Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Past and present. You can't make this stuff up.
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Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

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A thread for discussing conventional archæology:

Persepolis Recreated
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or the role of re-enactments or reconstruction archæology in understanding the past:

M.C. Bishop and J.C.N. Coulston, Roman Military Equipment (1993), at 40-41:
Re-enactment and display societies, prime amongst whom have been the Ermine Street Guard (Pl. 6), followed by more recent groups such as Junkelmann's ala II Flavia, or the legio XlIII Gemina, seek to convey to the general public some impression of what life in the Roman army may really have been like. To date, however, only a few societies, such as cohors V Galliorum, have preferred the third century over the first. Through diligent study of the source material, such groups reconstruct the weaponry and kit of the Roman soldier of their chosen arm and period with an efficiency that is laudable. However, this is not reconstruction archaeology in its strictest sense, for (ironically enough) much of the equipment is too well-made and, understandably, not field-tested to destruction under observation. Thus there are limitations in using the experience of such groups as 'evidence' for the study of military equipment. Nevertheless, the reader will find refer¬ence to the work of these bodies within the pages of this book and that should speak for itself.

One of the most famous instances of the use of reconstruction archaeology was the struggle of scholars to understand the workings of the segmental cuirass…. Most early attempts were firmly based on the images on Trajan's Column and so doomed to failure, given the representational limitations of that monument. When von Groller published the collection of material excavated from the Waffenmagazin at Carnuntum, it was to the Column that he turned in order to make sense of the many lorica pieces recovered. The main elements of the cuirass - girth hoops, shoulder strips and hinged fittings - were known, but the manner of their use not understood. Even as late as 1960, it was still possible for scholars to misplace pieces of the cuirass in attempting such reconstructions. The discovery of the hoard of military equipment and other objects at Corbridge in 1964….
Image
…provided the final clues to form of this type of armour, and the involvement of Robinson, a practising armourer, led to the now familiar and fully-functional reconstructions. Understanding that the armour was articulated on leather straps, rather than the less-flexible leather under-jerkin previously preferred by scholars, was an important step in the right direction, but even Robinson's first attempts to understand the Corbridge armour were misdirected…
Image
… because he initially allowed himself to be influenced by those earlier writers. Ultimately, the archaeological evidence was the only viable means of understanding the segmental cuirass…
Image
…and this was also true of the Newstead finds. With the benefit of hindsight, it may well be that involvement, at the time of the Carnuntum find, of an expert on medieval European or oriental armour (Robinson's particular speciality) could have provided a solution much earlier, since both these traditions produced articulated armour.

Some reconstruction archaeology is, however, more heavily dependent on sources other than the archaeological evidence. The study of ancient artillery requires detailed understanding of often obscure technical treatises, which provide formulae for producing weapons of varying calibres. These texts, together with their often corrupt manuscript illustrations (see Fig. 6), provide some means of identifying the components of artillery pieces, and some notable successes have been achieved. Schramm was an early pioneer of artil¬lery reconstruction in Germany during and after the First World War. Modern studies have to combine the interpretation of archaeological, literary and representational sources, a good example being the identification of kambestria belonging to bolt-shooting engines from Lyon…, Orgova, and Gornea…, and, moreover, distinguishing between a smaller, portable manuballista and its larger companions of a type similar to those depicted on Trajan's Column....
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

The Balme Archives - Ermine Street Guard - part 1
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Balme Archives - Ermine Street Guard - part 2
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Ermine Street Guard (part I)
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Ermine Street Guard (part II)
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Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

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Wroxeter Roman Villa
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Wroxeter Replica Roman House
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Channel 4 Roman villa is unveiled in Wroxeter

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12471298 (with embedded video)
Additional reports: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sh ... e-12471007

Catherine Eade, A very grand design

New Channel 4 series challenges builders to construct a huge Roman villa using only ancient methods

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... thods.html
10 January 2011

A new Channel 4 series starting this week aims to find out if modern day builders can reconstruct an entire Roman villa using only tools and materials from AD 320.

Rome Wasn't Built in a Day brings together six craftsmen from all over the UK to experience what it would have been like to build a villa in ancient times - and they have just six months to complete it for English Heritage.

Challenged to build a villa using only the most basic tools, materials and construction methods, the project sees the men working from scratch, including chopping down trees to make the frame of the villa, creating their own mortar and creating intricate mosaic floors... as well inspecting sheep entrails to see if the gods would approve

The series shows the trials and tribulations of the six-man team: Foreman Jim Blackham, 45, plasterer Tim Dalton-Dobson, plumber Kevin Fail, 52, carpenter Fred Farray, brickie Darren Prince and labourer Ben Gotsell, 21.

To ensure historical accuracy Channel 4 brought in archaeologist Professor Dai Morgan Evans from the University of Chester, who designed the villa and visits the site every two weeks to oversee its gradual construction.

His job is to advise on issues from the joints Roman builders would have used in carpentry and the wattle and daub used to create the walls, right down to the colour of paints Roman craftsmen would have used.

The villa is being built in Wroxeter, Shropshire, which was once the site of Viroconium, a major Roman city and the fourth largest settlement in Roman Britain, which was controlled by the Roman Empire between AD 43 and about 410.

It is an ambitious venture, with the design of the villa incorporating under-floor heating, a bath house, and detailed frescoes and mosaics.

One of the most challenging stipulations for the workers was that no power tools were allowed on site....

While there is no Kevin McCloud to keep an eye on the men, there is a manual they can consult, written in 25BC by the engineer Vitruvius.

Vitruvius, often referred to as the first architect, asserted in his book De Architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of 'firmitas, utilitas, venustas'. That is, it must be solid, useful and beautiful.

His manual documents many of the advanced engineering accomplishments introduced by Roman architects and builders, who are widely agreed to have surpassed most other civilizations of, and after, their time....
Virtual tour, full episodes from the series (blocked outside U.K. and Ireland, unfortunately), etc.:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/rome ... t-in-a-day

'New' Roman Villa at Wroxeter

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/abou ... man-villa/
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

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Dublin Viking Longship Part 1
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Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

The Viking Ships Part 1
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Part 2

Part 3

Part 4
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

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I watched this aircraft being built over a period of years, beginning when I was in high school. The workshop was in the basement of the city planetarium -- probably the only free space the volunteers could find.

The airframe was built from scratch using the original bluepprints and authentic materials and techniques, while the engine and certain instruments are original and restored to operating condition.

Among the lessons learned in the reconstruction:

[*] An open cockpit and the use of castor oil as an engine lubricant are not calculated to keep the pilot fit for duty day in and day out;

[*] Bureaucratic idiocy is not a recent development. British Aerospace (as successor to Sopwith Aircraft Co.) was unable to provide technical assistance due to the provisions of the Official Secrets Act (dating to the German spy scare of 1911). However, the blokes at the Smithsonian were enormously helpful. And, once the aircraft was complete, engineers from British Aerospace examined it and awarded a late production serial number. So presumably the materials and techniques used were correct -- even if they remain state secrets long after going obsolete.

Image

Sopwith Triplane

http://www.asmac.ab.ca/aerospace/main_c ... ?list_id=1
World War One

Herbert Smith designed the Sopwith Triplane in 1916. Within weeks it was in combat. While short-lived, with only 144 built, it was one of the great successes of World War One. Powered by a nine-cylinder Clerget rotary engine, the Triplane was highly maneuverable with an exceptional rate of climb. It gave the pilot the widest possible field of vision and permitted a high rate of roll.

The Triplane was used only by the Royal Naval Air Service and gained a reputation over the Western Front during the heavy aerial fighting of 1917. The Triplane bridged the gap between the Sopwith Pup and Camel. Production Triplanes entered service with No.1 and 10 (Naval) Squadrons in the spring of 1917. The Triplane was a favourite mount of "B" Flight, the "Black Flight", of No.10 Squadron. This flight was led by "Ace" Raymond Collishaw. Between May and July, 1917 they accounted for 87 enemy aircraft, 33 by Collishaw.

Our Aircraft:

N 6302 is the result of a dream of the late Mr. Stan Green who was an instructor in aeronautics at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Calgary. Working from original blueprints, Green, and later, after Green's death, museum restoration staff and volunteers completed this aircraft in June of 2000. The engine has been run several times and in theory the aircraft is fully flyable.

The aircraft is painted to represent the aircraft flown by Calgarian Alfred William "Nick" Carter. As a pilot and Flight Commander of "A" Flight of No.10 (Naval) Squadron, he earned a D.S.C. flying the Triplane in 1917 and was credited with 17 victories by the end of the war in 1918.
Sopwith Triplane (The Tripe)
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Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

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Top 10 Discoveries of 2011

http://www.archaeology.org/1201/feature ... amira.html
Years from now, when we look back on 2011, the year will almost certainly be defined by political and economic upheaval. At the same time that Western nations were shaken by a global economic slump, people in the Middle East and North Africa forcefully removed heads of state who had been in power for decades. “Arab Spring,” as the various revolutions have collectively been named, will have far-reaching implications, not just for the societies in which it took place, but also for archaeology. No year-end review would be complete without polling archaeological communities in the affected areas to determine whether sites linked to the world’s oldest civilizations, from Apamea in Syria to Saqqara in Egypt, are still intact. Our update appears here.

Of course, traditional fieldwork took place in 2011 as well. Archaeologists uncovered one of the world’s first buildings in Jordan. In Guatemala, a Maya tomb offered rare evidence of a female ruler, and, in Scotland, a boat was found with a 1,000-year-old Viking buried inside.

We also witnessed the impact that technology continues to have on archaeology. Researchers used a ground-penetrating radar survey of the site of a Roman gladiator school to create a digital model of what it may once have looked like. And scientists studying an early hominid have taken their investigation online by tapping the scientific blogging community. The team is seeking help to determine if they have actually found a sample of fossilized skin that appears to be more than 2 million years old. These projects stand as clear evidence that as cultures around the world undergo sweeping changes, so too does the practice and process of archaeology.
Features on the individual discoveries are accessible at the link above.
Last edited by Antipatros on Fri Mar 09, 2012 3:24 am, edited 2 times in total.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

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Allan Woods, Saga of the Northwest Passage

Discovering evidence of an ill-fated mission in the frigid waters of the Arctic

http://www.archaeology.org/1203/feature ... ation.html
It was well past midnight this past July and the round-the-clock Arctic sun was shining on Mercy Bay. Exhausted Parks Canada archaeologist Ryan Harris was experiencing a rare moment of rest on the rocky beach, looking out over the bay’s dark, ice-studded water. Around him, a dozen red-and-yellow tents lined the shoreline—the only signs of life. Every day for the previous two weeks, work had started by mid-morning and continued nonstop for 16 hours. Night and day had little relevance in the murky, near-freezing waters. Along with Parks Canada’s chief of underwater archaeology, Marc-Andre Bernier, Harris has overseen more than 100 dives at this remote inlet of Banks Island in Aulavik National Park, exploring the wreck of HMS Investigator, a British vessel that has sat on the bottom of the bay for more than 160 years.

Harris and a small team of archaeologists had discovered Investigator in 2010 and returned in 2011 with a larger team to dive, study, and document the wreck, which holds a critical place in the history of Arctic exploration. Twenty-five feet below the surface, Investigator sits upright, intact, and remarkably well preserved. Silt covers everything below the main deck, entombing the officers’ cabins, the ship’s galley, and a full library. The archaeologists had intended to leave the wreck and its artifacts where they had lain since the polar ship was abandoned, trapped in ice, on June 3, 1853. Artifact recovery was not part of their original plan, but that plan changed after their first few dives.

The team was instantly surprised by the number of artifacts they saw — muskets, shoes, and hunks of copper sheathing rested on Investigator’s upper deck, dangled off the hull, or lay haphazardly on the sediment. Leaving these artifacts behind in Mercy Bay would have made them vulnerable to the icebergs that regularly scour the bay’s floor, including the ones the six-man dive team had been dodging since their arrival....
For an account of the Investigator expedition, see here.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Trebuchet

Post by Antipatros »

NOVA Medieval Siege Excerpts Part 1
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NOVA Medieval Siege Excerpts Part 2
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Excerpts from Nova Secrets of Lost Empires 2. Medieval Siege. Trebuchet.
PBS's companion website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/trebuchet/

Warwick Castle Siege Engine, World's Largest Trebuchet
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Trebuchet Fireball
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Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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CSI: Vergina

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Jonathan Musgrave et al., The Occupants of Tomb II at Vergina. Why Arrhidaios and Eurydice must be excluded

Int J Med Sci 2010; 7(6):s1-s15.

http://www.medsci.org/v07p00s1.htm
Abstract

On 21 April 2000 Science published an article by Antonis Bartsiokas titled 'The Eye Injury of King Philip II and the Skeletal Evidence from the Royal Tomb II at Vergina'. In it he criticised some observations made by Prag, Neave and Musgrave in earlier publications concerning possible trauma to the cranium and facial asymmetry. In an attempt to identify the man in the main chamber of Tomb II at Vergina as Philip III Arrhidaios rather than Philip II, he also argued that the bones had been burned dry, degreased and unfleshed. We answer his criticisms, and refute his dry cremation argument, pointing out that, far from strengthening the claim for Arrhidaios, it weakens it considerably.

1. Introduction

In 1977-78 Professor Manolis Andronicos of the University of Thessaloniki excavated a large mound — the Great Tumulus — at Vergina. It was 13 m high and 110 m in diameter. Close together on the periphery of one quadrant Andronicos and his team discovered three tombs. Vergina is about 80 km south-west of Thessaloniki, and can now be identified as the ancient Aigai, the burial place of the Macedonian royal family in the 4th century BC. The Great Tumulus was rebuilt in 1992-93.

Tomb I had been robbed but contained a superb wall painting of the Rape of Persephone. Tombs II and III had not been robbed and contained, among other treasures, ceremonial military equipment, bronze utensils, silver tableware, gold wreaths, two gold larnakes (caskets) in Tomb II and a silver funerary urn in Tomb III. All three also contained human remains: fragmentary and inhumed in Tomb I; cremated in Tombs II and III. The description of the tumulus, the tombs and their contents which Andronicos wrote soon after their discovery remains an excellent introduction.

Since the discovery of these tombs there has been a lively debate about the identity of the occupants, especially of Tomb II. Because it dates to the second half of the 4th century BC and because the body of Alexander the Great was taken to Egypt, only two adult male ruling members of the Macedonian royal family and their wives were likely to have been buried in Tomb II: either Philip II of Macedon and Cleopatra or Philip III Arrhidaios and Eurydice. Other names have been suggested, but they do not stand up to careful study.

Philip II was assassinated in 336 BC aged 46. He lost his right eye at the siege of Methone in 355-4. His last wife Cleopatra was murdered, or forced to commit suicide, early in 335 on the orders of Olympias, his estranged and most powerful wife (of seven recorded liaisons in his life). See Fig. 1. With Cleopatra died Europē, a girl she had borne Philip as his last daughter not too long before his death. By then Europē would have been no more than 15 months old.

Philip III Arrhidaios — Philip II's son by Philinna — succeeded his paternal half-brother (Olympias's son) Alexander III — the Great — in 323. Arrhidaios and his wife Eurydice were murdered and forced to commit suicide respectively in the autumn of 317. Early in 316 or possibly in the winter/spring of 316-15 Cassander buried both of them, along with Eurydice's mother Kynna, all together in what one imagines was a new tomb....
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2012 7:33 pm

Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

War of 1812 Re-enactment
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Presented at Fanshawe Pioneer Village, London, Ontario

Fort Meigs 1813 Re-enactment
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Fort Meigs, in Perrysburg Ohio, comes to life for 2 days as re-enactors display how military life and combat may have looked during the War of 1812 in northwest Ohio. Each year near the anniversary of the British siege of the fort, 100s of re-enactors gather at Fort Meigs to celebrate both the American, British and Native American warriors who fought and died on this piece of land.

For more info about Fort Meigs: http://www.touring-ohio.com/history/for ... story.html
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2012 7:33 pm

Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

A useful resource for anyone interested in the region:

The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online

http://idp.bl.uk/
IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

IDP partner institutions which both provide data for and act as hosts to the multilingual website and database are:

The British Library, London IDP Directorate (English Version)
The National Library of China, Beijing (Chinese version)
The Institute for Oriental Manuscripts, St Petersburg (Russian version)
Ryukoku University, Kyoto (Japanese version)
The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities (German version)
The Dunhuang Academy, Dunhuang (Chinese version)
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (French version)
Research Institute of Korean Studies, Seoul (Korean version)

Major IDP partners providing data include:

The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
The British Museum, London
The Victoria & Albert Museum, London
The Museum for Asian Art, Berlin
Guimet Museum, Paris

IDP’s many other collaborating institutions provide data and work on joint projects....
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

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The Russian archaeological presence along the Silk Road reached its crest in 1908, when Colonel Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov (1863-1935) excavated Khara-Koto, the fabled "Black City" of the Tanguts. Kozlov is scarcely known outside Russia, and his extraordinary feats have been forgotten. He was born in 1863 to a peasant family living on the Sloboda estates at Duchovschina, a small town near Smolensk. Discovered by Przhevalsky, Kozlov received the same military training as his mentor and, at twenty, accompanied him on his fourth expedition to Central Asia. He was to make a further sortie with Przhevalsky, and when the latter died in 1888, the mantle of Russia's premier explorer passed to his student....

-- Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows (1999), at 378.
Apparently Kozlov's memoirs, including his fascinating encounters with the Dalai Lama, were never published in English. If they had been, he'd probably be in High Adventure; as it is, we'll have to settle for his most famous excavation.

The Silk Road 04 The Dark Castle.
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Khara-Khoto — The Black City

http://idp.bl.uk/archives/news02/idpnews_02.a4d
http://idp.bl.uk/downloads/newsletters/IDPNews02.pdf
Khara-Khoto lies north-east of Dunhuang in the Gobi Desert, just inside the present-day Chinese border with Mongolia. For Colonel Pyotr Kuzmich Koslov, leader of the 1907–1909 Russian Expedition to Mongolia and Sichuan, it was the city of his dreams: 'ever since reading about the ruins in the explorer Potanin's book Khara-Khoto has been constantly on my mind'. His discovery of the site in March 1908 was undoubtedly the triumph of Russian activity in Central Asia and heralded the start of Tangut studies. Khara-Khoto was a major city of the thriving Tangut state of Xia (known in China as Western Xia: Xixia) and many documents written in Tangut were found by Kozlov the city was one of the first to be overthrown by the Mongols when they invaded in 1226.They later established a Tangut province within their empire and the city continued to be known by its Tangut name, Edzina, as Marco Polo attests:
'When the traveller leaves this city of Ganzhou, he rides for twelve days until he reaches a city called Edzina, which lies on the northern edge of the desert of sand. This is still in the province of Tangut. The inhabitants are idolators. They have camels and cattle in plenty. The country breeds lanner and saker falcons, and very good ones. The people live by agriculture and stock-rearing; they are not traders.'
The inhabitants were later forced to convert to Islam and were conquered 1372 by troops of the Chinese Ming dynasty when, the official history records 'the town's defender Buyan'temur, surrendered.' Documents found at the site date no later than 1380 and it seems as if this defeat, possibly with climate changes which lowered the water table, forced city's inhabitants to move away. The locals, however, tell a more romantic story which Koslov reproduced in preliminary account of his journey (Geographical Journal, October 1909, pp. 387ff.) The city was too well fortified for the Chinese army to attack but they cut the water supply from the Edzin River forcing the city's troops to breach the wall and attack. The troops were wiped out, including their ruler, and the city subsequently destroyed by the Chinese army. However, it is said that the ruler sunk his treasury — eighty carts of it — into a hole in the northern corner of the city. The treasure has yet to be found but Koslov reported evidence of a dam. Koslov sent ten chests of manuscripts and Buddhist objects back to St. Petersburg after this initial visit in 1908 and carried more objects back, including Buddhist paintings, on his return journey in May 1909. The artefacts he discovered reflect the cultural richness of the Tangut Xia State. The paintings and other pieces (3,500 items) are in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg while the manuscripts and printed documents (8,000 items) are with those from Dunhuang at the Institute of Oriental Studies. Koslov was leading an exploratory rather than an archaeological expedition and the site was too large for a complete excavation. Several years later when Sir Aurel Stein arrived he found many objects and manuscripts. (See Innermost Asia, Text, vol. 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1928, pp. 463–506 for a list). Stein recorded his first view of the city:
'It was a striking site, the most impressive perhaps that I had seen on true desert ground, this dead town; with massive walls and bastions for the most part still in fair preservation, rising above the bare gravel flat which stretches towards it from the river bank ... There was nothing in the surroundings of the dead town to impair the imposing effect created by the massive strength of the town walls and the utter desolation which reigned within.'
Langdon Warner, who visited in 1925 under the sponsorship of the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, was also struck by the site's isolation:
'No city guard turned out to scan my credentials now, no bowman leaned from a balcony above the big gate in idle curiosity, and no inn welcomed me with tea and kindly bustle of sweeping out my room or fetching fodder for my beasts. One little grey hawk darted from her nest high in the grey wall, her set wings rigid, and sailed low over the pebbles and sparse thorn bushes of the plain. No other life seemed there, not even the motion of a cloud in the speckless heaven nor the stir of a beetle at my feet. It was high afternoon, when no ghosts walk. But, as sure as these solid walls were built up by the labour of men, just so sure was I that the little empty town had spirits in it. And the consciousness never left me by day or night while we were there.'
[The Long Old Road in China, Arrowsmith, London 1927. P. 141.]
Sven Hedin and Xu Bingchang led Sino-Swedish Expedition on archaeological excavations of the site between 1927–31 and between 1963 and 1984 the site was again excavated by the Li Yiyou of the Mongolian Autonomous Region Cultural Relics Team. Two exhibitions of the artefacts from Khara-Khoto have been held recently first was in Tokyo in 1989 and the second in Lugano, Switzerland (Fondzione Thyssen-Bornernisza, Villa Favorita Lugano, 25 June–21 October 1993). For an introduction to the city, its history and culture, and for photographs of many artefacts see the catalogue to this second exhibition: Mikhail Piotrovsky (ed.), Lost Empire of the Silk Road: Buddhist Art from Khara Khoto (X–XIIIth century), Electra, Milan 1993.
Khara-Koto - Heicheng - Black City

http://www.drben.net/ChinaReport/Inner_ ... -Main.html
Last edited by Antipatros on Tue Apr 17, 2012 7:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2012 7:33 pm

Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

Copan, Honduras (1948)

http://archive.org/details/upenn-f16-04 ... n_Hondurus

(I recommend turning off the sound when watching this film.)

Barbara W. Fash, Rescuing the Rosalila

http://www.mayadiscovery.com/ing/archae ... salila.htm
Nestled in the foothills of western Honduras is the ancient Maya city of Copan. Here, sculptors and architects created works of art like nowhere else in Mundo Maya to eulogize their rulers and reaffirm their political and religious beliefs. Artisans were encouraged to surpass their predecessors in an ongoing effort toward excellence. Copan was truly the artistic center of ancient Maya land.

Copan's Principal grouping is the so-called Acropolis, a manufactured mesa that stands above and overlooking the Copan River. The Acropolis was added to, modified and remodeled repeatedly over the centuries, new buildings going up over old. By A.D. 750, the four largest buildings of the Acropolis—Structures 11,16, 22 and 26—had antecedents dating back three centuries.

To learn more about these earlier buildings, Dr. William Fash, in conjunction with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History launched the Copan Archaeological Acropolis Project (PAAC) in 1986, and tunneling began beneath Structure 26 and its famous Hieroglyphic Stairway. In 1989, Fash asked Honduran archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle to excavate under Structure 16, the construction we now call Rosalila was discovered.

The Rosalila is an Early Classic temple built around AD 571 by "Moon Jaguar," the city's 10th leader. It is wholly intact and covered with the most elaborate facade decoration yet discovered at Copan. An intact 'under' building, in any condition, is a rarity among ancient Maya architecture. Engineers usually demolished the roof of the original structure and filled the rooms with the resultant rubble to create a suitable foundation on which to build. In the case of the Rosalila, not only did they avoid doing that, they took measures to preserve the temple. First, they plastered over the facade with a thin veneer of stucco, and then they covered the whole building with a protective layer of thick clay. For some reason, it was decided not to destroy Rosalila, and to this date no other Maya structure is known to have been so conserved.

The Rosalila was effectively entombed, and the termination rituals included leaving a cache of nine eccentric flints wrapped in a blue cloth at the front doorway. The plaster covering was a way to snuff out or 'kill' the spirit of the building, which had come alive with the application of color. Nearly the entire structure, including the roof crest was preserved (the latter an architectural element heretofore unknown at Copan).

Rosalila stands 14 meters high, with a 19 by 19-meter base. To prevent deterioration, the protective plaster or stucco covering has not been entirely removed. Probes at selected areas allowed us to infer the overall design and color scheme of the building and produce drawings of how it must have appeared in its day. The replica of Rosalila that is the centerpiece of the new Sculpture Museum in Copan (opened 1996) was created over a three-year period, from 1993-96, from the archaeologist's drawings....
More here.

Copan's New Sculpture Museum

http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/node/554
The older residents of the modern town of Copán Ruinas remember the earthquake that shook western Honduras in April 1934. The church in the town square was nearly destroyed, and dozens of houses were leveled. The nearby Maya ruins themselves suffered damage: four of the buildings on the Acropolis, already undercut by river erosion, collapsed into heaps of rubble, and what few sculptures remained on the other nine major buildings toppled. When Carnegie Institution archaeologist Gustav Stromsvik arrived shortly thereafter, he found people living in temporary lean-tos on the patios of their houses as they weathered the aftershocks of the following week. Cleanup work left ancient sculptures stacked in piles around the site.

The earthquake only added to the disarray created over the past centuries, during which local people and foreign visitors scavenged through the rubble of the Maya ruins and took attractive pieces for their own. This process began in the years following the collapse of the ruling Classic period dynasty in Copán, in about A.D. 820. Postclassic people removed sculpture from the temple that housed the tomb of the last ruler, Yax Pasah (New Dawn), and carried it off to their own homes. They buried their children and other loved ones in the east court of the Acropolis, using the carved blocks from what had been a funerary temple to line the bottoms of the graves. They carried broken fragments of stone incense burners high into the mountains and left them in caves and crevices of the sacred mountains where they revered their ancestors.

Collectors of a different kind later scattered Copán sculpture all over the world: to museums in Brussels, Cambridge, Chicago, Cleveland, Esquipulas (Guatemala), Genoa, London, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seville, Tegucigalpa (Honduras), the Vatican, and Washington, D.C. Meanwhile sun, wind, rain, and temperature change assaulted those sculptures that remained. As the great Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff observed, "As if jealous of this superb creation of man, all the most violent forces of nature seem to have conspired to destroy it."

This history presents a challenge for those seeking to study the ancient sculptures. As a result of major research and conservation efforts by archaeologists from the United States and Central America (working under the auspices of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History), in the past decade more than 25,000 stone sculpture blocks from Copán's fallen temples and palaces have been studied and cataloged, and indoor storage areas have been created to protect them from the elements. Now we and our Central American colleagues (including Honduran archaeologist Ricardo Agurcia, the executive director of the Copán Association, and Guatemalan architectural restorer Rudy Larios, the codirector of the Copán Acropolis Archaeological Project) have completed another ambitious mission: to create a new sculpture museum in Copán.

Built by the Honduran government and just opened on August 3, 1996, the museum insures the safekeeping of the monuments and unveils reconstructed façades with bold, sculptural messages from buildings throughout the ancient city. Although less familiar to the public than Copán's free-standing stelae and altars, these façades contained the most plentiful, and often the best, stone sculptures in the city. The carvings fit together like mosaics to depict human figures, gods, animals, flowers, crops, and other motifs.

Set within the Copán National Park, the museum consists of one main building and will eventually have several smaller ones connected by outdoor trails. Designed by Honduran architect Angela Stassano, the building is two stories high, broader at the second story. A large mound around the base is planted with trees native to the area to help the museum blend with its mound- and tree-filled surroundings. Natural light illuminated the Copán monuments and buildings for centuries, and every attempt has been made to use natural light within the museum. In addition to skylights, the museum has a large opening in the center of its roof to aid in circulation and so that at any given time, the daily and yearly movements of the sun will highlight some exhibits more clearly than others, just as they do at the archaeological site.

The building was planned to reflect the central concepts of the Maya worldview. The entrance is a stylized mouth of a mythical serpent, symbolizing a portal from one world to the next. As people proceed through the tunnel, they have a sense of entering another place and time. The entrance also evokes the tunnels that archaeologists dig to reveal the earlier constructions buried inside the pyramidal bases of Maya buildings....
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

The Ancient Indus Civilization

http://www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html
Introduction

The greater Indus region was home to the largest of the four ancient urban civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia and China. It was not discovered until the 1920's. Most of its ruins, even its major cities, remain to be excavated. The ancient Indus Civilization script has not been deciphered.

Many questions about the Indus people who created this highly complex culture remain unanswered, but other aspects of their society can be answered through various types of archaeological studies.

Harappa was a city in the Indus civilization that flourished around 2600 to 1700 BCE in the western part of South Asia....

The Saraswati River

In fact, there seems to have been another large river which ran parallel and west of the Indus in the third and fourth millenium BCE. This was the ancient Saraswati-Ghaggar-Hakra River (which some scholars associate with the Saraswati River of the Rg Veda).

Its lost banks are slowly being traced by researchers. Along its now dry bed, archaeologists are discovering a whole new set of ancient towns and cities.

Meluhha

Ancient Mesopotamian texts speak of trading with at least two seafaring civilizations - Magan and Meluhha - in the neighborhood of South Asia in the third millennium B.C. This trade was conducted with real financial sophistication in amounts that could involve tons of copper. The Mesopotamians speak of Meluhha as a land of exotic commodities. A wide variety of objects produced in the Indus region have been found at sites in Mesopotamia.

This site tells the story of the ancient Indus Civilization through the words and photographs of the world's leading scholars in the US, Europe, India and Pakistan. It starts with the re-discovery of Harappa in the early 19th century by the explorer Charles Masson and later Alexander Burnes, and formally by the archaeologist Sir Alexander Cunningham in the 1870's. This work led to the the first excavations in the early 20th century at Harappa by Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni, and by R.D. Banerji at another Indus Civilization city, Mohenjo Daro .

HARP and Indian excavations

Since 1986, the joint Pakistani American Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP) has been carrying out the first major excavations at the site since before independence in 1946. These excavations have the shown Harappa to have been far larger than once thought, perhaps supporting a population of 50,000 at certain periods. These continuing excavations are rewriting assumptions about the Indus Civilization, as is recent work by archaeologists in neighboring India. New facts, objects and examples of writing are being discovered every year in India and Pakistan.

Harappa.com

Almost 600 slides from HARP photographed by Dr. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer [University of Wisconsin, Madison] and Richard H. Meadow [Harvard University] appear on this Website, including the 90 Slide Introduction to the Ancient Indus Civilization. A detailed look at the discoveries from 1995-1998 at the actual site in Punjab describes the comprehensive evidence for a Early Harappan Ravi Phase dating to 3300 BCE. Another 90 slide section covers excavations in 2000-2001. It includes an essay on the early development of Indus arts and technologies. Another section explores the mysterious so-called granary and circular platforms at Harappa. A fifth 90 slide section covers further evidence for the Ravi and Kot Diji phases at the site. A 72 slide series by Sharri Clark [Harvard University] looks at ancient Indus figurines discovered in Harappa. There is also a 103 introduction and image series on Mohenjo Daro, the best known ancient Indus site in Sindh, southern Pakistan.

Another 600 slides and essays by a number of other leading scholars of the ancient Indus civilization in India, Pakistan, Europe and America are part of this Website. Many more new facts and theories will be published here in the coming years, for we are only at the beginning of what are likely to be a long series of exciting future discoveries in the Indus and Saraswati river basin.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Queen Anne's Revenge

Post by Antipatros »

Blackbeard the Pirate, Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project
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Produced by http://wwww.nautilusproductions.com. In 1996 Intersal, Inc. (http://www.lat3440.com/) discovered Blackbeard the Pirate's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge. Join Nautilus Productions and the North Carolina underwater archaeologists from the Blackbeard Shipwreck Project (http://www.qaronline.org) as they examine the site just outside Beaufort, NC.
From PBS Secrets of the Dead:

Blackbeards lost ship: Documentary
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Blackbeard was once the most feared and successful pirates on the sea having sailed with the likes of Sam Bellamy and Benjamin Hornigold. But at the height of his fame, the flagship of his pirate fleet, 'The Queen Anne's Revenge', sunk in mysterious circumstances off Beaufort Inlet on the East coast of America.

Now a team of underwater archaeologists are going below the waves to explore the wreck and find out why the notorious ship was lost. Was it the victim of bad navigation or are there more sinister motives behind the ship's sinking?
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Mary Rose

Post by Antipatros »

There is nothing like walking a historic battlefield or visiting a piece of living history, such as H.M.S. Victory:

HMS Victory and Mary Rose
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But let's step next door to consider the special problems of raising, conserving and partially recreating a shipwreck.

Mary Rose - 1545 right through until 2012
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The Discovery and Excavation of the Mary Rose

http://www.maryrose.org/project/index.html
The search for and discovery of the Mary Rose was a result of the dedication of one man, the late Alexander McKee.

In 1965, in conjunction with the Southsea branch of the British Sub- Aqua Club, he initiated project 'Solent Ships'. While on paper a plan to examine a number of known wrecks in the Solent, Alex McKee really hoped to find the Mary Rose.

Ordinary search techniques proved unsatisfactory so something different was needed. The answer was side-scan sonar. The collaboration of Professor Harold E. Edgerton (MIT) and John Mills, the British representative of his firm EG & G, led to the discovery of the wreck site. They provided the sonar systems and operated them, and in 1967 discovered a strange sub-seabed anomaly. This was confirmed by a further sonar survey in 1968. Alex McKee believed the Mary Rose had been rediscovered. In his fascinating book, "How we found the Mary Rose," he summarised the sonar data in a letter to Professor Edgerton as follows.
"(a) an oval shaped feature about 200 feet long headed towards No Mans Land Area.

(b) the interfaces give the impression of a flattened letter 'W'. i.e., they are exceedingly angular and nothing like the rounded shapes of the clay interfaces. They are smaller at the ends than in the middle. Oh, ho!

(c) the feature appears to form some sort of discontinuity or 'break' in the geological strata, and as this cannot be the results of an earthquake the hypothesis that it results from the insertion into the seabed of 700 tons of battleship seems likely, particularly when we consider that the findings at (a) are consistent entirely with the wreck of the Mary Rose.

If the suspect feature proves to be the Mary Rose, then I expect we shall be able to claim the carrying out of the first electronic trenching survey of a sub-mud historic wreck."
In November 1967 the Mary Rose (1967) Committee was formed. This consisted of Alexander McKee, Margaret Rule, (who had been providing archaeological advice almost from the start), W.O.B. Majer and Lt-Cdr Alan Bax. This organisation then leased the area of the seabed around the site for the grand sum of one pound per annum.

What was needed now was proof that the anomaly was indeed the Mary Rose. Between 1968 and 1971, diving on the site was carried out by a team of volunteers who called themselves Mad Mac's Marauders. This was accomplished from very small boats and on a vanishingly small budget. Indeed, the funds to support the project were often provided by the team themselves, there was no sudden influx of capital. In the winter of 1968, they confirmed the existance of something solid under the silt using probes. The excavation continued, using waterjets. a dredger to help remove the overburden, and airlifts.

They were encouraged when stray pieces of timber started showing up, and then the dredger brought up an iron gun. Because the gun started deteriorating as soon as it was exposed to air, it had to be sent for conservation as quickly as possible. Alex McKee radioed Portsmouth City Museum to tell them when the gun would be sent ashore, and in his own words states.

"After so many years of deing denigrated behind my back as a mad chaser after wild geese, it was with great satisfaction that I saw the message go off."...
C.T.C. Dobbs, The Raising of the Mary Rose

Archaeology & Salvage Combined

http://www.maryrose.org/project/raise1.htm
Aspects of the Salvage Operation

The decision on whether or not to salvage the hull of a historic ship is not an easy one to make. Due consideration has to be given to so many different factors, varying from whether it is technically and economically feasible to whether the funding can be sustained for the long-term restoration and conservation programmes that are required after salvage.

The 1978 excavation showed that salvage might be possible. Two major questions then had to be answered. Was it desirable to carry out a full excavation of the ship and her contents and then raise her?

Secondly, was this feasible? These questions were discussed at two meetings, specially convened by the Mary Rose (1967) Committee.One considered the first question, and was attended by archaeologists, ship historians, naval architects and museologists, who considered the archaeological evidence and the historical importance of the ship in cultural, social and military terms. They agreed that the Mary Rose should be completely excavated and recorded as she lay on the sea bed. They also agreed that if this was feasible, the hull itself should be recovered and brought ashore to form the centre-piece of a Tudor Ship Museum. The second meeting was attended by salvage consultants, salvage contractors, structural engineers and naval architects who agreed that it should indeed be possible to reinforce and recover the hull, although this could only be confirmed after the ship had been emptied and surveyed in greater detail. As a result of these two meetings, a charitable company, the Mary Rose Trust, was formed in January 1979 with objectives that included: "To find, to record, to excavate, raise, bring ashore, preserve, publish, report on and display for all time in Portsmouth, the Mary Rose (Rule 1982, 1983).

Although the original aim was to raise the hull if at all possible, the final decision to go ahead with the salvage operation was not taken until January 1982 when all the necessary information to make the decision was available. Even after that date there were various 'cut-off dates' when the decision to halt, survey and backfill could still be taken.

All salvage operations present their own particular set of problems but an important factor in trying to salvage the Mary Rose was that the remaining hull was an open shell, consisting mainly of the starboard side of the hull, rather than a complete cross section with transverse strength. Many methods were considered and the Trust had the benefit of expert advice from an Advisory Committee under the chairmanship of Professor G. Goodrich. The problem of the open shell led to an important decision being taken: namely to carry out the lifting operation in three very distinct stages.

In the first stage, the problem of 'bottom suction' had to be overcome. This was achieved by raising the first few centimetres over a period of several days using an ingenious system of twelve hydraulic jacks which raised the lifting frame slowly up the four legs. It was only when the hull was hanging freely from the lifting frame, clear of the sea bed and the suction effect of the surrounding mud, that the salvage progressed to the second stage when the hull was lifted completely clear of the sea bed and transferred underwater into the lifting cradle....
The Mary Rose Ashore

http://www.maryrose.org/project/ashore1.htm
While raising the Mary Rose ended one era for the project, it marked the start of a new and continuing phase. The ship herself had to be housed in a suitable environment, there were thousands of artefacts to store, record and then conserve, and a new museum had to be built to house them.

To support these aims, money had to be raised, the media had to be kept interested in the project and we needed to start attracting visitors. Lets take a look at some of the activities of the Trust since 1982, starting with the ship herself.

The Ship

After the ship was raised she was towed into Portsmouth naval base. She was wrapped in protective foam and polythene and constantly sprayed to keep her wet....
Much, much more at The Mary Rose.org.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

Image
[Smithsonian Institution photo]
TIGHAR (pronounced “tiger”) is the acronym for The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a non-profit foundation dedicated to promoting responsible aviation archaeology and historic preservation....

http://tighar.org/about.htm
TIGHAR Niku VII: The Earhart Project

Finding the Plane


http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/niku7.html
On March 20, 2012 at a special event in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the United States Department of State in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that later this year TIGHAR will do the long-awaited search for Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra in the deep waters off the reef at Nikumaroro in the Republic of Kiribati....

On July 2, 2012 – the 75th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance – TIGHAR’s Niku VII expedition will sail from Honolulu to conduct a search for the Earhart Electra in the waters adjacent to Nikumaroro. This is the hi-tech deep water search we’ve long wanted to do but could never afford.

Why now?

Photo analysts at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research have examined a photograph of the island’s shoreline taken three months after Earhart’s disappearance. They agree with TIGHAR forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman that an object visible in the photo is consistent with Lockheed Installation 40650, one of the main landing gear assemblies on Earhart’s Lockheed Electra Model 10E Special.

The photograph is not a smoking gun – at least not yet – but it is new and compelling support for TIGHAR’s long-standing hypothesis that Earhart landed the Electra safely on the island’s dry, smooth reef and sent radio distress calls for several days before rising tides and surf washed the aircraft into the ocean where it broke up and sank. The validation of Jeff Glickman’s research and the publicity generated by the announcement of the new expedition at a special State Department event on March 20th has enabled us to raise over 75% of the $2,000,000 it will take to carry out the search. As with our nine previous trips to Nikumaroro, no government funds are involved. The money is being raised from a growing family of corporate sponsors including Lockheed Martin and FedEx, but most of the funding to date has come as contributions, large and small, from individual donors. To complete the expedition budget we need what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called “Amelia’s spirit, that sense that anything is possible if we just roll up our sleeves and get to work together.”

The Niku VII Expedition

The expedition vessel will be the University of Hawaii oceanographic research ship R/V Kaimikai-O-Kanaloa (affectionately known as “K-O-K”). TIGHAR’s contractor for the hi-tech underwater search will be Phoenix International, the U.S. Navy’s primary source of deep ocean search and recovery expertise. Experienced underwater archaeologists will oversee the investigation of any man-made objects encountered during the search. A film crew will record the expedition for a Discovery Channel television documentary.

Upon arrival at Nikumaroro we’ll use multi-beam sonar to construct a detailed map of the steep, craggy underwater mountainside that is the island’s western reef slope. Understanding the topography will help us define and prioritize the area to be searched by an Autonomous Underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with a variety of sensors, including high-resolution side-scan sonar. The exact AUV has not yet been selected.

“Targets” identified by the AUV will be investigated using a Remora 6000 Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). This ROV, designed and built by Phoenix International, was used to recover the flight data recorder from Air France Flight 447, the Airbus A330 that went down in the South Atlantic on June 1, 2009.

Our objective on this expedition is to conduct a thorough search of the area we judge to be most likely to contain wreckage from the Earhart Electra. Any man-made objects found will be photographed and there [sic] location carefully recorded. No recovery of objects will be attempted unless necessary to confirm identification. Should identifiable wreckage from the Electra be discovered it will be documented as thoroughly as possible in situ so that a separate expedition can be equipped with the appropriate means to recover and conserve the materials....
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

James P. Delgado, Archaeology of Titanic

It has been 100 years since it sank, and 27 years since it was rediscovered. Now the wreck of Titanic has finally become what it was always meant to be: an archaeological site.

http://www.archaeology.org/1205/feature ... e_map.html
At the bottom of the ocean, centuries pass with little occurring in the way of incident. But on April 15, 1912, deep in the Atlantic, 375 miles southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, that changed. A massive steel structure, after falling for more than two miles, hit the silt and drove into thick clay beneath. Silt bloomed as the sound of the impact reverberated in the darkness. Other pieces of the world’s largest passenger steamship followed like a heavy rain. The bow came in fast, nose first, plowing a deep furrow into the clay. Over the next several hours, fragments of the hull, dishes, machinery, and linoleum tiles—and the remains of people—settled across miles of seabed. What had once been a floating city was fragmented and scattered two and a half miles down. More than 1,500 people lost their lives.

Slowly but inexorably, the processes of the deep sea went to work. Marine organisms and acidic clay consumed wood and other organic material, including human remains. Bacteria colonized and began to eat away at the steel, leaving behind tendrils and puddles of red, orange, and yellow byproducts. The ship’s crisp angles blurred and the proud name on the bow, Titanic, dissolved. Silt slowly accumulated on intact paneling, doors still on their hinges, and a metal bed frame with a nightgown draped over it. In 1912, Thomas Hardy imagined, in a poem lamenting Titanic, “Over the mirrors meant/To glass the opulent/The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.” Intact compartments and cabins that had once been filled with air, light, and passengers were full of water pressurized to 6,000 pounds per square inch and seemingly alien life. Over decades, the wreck became a haven for deep-sea creatures such as ghost crabs, crinoids, and worms—a series of “reefs” in what had once been a deep-sea desert.

Seventy-three years after the sinking, in the early morning of September 1, 1985, Argo, an unmanned deep-sea vehicle, disturbed the darkness for the first time. Argo, carrying video cameras and sonar, was towed at the end of miles of coaxial cable by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) ship Knorr. Argo sent back to the ship grainy, real-time images from the deep—the first the world had seen of Titanic since black-and-white photographs depicted it departing the Irish coast in 1912. Humans first visited the wreck the following year in the research submersible Alvin, peering out of small portholes. In 1987, another submersible, Nautile, glided over the site, and with a robotic arm carefully picked up the first of 1,800 artifacts it would recover from the mud during that expedition.

Since then, a new era has dawned in our quest to study the past that lies at the bottom of the ocean. In 2010 two highly sophisticated robotic vehicles systematically crisscrossed the seabed on their own, with high-resolution sonar and camera systems, creating the first comprehensive map of the Titanic site. Another robot, at the end of a fiber-optic cable, sent to the surface live, full-color, 3-D images, allowing scientists to virtually walk the decks of the ship. This latest research effort, of which I was a part, represents a paradigm shift in underwater archaeology. For the first time, Titanic can be treated and explored like any other underwater site—even extreme depth is no longer an obstacle to archaeology. Thanks to rapid technological advances and interdisciplinary work, archaeologists have a whole new perspective on sites such as Titanic, and new questions to ask, questions we never could have dreamed of when underwater archaeology began just 50 years ago....
NOAA, Titanic

http://archive.org/details/Titanic_692

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NOAA Titanic Expedition 2004: Breathtaking Wreck Footage
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R.M.S. Titanic: 100 Years Later

http://www.noaa.gov/titanic/

NOAA's Role
Exploration
Technology
Resources
Last edited by Antipatros on Wed May 02, 2012 6:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Donner Party

Post by Antipatros »

Julie Schablitsky, Letter from California: A New Look at the Donner Party

The Native American perspective on a notorious chapter in American history is being revealed by the excavation and study of a pioneer campsite.

http://www.archaeology.org/1205/letter/ ... ashoe.html
In late October 1846, an early snowstorm stranded 22 men, women, and children in Alder Creek meadow in California’s Sierra Nevada. The squall came on so fiercely and suddenly that the pioneers had just enough time to erect sleeping tents and a small structure of pine trees covered with branches, quilts, and the rubber coats off their backs. Living conditions were crowded, and their wool and flannel clothes were useless against leaks and the damp ground. As time passed, seasoned wood became so hard to find that the stranded pioneers, known as the Donner Party, were often without fire for days. Huddled under makeshift shelters, the migrants ate charred bone and boiled hides until they turned to more desperate measures to survive. Today the people of the Donner Party are remembered for cannibalizing their dead in a last-ditch effort to survive.

Almost 10 years ago, I arrived at Alder Creek meadow, a few miles outside of Truckee, California, with my excavation codirector Kelly Dixon, of the University of Montana, and a team of colleagues to search for archaeological evidence of that miserable winter. The story of the Donner Party is a familiar tale, well known from the accounts of survivors and rescuers. But, as in many cases, archaeology provided a different perspective and forced us to reevaluate what we thought we knew about this dark chapter in Western history....
U.S. Forest Service, Trail of Tragedy: The Excavation of the Donner Party Site (1994)

http://archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava19387vnb1

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Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Demon of Undoing »

The rebel yell, reconstructed.

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They wonder at the genesis of it, but anybody that has been to tribal meetings of Southeast natives ( Choctaw and Cherokee, particularly) will have heard this. I myself have made the sound for as long as I can remember ( mostly at appropriate moments, but not always). White Southerners had been fighting against and alongside those tribes for 200 years by the time of the Civil War. Properly done, that holler can rattle windows and make iron pots ring at close range. The psychological impact of hearing that out of a thousand throats while having rifle rounds drop your friends from sometimes absurdly long ranges had to be devastating. I remember reading of a meeting engagement at night in Tennessee, I think, and the Union troops report being unduly unnerved by the cry and the darkness. I'll see if I can find the reference.

That night had to have been like the early days of Guadalcanal was for the Marines. Oddly enough, William Manchester in his book reports Southerners leaking out of Raider lines and sneaking into Japanese lines like Indians, and using Bowie knives to do to the Japanese just what Indians would have done. Had Indians fought at night. Which they didn't .

Unrelated digression. Indians. War whoops. Southerners. You get the point.
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Antipatros »

Very cool, Demon. I'm glad they were able to locate two recordings for added assurance.

Maybe an accurate recreation of the "British cheer" will be next.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

--T.S. Eliot
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Marcus
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Marcus »

Demon of Undoing wrote:. . The psychological impact of hearing that out of a thousand throats while having rifle rounds drop your friends from sometimes absurdly long ranges had to be devastating. . .
Vastly overrated, DU . . 15,000 Rebel yells went up Seminary Ridge, 7,000 quiet Rebels went back down . . .

The day before, the Southern boys tried the Rebel Yell at Little Round Top, but when Joshua Chamberlain's boys from Maine, with empty rifles, charged with fixed, Yankee bayonets, the Southerners dropped their guns, fell silent, and were taken captive.
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
--- Richard Nixon
******************
"I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels."
—John Calvin
Demon of Undoing
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Demon of Undoing »

Marcus wrote:
Demon of Undoing wrote:. . The psychological impact of hearing that out of a thousand throats while having rifle rounds drop your friends from sometimes absurdly long ranges had to be devastating. . .
Vastly overrated, DU . . 15,000 Rebel yells went up Seminary Ridge, 7,000 quiet Rebels went back down . . .

The day before, the Southern boys tried the Rebel Yell at Little Round Top, but when Joshua Chamberlain's boys from Maine, with empty rifles, charged with fixed, Yankee bayonets, the Southerners dropped their guns, fell silent, and were taken captive.
So, then, I guess it was no big deal. The Union types were making up the pathos of the thing out of whole cloth.

I'm not bothering to refight the Civil War with anybody.
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Marcus
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Marcus »

Demon of Undoing wrote:. . I'm not bothering to refight the Civil War with anybody.
Me either, DU, or at least not for such a subject. My great-grandfather marched with Sherman to the sea . . I have his discharge papers framed.

My wife's people fought and died with the 9th and 23rd Texas Cavalry units . . three of her forebears lie under CSA gravestones in the Manchester Cemetery, Red River County, Texas.

Lot's of horse-puckey on both sides . . .
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
--- Richard Nixon
******************
"I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels."
—John Calvin
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Torchwood
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Re: Archaeology, Re-enactment & Reconstruction

Post by Torchwood »

I wondered why both sides made such a fuss about the Rebel Yell - but those recordings explain it. It simply does not sound human - can understand why it would spook the Union troops.
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