The sites and sounds of prehistory

Some archaeologists argue that sound effects were an important, perhaps even decisive, factor in how early humans chose and built their dwellings and sacred places. However, assessing the claims of 'acoustic archaeology' encounters a fundamental problem: sound is ephemeral. We do not even know what our ancestors were thinking - or often a clear idea of the original layout and acoustic properties of the structures we are interpreting.
     "We are visually very sophisticated, but acoustically very primitive," says UK archaeologist Paul Devereux, an advocate of the claims of acoustic archaeology. Our ancestors, by contrast, would have been "acoustically more calm and attentive in a much quieter world", he says. Without artificial light, listening intently would have been imperative to ward off night-time predators. In a time before writing, moreover, information was principally communicated orally. It seems reasonable that prehistoric humans would have paid more attention to their acoustic landscapes than we do today. "Senses as a whole were more fused," says Julian Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester, UK. "There wasn't the separation of vision from the other senses as there has been over the last few centuries. Nowadays we tend to prioritise vision."
     We also know that our ancestors appreciated their ability to exploit their environment to make sound early on. The discovery of three flutes in 2009 in a cave in south-west Germany pushes the origins of music back to the middle Palaeolithic era, 40,000 years ago. Lithophones or rock gongs - stones that create a tone when hit - are found around the world. A cave at Fieux à Miers in the Midi-Pyrénées region of the south of France contains a 2-metre-tall feature which resonates like a gong when struck. Recalcified fractures on the lithophone indicating where it was struck can be dated back to the upper Palaeolithic, around 20,000 years ago. Outdoor examples include Kupgal Hill in Karnataka state, southern India, where an outcrop of dolerite boulders emits loud ringing tones when hit with granite stones.
     Iegor Reznikoff of Nanterre University, Paris, has examined the caves of Rouffignac in the south of France and showed that paintings are located where the most interesting sound effects are heard. But systematic analyses of such sites are few and far between. It is one thing to show that our ancestors were aware of their acoustic environment. It is quite another to prove that they intentionally designed their surroundings with acoustics in mind.
     One focus of this debate lies with enclosed spaces such as burial mounds, underground temples and burial chambers dug out of rock and earth. In the 1990s, Devereux and his colleagues measured the acoustics of six sites in the UK and Ireland dating from around 3500 BCE to 400 BCE, and found that all of them have resonant frequencies between 95 and 120 hertz, within the range of a male voice. Chant in a drone at the right frequency and you can map out the shape of the acoustic resonance, hearing the sound loud in one place and hardly at all in another - a dramatic and impressive sound effect. Devereux thinks this is no coincidence: the spaces were tuned to maximise the acoustic impact of ritual chanting.
     Not everyone is convinced. Matthew Wright, an acoustics researcher at the University of Southampton, UK, is scathing in his commentary. "If you are going to conclude that particular burial mounds were designed for chanting, then you have to also conclude that my bathroom was made for singing," he says. Devereux accept that acoustic intent in the design of burial mounds is far from proved, and it will be difficult to do so conclusively.
     And what about Stonehenge? With no roof on the monument, any sound made within it might be expected to scatter vertically and be lost to the atmosphere, either directly or after reflecting from the ground. Yet the stones of the monument are oddly two-faced: while the sides facing outwards are roughly hewn, the interior surfaces have been chipped away at laboriously to provide a surprisingly smooth, slightly convex form that is ideal for high-frequency reflection.
     In 2009, Rupert Till, a musicologist from the University of Huddersfield, UK and Bruno Fazenda at the University of Salford, UK, measured Stonehenge's acoustic signature by bursting balloons to map out the reflections within it. What Till and Fazenda measured was impressive. "It's actually like walking into an enclosed space with a lively acoustic," Till says. "It is a really good space for speech because reflections from the stones mean you can be heard everywhere within it, even if you're hidden behind a stone." Clap your hands in the space and the sound reverberates around the monument as it reflects from stone to stone. The reverberation takes about 1.2 seconds to die down - typical for an opera house or school hall but astoundingly long for a space with no ceiling.
     Accident or design? Till suggests that our ancestors might have learned that such smoothly shaped surfaces gave off stronger echoes by observing the properties of other standing stones. Fazenda is more sceptical, suggesting it is more likely that Stonehenge was built for religious purposes, and that our ancestors exploited the lively acoustic they had created to support speech.
     Here as elsewhere, perhaps we shall never know for certain whether our ancestors built with acoustics in mind. "There may never be 100 per cent proof of acoustic intentionality," Till says. "That uncertainty just adds to the interest, mystery and aura of the ancient sites."

Source: NewScientist (27 August 2010)

  Prehistoric artifacts unearthed in Canada

Workers at a housing project in Sheshatshiu, central Labrador (Canada), have uncovered 3,000-year-old artifacts, including tools and weapons. What started as a housing development has evolved into an archaeological dig. "It's the time period that's the least studied in Newfoundland and Labrador archeology, so it's going to hopefully fill in a lot of gaps and help to answer a lot of questions," said archeologist Scott Neilson, one of the project's leaders. The artifacts will be sent to St. John's for dating and returned to Labrador to be displayed there.

Source: XCBC News (27 August 2010)

  Flint tools found during road repairs in England

Archaeological remains dating back to the last Ice Age have been found during work to upgrade a major road, the Highways Agency said. The remains, along with Iron Age and Roman settlements, were uncovered during work to upgrade the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool in Nottinghamshire (England).
     The British Highways Agency said the finds included ancient flint tools and flint knapping debris dating back to about 11,000 BCE - around the end of the last Ice Age when Stone Age hunter-gatherers returned as the climate began to warm up. A46 Highways Agency project manager Geoff Bethel said: "To uncover such rare flint tools dating back to the end of the Ice Age was very exciting." The pieces of flint found at Farndon show these people were making things out in the open, possibly in a temporary campsite, the Highways Agency said.
     The excavations also provided insight into the Iron Age and Roman communities that used to live in the area. Evidence of an Iron Age settlement at Owthorpe Junction, just east of Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire, was uncovered, and a 4,000 year old Neolithic circular monument with eight Bronze Age burials was found further north at Stragglethorpe junction.
     Phil Harding, Stone Age expert and presenter of Channel 4's Time Team, worked on the excavations as a field archaeologist for Cotswold Wessex Archaeology. He said: "Among the findings was a piece from a Neolithic axe made of greenstone, a type of stone from the Lake District. "It was very distinctive, only a chip the size of a stamp, but exciting nonetheless. Overall, there were enough bits and pieces to suggest we have evidence of hunting people, gathering, camping, and visiting the confluence of two rivers right through to the time of the first farmers."
     Jon Humble, English Heritage's regional Inspector of Ancient Monuments, added: "More than a hundred archaeologists have worked very closely with the road designers, highway engineers and earth-moving contractors to ensure that important archaeological remains have been properly recorded and recovered.

Sources: The Independent, Telegraph.co.uk (26 August 2010), Daily Mail (27 August 2010)

  Oldest evidence of arrows found

Researchers in South Africa have revealed the earliest direct evidence of human-made arrows. The scientists unearthed 64,000 year-old 'stone points', which they say were probably arrow heads. Closer inspection of the ancient weapons revealed remnants of blood and bone that provided clues about how they were used.
     The arrow heads were excavated from layers of ancient sediment in Sibudu Cave in South Africa. During the excavation, led by Professor Lyn Wadley from the University of the Witwatersrand, the team dug through layers deposited up to 100,000 years ago.
     Marlize Lombard from the University of Johannesburg led the examination of the findings. Because of the shape of these "little geometric pieces", Dr Lombard was able to see exactly where they had been impacted and damaged. This showed that they were very likely to have been the tips of projectiles - rather than sharp points on the end of hand-held spears. The arrow heads also contained traces of glue - plant-based resin that the scientists think was used to fasten them on to a wooden shaft. "The presence of glue implies that people were able to produce composite tools - tools where different elements produced from different materials are glued together to make a single artefact," said Dr Lombard. "This is an indicator of a cognitively demanding behaviour."
     The discovery pushes back the development of "bow and arrow technology" by at least 20,000 years. Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London said the work added to the view that modern humans in Africa 60,000 years ago had begun to hunt in a 'new way'. Neanderthals and other early humans, he explained, were likely to have been 'ambush predators', who needed to get close to their prey in order to dispatch them. Professor Stringer said: "This work further extends the advanced behaviours inferred for early modern people in Africa. But the long gaps in the subsequent record of bows and arrows may mean that regular use of these weapons did not come until much later."

Source: BBC News (26 August 2010)

  Discoveries in Syria reveal ancient trade routes to Nile

An academic excavation team said it had uncovered artifacts which indicate that an ancient Bronze Age kingdom in northern Syria had strong international trade relations with Nile river dynasties.
     Peter Pfalzner, a professor at the University of Tuebingen (Germany) and head of a joint German-Syrian archeology team, said that gifts originating from the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia were discovered in burial chambers at the ruins of a once royal city near what is now the Syrian city of Aleppo. He believes the ancient kingdom enjoyed great wealth and wider international trade than previously thought.
     The Qatna Kingdom wielded an extensive regional influence during its peak, from 2200 BCE until 2000 BCE. Pfalzner said that about 50 ancient gifts dating back to the late Bronze era (1650-1600 BCE) were found in his latest dig, including a gold and lapis bracelet, a sheet of gold with a depiction of a palm tree, a small crystal jar, and a stone statue of a hippopotamus of Egyptian origin.

Source: Monsters & Critics (26 August 2010)

  New theory: Oetzi was ceremonially buried

The prehistoric hunter known as Oetzi the Iceman may not have died at the site in the Italian Alps where he was found 19 years ago, but was only ceremonially buried there, according to a new study by Italian researchers. The 5,300-year-old man, whose frozen mummy is kept in a museum in the northern Italian city of Bolzano, died from an arrow shot in the back that hit a major artery, according to 2005 studies at Bolzano hospital.
     But Oetzi was slain on a different glacier from the one where he was found in the Oetz Valley between Austria and Italy, argues Luca Bondioli of the National Ethnology Museum in Rome (Italy). In his paper, Bondioli does not dispute this version of the Iceman's death but says a new examination of objects found with him show the body came from a nearby glacier. "Oetzi was buried in ceremonial fashion some time after his death," Bondioli claims.
     Bondioli and colleagues investigated the geomorphology of the site where Oetzi was found, a shallow depression between two low ridges. Some five meters (16.4 feet) away, they noticed a small rock platform, which they believe was Oetzi's burial site, connected by a natural fissure to the depression where the mummy was found. The researchers used this information to create the first comprehensive distribution map of the body and other artifacts, which they believe are funerary items rather than mountain equipment.
     The researchers plotted the distribution of the items on a digital model of the Iceman site. The model suggested that over time, Oetzi and the objects moved in semi-melted ice and slumped into the lower depression through the fissure. According to the researchers, the corpse would have turned prone, with the feet towards the north and the arms hanging down, like a body floating in dense fluid. It then stopped against the boulder where it was found in 1991.
     The new theory would explain why some of the weapons discovered alongside the mummy were not ready for use and why so many objects were found next to the body. The archaeologists believe that some of the valuable objects would surely have been looted by his murderer if Oetzi had died in a fight at the spot where he was found. "Our reconstruction suggests that Oetzi died at at lower altitude in early-mid spring, and was then buried up on the mountain with his goods in late summer or early autumn," Luca Bondioli said. Pollen found in the mummy's gut indicated that Oetzi died in April, while pollen within the ice suggested the corpse was deposited there in August or September. The theory would explain this mismatch.
     The international scientific community is split over the new findings. Frank Ruehl of Zurich University says Oetzi's arm is 'in a strange position,' a pose in which it was 'locked at the time of death'. This would indicate that the body was not moved, Ruehl contends. Also somewhat sceptical is Dr Wolfgang Muller of Royal Holloway University of London. He studied the chemistry of Oetzi's teeth and bones to track his migration route through the Alps. "It's an interesting new interpretation but it's not bullet proof," he said. "However, if Oetzi was buried they must have carried the body a long way because the nearby villages would have been at a low altitude."

Sources: BBC News (25 August 2010), ANSA, AFP, Yahoo! News, Discovery News (26 August 2010)

  10,000-year-old skeleton recovered from a Mexican cave

The skeletal remains of a young man found in a flooded cave in 2006 by German cave divers have recently been recovered following three years of in situ study. The remains, nicknamed the Young Man of Chan Hol because of the lack of wear on his teeth and after the cenote (water hole) in which he was found, are some 10,000 years old. It is hoped that they, along with remains of three others also found in Yucatan's caves will reveal new data about the peopling of the Americas.
     Arturo Gonzalez, Director of the Museo del Desierto de Coahuila and coordinator of the Study of Pre Ceramic Men of Yucatan project, who leads the investigation, stated that "Our dating confirmed that the skeletons collected in Quintana Roo belonged to members of Pre Clovis groups and are part of the few human rests found from the American Terminal Pleistocene, with physical features similar to those of people from Central and South Asia, suggesting there were several migrations to our continent." Unlike most remains of this age, from which often only the skull or jawbone is found, some 60% of the skeleton was collected.
     The investigations and recovery operation have not been easy since the remains were located in a flooded and stalagmite-filled cave some 542 metres long and 8m deep that can only be reached via dark, submerged and labyrinthine caves accessed from the Chan Hol cenote. Three years of in situ studies aimed at eventual recovery of the skeleton required more than fifty dives to record the remains in context with photographs and video. The bones were removed in plastic bags immersed in cave water in order to protect them from changes in temperature and acidity. A stalagmite that had fallen onto the left humerus was also removed since it provides important dating information - the stalagmites do not form in flooded caves.
     The remains of all four Yucatan cave bodies found so far, dating between 10 and 14,000 years old, seem to indicate a funerary use of caves since the bodies appear to have been deliberately arranged. Alejandro Terrazes and Martha Benavente from the Institute of Anthropological Investigations of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) reported that the Young Man of Chan Hol's legs were flexed to the left and the arms were extended to both sides of the body, a position they regard as unique. Stone tools, hearths and the remains of extinct animals suggest that caves were used as refuges with inhabitants drinking the water that filtered down into them. During the ice age, Gonzalez says, Yucatan was likely a desert pasture land with a sea level some 150 metres lower than today, which would have allowed people to walk through them.

Sources: Today.az (25 August 2010), Art Daily (26 August 2010)

  Welsh hillfort inspires paintings

In an excavation at Moel y Gaer hillfort, Llanbedr near Ruthin (Denbighshire, Wales) last year, students from Bangor and Vienna uncovered evidence of how the banks of the fort had been built and found tantalising glimpses of a possible building. Local artist Bill Kneale visited the site and produced paintings and landscape views of the Clwydian Range. Together with works by Mary Lloyd Jones, they are now on display in the Gwynedd Museum and Art Gallery in Bangor along with aerial photographs, reconstruction paintings and archaeological plans. Admission is free.

Source: Denbighshire Visitor (25 August 2010)

  Spear points from 3000 BCE found in Pennsylvania

A recent archaeological dig at Rotary Park has set Columbia Borough's historical clock back a few thousand years, revealing an American Indian community dating to a time when Stonehenge was under construction. "We've found spear points dating back to 3000 BCE," said Meg Schaefer, curator with the Wright's Ferry Mansion in Columbia (Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA). "We've even found evidence of what Natives were eating, including carbonized nut hulls and fish scales, which we can carbon date."
     Started in May, the dig was overseen by Stephen Warfel, an archaeologist who retired from the State Museum of Pennsylvania in 2007. "Whenever you're digging close to the Susquehanna River, you'd expect to find a concentration of native artifacts, but what we found in Rotary Park is exciting and unanticipated," Warfel said  "We don't know if there was a settlement here. It could have been a seasonal encampment. But I think, clearly, more work needs to be done, since we now have evidence that there were people living in what is now Columbia all the way back to around 3500 BCW," he said.
     Eventually, Schaefer said, the finds will be put on public display at Wright's Ferry Mansion, Second and Cherry streets. Mansion hours are from 10 to 3 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

Sources: Lancaster Online (24 August 2010), Lancaster Intelligencer Journal (26 August 2010)

  Iron Age dig in Kent to resume 21 years on

Evidence of the importance of Folkestone (Kent, England) as an Iron Age site has been unearthed as part of an archaeological project in the town. Work on A Town Unearthed: Folkestone before 1500, has begun at East Wear Bay. It is the first time since 1989 that the site has been excavated.
     Exploratory trenches have been dug to the north of the Roman villa and already evidence of Iron Age and Roman occupation has been found in the form of ditches filled with pottery, tile and animal bone. Andrew Richardson, project manager of archaeology, said: "It is already clear that a great deal of unexcavated archaeology survives across the site."
     He said one of the most interesting discoveries so far was a spread of compacted greensand chippings and dust with an unfinished quern stone, used for grinding corn, on top. "It has been known for some years that a quern stone industry, dating to around 2,000 years ago, existed at East Wear Bay, as many unfinished stones have been found at the site and on the beach below," said Mr Richardson. "This find provides conclusive evidence of manufacture of querns on the cliff top, probably during the first century BCE.
     Dig director Keith Parfitt said he was pleased with the progress. "We have a really good group of volunteers who have all worked extremely hard," he said. Volunteers are welcome to join, whether it's digging, washing finds, helping to catalogue them and process the data or showing people round the site. To become involved email townunearthed@canterbury.ac.uk or call 01303 850 614 (24 hour answerphone). Alternatively visit the site, weekdays and weekends, between 10am and 3pm to register as a volunteer.

Source: Kent Online (24 August 2010)

  Mysterious object unearthed in South Carolina

Museum volunteer David Bertrand of Georgetown (South Carolina, USA) recently discovered a mysterious object that has archaeologists baffled. The object, made of unglazed clay and about the size of an egg, appears to have a tiny human face and has crosshatch markings that appear to have been made with a thin sharp object; it also has a hole through it, possibly for suspension. Bertrand found it whilst gardening.
     Archaeologists have speculated that the object could be a boat stone, a weight attached to a throwing stick that increases accuracy and throwing distance, or a weight for a net. Ron Anthony of Charlestown County Museum suggested that it resembled artifacts from the Deptford Period (2500 to 100 BCE), but he noted that "In all the publications, I haven't seen anything like this." South Carolina archaeologist Carl Steen also remarked that he had not seen any similar object, and noted that "It's a pretty curious object. I would say that it's an important find because of how interesting it is. It will stimulate conversation, if nothing else." Martha Zierden, curator of the Charlestown County Museum stated that "We didn't know about it and we still don't. It wasn't anything that we recognized. From time to time, people bring us odd things we don't have an answer for."
     Bertrand hopes that he will be able to find out more about the object. It is currently on display with Native American objects in the Georgetown County Museum.

Source: Georgetown Times (24 August 2010)

  Bronze Age henge found in Hertfordshire

A Bronze Age henge has been discovered on land near Letchworth (Hertfordshire, England). Archaeologists have found a circular area about 50 metres wide surrounded by a bank at Stapleton's Field in Norton. North Herts Archaeology Officer Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews said: "Henges are quite rare with only 60 known in the UK, so this is a significant find. It's interesting as the only other henge known locally is on the Weston Hills, which is visible from the site we are working on."
     Fitzpatrick-Matthews, leading the team working on the site, revealed how the henge which dates back to between 3000 and 2000 BCE was discovered. "Aerial photographs of the area showed this rather extensive ring of chalk. There's nothing visible at ground level so we decided to put a trench through it. Having done that, we found the chalk bank just survives underneath the plough soil and we have massive ditches inside and out." The earth used to build the banks was taken from the ditches and the central area flattened.
     The archaeologists are able to date the henge because of pottery they found which is associated with the Bronze Age. "Grooved ware products were found, which dates the henge back to the third millennium BCE," explained Fitzpatrick-Matthews. Henges are only known to occur in Britain and Northern Ireland. They are commonly found in 'groups', each separated by hundreds of miles. There are various theories as to the purpose of a henge. Some experts believe henges were used as a defence, while others think they were meeting places for rituals.

Source: BBC News (24 August 2010)

  Nebra sky disk discarded because of volcanic ash?

One of the most spectacular archaeological finds in recent years is the discovery of the Nebra sky disk. The disk was buried about 3,600 years ago after a catastrophic volcanic eruption spewed huge clouds of ash into the sky, according to scientists at Mainz and Halle-Wittenberg universities in Germany.
     The 3,600-year-old Nebra sky disk, discovered in 1999 near the town of Nebra in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, is the oldest known representation of the night sky. It is thought by some to have been used as an astronomical clock to determine when to add a thirteenth month to synchronize the lunar calendar with the solar year.
     Scientists said the disk became worthless after the eruption on the Mediterranean island of Thera, located north of Crete and also known as Santorini, which ejected ash that obscured the sky all the way to Central Europe for up to 25 years. "There were cool, wet summers with devastating crop failures and exceptionally cold winters," said Francois Bertemes, a professor at Halle-Wittenberg University's Institute of European Art History and Archaeology. The changes were inexplicable to people of the Bronze Age, who were followers of a sun cult at that time. Their faith in their gods was shaken, Bertemes remarked, and "they called the priests and (the priests') rituals into question."
     Scientists said the 32cm-diameter bronze disk, dectrated with gold-leaf appliques representing the sun, moon and stars, was desecrated and buried on sacred Mittelberg Hill as an offering to the gods, accompanied by two swords decorated with gold, Bronze Age spiral bracelets and bronze axes. "The natural occurrences were almost certainly very bewildering to prehistoric people in Central Europe," said Frank Sirocko, a sedimentologist at Mainz University's Geosciences Institute.
     Sirocko and a team of researchers have analyzed the effects of weather and climate on human development for years and he has also looked into the Thera eruption. "It was surely a watershed in the Bronze Age and it's no coincidence that use of the stone circles at Stonehenge ceased 3,600 years ago, and that the Nebra sky disk was buried," Sirocko said. "Maybe the act was meant to make the gods merciful and get them to restore the previous conditions," said Bertemes, referring to the burial of the disk.
     The Nebra sky disk itself has been on permanent display at the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle (Germany) since 2008. Nebra Ark, a multimedia visitors' centre with information on the disk and its history, is located near the site where the disk was first discovered.

Source: M&C (23 August 2010)

  What the locals in Utah ate 10,000 years ago

If you had a dinner invitation in Utah's Escalante Valley (USA) almost 10,000 years ago, you would have come just in time to try a new menu item: mush cooked from the flour of milled sage brush seeds. In the upcoming issue of the journal Kiva, Brigham Young University anthropologist Joel Janetski and his former students describe the stone tools used to grind sage, salt bush and grass seeds into flour. Because those seeds are so tiny, a single serving would have required quite a bit of seed gathering. But that doesn't mean whoever inhabited North Creek Shelter had no other choice.
     Prior to the appearance of grinding stones, the menu contained duck, beaver, deer and turkey - sheep became more common later on. "Ten thousand years ago, there was a change in the technology with grinding stones appearing for the first time," Janetski said. "People started to use these tools to process small seeds into flour."
     After five summers of meticulous excavation, archaeologists are beginning to publish what they've learned from the 'North Creek Shelter.' It's the oldest known site occupied by humans in the southern half of Utah and one of only three such archaeological sites state-wide that date so far back in time. Janetski led a group of students that earned a National Science Foundation grant to 'get to the bottom' of a site occupied on and off for the past 11,000 years, according to multiple radiocarbon estimates. "The student excavators worked morning till night in their bare feet," Janetski said. "They knew it was really important and took their shoes off to avoid contaminating the old dirt with the new."

Source: Physorg (23 August 2010)

  5,000-year-old English landscape discovered

Five thousand years ago, the eastern coast of England, near present day Lincolnshire, was a swamp, inhabited by Bronze Age communities. Now, drained and cultivated, it supports English farms.
     But, as the region subsided up to four meteres, it sank below sea level. The peat that had formed from the decaying sea plants washed away to expose a fossilized landscape and remains of human habitation. Scientists from the University of Leicester (UK) have published a study on the region that includes fossilized rivers and creeks called "roddons". Their research, in the Proceedings of the Geologist's Association, seems to indicate that the roddons were clogged suddenly with an influx of sediment from the sea, killing the plant life and preserving it as fossils. Over the centuries, roddons repeatedly formed and then filled with silt.
     Dinah Smith, a geologist with the study team explains, "The Fenland roddons provide an eloquent signal of just how precarious environmental conditions are, at the edge of the sea. As climate and sea level are now set to change, it is knowledge of phenomena like these that will help us understand the world of the future."
     Also found were remnants of roundhouses, typical of Bronze age settlements in the region.

Source: Science Daily (18 August 2010)