Sydney Opera House Virtual Tour [update: link now broken] has probably won some kind of award for "excellent use of technology" or "best virtual tour" or something like that. It's good fun to explore, and includes Quicktime panoramas of views outside and inside various parts of the building. (Best for fast connections; uses Flash.)

Thanks to Frank DiSalle for the link.

From the Turkish Daily News: Ancient Roman church discovered in Burdur.

BURDUR - A church from the era of the ancient Roman Empire (late period) was discovered in the district of Golhisar, in the city of Burdur. A villager from Yusufca applied to the district governor of Golhisar after stumbling across painted frescos and he delivered these frescos to the district governor. The director of Burdur Museum Haci Ali Ekinci announced that restoration of this ancient church will begin next year. It was reported that archaeologists from Burdur Museum have begun studies and to conduct historical research on the church.

From the Independent: Ethiopian Psalms to be returned.

An ancient, handwritten copy of the Bible's Book of Psalms is to be returned to Ethiopia 135 years after it was looted by British soldiers during the bloody siege of Magdala city.

The 300-year-old book, 7in square and written in the old Ethiopian language of Ge'ez, was part of a huge haul taken by troops in the 1868 invasion of Ethiopia to free Western diplomats imprisoned by Emperor Theodore II.

After the battle, the soldiers loaded 200 mules and 15 elephants with gold crowns, swords, altar slabs and manuscripts, then burned the city to the ground.

Most of the plunder made its way into institutions such as the British Museum and Oxford's Bodleian Library. But a large number of smaller items were taken home by individual soldiers and ended up in private collections. The holy book, which will be returned to the Ethiopian studies department of Addis Ababa University this week, was bought from a private collector for £750 after being spotted in a book dealer's catalogue by members of Afromet, the Association for the Return of the Magdala Ethiopian Treasures.

The return will increase pressure on the British museums and galleries which still hold illuminated manuscripts and other looted items. [continue]

Related links:
The Association for the Return of The Maqdala or Magdala Ethiopian Treasures
Ethiopia Exhibit from the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library
Ge'ez language - from Wikipedia
Ge'ez language - from Ethnologue

From the BBC:

A unique Roman "souvenir" of the building of Hadrian's Wall has been discovered.

The bronze pan, dating from the second century AD, when the Romans built the dividing wall across the north of England, was found in the Staffordshire moorlands.

Archaeologists are excited because the names of four forts located at the western end of Hadrian's Wall - Bowes, Drumburgh, Stanwix and Castlesteads - are engraved on the vessel.

The discovery was being made public at the Institute of Archaeology in London by the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), an organisation which records archaeological objects found by members of the public.

Until the discovery of this pan, only two other examples were known with inscriptions naming forts on Hadrian's Wall - the Rudge Cup, discovered in Wiltshire in 1725, and the Amiens Patera, found in Amiens in France in 1949.

Between them they name seven forts, but the present pan is the first to include Drumburgh. It also has the inscription of a person's name on it. [continue]

Related:
Roman antiquity bowls over British experts - from abc.net.au
Rare memento of Hadrian's Wall unearthed

Who knew anybody made wine in Yorkshire? From the Guardian: Last of the summer wine.

Europe's most northerly vineyard is heading for a vintage year, as grape pickers move across a sunlit Yorkshire slope for the annual harvest of "Chateau Leeds".

Almost perfect conditions have produced heavy swags of small but highly sugared grapes on the 5.7 acres at Leventhorpe, south of the city, reviving a tradition dating back to the Romans.

"We could maybe do with slightly warmer nights for these last few days," said George Bowden, who swapped teaching chemistry for viticulture. A brief lift in overnight temperatures now would help his premium wine.

"We have an ideal micro-climate here, even though we're such a good way north," he said. Producing thousands of bottles a year since 1990, Leventhorpe's three dry whites and one red have long banished the bad reputation of British wine.

The vineyard benefits from quick draining sandy soil and warmer breezes funnelling up a valley. The same conditions prompted the Romans to grow wine in Leeds and later the Cistercian monks. [full article]

On the antiquity of pots: New method developed for dating archaeological pottery. From eurekalert.org:

The contents of ancient pottery could help archaeologists resolve some longstanding disputes in the world of antiquities, thanks to scientists at Britain's University of Bristol. The researchers have developed the first direct method for dating pottery by examining animal fats preserved inside the ceramic walls.

Archaeologists have long dated sites by the visual appearance of pottery fragments found around the site. The new analytical technique will allow archaeologists to more accurately determine the age of pottery and, by extension, the age of associated artifacts and sites. The research builds on recent work that has shed light on the types and uses of commodities contained within the vessels. (...)

Pottery is essential for classifying archaeological sites. Organic materials, such as wood and bone, can easily be dated using radiocarbon techniques, but they aren't always available or reliable. Wood tends to decompose over time, and animals often dig up bones and move them around a site. Ceramics, however, have a long and stable lifespan.

"If you go to a site and you find large amounts of Roman pottery, then you know you've got a Roman site," says Richard Evershed, Ph.D., a chemist at the University of Bristol and lead author of the paper. "Later pottery, such as Roman, is relatively easy to date from its appearance, but earlier pottery can be much harder because of its rough and ready appearance. That's where the appeal of having a technique like this comes in." [continue]

Who can resist the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus?

The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the Eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30-33 cm. Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are amphibious, spending only their early life and the period of their mating season in their ancestrial aquatic environment. Because of the moistness of the rainforests and specialized skin adaptations, they are able to keep from becoming desiccated for prolonged periods of time, but given the chance they would prefer resting in pooled water.

An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusk), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Adaptations its ancestors originally evolved in the three dimensional environment of the sea have been put to good use in the spatially complex maze of the coniferous Olympic rainforests. The challenges and richness of this environment (and the intimate way in which it interacts with it,) may account for the tree octopus's advanced behavioral development. (Some evolutionary theorists suppose that "arboreal adaptation" is what laid the groundwork in primates for the evolution of the human mind.) [continue]

What a hoot! Link via Unlocking the Air.

From Pravda: Language Problem in Ukraine.

About 15 years ago, the Ukrainian speech could hardly be heard in Ukraine, both in the western and in the eastern part of it. Almost all street signs and billboards were written in Russian, the majority of schools were teaching children in Russian. The Russian language was used even in special Ukrainian schools. Almost all institutes and universities were teaching in Russian too.

A lot of changes have taken place since that time. The majority of Kiev residents still speak Russian, but all Kiev schools are teaching children in the Ukrainian language. There are only eight Russian schools in Kiev from the total number of 500. The Russian language is gradually disappearing from Ukrainian streets too. There is a fashion in Ukraine - to be a Ukrainian. The people who called themselves Russians just a short time ago are proud to be Ukrainians now. They grow the Cossack moustache and make a lot of mistakes trying to speak the Ukrainian language.

Russian language classes in Ukrainian schools have been changed to English classes. Ukrainian children learn just the very basis of Russian, but they study English from the first grade. Apparently, someone does not like that Ukraine has been too much rusified, so that person decided to change Russian classes to English to "englify" Ukraine. [continue]

From Wired.com: Air Car Caught in Turbulence.

Worried about rising gas prices and automobile pollution? Relax. If a European company has its way, cars could soon be running on air.

By the end of this year, Moteur Developpment International, a 12-year-old company headquartered in Luxembourg, says it plans to distribute model fleets of so-called "air cars" in Spain and France.

As the name implies, this is no ordinary car. It runs entirely on a stream of air delivered to a two-stroke engine. No gasoline, no pollution and no costly expenditures at the pump. [continue]

Here's a bit about the upcoming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Almost worth a trip to England!

From the Telegraph: So modern, so medieval.

Through manuscripts, metalwork, textiles and sculpture, it takes us back to the England of Henry V and the early Tudors: a land of rood screens, church ales and painted devils, of relic cults, pilgrimages and guild feasts. Colourful, gaudy, fabulously expressive and deeply religious, it is all somehow alien yet still eerily familiar. This is England all right, but not quite as we have come to know it.

The exhibition covers the period from 1400 to 1547 - the death of Henry VIII. At first it may seem debatable to take the Gothic as far as the lifetime of Elizabeth I. But of course there are no neat dividing lines in history - mentalites, as the French call them, persist much longer than kings, and even dynasties. Shakespeare, for example, is full of this Old World - indeed, one might almost call him the last great product of the Gothic age.

So this is the story of late medieval England taken up to the eve of our very own Cultural Revolution. The continuities between the days of Henry IV and Henry VIII are here for all to see, but so are the developments. Most obvious is the English reception of the Renaissance through patronage and scholarship. As Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Muslim historian and polymath, put it, writing from Cairo, then the centre of civilisation, "We hear of late that over in the west of Europe the philosophies, sciences and education are greatly improving."

They certainly were, and this exhibition shows how - constantly surprising us by its quality. We tend to know kings such as Edward IV through Shakespeare, who portrays them as machiavellian actors in a blood-soaked chain of violence, but this show gives us a picture of lavish royal patronage, and is a stunning rebuttal to the view that England was a provincial backwater. [continue]

Related sites:
Gothic Art for England, 1400-1547 - the Victoria and Albert Museum's pages about this exhibit

Update:
Gothic - Art for Medieval England at the V&A in London - from the 24 Hour Museum, October 9th, 2003.

From abc.net.au: Roman ‘gladiatorial combat’ site unearthed in Spain.

Archaeologists in the southern Spanish city of Cordoba have uncovered the third-largest known Roman amphitheatre measured by ground surface, after Rome's Colosseum and Carthage in Tunisia, municipal authorities said.

The elliptical site is 178 metres at its widest point, just ten metres less than the Colosseum which was built 40 years later.

"With an estimated capacity of 30,000 to 50,000, it was built for gladiatorial combat during the reigns of emperors Claudius and Nero in the first century, some 50 years after Christ," Desiderio Vaquerizo Gil, professor of archaeology at the University of Cordoba said.

Mr Vaquerizo said the site was ransacked at some point between the fourth and seventh centuries before Arab forces conquered the southern region of Andalusia early in the eighth Century.

The ruins first came to light last November during construction of a car park at Cordoba's University of Veterinary Science but only now has it become clear that the site is a major find.

Various epigraphs have also been discovered, including the largest collection of gladiator epitaphs known outside Rome, as well as references to a gladiator school, the only one known to have existed in the Roman province of Hispania, according to Mr Vaquerizo. [continue]

Related articles:
Discovered: Europe's biggest amphitheatre after the Coliseum - Independent

The Capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) is the largest of all rodents. (It should be noted that the now extinct rodent Phoberomys pattersoni was significantly bigger.) Full-grown Capybaras reach between 105 and 135 cm in length, and weigh 35 to 65 kilos. They are native to most of the tropical and temperate parts of South America east of the Andes, always near water. It is the only member of its family, Hydrochoeridae. (...)

When Spanish missionaries first found Capybaras in Brazil during the 16th century, they wrote to the Pope for guidance, saying "there is an animal here that is scaly but also hairy, and spends time in the water (the capybara has webbed feet to facilitate its aquatic habit) but occasionally comes on land; can we classify it as a fish?" The question was significant, as the Catholic faith forbids eating meat during Lent. Having a second hand description of the animal (and not wanting the petitioners to turn away from Catholicism), the Pope agreed and declared the Capybara a fish. [continue]

That's from Wikiupedia's Capybara page, which I found through a link over here at Irish Elk. (And thanks, Irish Elk, for your kind comments about Mirabilis.ca.)

There are lots of good capybara photos here.

Related links:
Rainforest Live: Capybara
Animal Planet: Capybara
A capybara in South Africa

Lake Reveals Evidence of Pre-Incan Silver Industry. From Scientific American:

From the depths of a small Andean lake scientists have pulled up evidence of pre-Incan silver smelting that is nearly 1,000 years old. The discovery of metals associated with smelting in Bolivia's Laguna Lobato suggests that people practiced large-scale silver ore mining some 400 years before 15th-century Incans began their silver industry in the area. The findings, published today in the journal Science, clarify a record of New World technology that was partly destroyed by the extensive plundering and recycling associated with Spanish conquest.

Mark Abbott from the University of Pittsburgh and Alexander Wolfe from the University of Alberta detected traces of lead, antimony, bismuth, silver and tin in a sediment core from the bottom of the 11-meter-deep Laguna Lobato, which is located near the colonial mining center of Potosí. The researchers dated a 74.5-cm section in the core using measurements of radioactive elements and documented an increase in smelting-associated metals that began shortly after A. D. 1000. [continue]

From ScienCentral.com: Mystery Book.

Scientists are decoding an ancient mathematics book that contains 2000-year-old ideas that could have changed the course of history. Written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, who was born about 287 B.C., the book contains concepts that others wouldn't discover for centuries.

As shown on PBS's NOVA, the ancient book is not exactly in pristine shape. "The manuscript was heavily damaged by mold," Abigail Quandt, senior conservator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum told NOVA. "The parchment is perforated where the fungi have actually gone through and digested the collagen, and it means that the Archimedes text is just totally missing in these areas."

But the larger problem with the book is that Archimedes's text was hidden some 800 years ago by a medieval monk who ran out of paper for his prayer book. The monk took pages out of the Archimedes book, turned them sideways, washed away the ink, and wrote over it. Still, there is a faint trace of the Archimedes text, and some 900 years later, a team of scientists is teasing the two texts apart.

"We are trying to take advantage of the very slight differences in color of the two inks, of the inks from the Archimedes text and the later ink," explained Roger Easton, associate professor of optical sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. "So we did that by taking images at a wide variety of wavelengths." [continue]

In Egypt, Archaeologists Fly Kites to Detect Ancient Sites. From National Geographic:

In the Kharga Oasis, 175 miles (280 kilometers) west of Luxor in Egypt's Western Desert, surveyors are flying kites.

The oasis is in a military zone — where it is near impossible to organize private helicopter or balloon flights — so researchers use the kites, outfitted with remotely operated cameras, to help map one of Egypt's richest, least-studied archaeological troves.

A spectacular series of well-preserved Roman forts, possibly built on top of pharaonic ruins, speckle the oasis, 100 miles long and from 10 to 180 miles wide (160 kilometers long and from 15 to 300 kilometers wide). Many of the ruins have never been mapped; but looters have preyed on Kharga, and now archaeologists are racing to preserve it. (...)

The surveyors work in the early morning and evening when the ruins, some almost completely buried, cast long shadows over the arid, rocky terrain. The aerial perspective allows the researchers to see features not obvious from the ground. [continue]

From the Daily Yomiuri: Christian corner of Mongolia.

"Christendom" is a word rarely used these days--and when it is few people probably imagine it as an area extending as far east as Mongolia. But at one time it did.

According to a current exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of EurAsian Cultures, a small Mongolian Christian kingdom played a brief but possibly pivotal role in world history.

Alaqush Tegin Quri, king of the Onggut people who lived in a place called Olon Sume--now part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China--was "a faithful servant of Genghis Khan and he helped Genghis Khan fight against many tribes that were opposing him in terms of ruling the whole area," museum curator Yasuko Fukuhara said.

By assisting in the consolidation of local power, Alaqush helped set the stage for Genghis Khan's 13th-century conquest of much of the known world.

But what was a Christian king doing in 13th-century Mongolia? [continue]

From the Scotsman: The day ancient Britons left their fish suppers.

Ancient Britons switched from eating fish to meat as soon as they started farming, scientists have discovered.

The change came suddenly 5,200 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic period, when the population abandoned fish in favour of cereal crops and meat, new research shows. For the preceding 3,800 years, during the Mesolithic period, seafood was a major part of both coastal and inland communities? diets.

The discovery emerged from an analysis of bones from 167 Neolithic and 19 Mesolithic skeletons.

Marine and terrestrial foods leave different isotopes, or atomic forms, of carbon in the bones. By testing for this chemical signature, it is possible to investigate dietary habits from skeletons.

The scientists, led by Michael Richards from the University of Bradford, found a strong marine isotope signal in the Mesolithic bones but the carbon in the Neolithic bones bore a distinct meat hallmark. [continue]

Related:
Why Did Ancient Britons Stop Eating Fish? - National Geographic. (Lots more detail.)

From News in Science at abc.net.au: Rich fossil haul from ancient beaver pond.

A prehistoric beaver pond unearthed in freezing northern Canada has proved to be a treasure trove of fossilised plants and animals - and provides some stark new insights into the powerful impact that climate change can have on living things.

Dr Richard Tedford, of the American Museum of Natural History and Dr Richard Harington, of the Canadian Museum of Nature, report their findings in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The researchers report that the pond environment has been preserved in rich detail - right down to wood featuring beaver teeth-cuts - in a deep peat deposit on chilly Ellesmere Island in Canada. It was laid down in the Early Pliocene epoch, some four to five million years ago, they say.

"Today, the pond is 2,000 miles [3,200 kilometres] north of the present tree line, and its winter climate is about 15°C colder than the Early Pliocene one," the report says. "The fossilised remains illustrate the flora and fauna that lived in the region millions of years ago, during a period of interaction between Asia and North America."

The fossils and their links - or absence of links - with living species on the two continents reveal how mobile species were able to move across the Bering land bridge that has joined them at various times of low sea levels, the scientists say. [continue]

From the Times of Malta: Possible Roman olive press found in rubble wall.

What could be part of an olive press dating back to Roman times has been discovered embedded under a high rubble wall on the outskirts of Nadur.

The press was discovered by Lino Bugeja, of Marsascala, while walking down the winding road to Ramla bay last week.

Mr Bugeja said he was convinced the large round stone was a press because it was practically identical in shape and size to the existing olive press at the Archaeology Museum in Gozo. The one in the museum was one of two found in Xewkija. [full article]

Among Bowerbirds, Mimicry Wins Mates, Study Says. From National Geographic:

Male bowerbirds famously woo females by fashioning elaborate bowers — not nests but U-shaped showplaces with parallel walls of twigs. There the males prance and noisily serenade the females.

This spectacular courtship ritual during the November and December mating season has long attracted ornithologists to the species formally known as satin bowerbirds, native to Australia.

New research, however, reveals that the ritual may be even more complex and subtle than previously recognized; male satin bowerbirds mimic the calls of other bird species to attract a mate. [continue]

Update:
Bowerbirds Dance, Decorate to Suit Females' Changing Tastes - National Geographic, April 2004

From the BBC: Earliest British cemetery dated.

A cave in the Mendip Hills in southwest England has been revealed as the earliest scientifically dated cemetery in Britain.

The site at Aveline's Hole, near Burrington Combe, contained human bone fragments that have now been confirmed to be between roughly 10,200 and 10,400 years old.

The specimens - representing about 21 individuals - were originally removed from the cave in the early years of the 20th Century and were held in a museum in Bristol.

There, the collection was largely destroyed in a World War II bombing raid.

It is only recently that scientists have returned to the surviving bone and teeth samples to give them a proper assessment using modern methods. [continue]

It's been a while since I've seen anything about green roofs in the press, but look what the Guardian has today: Campaign for rooftop gardens.

A campaign to lift scraps of urban countryside on to the rooftops will start today at the first national conference on "green" roofs.

Calls for compulsory roof-garden conditions in the government's drive to redevelop so-called city brownfield sites will be made by some 150 planners, architects and experts on "plants in the sky".

The move follows a London campaign to save the small Black Redstart bird, whose brownfield habitat at Deptford Creek was built more than 10 years ago. Thousands of acres of plants embedded in crushed-brick on top of flats and office blocks provide havens for the birds. (...)

The Green Roofs for Healthy Cities conference at Sheffield University will hear that Deptford Creek became "a fantastic wilderness". Matthew Frith of the Peabody Trust, which has three green roofs on its social housing estates in London, said: "I was at one of our original Victorian tenement blocks this week and up on the roof they've got the only fruiting olive tree I've ever seen in London." [full article]

I thought it was a cool idea to start with, but the idea of a fruiting olive tree in London has me totally convinced. Do you think we could pull that off in Vancouver?

From Xinhaunet.com: Chinese collector knits ancient coins into huge sword, hoping for Guinness record.

AIYUAN, Sept. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A Chinese collector braided 10,000 ancient coins, which were made during under the rein of Emperor Tang Xuanzong (713-742), or the heyday of during imperial Tang dynasty (618-970), into a one-quarter-ton sword, and is applying to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records.

Wang Aipu, the collector in this capital of north China's Shanxi province, spent one and a half years in making the "Blessing Sword" to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the city this year.

The sword is 4.12 meters long, a symbolizing four seasons and 12 months in a year. It is 250 millimeters wide and weighs 250 kilograms, both denoting the city's 2,500th anniversary. [full article]

Well, weird. And where are the photos?

Banana land - a beautiful and fascinating set of photos from Don Ellis at kleptography.com.

Link found at Metafilter.

The fight to save battlegrounds from invasion of metal detectors. From the Independent:

They are sites that witnessed some of the seminal moments of British history, where the Wars of the Roses were won and lost, where the Cavaliers and the Roundheads battled over a nation's political future and where Henry V first displayed his military skills.

Britain's famous battlefields with names as evocative as Bosworth Field, Culloden and Hastings are as much a part of the historical canvas of the nation as Stonehenge and the Tower of London.

But many of these important sites are now under threat, according to archaeologists, from a new menace: metal detectors. The invasion of amateur treasure hunters is becoming such a problem that attempts to discover the truth about some of the most famous battles in British history are being jeopardised.

At least 10 important battlefields have been damaged by uncontrolled metal detecting and the unrecorded removal of thousands of objects, the Battlefield Trust a Heritage Lottery Fund supported charity said yesterday.

They include medieval England's largest battle (Towton, 1461), Edward IV's great Wars of the Roses victory at Tewkesbury (1471), the Civil War battles of Newark and Newbury, and Henry V's first great battle (Shrewsbury in 1403) one of the first mass deployments of longbows. [continue]

Take something like lipstick, silly putty, fireworks, or new car smell. What is that stuff, anyway? What's it made of? What's that stuff will tell you. They've got pages on lycra/spandex, aircraft de-icers, lightsticks, and a bunch of other stuff, too.

When you wake up one morning knowing that you must find the lyrics for some ol' Irving Berlin song, rest assured they're over here at the Lyrics Depot. They've got Puttin' on the Ritz, Cheek to Cheek, and others. Whee!

Elephant polo? There are people who play elephant polo? Yup, and Ananova reports that the Scots just lost the elephant polo final to the Germans.

Scotland captain Peter Prentice said: "There was a massive tropical storm about 30 minutes before the game began. The sky went black and for half an hour it just rained cats and dogs. It was a quagmire and as a result the ball slowed right down. On occasions the elephants just stamped the ball into the ground." [continue]

Related links:
King's Cup Elephant Polo Tournament -from ThaiElePolo.com
King's Cup Elephant Polo Tournament - from the Tourism Authority of Thailand
World Elephant Polo Association

Herds of reindeer and horses migrated across its plains, huge forests covered much of the countryside and men and women made their homes by rivers and lakes.

Then came the deluge, and this ancient Arcadia - which stretched across the North Sea, and covered the Channel - was inundated. All signs of human and animal activity were covered by several hundred feet of water. Only the occasional stone tool, bone harpoon and mammoth tusk, trawled from the sea bed by fishing boats, has provided reminders of this lost world's existence.

But the drowned lands of the North Sea and Channel may soon be revealed by British scientists using a revolutionary underwater scanning technique that can create sea-bed maps and images as accurate and detailed as those made of dry land. In the process, the idea of Britain as an island kingdom will be challenged by researchers.

‘For the first time, we have the technology to map the North Sea and Channel sea beds in unsurpassed detail,’ said Dr David Miles, chief archaeologist of English Heritage. ‘That offers us a unique chance to open up our history. There could be dozens of perfectly preserved sites down there.’ [continue]

That's from the Observer, although I first spotted it here at Cronaca. Whatever would we do without Cronaca?

From the Guardian: Henry V's funeral shield on show.

Among the medieval treasures of gold, silver, ivory and gems being heaped up for a major exhibition on Gothic art at the V&A Museum is a scruffy object which would not attract attention at a car boot sale.

Yet the assemblage of wormy lime wood, flaking paint, horsehair and faded silk is one of the most romantic and enigmatic objects in the exhibition.

It is the funeral shield of Henry V, the victor of Agincourt. Kept at Westminster Abbey since his death in 1422, it has been taken to the V&A for the first close examination in centuries.

The study has uncovered some puzzles. On one side is crimson velvet pattern - not Henry V's coat of arms, but part of that of his stepmother, Joan of Navarre.

Claude Blair, an expert on ancient armour, believes the shield must have belonged to his father Henry IV, Shakespeare's ruthless Bolingbroke.

Yet nobody can explain why Henry V should have been buried with his parent's shield. "It still has more questions than answers for us," the V&A curator Eleanor Townsend said. [continue]

Here's one for your list of strange and unusual churches. From CNN: Tourists have a taste for salt cathedral.

The Zipaquira Salt Cathedral is built into the walls of a salt mine nearly 600 feet into a mountain in this central Colombian town of 120,000 people.

Winding tunnels descend into the Roman Catholic temple, passing 14 small chapels representing the stations of the cross, which illustrate the events of Jesus' last journey. Soft lights outline the chapels, carved with simple yet powerful strokes.

Benches at each station appear to be marble but are really salt. Tourists and the devout kneel on the benches, breathing in a soft smell of sulfur as they pray.

Moist bits of salt flutter like snowflakes in the distance of the tunnels, while stalactites of the mineral poke out of the white and gray walls. [continue]

Related links:
Salt Cathedral photos

This is the problem that comes with extensive prenatal testing. (Link goes to BBC article.)

I'm reminded of that famous quotation from G.K. Chesterton: "Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like."

An Anglo Saxon "warrior queen" has been unearthed in Lincolnshire. From the Lincolnshire Echo:

A 1,500-year-old Anglo-Saxon "warrior queen" has been found buried just two feet under the surface of a county field.

Lincolnshire's own 6ft tall "Boadicea" has been described as one of the best Anglo-Saxon finds of its kind in the county.

She was still holding her shield and had a dagger at her side when she was found. On either side of her at the site just outside Lincoln were the remains of a man and a woman who were possibly her attendants.

The woman was wearing an amber necklace and had her feet bound together with rope. The male companion was buried with his hand over a pot.

The exceptional discovery was originally made by a man with a metal detector. [continue]

Monty Python fans flock to castle. From Today's Globe and Mail:

DOUNE, SCOTLAND -- Strange things happen to many travellers while they roam the dark passages and chambers of Doune Castle. They are overcome with the irresistible urge to say silly things like "Bring out your dead!" and "We are the knights who say Ni!"

The 14th-century castle, the location for much of the filming of the 1974 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has become something of a holy grail for Python fans.

They walk through the castle reciting lines from the movie, and looking for sites where specific scenes were shot -- such as the battlement where John Cleese's French soldier shouts down at King Arthur, "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" (...)

Doune Castle is considered the best-preserved medieval castle in Scotland. It was built at the end of the 14th century by Robert Stewart, the first Duke of Albany, whose story is laced with intrigue. [continue]

Related:
Doune Castle - from Undiscovered Scotland

From SwissInfo.org: Scientists unlock Monte Rosa's secret history.

Swiss and Italian researchers are digging near the summit of Monte Rosa on the Italian border in search of secrets locked deep within the ice.

They hope to reveal what sort of pollution the Romans caused and how the climate has changed over the past 10,000 years. [continue]

From Reuters: Ancient River Found Flowing Beneath Toronto.

TORONTO (Reuters) - A river runs through it -- wide, deep, cold and ancient -- and few people in Toronto suspect it's even there.

There's an ice-age river flowing deep under Canada's largest city. There has been for at least a million years but it wasn't until last month that anyone saw any real evidence of it.

The discovery of the glacial river happened when workers were trying to cap two artesian wells, part of a stormwater runoff project in High Park, one of the city's largest parks, near the shore of Lake Ontario.

One well was capped, and then, as the other was being capped, the first well blew off like a broken water main, spewing water 15 feet into the air.

As that cap was being repaired, the second blew off, shooting up water and gravel.

Consultation with experts confirmed the workers had siphoned into the rumored, yet still largely unknown, Laurentian River system running underneath the city.

"We've discovered where it probably comes out into Lake Ontario," said an elated Bill Snodgrass, senior engineer responsible for groundwater quality management for the city of Toronto. "What we never really knew before was where it connected to Lake Ontario." [continue]

What follows is an exerpt from an article at Aish.com. Aish has a PDA friendly version, so it's one of the sites I read on my Palm Pilot while waiting in line-ups and so forth.

How and when did Jews get to Ethiopia in the fist place?

During the First Temple period, around 700 BCE, the Jewish kingdom in Israel split into two, threatening the spiritual life of the nation. Some Jews from the tribe of Dan decided to escape the resulting corruption and fled to Africa, where they would spend the next 2,000 years in virtual isolation from the rest of world Jewry. Calling themselves Beta Israel, the House of Israel, Ethiopian Jewry would eventually reach half a million strong.

In Ethiopia, the Jews spoke Tigri, an Ethiopian dialect. They studied a holy text called Orit, consisting of the Five Books of Moses and the prophets. But they knew nothing of the later rabbinic injunctions codified in the Talmud; they were unaware of the holidays of Chanukah and Purim; they never heard of Maimonides, and never saw a copy of the Code of Jewish Law. (Today in Israel, they have adopted these laws and practices.)

The separation was so complete that Beta Israel thought they were the only remaining Jews in the world.

In the meantime, they developed a unique set of customs, like the wintertime Siged festival, signifying the receiving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and including prayers for the return to Jerusalem. (It is still celebrated today, with the Ethiopian community gathering in Jerusalem.)

The separation was so complete that Beta Israel thought they were the only remaining Jews in the world. [continue]

Isn't that fascinating? I had no idea.

Related sites:
Ethiopian Jewry - Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews
Ethiopian Jews or Beit Israel - Africana.com

This makes me feel like rushing off to the travel agent to book a trip to Italy. From Zetnit.org: Benedictines' Bookish Bent Seen at Display of Rare Works.

SUBIACO, Italy, SEPT. 18, 2003 (Zenit.org).- An exhibition under way here demonstrates that the history of books wouldn't be complete without the contribution of Benedictine monks.

The exhibition, entitled "Book Museum," will be open until year-end in the St. Scholastica convent in Subiaco.

The exhibition demonstrates the "boom" in monastic writing and printing, and includes illuminated manuscripts, incunabula and other very rare works.

The creation of the St. Scholastica Library dates back to St. Benedict himself (480-547), father of Western monasticism. His famous Rule implies the use of books in private and communal reading.

Early books were lost due to the devastation caused by the Saracens in the ninth century.

One of the most valuable pieces on display is the famous "Lattanzio Sublacense," a 1465 incunabulum, or early book, considered the first writing of this nature. It was done by two German monks named Sweynheim and Pannartz, who brought the printing system of mobile characters to Italy.

There is also a rare copy of St. Augustine's "De Civitate Dei" (City of God).

The library, housed in a 12th-century Romanesque cloister, is one of the richest of the 11 great abbeys of Italy. [full article]

Related:
Subiaco - The Columbia Encyclopedia
St Benedict and St Scholastica - css.edu

A snapshot of the upper-class hub of 16th-century Edinburgh. From The Scotsman:

Remains dating back to the 16th century - when Edinburgh's Old Town was an upper-class enclave of the city - have been discovered by archaeologists working on the site of last year's Cowgate fire.

Before its slide into infamy in the 19th century, the Cowgate was the home of ambassadors, noblemen and upper-class clergy.

The site of the former Gilded Balloon theatre was the childhood home of the illustrious architects Robert and John Adam, and was once owned by a notorious philanderer who was also a leading priest. (...)

A team of experts have spent nine months piecing together 500 years of history, studying all existing records of buildings on the site and working alongside demolition teams to assess the age of buildings which stood there.

One of the most notorious residents of the site was the wealthy Sir John Dingwall, a 16th-century property magnate who fathered a string of illegitimate children despite being a leading member of the clergy. [continue]

Related:
Darkest secrets of Cowgate revealed - Edinburgh News
Edinburgh Cowgate Fire, 2002 - Wikipedia

From an AP article at CBS News: Ancient Amazon Villages Unearthed.

Researchers working in the Amazon River basin have discovered clusters of settlements linked by wide roads and surrounded by agricultural developments.

The researchers, including some descendants of pre-Columbian tribes that lived along the Amazon, have unearthed evidence of densely settled, well-organized communities with roads, moats and bridges in the Upper Xingu part of the vast tropical region.

The findings show the Amazon was not, as was once thought, all an untouched wilderness before Columbus came to the Americas.

Michael J. Heckenberger, first author of the study appearing this week in the journal Science, said that the ancestors of the Kuikuro people in the Amazon basin had a "complex and sophisticated" civilization with a population of many thousands during the period before 1492.

"These people were not the small mobile bands or simple dispersed populations" that some earlier studies had suggested, he said.

Instead, the people demonstrated sophisticated levels of engineering, planning, cooperation and architecture in carving out of the tropical rain forest a system of interconnected villages and towns making up a widespread culture based on farming.

Heckenberger said the society that lived in the Amazon before Columbus was overlooked by experts because they did not build the massive cities and pyramids and other structures common to the Mayans, Aztecs and other pre-Columbian societies in South America.

Instead, they built towns, villages and smaller hamlets all laced together by precisely designed roads, some more than 50 yards across, that went in straight lines from one point to another. [continue]

Here's more at nature.com: Amazon was settled before Columbus' time.

Update:
Amazonian find stuns researchers - September 20th, Seattle Times

From the BBC: Giant rodent astonishes science.

The fossil remains of a gigantic rodent that looked something like a monster guinea pig have been identified by scientists in Venezuela.

The 700-kilogram beast - about the size of a buffalo - lived among the reeds and grasses of an ancient river system that threaded its way into the Caribbean Sea eight million years ago.

Researchers think the creature, which was 10 times as big as today's largest rodents, could have run in huge packs.

Evidence suggests it also had to dodge the constant attentions of super-sized crocodiles and carnivorous birds, which stood three metres tall.

The discovery of "Guinea-zilla", as some have already dubbed it, is reported in the journal Science.

The remains were pulled out of brown shale and coal beds at the town of Urumaco, 400 kilometres west of Caracas. [continue]

The typewriter-keyboard conversion is a fine bit of geekery from multipledigression.com.

My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.

The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There's a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lamé, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that... [continue]

(Link via Idle Type)

And look, somebody else did a similar thing, and attached an old Underwood typewritter to a Macintosh computer.

I'd be a bit tempted to try something like this, except that my typewriter is too nice to mess with, and too hard to type on. I've got my grandpa's old Underwood Number 5.

From eGullet: In Good Taste.

My name is Ugo DiFonte and I was the food taster for Duke Federico Basillione DiVincelli from the summer of 1529 to the winter of 1534, when he was poisoned. But more about that later. I have written a book about my experiences called The Food Taster. But I have been asked to write something here because there are people reading this who don't know anything about food tasters. Please be patient. I just learned how to write with a quill and now I have to learn how to use this stronzolo computer!

First, some history about my calling. It is a calling and not a profession. No one in his right mind decides to become a food taster. It is a calling because when a Lord or an Emperor calls you, you come. There used to be a lot of calling in Roman Times and even before. Back then, food tasters dropped like flies. None of them lived long enough to go down in history. Most of them never had names, or if they did have names they didn't live long enough for anyone to find out what they were. Mostly, it was, "Hey you. Taste this."

For a while it got so bad that some emperors used to take a little bit of arsenic every day to build a resistance. That seems stupid to me. You can take a little bit of arsenic every day for ten years, but what happens if someone slips some meadow saffron in your polenta? [continue]

Related book:
The Food Taster

Monkeys strike for justice. From nature.com:

Monkeys strike for equal pay. They down tools if they see another monkey get a bigger reward for doing the same job, US researchers have found.

The experiments show that notions of justice extend beyond humans, says Sarah Brosnan of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. This is probably an innate ability that evolved in our primate ancestor, she believes: "You need a sense of fairness to live in large, complex groups."

Brosnan and her colleague Frans de Waal taught brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) to swap plastic tokens for food. Normally, monkeys were happy to exchange a token for some cucumber.

But the monkeys took offence if they saw a neighbour getting a grape for a token. In about half of such trials, the short-changed capuchin either refused to hand over its token, or rejected the reward. Some threw the token or cucumber clean out of their cage.

The animals' umbrage was even greater if another monkey got a grape for nothing. About 80% rebelled in some way in this situation.

"It's a really neat discovery," says primatologist Charles Janson of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "The monkey is clearly paying attention to what its neighbour is doing, and realizing that it's getting a better reward." [continue]

Related articles:
Study shows monkeys may resent unfairness - Salon.com
Monkeys Show Sense Of Fairness, Study Says - NationalGeographic.com
Capuchins prove we are brothers under the skin -Telegraph.co.uk
Genetic Basis to Fairness, Study Hints - NYTimes.com

From the BBC: Where box cameras never say die.

The era of people posing to have their picture taken by photographers using a large, black, wooden box may belong to the history books in most of the world.

But this nostalgic spectacle isn't entirely extinct.

A few old-fashioned box cameras still click away in the Indian capital, Delhi, defying the onslaught of digital photography.

And the wooden casing of these cameras is as strong as the will-power of those who rely on them for a living. [continue]

If we ever move to Britain, I'll buy a metal detector and dig up gardens. From Ananova: Man finds Roman tablet in garden.

Experts are studying a gold Roman tablet engraved with magic symbols found by a man tending his garden.

The tablet, a thin plate covered in Greek writing asking a god for protection and magic symbols, was found in Dereham, Norfolk, and handed to museum staff in Norwich.

A spokesman for Norfolk County Council said the tablet, which is about an inch square and thought to date back to the second century AD, had been passed to the British Museum where it was being valued by experts.

Officials have not released who found the coin or exactly where or when. But the council spokesman added: "Museum staff think it could be a very important find."

It is thought to be the fourth tablet of its kind found in Britain.

From the Christian Science Monitor: Ancient art of origami shapes high-tech gizmos.

TOKYO — When Taketoshi Nojima envisions the future, he pictures it in collapsible terms.

The Kyoto University scientist imagines people lounging on foldable furniture and living in houses that compress rather than crumble during an earthquake.

His inspiration springs from an unlikely source - origami.

Long regarded as a children's hobby, the Japanese folk art - which creates delicate objects from intricately folded squares of paper - is riding a wave of newfound enthusiasm from scientists, mathematicians, and engineers around the country and, increasingly, across the globe.

Researchers have tapped into the craft's abundant hidden rules, angles, and limits, poising them to revolutionize the design and function of everything from water bottles to the "crumple zones" of cars.

"Origami theory can be used for anything," says Mr. Nojima, one of the country's leading experts in the field. "Because origami is everywhere." [continue]

From the New York Times: Music of the Heavens Turns Out to Sound a Lot Like a B Flat.

Astronomers say they have heard the sound of a black hole singing. And what it is singing, and perhaps has been singing for more than two billion years, they say, is B flat — a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C.

The "notes" appear as pressure waves roiling and spreading as a result of outbursts from a supermassive black hole through a hot thin gas that fills the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 million light-years distant. They are 30,000 light-years across and have a period of oscillation of 10 million years. By comparison, the deepest, lowest notes that humans can hear have a period of about one-twentieth of a second.

The black hole is playing "the lowest note in the universe," said Dr. Andrew Fabian, an X-ray astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge University in England. [continue]

From NewScientist.com: Early villages hold the key to war.

The advent of affluent village life with communities splitting into clans may have heralded the first wars, suggests archeological analysis of ancient Mexico.

Raiding between early Mexican villages began about the same time that villagers began splitting into subgroups, says anthropologist Joyce Marcus of the University of Michigan. And over the next 1200 years this escalated to full-scale warfare.

Her findings, from the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico, support a theory that raiding - a prelude to war - began in segmented societies with rich resources.

Conflict originated in prehistory, but it has been hard to trace its evolution from individual homicides through group raids, to full-scale warfare. Some believe that group conflict originates in marginal environments, where people are struggling for resources. [continue]

Monastery Mourns Loss of Bells. From the Harvard Crimson:

MOSCOW — At the top of the bell tower of Danilov Monastery, fruit flies buzz around the dark metal bells and a cool breeze sweeps off the nearby Moscow river.

The 11 bells hang in heavy silence, far above the hustle and bustle that can be seen all around the walled-off grounds of Moscow's oldest monastery.

The bells, too, seem like a part of the city's ancient history.

But they are merely a substitution for the originals which now hang in the Lowell House bell tower.

Charles Crane, an American businessman, bought the bells from the Soviets in the 1920s, saving them from ruin. He gave them to then University President A. Lawrence Lowell in 1930.

For almost 70 years, while Lowell House residents rang the Russian bells every Sunday, the Danilov monastery was silent. [continue]

And now the Danilov monastary would really like to have its bells back.

Related site:
Danilov Monastery - transsib.com
Danilov Monastery -moscow-taxi.com

From Yahoo: $150,000 Medieval Torture Rack Cures Chronic Back Pain.

BEVERLY HILLS, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Jeffrey Farricielli, at the Beverly Hills Physical Medicine Center, uses today's version of the medieval torture rack to cure patients suffering of low back pain, and herniated and degenerated discs. After six years of research and testing in hospitals and universities the rack has now been released with great success. The device was invented by Dr. Allan Dryer, former Canadian Deputy Minister of Health, who pioneered research on the heart defibrillator which is used around the world.

Dr. Jeffrey Farricielli describes the treatment as: "The patient is being drawn across the machine in a controlled stretch that creates a vacuum between the vertebrae and thus the disc is literally sucked back into place. Patients that suffer from chronic back pain from sitting in a chair all day to sports injuries are our specialty. Each treatment last for 45 minutes, results are rapid and miraculous, within several weeks back pain reduces or disappears. Our focus is to correct the problem, not just relieve the symptoms." [continue]

This looks splendid!

...the Bayeux Tapestry is the inspiration behind the Historic Tale Construction Kit (note: Flash 6 required). Build your own medieval themed cartoons & email them to friends.

Found at Metafilter.

From the BBC: Greeks ‘borrowed Egyptian numbers’.

The astronomers, physicists and mathematicians of ancient Greece were true innovators.

But one thing it seems the ancient Greeks did not invent was the counting system on which many of their greatest thinkers based their pioneering calculations.

New research suggests the Greeks borrowed their system known as alphabetic numerals from the Egyptians, and did not develop it themselves as was long believed.

Greek alphabetic numerals were favoured by the mathematician and physicist Archimedes, the scientific philosopher Aristotle and the mathematician Euclid, amongst others.

An analysis by Dr Stephen Chrisomalis of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, showed striking similarities between Greek alphabetic numerals and Egyptian demotic numerals, used in Egypt from the late 8th Century BC until around AD 450.

Both systems use nine signs in each "base" so that individual units are counted 1-9, tens are counted 10-90 and so on. Both systems also lack a symbol for zero. [continue]

Dating is a three-day event for Moroccan berbers. From SFGate.com:

IMILCHIL, Morocco -- As Rakia Al-Mamouni pushed through the throng, she was on the lookout for just one thing: a potential husband.

She ignored the man who rushed by carrying a sheep across his shoulders. She didn't seem to care for the hawker selling goats' heads. But she did stop when a young, well-dressed fellow ambled over to her and said: "You have captured my liver."

Not the most eloquent pickup line ever. But for the Berbers of the Atlas mountains in Morocco, who consider the liver to be where love resides, it's a lovely sentiment.

It got the attention of the heavily made-up Ms. Mamouni, who chatted briefly with the young man. But the 19-year-old wasn't swept away. "We'll see what happens," she said as she moved on, with eyes peeled for other prospects.

Each year, hundreds of marriageable Berbers gather for this three-day dating ritual, which has been practiced among nomadic tribes in these arid, windy mountains for centuries. Today, the ritual has developed into a major Berber bazaar and a tourist attraction. [continue]

Found at Metafilter.

Oooh, look what's at the Beeb: Supermarket molluscs reveal Roman secret.

The secret of imperial purple has been rediscovered.

A British amateur chemist has worked out how the ancient Romans dyed the togas of emperors this deep colour thanks to a bacterium found in cockles from the supermarket Tesco.

The hue had special significance as the colour of imperial power. Cleopatra also had the sails on her ship dyed the same colour.

The recipe for the dye had been kept a craft secret, even in ancient Egypt and Rome. There are few references to the dying process in the historical literature.

Modern chemistry can make every shade of every colour, but retired engineer John Edmonds is interested in how the ancients managed to make dyes from natural materials.

He explained to the British Association science festival in Salford, Greater Manchester, how he rediscovered the secret of imperial purple after studying the fermentation process of indigo pigments from the woad plant.

With help of researchers in Reading and from Israel he has been able to establish the vital role played by a bacterium in chemically reducing the ancient pigments so that they will dissolve in a dye solution. [continue]

From Ananova: Language influences the way you think.

Speakers of different languages not only describe the world differently but think about it differently too, according to a new study.

Researchers used a cartoon featuring black and white cat Sylvester to study how language was reflected in the gestures people made.

Dr Sotaro Kita of the University of Bristol's Department of Experimental Psychology, showed the cartoon to a group of native English, Japanese and Turkish speakers and then watched their gestures as they described the action they had seen.

He found speakers of the three different languages used different gestures to depict the same event, which appeared to reflect the way the structure of their languages expressed that event.

For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc trajectory and the Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc.

Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb ‘to swing’. [continue]

Related:
Cartoon cat in science study - BBC

From the BBC: Undersea Stone Age site found.

A team of scuba-diving archaeologists have discovered an undersea settlement that could be 10,000 years old.

The divers were honing their skills in preparation for a more detailed search further away from Tyneside.

But they found what is believed to be the country's second submerged Stone Age development, while practising in the North Sea off Tynemouth.

Another slightly more recent site, still from the Mesolithic era, was also found on the seabed nearby.

The settlements came to light when Dr Penny Spikins of Newcastle University noticed some flints on the seabed, which she instantly recognised as being significant. (...)

Among the flints, the team found an arrowhead and cutting implements with a serrated edge.

One settlement is thought to date back to the late Mesolithic period, 8,500 to 5,000 years ago, while the other, found further out to sea, is thought to be early Mesolithic, 8,500 to 10,000 years ago.

Both sites would have been gradually submerged as sea levels rose following the end of the last Ice Age.

Mesolithic people were hunter-gatherers and lived in the Middle Stone Age - between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. (...)

Dr Spikins said: "Archaeologists thought that the sites left by people who lived 5,000 to 10,000 years ago had simply been lost to the sea.

"But our finds could change our understanding of the earliest occupation of the British Isles." [continue]

From the Discovery Channel: Artifacts Reveal Childhood in Ancient Greece.

The first major international exhibit on childhood in ancient Greece reveals startling similarities between the lives of kids from the classical past and 21st century children, including the fact that toys and gadgets comparable to those of the ancient world are still in use today.

Now at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the exhibit displays potty chairs, pull toys, games, feeders, rattles and other items that almost look as though they came from a modern nursery room. The collection suggests the needs of children, and the stages of early human development, have not changed as much as previously thought over the years. (...)

Jenifer Neils, professor of art history and classics at Case Western Reserve University and co-author of the exhibit's catalogue, Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past, said Greek civilization was the first to recognize stages in childhood development, and the first to see youths as not merely miniature adults.

"In their artwork, the Greeks depicted children as they were in real life," Neils told Discovery News. "They represented them in a perceptual, rather than conceptual, manner not seen much in ancient Egypt, or even later in Medieval Europe."

Artifacts show children studying, playing, and possibly even pooping, as one small clay vessel is of a child waving a rattle and sitting on what appears to be a ceramic potty chair. [continue]

From nature.com: Radio-dating backs up biblical text.

An ancient waterway, described in the Bible, has been located and radiocarbon-dated to around 700 BC.

The half-kilometre Siloam Tunnel still carries water from the Gihon Spring into Jerusalem's ancient city of David. According to verses in Kings 2 and Chronicles 2 2, it was built during the reign of the King Hezekiah - between 727 BC and 698 BC - to protect the city's water supply against an imminent Assyrian siege. Critics argue that a stone inscription close to the exit dates the tunnel at around 2 BC.

To solve the conundrum, geologist Amos Frumkin, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and colleagues looked at the decay of radioactive elements - such as carbon in plants and thorium in stalactites - in tunnel samples.

The plaster lining the tunnel was laid down around 700 BC, says Frumkin's team. A plant trapped inside the waterproof layer clocked in at 700-800 BC, whereas a stalactite formed around 400 BC. "The plant must have been growing before the tunnel was excavated; the stalactite grew after it was excavated," explains Frumkin. [continue]

Imagine finding something like this at the bottom of your local lake.

OSLO: A dugout canoe that may date from Viking times has been found in south Norway, giving clues to the lives of people who fished a small lake perhaps 1,000 years ago.

The pine vessel was dragged from Royraas lake in south Norway after a tip from the family of two elderly men who had spotted the boat when they swam in the lake as children in the 1930s.

"We believe it dates from the Viking times or perhaps from the early Middle Ages," Snorre Haukalid, the county archaeologist for Vest Agder, said. He put its likely age at 800-1,200 years.

"If we're really lucky, it could be even older, perhaps 2,000 years," he said. A splinter had been taken for carbon dating tests that would take several weeks.

"A lot of archaeology in the Nordic region looks at burial mounds and the lives of the rich," Haukalid said. "The special thing here is that this is an isolated lake so the boat was probably used by ordinary people, perhaps for fishing." [continue]

From a Reuters article at Yahoo: Medieval Gunpowder Packed a Modern Punch.

MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) - Medieval gunners knew a thing or two their modern day counterparts might find surprising, producing gunpowder of equal potency to that in use today, a scientist said on Wednesday.

A mixture of charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur -- the recipe for gunpowder used by Edward III's gunners as his armies rampaged across France in the 14th century -- equaled the explosive force of the 20th century version, Robert Smith of Britain's Royal Armories told reporters.

"At the moment we are a bit gobsmacked at how good the medieval gunpowder is," he said at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (news - web sites). "It is almost as good as modern gunpowder." [continue]

This made my day: an excellent online version of Tristam Shandy, which I found throught the Acetylene weblog.

Somebody please tell me what music is playing during the flash intro. It's so familiar, but what is it?

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. From ExpressandStar: Hundreds join ancient dance date.

It is one of Britain's oldest rituals. And yesterday it seemed as popular as ever as hundreds of enthusiastic visitors turned out for the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance.

It involves a merry band of men carrying ancient reindeer antlers for around 12 hours, usually walking twice the distance.

The ritual definitely dates back to 1226 - the dance was performed at the three-day Barthelmy Fair in that year - but many believe it is much older than that, and it has survived and continues to flourish in the Staffordshire village.

The massive horns have been carbon dated back to 1,000 years ago, and are carried aloft by the dancers every Wakes Monday.

Six costumed men dance the horns around the village and its surrounding smallholdings - and before Lady Bagot at Blithfield Hall - stopping traffic in their wake and performing the dance scores of times.

Meanwhile, the jester bashes unsuspecting onlookers with his pig's bladder, which is supposed to bring fertility, and two accordion players keep the music going with delightful ease. [full article]

Here's more from the BBC, and still more from AbottsBromley.com. Photos and everything!

From GreeceNow: Harry Potter to be published in ancient Greek.

The publishers of the best-selling Harry Potter children's books have announced plans to release an ancient Greek translation of the series.

With global interest in J K Rowling's schoolboy wizard peaked by the success of its film tie-in, publishers Bloomberg believe the stories could make learning the ancient language more fun. [continue]

Bless their hearts.

Related content:
Harrius Potter
Medieval Christian symbols in Harry Potter
Gloucester Cathedral's medieval window

From National Geographic, here's Cyber Tiger. Name your Siberian tiger, design a zoo for him, then turn him loose.

How else would you want to start your week?

I never know just what I'll find at Pravda. Today there's this: Russian Orthodox Church marks holiday devoted to the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir.

On Monday, the Russian Orthodox Church marks a holiday devoted to the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir.

The icon is believed to have been painted by St Luke the Gospel Writer back in the 1st century. In the 12th century, the icon was presented to Prince Yury Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow. It has ever since been revered as Russia's greatest shrine.

The icon has been known as the Icon of Our Lady of Vladimir since it was brought to the city of Vladimir in 1160. Numerous legends tell how the Holy Virgin helped the Russian people through this icon.

In 1395, the icon was brought back to Moscow from Vladimir to defend the city from Tamerlane's nomadic hordes. September 8 has ever since been marked as the religious feast of the Purification of Our Lady. [continue]

From Itar-Tass: Greek govt speaks up in defense of Holy Mount Athos monasteries.

ATHENS, September 6 (Itar-Tass) - Greek government on Friday voiced its support to the status of the Holy Mount Athos, a de facto monastic republic in Northeast Greece, from attacks by the European Parliament, which is seeking an abolition of a millennium-old ban on women's trips to the Mount Athos territory.

The status of the area is linked to a thousand years of tradition, the Eastern Orthodox Creed, and monastic lifestyle, and a stereotyped application of the principles of equal opportunities for access, free trade and competition confronts the fundamental concept of Mount Athos, said Tassos Giannitsis, First Deputy Foreign Minister.

Georgios Katiforis, head of the PASOK ruling party's delegation to the European Parliament recalled in a letter to the parliament presidium that the special status of Mount Athos had been confirmed when Greece joined the European Union.

The European MPs cannot go back on that decision, Katiforis recalled. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca entries:
Monks keep part of Napoleon's tent
Mount Athos
Esfigmenou monks won't leave
Gifts from the monastery

This must have been a very fun bit of research. From the Guardian: Sleuthing students solve Wodehouse castle mystery.

PG Wodehouse invented eccentric, aristocratic characters who lived in big country houses and popped up again and again, and he frequently located them at Blandings Castle, somewhere in Shropshire.

Wodehouse himself never revealed the identity of the castle in which the absent-minded Lord Emsworth lived through seven novels, with his brother Galahad and their 10 formidable sisters. But the search for the mysterious Blandings has preoccupied Wodehouse fans ever since.

Three books have already been written on the subject, putting Blandings in different places. One clue was the train to Market Blandings station - three hours and 41 minutes from London, and supposedly two-and-a-half miles from the castle; Edwardian train timetables were examined.

Norman Murphy, retired president of the PG Wodehouse Society, spent almost two years in the British Library looking for clues. He then visited every big house in Shropshire to compare the descriptions in the books with the physical features of the houses and parks. He came up with Weston Park, Telford, for the park, and Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire for the house.

But at the Royal Geographical Society Conference in London, two geographers who used the latest computer technology yesterday announced a different answer: Apley Hall in Shropshire, which they reckon a 98% certainty. [continue]

Related articles
Geographers use computer to locate P.G. Wodehouse's castle
Right Ho, Geographers!
Zeroing in on Blandings

Related eBooks
Search for free Wodehouse eBooks at Project Gutenberg. (You'll get 28 Wodehouse books to choose from.) The perfect thing to put on your PDA for reading on the train!

Wodehouse's Blandings books at Amazon:
Blandings Castle
Life at Blandings: Something Fresh, Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather
Galahad at Blandings

Apley Hall and Sudley Castle
Apley Hall website
Sudley Castle website

From This is Gloucestershire: The 600-year-old skeleton of a monk?

Six Hundred years ago - even before the tower of Gloucester's famous Cathedral was built - this man was laid to rest in a grave outside the then thriving Llanthony Priory.

He lay there undisturbed, until this week when archaeologists surveying the area in preparation for the Gloucester Quay's regeneration scheme uncovered his skeleton. It is thought the remains from Medieval times could belong to a monk or another member of the priory. The skeleton was discovered lying between the remains of the old priory and the Gloucester to Sharpness canal near the Business Park on Llanthony Road.

Andrea Burgess, of Scott Wilson Consultants, which is leading the archaeology study, said: "It is likely that these are the remains of a member of the medieval priory community.

"The bones are in good condition and are those of an adult male, probably in his late 30s or 40s. After the Priory fell into ruin, the position of the church and churchyard would have been forgotten and other burials were almost certainly disturbed during the construction of the canal and the railways." [full article]

Castle Wales has a page about Llanthony Priory, complete with photos of the ruins.

related:
Llanthony Priory - from the Catholic Encyclopedia

From the BBC: Sub-tropical paradise in London.

The East End of London used to be a sub-tropical paradise with swaying palm trees, shallow warm waters and exotic marine species.

This is the conclusion drawn by Jackie Skipper, palaeontologist at the UK's Natural History Museum, from fossils uncovered by digging work on London's Channel Tunnel rail link.

Dr Skipper has found oyster, shark teeth and exotic palm tree fossils which show that Stratford in east London had a climate similar to today's South China seas 55.5 million years ago.

Work on the rail link to the Channel Tunnel has carved out a trench 1.1 kilometres (two-thirds of a mile) long, 40 metres (44 yards) wide and more than four storeys deep.

"This exciting find gives us valuable evidence of what London's landscape used to look like," Dr Skipper said.

"We are talking Malaysia, Thailand, that kind of temperature, in east London.

"We've got palm trees, we've got sharks, we've got shells and a sandy beach," she told the BBC.

"We've got these huge banks of oysters, we've got evidence of enormous earthquakes, of a sub-tropical paradise in east London with sharks swimming through the streets. [continue]

From Wired.com: PDAs and Laptops Powered by Suds.

Giving new meaning to clean energy, a New Jersey company is developing micro fuel cells for mobile phones and laptops using a major ingredient in soap.

Millennium Cell of Eatontown, New Jersey, is working on hydrogen fuel cells based on sodium borohydride, a high-energy form of borate, or borax, a natural mineral mined to make laundry soap.

When passed over a proprietary catalyst, a solution of sodium borohydride releases hydrogen, which is combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to generate electricity.

Millennium Cell said it has developed several prototype systems for mobile phones, PDAs and laptops that are no bigger than standard battery packs, but deliver up to four times the battery life. [continue]

A 67-year-old Capuchin monk was taken hostage by his parishioners, but he's not angry at them. "I consider myself a prisoner of love," said Father Emilio Cucciella after he was bricked up inside his monastery. When locals in a small Italian town learned that there were plans to shut down the monastery because of a priest shortage, they fought back by barricading and bricking up the structure. The church, the Madonna of Perpetual Succor, is one of two parishes looking after the town of 6,000. "We Capuchins have been here since at least 1570. St Francis himself passed through here in the early 13th century. I have to obey orders but I can understand why they are upset," said the priest. Luckily, Cucciella has enough food to keep him going, although he did say he's prepared to go on a hunger strike in solidarity with the town residents. Meanwhile, some bricks were taken down Thursday morning, although locals were still on guard. As for the irreverent reverend, he's being good-natured about the whole thing. "Luckily, I don't suffer from claustrophobia," he said.

That's from Toronto's Pulse 24.

The Italian government is trying to reinstate Friday fasting. From the Guardian:

Silvio Berlusconi's government has made its own, characteristically unconventional contribution to the growing debate in Europe on how to curb obesity.

In a newspaper interview published this week, the health minister in Italy's right-of-centre administration, Girolamo Sirchia, announced that he would be doing what he could to reinstate Friday as a day of fasting throughout Italy.

"Apart from being an ancient religious tradition, the weekly fast is a useful health measure," Mr Sirchia told the daily La Stampa. "It has a scientific basis. It helps to purify the system of the effects of an unhealthy diet."

In a country, moreover, where the state continues to be present in many areas of society, the government should be able to ensure that its ideas are put into practice. Mr Sirchia's cabinet colleagues are in a position to dictate what is offered to hospital patients, school students and workers in Italy's still-extensive public sector. [continue]

Lion man takes pride of place as oldest statue. From nature.com:

Intricate ivory carvings said to be the oldest known examples of figurative art have been uncovered in a cave in southwestern Germany. Researchers say that the finding could change our understanding of early man's imaginative endeavours.

The artefacts - including a figurine depicting a Lowenmensch (‘lion man’) - have been carbon-dated to around 30,000 years ago, when some of the earliest known relatives of modern humans populated Europe. [continue]

This from eKathimerini:

A nest of ancient pirates who apparently preyed on Mediterranean shipping for nearly 300 years has emerged during excavations this summer on a remote island off the southeastern tip of the Peloponnese.

According to a Culture Ministry announcement yesterday, archaeologists digging at the ancient city of Antikythera since 2000 have located sanctuaries, a large public building and a wealth of missiles — spear and arrow heads, slingshots and large catapult stones — in the settlement identified as the city of Aegila mentioned in ancient sources. Antikythera controlled the strait between Kythera and western Crete, a crucial passage for shipping.

The site, occupied from the mid-fourth to the mid-first centuries BC, is surrounded by a strong, double enceinte of walls that today reach a maximum height of 5 meters.

"Excavators believe the city may have been a nest of pirates, at a time when piracy was quasi-legitimate," the ministry said. Archaeologists also located a large boat shed "which protected the constantly war-ready pirate ships."

From the Beeb: Mouldy mugs mark milestone.

Scientists are toasting the anniversary of a great medical breakthrough by raising a mouldy cup of coffee.

Wednesday marks 75 years since Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin thanks to a discarded dirty dish in his laboratory.

To commemorate the milestone, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) wants people to send in photographs of furry coffee cups, of the kind commonly found lurking in the corners of offices and factories.

The most spectacularly rancid example will win the owner a night of culture in, hopefully, cleaner surroundings.

Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at St Mary's Hospital, London, on 3 September 1928 after leaving a dish in his laboratory one summer. [continue]

A bit more detail about the dish from the penicillin page.

The Wonder Drug Penicillin was discovered accidentally when Flemming removed the cover of a deadly bacteria that he had been studying. A mold had formed on the exposed culture, and Flemming would have thrown it out if he had not noticed something very peculiar about the mold, in the area surrounding the mold the bacterium was gone! Flemming kept the strain of mold alive and tested it on laboratory animals. He realized that this was a great thing, and could help fight many diseases. In 1929 he published a medical paper that proved how this mold was a powerful germ killer, yet would not damage skin tissue. [continue]

Related link:
Penicillin - a shared discovery? - BBC

From the Guardian: 2,000-year-old carvings dated back to ... 1995.

Blundering archaeologists were red-faced yesterday after "ancient carvings" found on a giant rock turned out to have been made just eight years ago.

The engravings of two intertwined serpents, a dragon and runic symbols on a two-tonne lump of flat-faced granite were spotted in July by holidaymakers on a beach.

Local historians were immediately alerted to the find on one of the rocks imported from Norway in the 1980s to make sea defences at Gorleston near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.

Excited archaeologists from Norfolk county council decided that they could date back 2,000 years.

Last week a crane was used to remove the rock for safekeeping and it was transported by truck to council storage.

But the mystery was solved after the Great Yarmouth Mercury local newspaper reported the "potentially very important discovery". Jobless construction worker Barry Luxton, 50, saw the report and a photograph of the rock and recognised it as one that he had engraved. [continue]

Step right up and read about The World's Most Outrageous Biblical Lawsuit.

Egyptian law dean plans suit against "all the Jews of the world" for Exodus theft.

When, after the Ten Plagues, Pharaoh finally let Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt, says the book of Exodus, the former slaves "plundered the Egyptians."

Now, more than three millennia later, Egypt wants its stuff back.

Nabil Hilmi, dean of the law school at Egypt's University of Al-Zaqaziq, is suing "all the Jews of the world" for stealing "from the Pharaonic Egyptians gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing, and more, leaving Egypt in the middle of the night with all this wealth, which today is priceless," according to the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram Al-Arabi (translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute).

"If we assume that the weight of what was stolen was one ton, [its worth] doubled every 20 years, even if the annual interest is only 5 percent," Hilmi told the paper. [continue]

Drop everything and go read the rest of this article at Christianity Today. It's utterly hilarious.

And a good point, noticed at Quenta Nârwenion:
"... if it they succeed, maybe then the Catholic Church could try to get back all those stolen parish churches in England...."

From New Scientist: Origami helps cellphone cameras to focus.

Picture-messaging phones may be about to get a whole lot more intrusive.

Oh, just great.

Thanks to a novel and ultra-cheap micromotor technology, cellphone cameras should soon be able to zoom and focus with the same precision as the autofocusing lenses used in expensive stills cameras. [continue]

You'd think this would be obvious, wouldn't you? It's cheaper to grow your own clean water.

Big cities such as Melbourne and New York can save the billions they spend on treating water to make it drinkable by keeping their forests instead, a new study has found.

The 114-page report titled Running Pure was released on Monday by the World Bank and the ecology organisation the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-International).

The report found that one-third of the 105 big cities studied, including New York, Tokyo, Barcelona and Melbourne, get much of their water from protected forests. It found that preserving these forests is a cost-effective way to provide clean drinking water because forest reduce landslides, erosion and sediment, improve water purity by filtering pollutants, and in some cases capture and store water.

"For many cities, time is running out. Protecting forests around water catchment areas is no longer a luxury but a necessity," said David Cassells, senior environmental specialist for forest resources with the World Bank. "When they are gone, the costs of providing clean and safe drinking water to urban areas will increase dramatically." [continue]

The Norwich Bulletin reports that three Orthodox priests blessed the Thames River yesterday. (No, not the Thames in England. There's another one.)

NORWICH -- The occasional raindrop wasn't the only thing to ripple the surface of the Thames River Monday morning.

Shortly before noon, the Rev. Charles Simones of the St. Sophia Hellenic Orthodox Community in New London walked up and down the pier at Chelsea Landing, ceremonially blessing the river. A family of approaching swans looked on as droplets of holy water splashed into the Thames.

In Howard T. Brown Memorial Park next to Norwich Harbor, two Norwich priests -- the Rev. Dennis Rhodes, pastor of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, and the Rev. Paul Pantelis of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church -- led 10 people in a chorus of prayers for the protection of the environment.

Over the past four years, the river blessing ceremony has become a Sept. 1 tradition for the three Orthodox churches, which consider the day to be the first of the ecclesiastical year. The practice date backs to the Roman and Byzantine Empires when Sept. 1 was also the beginning of the civil year.

Rhodes said the two themes have been combined since 1989 when Dimitrios, the late patriarch of Constantinople, declared Sept. 1 the Annual Day of the Protection of the Environment. (...)

During his sermon, Rhodes explained to petitioners why the protection of the environment is so important. He described the Earth as "God's sacred creation" and likened it to the Garden of Eden.

"It's still God's garden," Rhodes said. "It's not ours to use up or to do whatever we want with. We are here simply to tend it and take care of it." [continue]

Is it just my imagination, or is the Orthodox church doing a lot more environmentally-related stuff than it used to?

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Patriarch Bartholomew I, still fighting for the environment
Bartholomew, on the environment

From an Ananova article:

Linguistics experts in Germany fear the country is being invaded by a hybrid language full of English words.

Experts from the Association of the German Language and the Goethe Institute warn the German language could even die out.

They said German words were continually being replaced by Anglicisms, and in most parts of the country pure German was no longer spoken.

They said "Denglish", a mix of German and English, was now the language most commonly being used.

Erika Steinbach from the Goethe Institute in Berlin said: "Consumer protection has to be extended in order to tackle this problem.

"Every product, from train tickets to fabric softener, has to have their name and instructions in readable German."

Authorities have now been banned from using Denglish in official business and Jutta Limbach, former President of the Federal Constitutional Court, has even founded her own German Language Council.

Art lovers, get this! England's Tate Gallery has put its entire collection online. That's 50,000 works. Wow.

Related article:
A new scheme puts the Tate's archives online

From a Telegraph article, In sickness and in health: of cabbages and things.

The dominating influence of the drugs companies in contemporary medicine has marginalised - to the point of extinction - knowledge of the simple remedies of an earlier age. Thus, an orthopaedic surgeon at Bristol's Southmead Hospital was rather taken aback when a 72-year-old woman with severe arthritis of the knee lifted her skirt to reveal a large cabbage leaf firmly strapped in place - which, she claimed, was "the only thing" that relieved her pain.

This struck him as so bizarre as to warrant a short, illustrated report to the British Medical Journal. He was quite unaware - as was subsequently vigorously pointed out - that cabbage leaves have an ancient and esteemed role in medical folklore. Since antiquity, people have been applying them to swollen joints and other painful swellings, and breast-feeding mothers have found them uniquely beneficial in relieving their tender, engorged breasts. Certainly the shape of the leaves is particularly well suited to the purpose, while their coolness provides an effective antidote to heat and soreness.

And it's not just cabbage leaves, for, as Michael Hurley, a physiotherapist at King's College Hospital in London, points out, doctors have a "serious drug habit" that discourages them from recommending other highly effective non-pharmacological treatments. In the case of knee arthritis, this also includes something as simple as muscle-strengthening exercises. [continue]

From Canoe.com: DNA study to settle ancient mystery about mingling of Inuit, Vikings. [Update: article no longer available.]

A centuries-old Arctic mystery may be weeks away from resolution as an Icelandic anthropologist prepares to release his findings on the so-called "Blond Eskimos" of the Canadian North.

"It's an old story," says Gisli Palsson of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. "We want to try to throw new light on the history of the Inuit." Stories about Inuit with distinct European features - blue eyes, fair hair, beards - living in the central Arctic have their roots in ancient tales of Norse settlements and explorations.

"The Icelandic sagas, at several points, mention the Norse in Greenland meeting people who belong to other cultures," Palsson said.

Although those settlements pushed ever westward from Greenland as early as the 9th and 10th century, they had mysteriously disappeared by the 15th. The fate of settlers - did they simply disappear into the local population? - is unknown.

The Inuit tell legends of long-ago meetings with people from a strange culture.

Tantalizing accounts of European-looking Inuit surface in the accounts of some of the earliest western Arctic explorers, including Sir John Franklin, who was later to lead the doomed Franklin Expedition. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
DNA test to tackle Arctic mystery
Viking DNA in England

Update, October 28th, 3003:
DNA tests debunk blond Inuit legend - from the CBC

From a Herald article:

It was in a stubble field near St Andrews that Sandy Lyon almost walked away from the biggest find of his metal detecting career. "There was a huge signal but I thought it was just a beer can," he says. "They're big and usually near the surface so they give a really big signal. I walked away from it, but then thought I'd dig it, just in case. It was within four to six inches of the surface - most stuff comes up at that depth - and as soon as I got it out of the ground I knew exactly what it was."

Drawing on his eight years of detecting experience and knowledge of archaeological relics, he identified the find as a Middle Bronze Age Palstave axe and dated it as 3500 years old. "I found it hard to believe I was holding it, because they're never usually seen in Scotland," says Sandy, a full-time carer and secretary of the Scottish Detector Club. "It was only the third one to be found. It was in great condition."

The axe was examined by an archaeologist the following day and claimed as treasure trove. Sandy is now waiting for the final report on it, which will include its valuation. He doesn't expect it will be much. "It'll probably be a few hundred, but that doesn't matter. It was a pretty special find," adds Sandy.

Other detectorists have found the hobby more profitable. In November 1991, William Swanston discovered 1380 gold and silver coins in a stubble field near Kelso. The find was valued at £30,000, which was divided between himself, the farmer who owned the field and a third party.

"It started when I found one silver coin which was dated 1547 and then followed a trail up the field," says William, a retired engineer. "The signal became very loud and I dug the pot out about three foot below the surface. I think a deep plough had knocked the top off the pot and dragged the coins along the field. I was very excited. I think it just comes down to luck." [continue]