, however, we mostly didn't pay much attention to the accomplishments of our classmates' parents, often realizing how out of the ordinary they were only many years later -- alas.

Washington Post obituary here.

Chinese archeology: too much past, too little time

This rather undermines China's recent efforts to make a moral case for repatriation of Chinese artifacts held in foreign museums:

When this city began its gargantuan construction job for the 2008 Olympics, an early complication involved dead eunuchs. Workers had discovered a eunuchs mausoleum buried under the site of the skeet-shooting venue on the city's western fringe. And the eunuchs had company.

Along the city's northern rim, surveyors examined the sites for the main Olympic stadiums and discovered archaeological remains tracing back 2,000 years to the Han dynasty. In all, archaeologists excavated 700 ancient burial sites and recovered 1,538 artifacts, such as porcelain urns and jade jewelry, while collecting more than 6,000 ancient coins.

The subterranean Olympics cache would be considered remarkable in many countries, but in a China convulsing with demolition and construction, it amounted to just another work site. Building the new China usually entails digging up the old China. Construction zones across China are uncovering so many antiquities that it might be considered a golden era for archaeology, except that sites and antiquities are often simply demolished by bulldozers or looted.

I'm not so sure that everything being dug up for the Beijing Olympics is being properly studied and preserved, but even if it is, the bigger picture is grim:

The Olympics site seems to be an example of how China's antiquities protection system should work. Construction supervisors and archaeologists have collaborated for four years, conducting excavations and restoring three Taoist temples, including one near the National Stadium, the main Olympic venue, which undoubtedly will become a familiar sight to television viewers during the Games.

But elsewhere in China, archaeologists are often in a losing race against bulldozers. In late January, a work crew in the ancient capital city of Nanjing unearthed and destroyed the burial sites of 10 noblemen from six dynasties. By the time a team of local archaeologists arrived, bulldozers had crushed the burial crypts and looters had combed through the site.

Such stories are common. Last year, local antiquities officials in the city of Luoyang described how unceasing urban development was steadily encroaching on a protected zone of ruins dating to the Tang dynasty, 618 to 906. Meanwhile, a local newspaper reported that a major redevelopment project, including an industrial park, was being planned atop the ruins of an ancient palace.

Palaeolithic hunting camp found in German coal mine

Archaeologists have found the remains of a 120,000-year-old Stone Age hunting camp in an open-cast lignite mine near Inden in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

"We'll never find such a camp ever again," archaeologist Jürgen Thissen from the Rhineland Commission for Historical Sites said in Bonn Monday. "There isn't another one in the whole of Germany". . .

Thissen and his assistants came across postholes of three shelters in the open-cast mine last August. Two fireplaces with traces of fires were also found, as were over 600 stone tools and the stone chips left over from their production. Among the stone tools found were a stone knife, serrated blades, and so-called "blanks" (pieces of stone ready to be shaped into tools).

A hand ax was discovered in the mine in December 2005, prompting a full excavation.

Full story here.

Stereo portraits with a single camera

One lens, not two -- but multiple light sources:

The technique, called photometric stereo, uses a fixed digital camera and at least three lights placed around it to illuminate the face from different angles.

The lights are synchronized to flash very quickly in succession, in a few hundredths of a second, so the person being photographed only perceives one flash. But the computer picks up digital data for all lighting angles.

A program written by Petrou and her colleagues analyzes the shadows and highlights, and then combines them into one three-dimensional image.

From Discovery News. Photometric stereo has been applied successfully to the recording of ancient artifacts, and inscriptions in particular. For stereo landscape photography, however (still a popular pursuit), you'll have to stick to the old techniques.

Me, myself, and 182 of my closest friends

No human walks alone, according to a recent finding that skin harbors at least 182 species of bacteria, many of which were previously unknown.

Researchers liken human skin — the body's largest organ — to one of the world's last unexplored domains. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents the first molecular exploration of this largely uncharted realm, according to the authors.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that the human body is the home to thousands of species of microbes, many times for years, decades, or for our entire lifespan," coauthor Martin Blaser told Discovery News. . . .

"These types of surveys, whether conducted in the gut, mouth, or skin, are revealing a heretofore unappreciated level of biodiversity associated with our bodies," said Jeffrey Gordon, director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University's School of Medicine.

He added, "An inspiring or sobering thought: As adults we have 10 times more microbial cells than human cells, and perhaps 100 times more genes embedded in the genomes of our microbial partners than in our own human genome."

Full article here.