To the map room, Indy!

waiffield:

‘I love you bro no homo’ Gilgamesh said to Enkidu as they hold hands and skipped to kill some lame ass forest giant

‘ALL OF THE HOMO’ Enkidu replied and so they slaughtered said lame ass forest giant who cares about Humbaba no one

archaeologicalnews:

An overgrown site on Alderney has been found to be one of the best-preserved Roman military structures in the world.

Island tradition had long suggested the site, known as the Nunnery, dated back to Roman times, although excavations since the 1930s had always proved inconclusive.

A joint project between Guernsey Museums and the Alderney Society was set up in 2008 to find the answers.

Over four August bank holiday weekends, a team of a dozen volunteers undertook various excavations to determine the history of the site.

Dr Jason Monaghan, Guernsey Museums director, said: “In 2009 we proved there was a Roman building inside the Nunnery and began to suspect this was a tower as all the northern English forts have a tower in the middle.

“In 2010 we went back specifically looking to prove there was a tower there - and ‘wow’ is there a tower. Read more.

anthrocuriosities:

Last member of 65,000-year-old tribe dies, taking one of world’s earliest languages to the grave.

solutreantoolkit:

jalwhite:

fyeahblackhistory:

The last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe has died, taking one of the world’s earliest languages to the grave.
Boa Sr, who died last week aged about 85, was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo.
Named after the tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to the pre-Neolithic period when the earliest humans walked out of Africa.

archaeologicalnews:

Extraordinary new discoveries are shedding new light on why Britain’s most famous ancient site, Stonehenge, was built – and when.

Current research is now suggesting that Stonehenge may already have been an important sacred site at least 500 years before the first Stone circle was erected – and that the sanctity of its location may have determined the layout of key aspects of the surrounding sacred landscape.

What’s more, the new investigation – being carried out by archaeologists from the universities’ of Birmingham, Bradford  and Vienna – massively increases the evidence linking Stonehenge to pre-historic solar religious beliefs. It increases the likelihood that the site was originally and primarily associated with sun worship

The investigations have also enabled archaeologists  to putatively reconstruct the detailed route of a possible religious procession or other ritual event which they suspect may have taken place annually to the north of Stonehenge. Read more.

My student was supposed to be in today, but what neither of us realized is that there is no school today, because today is Dump Day.  Yes, schools here close on the first day of the lobster season.  I can not get over how Nova Scotia that is.

archaeologicalnews:

TRIPOLI, Libya — Moammar Gadhafi’s forces tried to flee Tripoli with a sack of ancient Roman artifacts in hopes of selling them abroad to help fund their doomed fight, Libya’s new leaders said Saturday as they displayed the recovered objects for the first time.

The director of the state antiquities department, Saleh Algabe, hailed the find of 17 pieces, mostly small stone heads, as an important recovery of national treasures.

The pieces included a female figurine evocative of ancient fertility symmbols, several small stone human heads and two ornate terracotta fragments. Algabe said the figurines were likely used in pagan worship and dated back to the second and third centuries A.D., when a swathe of North Africa belonged to the Roman Empire. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s archaeology institute downplays theories that the ancient Mayas predicted some sort of apocalypse would occur in 2012, but on Thursday it acknowledged that a second reference to the date exists on a carved fragment found at a southern Mexico ruin site.

Most experts had cited only one surviving reference to the date in Mayan glyphs, a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.

But the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement that there is in fact another apparent reference to the date at the nearby Comalcalco ruin. The inscription is on the carved or molded face of a brick. Comalcalco is unusual among Mayan temples in that it was constructed of bricks.

Arturo Mendez, a spokesman for the institute, said the fragment of inscription had been discovered years ago and has been subject to thorough study. It is not on display and is being kept in storage at the institute. Read more.

uhuh-she-said:

FALSE.

Check it:

Sarcasm seems to exercise the brain more than sincere statements do. Scientists who have monitored the electrical activity of the brains of test subjects exposed to sarcastic statements have found that brains have to work harder to understand sarcasm.

That extra work may make our brains sharper, according to another study. College students in Israel listened to complaints to a cellphone company’s customer service line. The students were better able to solve problems creatively when the complaints were sarcastic as opposed to just plain angry. Sarcasm “appears to stimulate complex thinking and to attenuate the otherwise negative effects of anger,” according to the study authors.

The mental gymnastics needed to perceive sarcasm includes developing a “theory of mind” to see beyond the literal meaning of the words and understand that the speaker may be thinking of something entirely different. A theory of mind allows you to realize that when your brother says “nice job” when you spill the milk, he means just the opposite, the jerk.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Science-of-Sarcasm-Yeah-Right.html#ixzz1eoAG1V3O

archaeologicalnews:

History seems to commemorate only those who achieve the greatest triumphs or commit the most heinous deeds. Falling between the gaps - or even accidentally straddling them - brings few rewards.

Take the nameless souls who discovered Colombia’s Ciudad Perdida (Lost City) in 1973. The men spent weeks in the jungle, fighting off clouds of mosquitoes and avoiding snakes, before discovering one of South America’s most important archaeological sites.

They immediately set about ruining their chance of greatness by stealing everything of value and didn’t stop until almost three years later, when news of their bounty filtered beyond the jungle.

Though the theft ruined large parts of the site for dedicated archaeologists, the party’s initial pioneering opened the settlement to the world. Read more.

archaeologicalnews:

Among archaeologists who report rampant thefts of antiquities from their dig sites worldwide, U.S. archaeologists are unique in reporting run-ins with methamphetamine addicts bent on looting dig sites.

From Italy’s Etruscan tombs to Egypt’s ancient pyramids to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temples, thieves have pillaged ancient heritage sites for centuries, and a new survey finds looting widespread in both wealthy and poor nations.

Hobbyist “pot hunters” have long disturbed U.S. archaeological sites looking for early Native American artifacts to steal or sell, but anecdotal reports of “meth heads” invading sites adds a new worry for scholars.

“Archaeological fieldwork has become an increasingly dangerous occupation around the world,” finds the survey of 2,358 archaeologists (initially it was mailed to about 15,000 researchers, for a 16% response rate) reported in the current Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, noting looters — sometimes armed — at archaeological sites worldwide. “From a global perspective, looting is not an isolated problem,” says survey author Blythe Bowman Proulx of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. Read more.