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Forum: Stones Forum
Moderated by : Andy B , TimPrevett , coldrum , Klingon , MickM , TheCaptain , bat400 , davidmorgan , Runemage , SolarMegalith , sem
Respond to: New Sites and Finds in Asia
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jackdaw1
Joined:
03-06-2006
Messages: 115
from Here and now.
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|  New Message Posted!2013-06-18 14:36
Laser scans flesh out the saga of Cambodia's 1,200-year-old lost city
Continued on link above.
Video hnom Kulen Mahendraparvata City of God
Laser-scanning technology reveals that the Cambodian lost city of Mahendraparvata, dating back to a time before Angkor Wat, was much more extensive than previously thought. The latest word about the high-tech hunt for hidden ruins came over the weekend in an on-the-scene report from Australia's Fairfax Media.
Archaeologists have known about the Hindu-Buddhist-influenced city, situated about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of the better-known Angkor Wat temple complex, for decades. Some of the ruins rank among the tourist attractions on the holy Khmer mountain known as Phnom Kulen ("Mountain of the Lychees"). However, experts weren't sure how extensive the site was ... until now.
"We're talking about a city that is more than 1,000 years old and is all underground. If you didn't know, you might think it's natural," Stephane De Greefe, the archaeological project's lead cartographer, told Cambodia Daily.
The Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium set up an aerial survey of the Mahendraparvata site and its surroundings, using a technique known as lidar (short for "light detection and ranging"). The process involves flying an instrument-equipped helicopter over the area, bouncing pulses of laser light off the ground below, and then analyzing the scattered light readings to produce a 3-D map of the terrain beneath the jungle's vegetation.
Billions of data points and about 5,000 digital photographs were collected during a week's worth of aerial surveys, taking in an area amounting to 143 square miles (370 square kilometers).
'Eureka moment'
University of Sydney archaeologist Damian Evans told Fairfax Media that seeing the map displayed on a computer screen marked the "eureka moment" in a years-long search. The readings revealed dozens of temple sites, hundreds of mysterious mounds that may represent burial sites, and traces of canals and roads criss-crossing the area.
An on-the-ground expedition followed, during which the team came across two temple sites that may still be intact, and a cave with centuries-old carvings that may have been a refuge for hermits during the Angkor period.
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jackdaw1
Joined:
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Messages: 115
from Here and now.
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| New Message Posted!2013-06-17 11:36
Cambodia:Jungle surrenders its lost city
Video report on link above.
Archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology have discovered a lost mediaeval city that thrived on a mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1200 years ago.
The city, called Mahendraparvata, includes temples hidden by jungle for centuries that archaeologists believe have never been looted.
An instrument called a lidar strapped to a helicopter that criss-crossed a mountain north of the famous Angkor Wat complex provided data that matched years of ground research by archaeologists, unveiling the city that founded the Angkor Empire in AD802.
The University of Sydney's archaeology research centre in Cambodia took the lidar instrument to Cambodia and played a key role in the discovery.
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An expedition of Australian and French archaeologists using GPS co-ordinates gathered from the instrument's data uncovered five previously unrecorded temples and evidence of ancient canals, dykes and roads.
The Saturday Age recorded the discoveries by joining the expedition as it pushed through landmine-strewn jungle, swollen rivers and bogs on a mountain called Phnom Kulen, 40 kilometres north of Angkor Wat in north-western Cambodia.
French-born archaeologist Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the London-based Archaeology and Development Foundation, a co-leader of the expedition, said it was known from ancient scriptures that the great warrior Jayavarman II had a mountain capital ''but we didn't know how all the dots fitted, exactly how it all came together''.
''We now know from the new data the city was connected by roads, canals and dykes,'' he said.
Mahendraparvata existed 350 years before Angkor Wat, the Hindu temple that has captivated interest across the world and attracts more than 2 million people a year.
The lidar technology effectively peeled away the jungle canopy by using billions of laser impulses, allowing archaeologists the first glimpse of structures that were in perfect squares, completing a map of the city that years of painstaking ground research had been unable to achieve.
The archaeologists were amazed to see that 36 previously recorded ruins scattered across the mountain were linked by a network of gridded roads, dykes, ponds and temples that were divided into regular city blocks.
Over a period of years Dr Chevance and his staff had crossed ancient roads and passed by ancient structures they suspected were there but could not see because they were hidden by jungle and earth.
The discovery will prompt scientific excavation of the area's most significant sites by archaeologists seeking to discover what life was like for a civilisation about which virtually nothing is known, including why it was abandoned to the forest.
It also will allow archaeologists and historians to learn more about the evolution of Angkor, the enormous political and religious empire that dominated most of south-east Asia for 600 years.
The director of the University of Sydney's centre in Cambodia, Damian Evans, who was another leader of the expedition, said there may be implications for modern society.
''We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation,'' Dr Evans said.
''One theory we are looking at is that the severe environmental impact of deforestation and the dependence on water management led to the demise of the civilisation … perhaps it became too successful to the point of becoming unmanageable.''
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bat400
Joined:
10-04-2006
Messages: 1349
from South Central Indiana, US
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| New Message Posted!2013-06-17 05:54
Archeological excavations in West Kazakhstan region
Specialists of the West Kazakhstan Centre of History and Archeology have found the burial of a young lady dated back to the Bronze Age.
Specialists of the West Kazakhstan Centre of History and Archeology have found the burial of a young lady dated back to the Bronze Age.
It is situated in the territory of the ancient city of Zhaiyk some 12 kilometres from Uralsk. Archeologists claim that their discovery is unique. The woman was buried in the fetal position and her body was directed to the west. It is believed that a person buried like that will receive the second birth. People buried their relatives and friends in such a manner in the Bronze Age, over 2 thousand years ago. It means that if earlier archeological information dated Uralsk back to the 14th century, today there is proof that this city is much older. The ancient skeleton was situated near the 800-year old brick furnace. The team accidentally found the landmark site during routine excavations. It means that the two discoveries located in close proximity were in fact two millennia apart.
Murat Kalmenov, SENIOR FELLOW, WEST KAZAKHSTAN REGION CENTRE FOR HISTORY AND ARCHEOLOGY:
-The burial was higher than the base of the furnace. Then we have found an inscription, which said that there was a burial mound here in the 14th century. I believe that people living here hadn’t recognised it and built a furnace near it.
There are a lot of such historical complex areas in the territory of this region. This year excavations in Akzhaiyk, Chingirlau and Kaztal regions are planned to be launched.
Thanks to coldrum for the link. For more, see http://caspionet.kz/eng/general/
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2013-06-17 05:55 ]
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bat400
Joined:
10-04-2006
Messages: 1349
from South Central Indiana, US
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| New Message Posted!2013-03-08 20:04
No, this is not the same site; different locationm. (Although it sounds like a similar type of site.)
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2013-03-08 20:06 ]
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cropredy
Joined:
01-01-2006
Messages: 5598
from Oxon
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| New Message Posted!2013-03-07 17:45
Does this belong here?
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/megalithic-stone-circles-found-on-male-mahadeshwara-hills/article4475893.ece
cropredy
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bat400
Joined:
10-04-2006
Messages: 1349
from South Central Indiana, US
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| New Message Posted!2013-02-19 03:05
Urn burial site discovered near Kancheepuram, Tamil Nadu, India.
A vast urn-burial site has been found at Mandapam village, near Aarpakkam intersection, about 14 km from Kancheepuram. The importance of the site, archaeologists say, is that it belongs to a period earlier than the Megalithic Age or Iron Age in Tamil Nadu.
They estimate that the site is datable to 1,800 BCE to 1,500 BCE, that is, 3,800 to 3,500 years before the present.
The site, however, has been ravaged by quarrying for blue-metal. Earth-movers have sliced the big urns and smashed into pieces ritual pottery, bowls and terracotta plates inside the urns. Quarrying has reduced the site to small lakes with deposits of blue metal jutting out and broken urns protruding in places. A stone-crushing machine is filling the air with dust.
Villager P. Mani, who discovered the site, reported it to V. Arasu, Head of the Department of Tamil, University of Madras, and S. Elango, lecturer in Tamil, Madras University. Dr. Elango, who visited the site a few times, said the flat/conical bottomed urns were buried only one or two feet below the soil surface. While some had ritual pottery and terracotta plates inside, others were empty. There were disintegrated human bones in several urns. More importantly, there were no cairn circles on the surface of the graves to mark them. There were no graffiti marks on the urns.
The site could be as ancient as the Adichanallur site, another urn-burial site in Tamil Nadu, Dr. Elango suggested.
Cairn circles are big stones, i.e., liths, placed in a circle on the surface of the soil and urns are kept below them. The urns are also kept inside cists, which are compartments made of granite slabs. Since big stones/liths mark the urn burials below, they are called Megalithic Age burials.
The Iron Age and the Megalithic Age are contemporaneous in south India. Archaeologists say the Iron Age in south India was extant from 1,000 BCE to 300 BCE.
While urn burials with cairn circles could easily be located, the discovery of urn burials without megaliths on the surface was mostly accidental. Such sites, without cairn circles, were not uncommon in Tamil Nadu. They included the Adichanallur site.
When the Adichanallur site was re-excavated by Dr. Satyamurthy in 2004 and 2005, he found 185 burial urns there, including 90 intact and 36 with complete human skeletons inside.
Among the artefacts discovered were red ware, black ware, copper bangles and ear-rings, iron spearheads, daggers and swords.
“If the railway line between Tirunelveli and Tiruchendur, cutting across the mounds at Adichanallur had not been laid by the British, Adichanallur would not have to come to notice,” he said.
The Mandapam site was analogous to the Adichanallur site in many ways, Dr. Satyamurthy said.
In both the cases, the urn burials were not associated with stone monuments; the urns were kept a couple of feet below the earth's surface, above a natural rocky outcrop; in both, it-lines were absent; the urns were covered with lids; the urns and associated pottery had no graffiti marks; and while Mandapam is located between Palar and Cheyyar rivers, Adichanallur is located on the banks of Tamiraparani. (The pottery found in the habitatational site at Adichanallur, however, had graffiti).
Thanks to coldrum for the link. For more, see: http://www.thehindu.com
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2013-02-19 03:08 ]
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bat400
Joined:
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Messages: 1349
from South Central Indiana, US
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| New Message Posted!2012-08-29 18:45
'Red Deer Cave people' may be new species of human
The fossilised remains of stone age people recovered from two caves in south west China may belong to a new species of human that survived until around the dawn of agriculture.
The partial skulls and other bone fragments, which are from at least four individuals and are between 14,300 and 11,500 years old, have an extraordinary mix of primitive and modern anatomical features that stunned the researchers who found them.
Named the Red Deer Cave people, after their apparent penchant for home-cooked venison, they are the most recent human remains found anywhere in the world that do not closely resemble modern humans.
The individuals differ from modern humans in their jutting jaws, large molar teeth, prominent brows, thick skulls, flat faces and broad noses. Their brains were of average size by ice age standards.
"They could be a new evolutionary line or a previously unknown modern human population that arrived early from Africa and failed to contribute genetically to living east Asians," said Darren Curnoe, who led the research team at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
"While finely balanced, I think the evidence is slightly weighted towards the Red Deer Cave people representing a new evolutionary line. First, their skulls are anatomically unique. They look very different to all modern humans, whether alive today or in Africa 150,000 years ago," Curnoe told the Guardian.
"Second, the very fact they persisted until almost 11,000 years ago, when we know that very modern looking people lived at the same time immediately to the east and south, suggests they must have been isolated from them. We might infer from this isolation that they either didn't interbreed or did so in a limited way."
One partial skeleton, with much of the skull and teeth, and some rib and limb bones, was recovered from Longlin cave in Guangxi province. More than 30 bones, including at least three partial skulls, two lower jaws and some teeth, ribs and limb fragments, were unearthed at nearby Maludong, or Red Deer Cave, near the city of Mengzi in Yunnan province.
At Maludong, fossil hunters also found remnants of various mammals, all of them species still around today, except for giant red deer, the remains of which were found in abundance. "They clearly had a taste for venison, with evidence they cooked these large deer in the cave," Curnoe said.
The stone age bones are particularly important because scientists have few human fossils from Asia that are well described and reliably dated, making the story of the peopling of Asia hopelessly vague. The latest findings point to a far more complex picture of human evolution than was previously thought.
"The discovery of the Red Deer Cave people shows just how complicated and interesting human evolutionary history was in Asia right at the end of the ice age. We had multiple populations living in the area, probably representing different evolutionary lines: the Red Deer Cave people on the East Asian continent, Homo floresiensis, or the 'Hobbit', on the island of Flores in Indonesia, and modern humans widely dispersed from northeast Asia to Australia. This paints an amazing picture of diversity, one we had no clue about until this last decade," Curnoe said.
Much of Asia was also occupied by Neanderthals and another group of archaic humans called the Denisovans. Scientists learned of the Denisovans after recovering a fossilised little finger from the Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia in 2010.
The fossils from Longlin cave were found in 1979 by a geologist prospecting in the area. At the time, researchers removed only the lower jaw and a few fragments of rib and limb bones from the cave wall. The rest of the skeleton was left encased in a block of rock, which sat in the basement of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Kunming, Yunnan, for 30 years. The fossils were rediscovered in 2009 by Ji Xueping, a researcher at the institute, who teamed up with Curnoe to examine the remains.
"It was clear from what we could see that the remains were very primitive and likely to be scientifically important. We had a skilled technician remove the bones from the rock, and they were glued back together. Only then was it clear what we had found: a partial skeleton with a very unusual anatomy," Curnoe said.
Lumps of charcoal uncovered alongside the Longlin fossils were carbon dated to 11,500 years, a time when modern humans in southern China began to make pottery for food storage and to gather wild rice in some of the first steps towards full-scale farming.
Marta Mirazón Lahr, an evolutionary biologist at Cambridge University, is convinced the remains are from modern humans. The unusual features, she said, suggest the Red Deer Cave people are either "late descendants of an early population of modern humans in Asia" or a very small population that developed the traits through a process known as genetic drift.
Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum, London, was similarly sceptical. "The human remains from the Longlin Cave and Maludong are very important, particularly because we do not have much well-described and well-dated material from the late Pleistocene of China.
"The fossils are unlike recent populations of modern humans in several respects, and the mosaic of more archaic features could indicate the dispersal of a poorly known and more primitive form of modern human that left Africa before the main exodus at about 60,000 years. This dispersal could have reached as far as China, surviving there for many millennia, before disappearing in the last 12,000 years."
But he added: "There might be another possible explanation for the more archaic features. Could these alternatively be attributed to gene flow from a more archaic population that survived alongside modern humans? In the case of the Longlin Cave and Maludong fossils, the most likely candidate would be the enigmatic Denisovans who apparently interbred with the ancestors of modern Australasians somewhere in south east Asia. Could these Chinese fossils be further evidence of such hybridisation?"
Thanks to coldrum for the link. For more, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/14/red-deer-cave-people-species-human
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2012-08-29 18:48 ]
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bat400
Joined:
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Messages: 1349
from South Central Indiana, US
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| New Message Posted!2012-07-31 14:52
Archaeological dig in Qatar reveals fascinating material about the terrain and climate of Qatar seven millennia ago.
Carbon dating of ancient organic remains from Wadi Debay’an, a site a few kilometres south of Al Zubara on Qatar’s north-west coastline, has yielded the earliest yet known date for human occupation in Qatar – 7,500 years before present.
This was revealed by Environmental archaeologist Dr Emma Tetlow (Qatar National Environment Record (QNER)) in a presentation to the Qatar Natural History Group on recent investigations at Wadi Debay’an. (QNER is a combined project of the Qatar Museums Authority and the University of Birmingham, UK, directed by Dr Richard Cuttler.)
Previous to the work of the QNER, the application of environmental archaeology and geoarchaeology to sites in Qatar has been limited, but now geomorphological and sedimentological data are being used to establish sites which would have been favourable for human occupation. Applying analytical techniques to pollen, macroscopic plant remains and those of insects – Tetlow’s special field of research – is revealing fascinating material about the terrain and climate of Qatar seven millennia ago.
“In Europe,” observed Dr Tetlow, “waterlogged deposits are perfect retainers of ancient organic material, ideal for carbon dating – being anaerobic the contents of these deposits decay very slowly and can survive for thousands of years.
“When I came to Qatar I thought – well, this is a desert – we are not going to find any waterlogged deposits here. How wrong I was! At Wadi Debay’an we are using an electrically powered auger, known as an Atlas Copco Window Sampler, to drill deep beneath the surface terrain of loose stones and sand and the layer of concrete-like gypsum that lies under it, into layer upon layer of organic deposits containing vast quantities of material.”
Among the organic remains is that of a midden – an accumulated pile 2.5m thick where people dumped their rubbish, including thousands of fish bones. By identifying the bones, especially tiny ear bones known as otoliths, specialists can determine which species were found in the Arabian Gulf at the time and which formed preferred fish catches.
There are also sea shells, including those of pearl oyster shells and murex, and bivalves which have been pierced for use as ornaments, flint tools and fragments of pottery.
The 41 lithics (stone tools) found so far date to the late Neolithic period of around 6000 years ago and are finely worked. Some are made from a beautiful chocolate-coloured tabular flint. There are also 141 sherds of painted Ubaid pottery, made in Mesopotamia in what is now modern Iraq, at the same period.
Evidence of trade routes that covered thousands of kilometres, is borne out by the discovery of a deposit of obsidian, which has been sourced from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey. It is clear that these fish-eating inhabitants of Qatar were not living in isolation but as part of a wide pattern of settlements throughout Asia.
What may prove to be a post-hole for a dwelling has been excavated; evidence that at least for part of the year people were staying beside their main food source rather than leading a purely nomadic existence. A hearth near the post-hole yielded the earliest date of 7,500 years ago.
Dr Tetlow said that carbon dates have revealed evidence of continuous occupation of the Wadi Debay’an sites from the Neolithic right through to the Bronze Age, covering a span of some 5000 years.
Recently, deep within a trench, the archaeologists came across what looked like a wall built of stones. They now think that this is possibly a fish trap, of the type that was constructed around Qatar’s shores until very recently. Many can still be seen – long lines of stones stretching out into the shallow water at right angles to the shore, on which nets would have been fastened to trap fish as the tide went out.
Organic remains of insects, plants, wood and diatoms yield a wealth of information once under the microscope. From these experts can learn much about the climate at the time, the vegetation coverage and the fauna.
Excavations and research at Wadi Debay’an will continue through 2011 into 2012, and more discoveries at this remote and lonely site, on the surface so apparently barren but so rich in evidence of the lives of the ancestors of the Qatari people, will continue to shed light on ancient Qatar.
Thanks to coldrum for the link. For more click here: http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=468921&version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16
[ This message was edited by: bat400 on 2012-07-31 15:00 ]
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tDrusin
Joined:
21-01-2012
Messages: 156
from charleston, sc usa
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|  New Message Posted!2012-07-17 16:30
wow!! thank you soooo much for posting so much fascinating information about asian history, this is very helpful to me!! love to all at the mp 
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Godzilla1
Joined:
29-04-2011
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from Portland
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| New Message Posted!2012-07-12 02:55
What Ho, Rune.
Thanks your reply - should've known MP would have covered this site.
I am astounded by the estimated age of occupation - 5k years before Malta sites? Yikes.
Peace, G
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