Stone Pages Archaeo News: December 2014 Archives

December 2014 index:

1 December 2014: How farming threatened ancient human civilisation; Around 9,000 years ago, humans had mastered farming to the point where food was plentiful, and began moving into large settlements. Abruptly, these proto-cities were abandoned - one of the...
5 December 2014: Children involved in making giant 'moose' geoglyph; A giant stone geoglyph, in the shape of a moose, radiocarbon dating from approximately 3,000 to 4,000 BCE, is still baffling archaeologists regarding its origin. The geoglyph is 275 metres...
: Cappadocian site continues to yield results after 25 years; The site in question is called Asikli Hoyuk and is located in the Cappadocian region of Central Anatolia (Turkey). It has been worked continuously as a site since it was...
: Polish archaeologists dissect Iron Age burial mound; In the depths of the forest in Grudna (Poland) archaeologists have been painstakingly de-constructing a 2,000 year old burial mound to determine how it was put together. The research was...
10 December 2014: Iron Age settlement found at a Newcastle mine site; Archaeologists working for a mining company have uncovered an Iron Age settlement near Newcastle (Tyne and Wear, England). The five-hectare site at the Brenkley Lane Surface Mine has been excavated...
: Neanderthal bones in Northern France; At a rescue excavation of an open-air prehistoric site, Tourville-la-Rivière in the Seine Valley of Normandy in northern France, archaeologists were in for a surprise - the discovery of three...
: Auction of Sardinian mother goddess put on hold; A campaign in Sardinia (Italy) to reclaim a 4,500-year-old pagan idol from a US auction house is gathering pace ahead of its scheduled sale, as Italy steps up the fight...
: Oldest engraving discovered on 500,000-year-old shell; Homo erectus on Java was already using shells of freshwater mussels as tools half a million years ago, and as a 'canvas' for an engraving. An international team of researchers,...
: Evidence of ancient earthquake found in China; Scientists have found evidence of a powerful earthquake 3,000 years ago in central China, apparently the earliest known in the country's history. The earthquake, which hit an area now part...
11 December 2014: 4,500 year-old skeleton show signs of bone cancer; More than 4,500 years ago, a Siberian man succumbed to a disease that left telltale signs on his bones. By the time it took him, the cancer had riddled his...
: Stone age axe found with wood handle; Archaeologists in Denmark have uncovered an incredibly rare find: a stone age axe held within its wooden handle. The 5,500-year-old Neolithic axe was found during archaeological surveys ahead of a...
: Danish Bronze Age glass beads traced to Egypt; An international collaboration between Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and Institut de Recherche sur les Archéomatériaux (IRAMAT) at Orléans, France, has resulted in a...
12 December 2014: 23,000-year-old 'Venus' statuette dug up in France; A 23,000-year-old limestone statue of a woman with large breasts and buttocks has been discovered in a small heap of rocks during the second day of a dig at a...
: The origins of symbolic thought; Three years ago on an expedition to Sulawesi, one of the larger islands in the Indonesia archipelago, archaeologist Adam Brumm visited a cave decorated with ancient art: hand stencils, paintings...
13 December 2014: Earliest known systematic use of fire for cooking; For years, archaeologists have been digging their way through prehistoric layers of Qesem Cave, near the town of Rosh Haayin 12 kilometres east of Tel Aviv (Israel). After 14 years,...
: Man in USA finds spearhead dating back thousands of years; The ancient Native American artefact was found last month, deep in the sand near Concord, New Hampshire, about 100 kilometres north-northwest of Boston, in the northeast USA. Harry Lewis was...
: Stonehenge road tunnel plan revisited; Reaction to the UK government's proposal to bury the A303 carriageway in a tunnel within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site is deeply split, with English Heritage and the National Trust...
16 December 2014: Possible Bronze Age site spotted on Google Maps; A metal detectorist has discovered a possible Bronze Age burial site while browsing on an aerial mapping website. Gary Campion was using Google Maps when he noticed dark circles and...
: Ancient settlement and burial ground found in Greece; Excavations in Platamonas, Pieria, northern Greece, have unearthed an ancient settlement and burial ground that belongs in the late Bronze Age, around 1500 BCE. The discovery was made in parallel...
: Rare gold strap unearthed in Cornwall; A treasure hunter who found a rare piece of Bronze Age gold strap in a farmer's field in Roche (Cornwall, England) thought he'd initially unearthed a worthless piece of brass....
17 December 2014: More ancient rock art found in Southeast Asia; Back in October 2015 research results were published by Griffith University (Australia) documenting the discovery of rock art in Sulawesi (Indonesia), dated at approximately 35,000 to 40,000 years old. At...
: Dolmens under threat in India; Thrissur is currently the third largest populated city in Kerala (India) and is known as the Cultural Capital of the region. Megalithic dolmens were quite prevalent in the area, dating...
: Submerged Neolithic village found in the Mediterranean; Sea levels have been rising for tens of thousands of years. Today we have technology to help us combat the effects, but even so, a small increase can have a...
20 December 2014: Ancient settlement discovered in Georgia; The satellite images from space have allowed Georgian archaeologists to discover an ancient settlement in Shiraki (Kakheti region, Eastern Georgia). The first phase of archaeological research will be completed in...
: Mesolithic encampment unearthed near Stonehenge; Archaeologists working on a site near Stonehenge say they have found an untouched 6,000-year-old encampment. David Jacques, from the University of Buckingham, made the discovery at Blick Mead in October,...
22 December 2014: Underwater excavation reveals lost Levantine village; A 7,500-year-old water well at a Neolithic site off of Israel's Mediterranean coast near Haifa has been partially excavated. Submerged under five metres of water due to prehistoric sea-level rise,...
: Experts to examine rare Iron Age mirror; Some of the UK's top archaeologists will gather at the Oxfordshire Museum in early 2015 to help explain the secrets behind a rare Iron age mirror. The artefact was found...
23 December 2014: 3,000-year-old Settlement in Eastern Turkey; The discovery of a 3000-year-old settlement in eastern Turkey was widely reported in the Turkish media last year. The largest in the Tunceli province, it is a citadel-like site wider...
: 50 newly discovered sites scheduled in Malta; The Maltese planning authority has scheduled 50 newly discovered archaeological sites within the area of Mġarr and Żebbiegħ. It also extended the scheduled boundary of the area of archaeological importance...
24 December 2014: Chichester skeleton with unusual dagger analysed; Tests have only now revealed that a virtually-complete 4,000-year-old Bronze Age skeleton found in 1989 on farmland in West Sussex, around 100 kilometres southwest of London near the south coast...
: Iron Age settlement reveals story of prehistoric Scottish communities; Archaeologists say a large early Iron Age roundhouse with commanding views of Edinburgh, built in two phases of wattle and daub walls with a hearth at its centre between 600...
: Tool suggests humans entered Europe much earlier than thought; A stone knife found at a prehistoric gateway into Europe could force anthropologists to rewrite theories about how our human ancestors first arrived on the continent. Archaeologists discovered the sharp...
27 December 2014: Temple culture on Malta; Around one and a half millennia before the development of a complex culture of temple building which lasted for just over a millennium, settlers arrived on Malta from Sicily bringing...
31 December 2014: Ancient farm community unearthed in Scotland; Remains of one of Scotland's oldest farming communities have been unearthed by diggers working on a tram line near Edinburgh Airport. The site is on a narrow ridge about 100...
: Humans may have been drinking milk 5,000 years ago; Strong genetic mutations noted only in certain populations, including northern Europe, allow the intestinal enzyme which digests lactose during infancy to be produced throughout a lifetime. An international team of...
: Bronze Age hoard found in Wales hint at long-distance sea travel; Archaeologists investigating a 2.5-kilogram hoard of sword blades, scabbards and knives found by a metal detectorist in January 2013 say the plough-disturbed artefacts could have been delivered to Wales by...