Nothing makes me think "contentment" more than malaria and dysentery.Speaker to Animals wrote: Thu Aug 23, 2018 10:16 pm He might be interested in the violent death rate amongst hunter-gatherers.
Heatwave reveals hidden archaeological sites across Britain's countryside
Mysterious Neolithic ceremonial monuments and a Roman farm are among hidden secrets of England’s past that have been revealed by the summer heatwave.
Evidence of Iron Age settlements and ancient burial mounds have been spotted for the first time by archaeologists after the prolonged dry weather turned the lush green landscape yellow.
Archaeologists at Historic England have been taking to the skies to study “cropmarks” which have appeared in Britain’s parched fields.
The marks expose the remnants of historic buildings because the grass or crop above them grows differently compared to plants in the surrounding soil.
The resulting differences in colour or height of crops and grass can reveal the layouts of buried ditches or walls which once marked out settlements, field boundaries or funerary monuments.
Among the new discoveries in recent months are two Neolithic “cursus” monuments near Clifton Reynes, Milton Keynes, one of which has been hidden until this year under a medieval bank which is gradually being ploughed away.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... henge.htmlThe Sittaford Tor stone circle was discovered after undergrowth was removed in a controlled burn of the area, a practice known as ‘swaling’, exposing the stones.
The site is now being investigated thanks to a Heritage Lottery Funded scheme, Moor Than Meets The Eye. The information released so far comes from preliminary geophysical investigations.
The discovery raises many questions, including the mystery of what lies at the centre of the sacred arc, according to Marchand.
The stones were toppled 4000 years ago, with all the stones falling in the same direction, suggesting it was deliberate.
Marchand believes further analysis of the site will reveal some answers and shed light on the spiritual practices of Bronze age Brits.
“What we are starting to see is the largest surviving stone monument, preserved underneath a bank, that has ever been discovered in Britain and possibly in Europe,” said Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist at Bradford University who leads the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape project. “This is archaeology on steroids.”
The stones are thought to have been hauled into position more than 4,500 years ago to form the southern edge of a ritual arena centred on a natural depression. The stones appear to have joined up with a chalk ridge that had been cut into to accentuate the natural border.
“We presume it to be a ritual arena of some sort,” said Gaffney, whose team has mapped the terrain and subsurface features around Stonehenge with a rich suite of instruments.
The remains of an Anglo-Saxon island have been uncovered in Lincolnshire in a significant find that has yielded an unusually wide array of artefacts.
The island, once home to a Middle Saxon settlement, was found at Little Carlton near Louth, Lincolnshire, by archaeologists from the University of Sheffield after a discovery by a metal detectorist.
Graham Vickers came across a silver stylus, an ornate writing tool dating back to the 8th century, in a disturbed plough field. He reported his find and subsequently unearthed hundreds more artefacts, recording their placement with GPS, thus enabling archaeologists to build up a picture of the settlement below.
The artefacts include another 20 styli, about 300 dress pins and a huge number of sceattas – coins from the 7th-8th centuries – as well as a unusual small lead tablet bearing the female Anglo-Saxon name “Cudberg”.
Students from the university later found significant quantities of Middle Saxon pottery and butchered animal bone.
It is thought that the site is a previously unknown monastic or trading centre, but researchers are still at an early stage of their investigations.
Searchers have located the wreck of a P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft buried deep within a glacier in Greenland, more than 70 years after a lost squadron of U.S. warplanes crash-landed on the ice there during World War II.
The search team plans to dig and melt the rediscovered warplane out of the glacier next summer — and the searchers hope that their techniques can locate other World War II air wrecks in the region, including some that carried MIA (missing in action) U.S. airmen.
A one-legged skeleton discovered under a dance floor in Russia may hold the key to a centuries-old mystery involving Napoleon's favourite general.
Charles-Étienne Gudin died aged 44 after he was hit by a cannonball during the French invasion of Russia in 1812.
He had to have his leg amputated and died three days later from gangrene.
Archaeologists believe the skeleton found in the city of Smolensk, west of Moscow, is his. Samples have been sent to France for DNA testing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe ... ting-storyResearchers used the memoirs of Louis-Nicolas Davout, another French general of the Napoleonic era, who organised Gudin's funeral and described the location. They then followed another witness account, which directed them to the coffin.
Gudin, who died on 22 August 1812, attended the same military school as Napoleon Bonaparte and is believed to have been one of the French emperor's favourite generals.
