Iraq archeology playing cards

American troops in Iraq are being sent another deck of playing cards, this time showing some of the country's most precious archaeological sites and advice on how to respect them.

The Pentagon is sending 40,000 new decks to units in Iraq and Afghanistan, four years after it issued soldiers with a more gung-ho pack showing pictures and information about the most-wanted former members of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The cards are part of an archaeology awareness programme designed to make troops aware of the damage they can cause to sites and to discourage the illegal trade in artefacts.

No info on where civilians can get decks of their own. From the Telegraph, which really should have shown more care in the following passage:

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Americans built a helicopter pad on the ruins of Babylon and filled their sandbags with archaeological fragments from the ancient city.

What happened was serious enough, but it would have been better to have written "in the ruins of Babylon", and "disturbed the soil of the site filling their sandbags". As it stands, it gives the impression that the landing pad was put right on top of the palace, and that potsherds were used to fill the bags.

East German nostalgia

There's now a hotel in Berlin built as a sort of time capsule of the old East Germany. Wonder if they have hidden cameras and microphones in all the rooms, too?

Stonehenge, Druids, and more

A number of my friends were left shaking their heads by these pictures of the solstice festivities at Stonehenge this year. Normally one is only permitted to approach the stones; so why allow a mob scene like this?

A total of 24,094 people witnessed dawn break over the ancient stones, compared with 18,700 last year. . .

Many apparently heeded advice to come by public transport and fewer cars than previous years were at the scene. . .

Druids, Pagans, hedonists and hippies were among those who attended an all-night party at the stones.

Latter-day druidophiles might also take a look at this article on the new installation of Lindow Man at the British Museum -- likely a victim of druidic sacrifice.

Musical stones, lost and found

Archaeologists have rediscovered a huge rock art site in southern India where ancient people used boulders to make musical sounds in rituals.

The Kupgal Hill site includes rocks with unusual depressions that were designed to be struck with the purpose of making loud, musical ringing tones.

It was lost after its discovery in 1892, so this is the first fresh effort to describe the site in over a century. . .

Modern-day commercial granite quarrying has already disturbed some sections of the hill. A rock shelter with even older rock art to the north of Kupgal Hill has been partially destroyed by quarrying.

"It is clear government intervention will be required to elicit effective protection for the majority of the sites in the [area] if these are not to be erased completely over the course of future years," writes Dr Boivin in Antiquity.

From the BBC.

Smithsonian scandals

As Wonkette puts it:

Running the Smithsonian might be the best job in Washington. Nearly a million a year and unlimited vacation — sign us up! Even the deputy secretary got all the leave she wanted! And though you’ll be forced to resign in disgrace when it’s revealed that you took 10 weeks of vacation a year while making $5.7 million at outside gigs and failing to raise as much money for the institution as your predecessor, it’s still great while it lasts. . .

And from ArtNet News:

You say that top museum execs pull down super-salaries because they do super jobs? Think again. An independent investigation into the seven-year tenure of Smithsonian Institution chief executive Lawrence M. Small, who resigned earlier this year in disgrace after reports of his lavish expense-account spending hit the press, showed that as Small’s pay packet swelled, the amount of private donations to the Smithsonian declined.

For the full, gruesome, details, see today's Washington Post. The lead:

Leaders of the Smithsonian in the past seven years took extraordinary steps to keep secret the amount of top executives' compensation, lavish expense-account spending, ethical missteps and management failures, an independent report released yesterday shows.

Former secretary Lawrence M. Small, with the help of his top deputy, Sheila P. Burke, took advantage of a vast gap in oversight to set his own salary, spend freely, take unlimited leave and ignore policy to pursue private agendas, according to the independent review committee, which was established by the Smithsonian Board of Regents to investigate reports of excessive spending and management abuses.

Compounding the problem, traditional institutional watchdogs, including the Board of Regents, general counsel, inspector general and chief financial officer, all failed in their duties to rein in excesses, the panel found in its report.

Wellcome Collection opens

A human heart, ancient Japanese sex toys, a French guillotine blade and a mummified Peruvian body are amongst the fascinating objects unveiled today at The Wellcome Collection, London’s new £30 million museum exploring the history and wider meaning of medicine.

The Wellcome Collection ranges over two floors and three galleries and builds on the vision, legacy and remarkable personal collection of Sir Henry Wellcome who amassed a massive collection of over one million medical related items.

From the 24 Hour Museum. Wellcome Collection website is here.

Antiquities curator appointed at the Getty

Karol Wight, a 22-year veteran of the J. Paul Getty Museum, was named its antiquities curator Wednesday. She succeeds her beleaguered former boss, Marion True, whose job she has held on an acting basis since True's resignation under fire in October 2005.

From the LA Times.

Refining gold in Kush

Traces of a gold factory along the banks of the river Nile are shedding a glittering new light on the kingdom of Kush, one of the great forgotten civilizations of Africa, U.S. archaeologists announced on Tuesday. . .

In the fall of 2008, the Merowe Dam will create a 100-mile-long lake south of the Fourth Cataract, displacing some 50,000 people and flooding undiscovered archaeological records.

Right there, at the desolate site of Hosh el Geruf, about 225 miles north of Khartoum, Emberling's team rescued from the rising Nile the concrete evidence of a gold-processing center — 55 grinding stones made of a granite-like rock called gneiss.

From Discovery News. Another writeup at the BBC.

Oldest gunshot in the Americas

A team led by Peruvian archaeologist and National Geographic grantee Guillermo Cock has uncovered the skeleton of the first documented gunshot victim in the New World in an Inca cemetery outside Lima, Peru. The body is thought to be the first forensically proven casualty of the Spanish conquest, one of 72 apparent victims of an uprising against the conquistadors.

Most of the attention has gone to the gunshot wound(s), but all of the bodies will surely yield new information about the grisly mechanics of hand-to-hand warfare:

"These bodies were strangely buried," Cock said. "They were not facing the right direction, they were tied up or hastily wrapped in a simple cloth, they had no offerings and they were buried at a shallow depth. Some of the bodies also showed signs of terrible violence. They had been hacked, torn, impaled -- injuries that looked as if they had been caused by iron weapons -- and several had injuries on their heads and faces that looked as if they were caused by gunshots."

Interestingly enough, the musket balls used were apparently iron, not lead. Full press release here, including this:

The new finds at Puruchuco will be featured in "The Great Inca Rebellion," a new NOVA/National Geographic special, premiering Tuesday, June 26, 2007, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on PBS (check local listings).

Get it while it's cold

It must have been shortly after I got my driver's license that I learned that filling up in the cold of the morning would save you money (with the additional benefit of not losing all the vapors from a hot tank when you uncapped to fill). Still valid, it seems:

As the temperature rises, liquid gasoline expands and the amount of energy in each gallon drops. Since gas is priced at a 60-degree standard and gas pumps don’t adjust for any temperature changes, motorists often get less bang for their buck in warmer weather.

Consumer watchdog groups warn that the temperature hike could end up costing consumers between 3 and 9 cents a gallon at the pump.

Full story here.

Lincoln collection to Museum

A battered old hat, a pair of stained gloves, a child’s silly rhyme — hardly the stuff of history.

Except that this hat is a stovepipe hat, the gloves are stained with a president’s blood and the rhyme was written by a young Abraham Lincoln.

All three items are part of an immense private collection put together by a Lincoln fan over 35 years. Now the collection is about to go public after being purchased for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

From the AP, via MSNBC.

More manuscript digitization

After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest copy of Homer's Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.

A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript -- complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection -- using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm. . .

The Venetus A is the oldest existing copy of Homer's Iliad and the primary source for all modern editions of the poem. It lives in Venice at the ancient Public Library of St. Mark. It is easily damaged. Few people have seen it. The last photographic copy was made in 1901.

Perhaps best of all:

A high-resolution, 3-D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.

Full story here. More on the manuscript (aka codex Marcianus Graecus 454) here.

Elders of the deep

Biologists, long stumped at figuring out how old whales are, lucked out when a 50-ton bowhead caught off Alaska came with a telltale clue: fragments of a harpoon lodged in a shoulder bone.

The weapon was used more than a century ago by whalers from New Bedford, enabling researchers to estimate that the whale was at least 115 years old and providing more evidence for their long-held belief that the bowhead whale is one of the longest living mammals on earth, surviving for up to 150 years.

I'd initially spotted this story elsewhere, but this Boston Globe article answers, at least partially, the question of the projectile's datability:

Anthropologists have analyzed hunting devices found in whales before, said Scott Kraus, vice president for research at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

It was often difficult, however, to determine when the weapon was fired.

"What you don't know is if some Yankee whaler had a harpoon made in 1830, traded it to an Inuit, and the Inuit or his offspring used it 40 years later," Kraus said.

But because the bomb lance was patented and stocks were used up quickly, Bockstoce and his colleagues identified a narrow window in which they believe the whale was shot, sometime between 1885 and 1895.

A number of other articles made a big deal of the patent date on the lance head, apparently without appreciating that such a mark provides only a terminus post quem, absent further information. A widespread misconception -- look on eBay, and you'll see how many sellers think that something marked with an 1884 patent date must date to 1884 -- but one should expect better from our journalistic establishment.

In any event, the story is a poignant reminder of what is lost when a whale is killed. It may not be widely appreciated among the general public how long-lived (and, correspondingly, slow-to-reproduce) the great cetaceans are. This 2000 article helps fill out the picture:

Next time you hop a whale-watching tour or gaze out across the ocean from the coast's edge, consider this: Some of the whales out there now may have been swimming around during the Civil War. Or even when Thomas Jefferson was president.

In studies that could rewrite biology textbooks and establish whales as the longest-living mammals on Earth, scientists in Alaska and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla have estimated the ages of three bowhead whales killed by Inupiat Eskimos in northern Alaska at 135 to 172 years. At the time it was killed, a fourth bowhead whale was believed to be a stunning 211 years old, the researchers concluded.

The ages were determined by studying changes in amino acids in the lenses of the whales' eyes.

Yet adding a layer of corroboration -- and a dash of Hollywood intrigue -- Inupiat hunters in Barrow and other villages along the frozen north coast of Alaska have found six ancient harpoon points lodged in the thick blubber of freshly killed bowhead whales since 1981. The harpoon points are made of ivory and stone, two materials not used by native Alaskan whalers since the 1880s, when they were introduced to steel harpoons. . .

Other whales across the globe also may be much older than previously thought.

There's also a quite detailed press release here from the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Time warp time

My 8 year old daughter was recently testing me out on some of the whodunits in her Scholastic Two-Minute Mysteries and Still More Two-Minute Mysteries paperbacks. Though they aren't that old (the latter volume originally published in 1971, I believe), in one respect they have become quite dated. Quite a few of the solutions are based upon the presumption that certain persons -- a professor, a secretary to a corporate president, etc -- simply would not make gross errors in spelling and grammar. . . .

Jet pack madness

Spotted this link via Instapundit: a Popular Mechanics article reporting on the first jet packs to be put on the market. Considering that you'd have to pay in the six figures for a rocket belt weighing 124 to 139 pounds and good for only a half-minute of flight (not counting the plummet at the end when the fuel gives out unexpectedly).

What really caught my attention was the fuel used -- hydrogen peroxide -- because I remember reading years ago about the H2O2-fuelled Me 162 "Komet" rocket interceptor, including an account of one that landed hard enough to rupture fuel lines, dissolving the pilot by the time rescuers could get to him. Perhaps this story was an exaggeration, but probably not: industrial-grade H2O2 typically comes in 35% and 70% concentrations, and even the 35% has to be handled with care as it is a powerful oxidant that can give nasty burns. Rocket-grade is more concentrated still (80% appears to be what was used in the Komet) -- so the Popular Mechanics article is rather wide of the mark in calling it "inert".

More on rocket belts here; I also ran across this discussion, in which the risks of H2O2 as a propellant were felt to be exaggerated.

Library of St. Gall online

The purpose of the “Codices Electronici Sangallenses” (Digital Abbey Library of St. Gallen) is to provide access to the medieval codices in the Abbey Library of St. Gallen by creating a virtual library. The project will begin with a two-year pilot to digitally reproduce a selection of the finest illuminated codices at such a high resolution that researchers cannot only work with the manuscripts but also perform detailed (art historical or otherwise) analyses of the miniatures in the codices.

The online library is now up to 144 codices. For those unfamiliar with St. Gall (aka Sankt Gallen), here is a brief intro from the site:

With its 2,100 codices, the Abbey Library counts as one of the oldest and most important codex libraries in the world. Half of the codices were written during the Middle Ages, 400 of them before 1000 A.D. The Abbey Library has been in continuous existence for over 1,200 years. It is the only major medieval convent library still standing at its original location.

The architecture of the abbey complex is no longer medieval, however, but exuberantly Baroque.

ADDENDUM: I see via the Cranky Professor that the Liber Floridus site provides access to the illuminated manuscripts of the Bibliothèques Mazarine and Sainte-Geneviève, to the tune of some 1600 manuscripts and some 31,000 images.