At Science Museum, plenty of buried treasures

From Minneapolis Star Tribune: At Science Museum, plenty of buried treasures
Ed Fleming opens the aluminum cabinet and allows his guest to lean in for a peek. "This is the so-called Thunderbird pot," says Fleming, curator of archaeology for the Science Museum of Minnesota. "It's probably my favorite piece here." It's also one of the many hidden treasures in the museum's vault that the public rarely, if ever, gets to see.

Created by local American Indians more than 700 years ago, the Thunderbird pot is a large ceramic vessel about the size of a soccer ball. It's veined with faint cracks where it has been professionally pieced back together. Among its swirl of faded designs, the distinct drawing of a bird emerges to the foreground. "It's unusual because it's a figurative representation rather than an abstraction," notes Fleming.

The Thunderbird pot was unearthed during the 1960s from a pre-colonial American Indian village near Red Wing, Minn. It has lived in the museum's 10,000 square foot, climate controlled vault ever since. "I'd like to get this on the floor because it's such a great piece," Fleming said.

Like any museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota employs a small team of curators such as Fleming. Their jobs entail preserving, promoting and interpreting the 1.75 million artifacts in museum's sprawling collection, including the Thunderbird pot.

Unlike the typical museum, however, the museum's curators have an additional responsibility: They're supposed to help populate the galleries. That is, they conduct original research and fieldwork that eventually shows up in public exhibits.

The most significant contributions have been made by 79-year-old staff paleontologist Bruce Erickson. He started working at the museum in 1959, when the dinosaur collection was pretty paltry.

"They basically told him, 'Go out and get a dinosaur,'" said Fleming.

Within two years, Erickson had done just that -- he unearthed the museum's crowd-pleasing triceratops, still one of the largest and most complete specimens in the world, from northeastern Montana in 1961.

Erickson later discovered the museum's jaw-dropping diplodocus skull, now on display in the Dino and Fossil Gallery. More recently, he discovered the skeleton of a mammoth near Albert Lea, Minn., which visitors can see in the new Future Earth exhibit.

Fleming, 41, has made a few discoveries of his own. For example, he helped excavate and analyze the Cross Site, another pre-colonial American Indian settlement in Minnesota. A few of his findings are displayed in the Mississippi River Gallery.

A native of the Midwest, Fleming is particularly fascinated with sites such as these in the Mississippi River Valley.

That's why he prefers the Thunderbird pot over, say, ancient Peruvian textiles or Etruscan bronze.

In the pre-Colonial era, "the Red Wing area was a point of interaction," said Fleming. "It was intensely occupied, especially between 1100 and 1350."

Many of Fleming's predecessors shared his interest in the area. During the 1950s, in fact, researchers from the Science Museum were involved with excavating a Mississippi River site called Spring Lake. Knives, bottles and pipes -- these findings were collected but never analyzed by staff scientists. So Fleming and his team have finally started combing through the Spring Lake findings piece by piece.

So far, they've discovered that Spring Lake was settled for a longer period than originally thought. "The bow and arrow showed up in this area in about 700 AD or so," said Fleming.

Then again, Fleming has dated a few of the site's pottery fragments to the Oneota period, about 900 to 1600 AD.

When can the public finally meet with these discoveries from Spring Lake? Look for a new display in the Mississippi River Gallery sometime in the next year, said Fleming. Meanwhile, he has recorded his observations and insights on a special Spring Lake blog. Check it out at www.smm.org.

Bones of early American disappear from underwater cave

From New Scientist: Bones of early American disappear from underwater cave

One of the first humans to inhabit the Americas has been stolen – and archaeologists want it back.

The skeleton, which is probably at least 10,000 years old, has disappeared from a cenote, or underground water reservoir, in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

In response, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico City has placed "wanted" posters in supermarkets, bakeries and dive shops in and around the nearby town of Tulum. They are also considering legal action to recover the remains.

The missing bones belong to a skeleton dubbed Young Man of Chan Hol II, discovered in 2010. The cenote in which it was found had previously yielded another 10,000-year-old skeleton – the Young Man of Chan Hol, discovered in 2006.

The earlier find has anatomical features suggesting shared heritage with Indonesians and south Asians. Other skeletons found in cenotes in the area with similar features may date to around 14,000 years ago. Such finds imply that not all early Americans came from north Asia. This deals yet another blow to the idea that the Clovis people crossing an ancient land bridge between Siberia and Alaska were the first to colonise the Americas. Clovis culture dates to around 13,000 years ago.

Both skeletons were laid to rest at a time when sea level was much lower than it is today and the cenote, now about 8 metres below the water, was dry. Archaeologists have also found the remains of elephants, giant sloths and other animals in the caves, giving an indication of what the ancient humans ate.

INAH researchers have been aware of creeping theft of specimens from cenotes, but they lack the resources to guard the hundreds of sites that dot the peninsula 

Dinosaur bone found by archaeological team in Md.

From HTR News:Dinosaur bone found by archaeological team in Md.

EDGEWATER, Md. (WTW) — The artifact-rich, multilayered Pig Point site being worked by Anne Arundel County's archaeological team for yet another season has turned up more unusual finds — a dinosaur bone and a dog burial site.

The dinosaur bone was found during last season's dig along the banks of the Patuxent River overlooking Jug Bay in south county, and later identified as technicians pored over the pickings at the county's archaeological lab at Historic London Town and Gardens.

The dog burial site was discovered just weeks ago as this season's dig got under way near the original upper tract. Three years ago, the team found evidence of a series of wigwams indicating a settlement over hundreds of years.

Al Luckenbach, the county's archaeologist, said he immediately identified the petrified dinosaur bone because he had seen similar bones years ago.

"They were building (in) an area northwest of BWI (Thurgood Marshall) Airport and were finding huge pieces of petrified wood and bone," he said. "I picked up a piece of dinosaur backbone, and more."

He said staff members sometimes do not realize what they have discovered until it's cleaned up in the lab.

"We dig up a lot of stuff over the (summer) season and then go into the lab over the winter and start washing it up. We didn't realize we had it until it turned up this winter," he said.

A lab worker showed it to him and Luckenbach said, "Oh, that is a ferruginous sandstone dinosaur backbone from the Arundel Formation" — only because he had seen one many years ago.

The Arundel Formation is a huge clay deposit stretching between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, running roughly along Route 1.

Part of the formation is made up of iron-bearing sandstone, which appears closest to the surface in the Laurel area off Route 1 in Prince George's County, where it is known as the Muirkirk Deposit. The deposit was the site of iron mining operations stretching back into the early 19th century, and troves of fossilized animal and plant remains have been found in it.

Some of the first dinosaur bones, believed to be 110 million years old, were found there. These include some of the earliest finds in the Smithsonian Institution's dinosaur collection.

In the Cretaceous Period, some 100 million years ago, the area was a delta, with rivers that meandered in wide bends. Scientists believe flooding deposits bones and plant matter in oxbow lakes formed when large bends in a river are cut off, creating a lake.

Luckenbach first thought a Native Americans had picked up the dinosaur bone near the Muirkirk area and brought it to Pig Point.

But after further investigation, he thinks the bone was picked up along with similar-sized rocks and used as a cobble, or pot boiler, for cooking.

"The Native Americans cooked in clay pots. But if you put a clay pot on the fire it would crack as it heated up," he said.

"So they would put their meat, vegetables and water in the pot, then heat up these small rocks in the fire and drop them in the pot to cook their food," Luckenbach said.

He said archaeologists find pot remnants with similar stones, or pot boilers, in them.

The dog skeleton was found on the upper tract of the Pig Point site.

"The dog was elderly, its teeth were quite worn," Luckenbach said. Many of the dog's bones could not be recovered, but most of the skull was preserved.

"We have not run a C14 (carbon isotope) test on it to determine its age, but we estimate the dog was buried in the Late Woodland Period, roughly from 1000 to 1300 A.D."

Dogs were the only domesticated animals Native American tribes had, but few dog burials from the period have been found in Maryland.

The animals were used for hunting and as guard dogs.

"Anything approaching the village, the dogs would provide a good warning," Luckenbach said.

Sometimes dogs were sacrificed, perhaps to go along with their masters into the afterlife.

"There was a lot of religious ritual and mythology associated with dogs," he added. "Dogs had a special place in the lives of Native Americans."

He doesn't know whether the dog died of old age or was sacrificed, but it was buried a few feet from a wigwam, "perhaps to guard the place from the next life," Luckenbach said.

He said it was heartening to see man's best friend from 900 years ago. "He had a special burial."

Son writes ‘Man Who Thought Like A Ship'

From the Daily News: Son writes ‘Man Who Thought Like A Ship'
“The Man Who Thought Like a Ship,” by Loren C. Steffy, Texas A&M University Press, 2012, 256 pages, $35

J. Richard “Dick” Steffy was a pioneer in the field of maritime archaeology and, upon his death, professor emeritus at the prestigious Institute for Nautical Archeology at Texas A&M University.

That bare description reveals as much about Steffy as the visible portion of an iceberg reveals about its total size. Steffy’s biography, “The Man Who Thought Like a Ship,” by Loren C. Steffy, reveals Dick Steffy as an American original.

Dick Steffy had little formal academic training. He had an associate degree in electrotechnology from the Milwaukee School of Engineering but never finished the baccalaureate degree in electrical engineering as he had planned. Instead, he returned to his hometown of Denver, Pa., and joined his family’s electrical business, spending nearly 20 years as an electrician.

Retaining a boyhood interest in ships, Steffy expressed it through model-making. He began exploring ship construction methods through his models of ancient ships. In trying to understand how they were built and why they were built the way they were, he contacted archeologists, like George Bass and Fred van Doorninck. The answers he sought lay in the wrecks of these ships, and soon, Steffy was exchanging ideas with many in the then-minor field of maritime archaeology.

Beneath the water off the coast of Cyprus, a nearly-complete wreck of an ancient trading vessel was found. Enough of the hull was found that the lead archeologist on the dig wanted the ship reconstructed from the existing bits. He invited Steffy to try.

It was the first attempt at such a reconstruction. Steffy had a business to run and a family to support, but he accepted the offer, spending two years successfully completing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. His talent lay in being able to place himself in the position of the ship’s designer and to reconstruct the design from the clues in the wood.

Success led to a career change. Steffy helped found the Institute for Nautical Archeology. When it moved to Texas A&M in 1976, Steffy became a professor. He proved to be an outstanding instructor, training a generation of leaders in maritime archaeology in his hands-on approach to reconstruction. Along the way, he became a MacArthur Foundation fellow.

Loren Steffy, Dick’s son and a newspaper correspondent, tells this story through mining family archives, academic records and colleagues’ memories. “The Man Who Thought Like a Ship” is an absorbing tale of a man who was a creative genius, excellent teacher and genuinely decent person.

Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian and model-maker, lives in League City. His website is marklardas.com

Sharjah Archeology Museum supports Higher Colleges of Technology

From AME.com: Sharjah Archeology Museum supports Higher Colleges of Technology
Under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed bin Sultan Al Qasimi, Crown Prince and Deputy Ruler of Sharjah, will inaugurate the exhibition "MOSAIC 2012 - Know Your World", at the Headquarters of the Sharjah Higher Colleges of Technology, at University City, Sharjah.

The exhibition, organized by the Higher Colleges of Technology, will be inaugurated in the presence of Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Chancellor of the Higher Colleges of Technology. The event, held under the theme "The Spirit of Scientific Discovery", is taking place from 22-25 April.

In line with Sharjah Museums Department's (SMD) commitment to supporting various educational activities and cooperation with higher educational institutions in the country, the Sharjah Archeology Museum, Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, and sharjah science museum, as well as SMD's Department of Interpretation and Education, are participating in the Mosaic 2012 exhibition.

Mosaic 2012, which is a testament to the architects of science, their achievements, and the impact of these achievements on today's life, aims to inspire in students a sense of wonder and curiosity about the accumulated human experiences that have shaped the modern world throughout successive generations. The participating students are divided into groups, each of which is tasked with focusing on one field of science so as to explore its pioneering scientists and to further present what they have learnt in an innovative manner that gives credit to science and scientists.

Speaking on the event, Manal Ataya, SMD Director General, said: "SMD's participation in this exhibition aims to support university level students, specifically those pursuing degrees in the sciences as the variety of museums in Sharjah showcase diverse collections with which they can research, learn and find inspiration from."

She noted that, "SMD has education as its core value and stressed that the department will continue to provide continued support for higher education students and help nurture their scientific and creative talent."

The Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization is participating in the exhibition by showcasing a number of models and scientific robots from the World and Islamic Science section, which is a selection of medical tools and achievements in physics and astronomy invented and developed by Muslim scientists.

Sharjah Archeology Museum will showcase selections from some of its collections, such as models of the human skeletons which were found in Al Buhais cemetery dating back to around 7000 years ago, and a model of the Fort of Mleiha,a symbol of the region 2000 years ago when it was a destination for commercial convoys and a market for the nearby villages and oases. The museum will also provide all the technical facilities, and scientific materials identifying archeology and the history of archeological excavations in Sharjah, in addition to a brief on the most important discoveries in the Emirate, as well as a set of photographs on the most important antiquities discovered in Sharjah that are on display at the museum's halls.

The set of models and pictures will offer visitors a chance to learn about the role of archeologists, and explore the importance of archeology in our modern lives wherein archeologists enable today's people to visualize scenes that would be otherwise hard to imagine by portraying how people lived thousand years ago, as well as by restoring ancient cities in virtual reality to enable viewers to experience what they looked like at that time.

The participating students designed a model for an excavation site at the exhibition, which will enable visitors to know more about the role of archeologists, and materials and tools they use to maintain discovered artifacts. They also made a model of the archeologists' laboratory, which comprises equipment, and tools that help them examine and study the discovered artifacts.

A number of educational workshops will be held on the sidelines of the exhibition so as to help visitors learn about the restoration of pottery, old coins and old costume jewelry, among others.

Unique seashell reference collection digitized by UH Museum Consortium

From Phys.org: Unique seashell reference collection digitized by UH Museum Consortium
The University of Hawaiʻi Museum Consortium has completed the digitization of a unique natural science specimen collection from UH Mānoa's Anthropology Department's Archaeology laboratory.

"The collection is fairly comprehensive for much of the archeological shell midden material commonly found in the Hawaiian landscape," said Dr. Michael Thomas of the UH Museum Consortium. Beachcombers and citizen scientists will also find the digital collection useful for identifying more than 190 species of seashells found throughout the Hawaiian Island beaches.

The collaborative project was cross disciplinary and involved several curators, students, community volunteers, and the University photographer. Thomas added, “This initiative is an excellent demonstration of how digital technologies can be applied to increase public access to university collections and to add-value to an underutilized reference collection."

The Anthropology Department's Marine Shell Collection began decades ago as an avocational pursuit of Bertell E. Davis. In 1985 Mr. Davis bequeathed the collection to his son, Bertell D. Davis, then an archaeology graduate student in the department. The younger Davis (PhD, Mānoa, 1990), who was interested in documenting the impact of humans on the environment, further developed the shell collection as a reference and comparative resource for identifying shell midden from Hawaiian and Pacific archaeological sites.

The collection, which includes nearly 200 species of marine mollusks, was donated to support undergraduate education through various courses of the Anthropology Department's Archaeology program in 2005. The specimens are currently curated by Archeology Lab Manager Jo Lynn Gunness and housed in UH Mānoa's College of Social Sciences Anthropology Department's Archaeology Program.

The University’s Virtual Museum, established in 2008, offers a single web portal to various university Natural Science and Humanities collections. Currently, the University’s Joseph F. Rock Herbarium, Insect Museum, and the Historic Clothing Museum have digital collection initiatives underway.

Archeological excavations to be conducted in Azerbaijan’s 40 regions

From APA )an Azerbaijani webzine): Archeological excavations to be conducted in Azerbaijan’s 40 regions
Baku. Kamala Guliyeva – APA. Archeological excavations will be conducted in 40 regions of Azerbaijan this year, deputy director of the Archeology and Ethnography Institute of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), Najaf Museyibli told APA.

According to him, archeological excavations will start in May-June and continue till the autumn, before rainy season.

Museyibli said that electronic cartography of the archeological monuments in Ganja-Gazakh, Garabagh and Nakhchivan has been started since this year. This process will cover stage-by-stage the archeological monument in the other regions. Currently more than 2000 monuments are in the state registration. More than 40 monuments of them are of universal importance.

Turkey: To Regain Antiquities, Ankara Plays Archeological Hardball

From eurasiaNet: Turkey: To Regain Antiquities, Ankara Plays Archeological Hardball
Having played host over the centuries to Greeks, Romans, the Byzantines and other great cultures, the land that comprises modern-day Turkey is filled with numerous and valuable archeological sites. To view some of the more extraordinary finds from many of those sites, though, requires going to museums in other countries. For example, the altar of Zeus from the ancient city of Pergamon, dug up by a German team in the late 1800's, resides in Berlin, while other valuable artifacts originally found in Turkey are housed in assorted European and American museums.

Filled with a renewed sense of political and economic self-confidence, Ankara is now looking for ways to regain those antiquities, resorting, if need be, to playing hardball. From a very interesting recent Newsweek article on the subject:

The Turkish government has decided that it can score nationalist points by launching a vocal campaign to recover ancient Anatolian artifacts from foreign museums. Over the last year the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism has resorted to ever-more aggressive measures, from threatening to suspend the excavation licenses of foreign archeological teams to blocking the export of museum exhibits. Last month, for instance, the ministry announced that it would not issue export licenses for several dozen museum pieces due to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. As a result, important exhibitions—Byzantium and Islam at the Met, The Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam at the British Museum, and The Ottomans at the V&A—have either had to scramble to find alternative artifacts in non-Turkish collections or delay the exhibitions altogether.

As the Newsweek article makes clear, though, while Ankara may be accusing American and European museums of practicing cultural imperialism, Turkey itself could be charged with committing the same offense. Istanbul's Archeology Museum is filled with artifacts excavated by Ottoman archeologists in Lebanon, Egypt and other countries that were once controlled by the sultans. And many of the artifacts Turkey refused to lend for The Hajj exhibit in London are actually not Turkish but rather objects taken during Ottoman times from what is now Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, in a recent post on the International Herald Tribune's Latitude blog, veteran Turkey correspondent Andrew Finkel suggests that rather than playing tough with museums abroad, Ankara should focus its energy on protecting its vulnerable cultural assets at home. From Finkel's post:

No one should dispute Turkey’s right to protect its own archaeological heritage from thieves. Nor should there be any question of Turkey’s obligation to recover objects smuggled abroad. But the effort and expense of fighting over long-lost objects in Britain would be better employed on improving the deplorable state of cultural management at home.

The destruction by treasure seekers around Turkey’s major archaeological sites is enormous, yet the government doesn’t take practical steps to stop it. For starters, Ankara should enforce existing laws meant to protect antiquities. The government could also ban the sale or licensing of metal detectors to stop treasure hunters from looting the countryside around archaeological sites. Moreover, there is no proper archaeological inventory for the much-visited site of Cappadocia in Central Anatolia or even for Istanbul. The authorities should see that such inventories are completed to protect properties from avaricious developers.

Indeed, recent years have seen a string of embarrassing episodes take place at some of Turkey's most prized museums and cultural institutions. Several employees at Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, former home of the sultans, were reassigned last year after it turned out that they moved valuable artifacts -- including the throne of Sultan Selim III -- out of the Harem and into the private residence of the palace museum's director. Unable to fit the throne through the residence's doorway, the workers reportedly left the Ottoman treasure in the rain for some time until a solution could be found. And earlier this year, two palace workers were dismissed after being caught on camera having sex in a wing of the palace used for displaying, of all things, religious items.

Spitfires buried in Burma during war to be returned to UK

From the Telegraph: Spitfires buried in Burma during war to be returned to UK
The Prime Minister secured a historic deal that will see the fighter aircraft dug up and shipped back to the UK almost 67 years after they were hidden more than 40-feet below ground amid fears of a Japanese occupation.

The gesture came as Mr Cameron became the first Western leader to meet Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy campaigner held under house arrest for 22 years by the military regime, and invited her to visit London in her first trip abroad for 24 years.

He called on Europe to suspend its ban on trade with Burma now that it was showing “prospects for change” following Miss Suu Kyi’s election to parliament in a sweeping electoral victory earlier this year.

The plight of the buried aircraft came to Mr Cameron’s attention at the behest of a farmer from Scunthorpe, North Lincs, who is responsible for locating them at a former RAF base using radar imaging technology.

David Cundall, 62, spent 15 years doggedly searching for the Mk II planes, an exercise that involved 12 trips to Burma and cost him more than £130,000.

When he finally managed to locate them in February, he was told Mr Cameron “loved” the project and would intervene to secure their repatriation.

Mr Cundall told the Daily Telegraph: “I’m only a small farmer, I’m not a multi-millionaire and it has been a struggle. It took me more than 15 years but I finally found them.

”Spitfires are beautiful aeroplanes and should not be rotting away in a foreign land. They saved our neck in the Battle of Britain and they should be preserved.”

He said the Spitfires, of which there are only around 35 flying left in the world, were shipped to Burma and then transported by rail to the British RAF base during the war.

However, advances in technology and the emergence of more agile jets meant they were never used and in July 1945, officials fearing a Japanese occupation abandoned them on the orders of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the head of South East Asia Command, two weeks before the atom bombs were dropped, ending the conflict.

“They were just buried there in transport crates,” Mr Cundall said. “They were waxed, wrapped in greased paper and their joints tarred. They will be in near perfect condition.”

The married father of three, an avid plane enthusiast, embarked on his voyage of discovery in 1996 after being told of their existence by a friend who had met some American veterans who described digging a trench for the aircraft during the Allied withdrawal of Burma.

He spent years appealing for information on their whereabouts from eye witnesses, scouring public records and placing advertisements in specialist magazines.

Several early trips to Burma were unsuccessful and were hampered by the political climate.

He eventually met one eyewitness who drew maps and an outline of where the aircraft were buried and took him out to the scene.

“Unfortunately, he got his north, south, east and west muddled up and we were searching at the wrong end of the runway,” he said.

“We also realised that we were not searching deep enough as they had filled in all of these bomb craters which were 20-feet to start with.

“I hired another machine in the UK that went down to 40-feet and after going back surveying the land many times, I eventually found them.

“I have been in touch with British officials in Burma and in London and was told that David Cameron would negotiate on my behalf to make the recovery happen.”

Mr Cundall said sanctions preventing the removal of military tools from Burma were due to be lifted at midnight last night (FRI).

A team from the UK is already in place and is expecting to begin the excavation, estimated to cost around £500,000, imminently. It is being funded by the Chichester-based Boultbee Flight Acadamy.

Mr Cundall said the government had promised him it would be making no claim on the aircraft, of which 21,000 were originally produced, and that he would be entitled to a share in them.

“It’s been a financial nightmare but hopefully I’ll get my money back,” he said.

“I’m hoping the discovery will generate some jobs. They will need to be stripped down and re-riveted but it must be done. My dream is to have a flying squadron at air shows.”

UNL students travel to back in time with summer archeology trip to former POW camp

From Daily Nebraskan: UNL students travel to back in time with summer archeology trip to former POW camp
During World War II, just fewer than half a million Axis prisoners of war were held in the United States. This summer, 12 University of Nebraska-Lincoln students and four professors will have the opportunity to explore these prisoners’ living conditions.

Students attending the 2012 UNL Summer Field School in Archaeology will receive six credits, while documenting three different archaeological sites, including a German POW camp in Red Willow County, Neb.

“It’s kind of where you get out of the classroom and learn the series and the background of the field,” said Allison Young, a graduate student of anthropology. “You get outside and get your hands dirty and learn how to do archaeology.”

Young will be documenting information from the Indianola POW camp to use in her graduate thesis. She recently traveled to Maryland to complete research using the national archives. Indianola held about 3,000 prisoners, Young said. The majority of these prisoners were Germans, who were captured while serving in Africa.

“The U.S. Army adhered to the Geneva Convention and the prisoners were treated fairly well,” Young said.

Peter Bleed, an emeritus professor of anthropology, said internment really mattered in the 20th century. Millions of people spent time in POW camps, but little is known about the lives they led while in these camps.

“Allison is doing very innovative research that will add to our understanding of these very important kinds of sites,” Bleed said.

While she has had the chance to briefly walk through the camp, Young looks forward to the five days dedicated to in-the-field research. Students will map the site for important features and use metal detectors to find artifacts left behind.

“Some of it will be personal debris that soldiers left behind, hid or lost,” said Douglas Scott, an adjunct professor of anthropology. “The things we leave behind everyday tell us about how we lived our lives. You can look at how prisoners actually lived there and what the guards’ lives were like.”

While there are military documents of German POWs, there are few specifics of their lives in Nebraska because most did not speak English, Young said.

Many German prisoners were sent to the Midwest to help with agricultural work, according to Scott. American men were fighting abroad and few farmers were left to provide food for the public. German prisoners were paid for their help on farms.

Scott said most Americans know there were POW cites in the United States, but most Nebraskans are yet unaware of the camp in Indianola.

“It’s something that’s faded from memory and most of the people who participated are gone,” Scott said. “I think it’s really important that it’s quite intact. This one seems to be one of the best preserved of any in the state at the present time.”

However, Young’s work will not be done when she leaves Indianola. She will process, clean, label, organize and analyze data before she begins writing her thesis.

Bleed estimated Young will be able to write numerous reports with the information she finds.

“She’s really interested in the long term, so I think she’ll be able to use her research here to study other camps in America, Europe and Asia,” Bleed said. “She will be publishing it in local outlets like ‘Nebraska History,’ but I think it will attract the attention of people around the world — both archaeologists and people interested in history.”

While Young is most excited to explore the POW camp, two other sites may suit students with different interests.

The first portion of the field school will focus on discovery and field documentation techniques. Matthew Douglass and LuAnn Wandsnider, both professors of archaeology, will lead this section titled “High Plains and Sand Hills Archaeology.” It will take place May 28 through June 15 at the Hudson-Meng Museum and Research Center Facility on the Oglala National Grassland, near Crawford, Neb.

Students will end their archeological adventures at The Pecos National Historical Park in New Mexico. With the help of Scott and Bleed, students will investigate the prehistoric and historic Pecos pueblo. Some believe this area was the camping site for Coronado’s visit and attack on the pueblo in 1541.

Because most field schools only complete research at one site, Scott said UNL students are lucky to focus on three different places.

“It’s a wide-ranging project, working with different instructors and different field methods,” Scott said.

In addition to $1,249 in tuition and fees for six anthropology credits, students will be charged a field school fee to cover transportation and other costs. The estimated total for the trip is $1,524.

All majors are welcome to apply. Applications are due Sunday, April 15.

Young urges any student who enjoys nature to apply.

“I feel like archaeology has the ability to speak to things that often get overlooked in other disciplines, in this case history,” Young said. “These guys (POWs) were here and they’ve been overlooked. I think it’s a really important part of Nebraska’s history that will come to light.”

Continuing education courses keep senior’s mind active

The Vancouver Sun: Continuing education courses keep senior’s mind active
Maureen Malcolm is a good person to have at a cocktail party. She can chat people up about the archeology of the American Southwest, the psychological anatomy of trauma and even what women’s shoes from various eras tell us about the culture of the time.

Malcolm, 69, is a wealth of knowledge, partly because she has been taking classes at Simon Fraser University’s continuing studies program for seniors ever since she retired nine years ago.

She felt it was important to keep her mind active.

“When people retire, often they have this time on their hands and especially some people, if they had a very, very demanding job ... suddenly they feel, ‘Oh, no, there’s not enough to fill my day,’ ” said Malcolm, a former adult education worker herself.

This is not a problem that afflicts the busy grandmother of six. Malcolm will sometimes go for lunch with her classmates before or after a lecture or attend meetings of a poetry appreciation group she formed with some colleagues as a way of building on what they learned in a recently completed seminar class.

People 55 and older can take some SFU classes at a discount; these classes are mostly held at the university’s downtown campus.

The University of B.C., as well as Langara and Douglas colleges, VCC and the University of the Fraser Valley, offer some courses tuition-free for seniors 65 and older, and others at a discount. Capilano University has a program called Eldercollege geared to adults 55 and up “with a zest for learning and exploring life,” which costs $139 per term or $75 for a single course, according to the program’s website.

The breadth of courses offered and the quality of the instructors are what keeps Malcolm coming back to SFU’s continuing studies program. In her nine years of taking classes, Malcolm said she has only had one instructor who she didn’t think was “absolutely fabulous.”

“Everybody I know that’s taken one always comes back and does more,” she said. “You kind of get to have your favourite instructors, so if you see they’re teaching another one, you want to take that.”

Malcolm said her classmates range in age from 55 to their early 90s and tend to be women, although her current class on the archeology of the American Southwest has attracted more men than usual.

One of her classmates is so enthusiastic about the program that he commutes regularly from Ladysmith on Vancouver Island, Malcolm said.

She takes notes in class in order to stay focused, but because she is not pursuing the program’s liberal arts certificate, Malcolm is not required to complete written assignments or tests. Literature and history are among her favourite subjects.

Malcolm doesn’t plan to cease her studies any time soon.

“I’m doing this as long as I possibly can,” she said. “I have six grandchildren and they think it’s quite funny that nanny still goes to school.”

Titanic: Budget crunch forced Vancouver museum to sell rare photo

From Times Colonist (Vancouver): Titanic: Budget crunch forced Vancouver museum to sell rare photo

VANCOUVER — A haunting photograph of the Titanic, one of the last taken of the doomed ship, has been sold by the Vancouver Maritime Museum for a paltry $4,935.

The Vancouver Province learned of the sale during research in the lead-up to the 100th anniversary of the sinking.

It was sold by former museum boss James Delgado more than a decade ago.

“It was felt at the time that the photograph . . . would be better off providing an infusion of cash into the acquisitions fund,” said the museum’s current executive director Simon Robinson.

“It is sad that museums sometimes feel the need to sell things. Regret about the sale would be the wrong word, but it’s always better to have something than not. The artifacts have become more and more valuable.”

The image shows Titanic serenely leaving the dock at Southampton, in effect waving goodbye to the world.

It is a visual record of mankind’s achievement in building a technological marvel and to the design follies that led to a shortage of lifeboats for the more than 1,500 who perished.

Simon Fraser University Archeology Prof. Robyn Woodward, who has lectured on the Titanic and sat on the museum’s board for two decades, said the sale never came up at the board level.

“I’m sure it was not done lightly. When you don’t have a huge acquisition budget, calls have to be made,” she said.

“But it would have been a fascinating shot to have in the collection because it has a Vancouver connection.”

The yellowish-brown, postcard-sized picture was donated to the museum in 1968 by Mrs. R.H. Hooper of nearby Richmond, B.C., whose father Henry William Clarke was chief engineer in Southampton when he took the photo on April 10, 1912.

It languished in the museum’s archives for 30 years, when its value was belatedly discovered by then-executive-director James Delgado.

In a 1998 interview, Delgado heralded the find as a rare bit of history and said an expert had authenticated its unique value.

“The photo became precious because the Titanic didn’t have a long life,” he said recently.

Despite its top-ranked billing as the “last” photo ever taken of the ship, Woodward said other pictures have surfaced from Cherbourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland, where passengers were picked up after leaving England.

“The pictures from Cherbourg mostly concern the famous people getting on board, but there is one shot of the ship leaving Queenstown,” she said.

Delgado blames the City of Vancouver for financial problems at the time of the sale, related to an aborted plan to relocate the museum from Vanier Park to North Vancouver, B.C.

Delgado was also the spearhead for the St. Roch fundraising expedition, that ended up spending more money than it raised.

“The original picture was sold because the museum was under hard times and needed money for its collection,” he said.

Delgado, 54, is now director of maritime heritage at the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D.C.

He was chief scientist on a team that, in 2010, used the latest in 3D underwater robot technology to photograph the ship’s ghostly remains in a way never seen before.

He said it is a crash scene where the lights have finally been turned on over the 400-hectare debris field.

“Not one teacup has been missed. There are no secrets now,” he said. “It is eerie. The best museums are those that are real, like Titanic.”

The first comprehensive map of the entire sea floor around the site can be seen on National Geographic's website.

Delgado said analyzing the digital images will occupy underwater archeologists for years to come.

“The story has embedded itself in the world’s consciousness,” he said.

Those in Vancouver who care to see a Titanic exhibit will want to check out the Maritime Museum.

There is a two-piece model of the Titanic in its death throes and a collection of newspapers that recorded the terrible events as they slowly unfolded.

But no last photo.

“The Titanic story has grown over the years. It doesn’t seem to diminish,” said Robinson.

Easter Pause

So sorry to have missed so many days of posting - unexpected family matters cropped up.

And now it's Easter, so more family matters.

Will get back on track Monday.

Thanks for your patience.

Satellite Archeology

From Living Earth: Satellite Archeology
Mesopotamia is believed to be the birthplace of civilization, but the extent of human settlement in this area is relatively unknown. Archeologists spend a lot of time scouring the ground for clues, but now some enterprising scientists are looking to the skies for help. Professor Jason Ur of Harvard tells host Bruce Gellerman about turning satellite photos into maps showing ancient cities, and why he digs this new technology.

Transcript

GELLERMAN: Half the world’s population lives in cities, and by 2050 it’s predicted that 70 percent of us will be urban dwellers. But cities aren’t new; in fact, they’re ancient.

GELLERMAN: Music from Mesopotamia. It’s here, in the cradle of civilization, that urban societies first emerged, 6000 years ago. Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, stretches from what is modern day Southern Turkey, through Northern Syria and Iraq.

Archeologists aren’t sure why cities first formed, or how many there were, but thanks to a new technique developed by Harvard professor Jason Ur and his college Bjoern Menze from MIT, scientists now have much faster way to identify the tell tale signs of ancient urban societies. Jason Ur says now, in addition to archeologists putting muddy boots on the ground, they can scan satellite images from space.

UR: I spent two months walking around 125 square kilometers of an area around a Bronze Age city, in northeastern Syria, and I found 60 sites.

GELLERMAN: And using your new technique, your satellite technique, how many did you find?

UR: Well, we found 14,000 places of potential interest, which we could narrow down to around 9,500 relatively reliable places and this was done on computers overnight.

GELLERMAN: Now, satellite imagery has been around for a long time, so what do you bring that’s new to this endeavor?

UR: Well, the traditional way is to get out and start walking. We look for surface manifestations of places where people might have lived, and usually this is in the form of broken pottery, they survive very well and they end up on the surface so we can find places of concentrations of broken artifacts.

GELLERMAN: Slow methods.

UR: Very slow. Today we have systemized this. We are training computers to do this for us, they are much more objective than we are. And then this computer program that I have developed with my colleague Bjoern Menze at MIT, his algorithm then does this in an automated fashion, letting computers do our job for us.

GELLERMAN: Well, let’s look, you’ve brought some images on your computer here. What is this image here? It looks like an abstract piece of art - black and white and red!

UR: What you’re seeing here as red, represents the near-infrared band of the visible spectrum; not something that our eyes can normally see. That’s one of the real powerful aspects of what we’ve attempted to do here is that we can see well beyond what the human eye can see into the near infrared and infrared wavelengths of light which are much too large for our own eyes.

GELLERMAN: So this one looks like, almost like an amoeba, an orange amoeba!

UR: Well, you’re looking at a major early city called Tell Brak. I’ve argued that this is one of the world’s first cities, if not the world’s first city, today in northeastern Syria. The area that you’re seeing that looks like an amoeba is of a high probability of ancient settlement. What we’re really seeing here is soils that have been changed by human occupation. I find this particular image of this particular place to be especially compelling because a second image that I can show you here represents the density of surface artifacts, which I collected over four seasons of walking back and forth across this place and they match precisely.

GELLERMAN: So the idea here is you take empirical studies from on the ground, what you found, and then you say: Okay satellite and algorithm, look at this image, remember this image and compare that to this other new images and see if there’s evidence of an urban settlement.

UR: That’s exactly the process. So if I give it a good set of places that I am 100 percent certain are ancient places, this algorithm can then develop a very precise understanding of what are the wavelengths that represent an ancient place, in this case the soils that human activity produce, that’s really what it’s seeing, and then it can then go find those in other places.

GELLERMAN: Tell me about Tell Brak - what kind of place was it besides just a pile of mud and brick at this point?

UR: In the past, it was a thriving, very early city. But what our method has shown is there were outlying neighborhoods around them that were spatially separate. They were not up against each other such as what we think of when we think of urban neighborhoods. But what we find is that with time they grow together. And this is very interesting, why initially were there distance between these different parts of the settlement and what overcame this potential reluctance for these groups to come together through time.

GELLERMAN: What do you think?

UR: Well, this is the great question! What we suspect is that there was that initial pull to bring people into a place like Tell Brak, that we don't quite understand. But I would probably say that it wasn’t top down. It was probably something that brought people in under their own volition rather than a central king or ruler compelling people to come in. If I had to guess, I would guess that through time, various institutions developed that could allow people to be more closer together. Maybe these were religious institutions, maybe these were political institutions, that’s something that requires more than satellites.

GELLERMAN: These people - tell me a little bit about the people that might have lived in these ancient cities.

UR: The majority of people living in early cities were farmers and herders. They were concerned with very basic elements of sustaining themselves. When we think of cities today, these cities are homes of the elite, the political elite, great corporations, cities are homes of consumers and producers live out on farms elsewhere. The earliest cities were almost certainly homes of the producers as well.

GELLERMAN: Tell. What does tell mean?

UR: This is a word in Arabic and Hebrew that refers to a ruin. And we don't think of archeological sites as being 'up', we think of them as 'down', you have to dig to get into them. But in fact, in the Middle East, archeological sites stand out. And this is because people build their houses using a mud-brick, and mud-brick houses don’t last very long. After about 50 years you can no longer patch it up, you need to knock it down and start over. So you level your old house, you build your new house on top of it, and through time, your settlement goes up and up.

GELLERMAN: So over time these cities literally built on top of themselves, or their predecessors or their ancestors.

UR: This is particularly interesting because people in the past chose to continuously reoccupy exactly the same place. And this doesn’t necessarily make sense. Because, as you go higher and higher, you’re getting yourself further and further from things like your fields and, most critically, from water. And this is what’s interesting, why did some of these places become so important that people would continue to live there even as they were putting themselves at a disadvantage in doing so?

GELLERMAN: You’ve got a hypothesis?

UR: Well, we know that cities were the homes of gods. We think that probably it was, it could have been a cosmological reason, or it could have been political power, in this case we really have to do excavation rather than looking at satellites to answer questions like this.

GELLERMAN: Did you find any cuneiform evidence? Written evidence, since these people were basically the first to use written language, I suppose.

UR: Yes. In this region, we have the origins of writing. And it’s very closely associated with the states and early kingship. However, it post-dates, writing post-dates, the earliest cities, so clearly urbanism as phenomenon was something that didn’t require this sort of administration or book keeping, and probably this is a result of urbanization but not the cause of it.

GELLERMAN: So, urbanization is a very natural process, a very human process, you know, people left upon their own devices will come together?

UR: That seems to be what I take from this particular Mesopotamian case study. I think in a lot of cases, we have a tendency to see governments as behind a lot of these processes. Especially in the past, we see things like the famous mythical king Gilgamesh, who claims to have built the great early city of Uruk. He brought this about through his own kind of charisma and political will.

Probably this is a later understanding of how these places came about, and in fact, it was probably more of what we could call an emergent phenomenon, people acting under their own motivations, but the aggregate of these actions results in something that might look very planned. And here I see a lot of parallels with the intelligent design movement where large complex things can only be the result of some central planner, that certainly isn’t the case with ancient cities.

GELLERMAN: What’s interesting to me is that these urban centers existed for thousands of years and then, they’re gone, most of them. What happened?

UR: Well, there is no single answer. There has been a big attempt in recent years to attribute this to climatic change, this is something obviously that we’re all very concerned about today and we think about this in the past. It may be that in some cases some of these cities simply over extended themselves. Places got simply too large for the existing agricultural technologies. And sometimes when these are excavated, we find that they have been burned. Archeologists love burned cities, because cities that were destroyed, there’s a lot to find there.

GELLERMAN: So probably war?

UR: In some cases. The past was a violent place. Certainly the 20th century AD does not have a monopoly on violence, that’s certainly the case.

GELLERMAN: What now for you? What do you do with all this data from your algorithm?

UR: Well, obviously it’s of academic interest. But there are other aspects of this. We can take this incredible map of settlement, and we can take this to antiquities officials, in this case in Syria, and we can say: Here’s what you have that you might want to protect. This is the past of the Syrian people, but it’s also the world’s past, and this needs to be protected.

GELLERMAN: In the current fighting that’s going on, the war that’s in Syria, are you afraid that some of these areas will be destroyed?

UR: Well, this is always a concern, how the past falls victim to modern political activities. A larger concern in the case of Syria right now, are the museums. We all saw what happened in Baghdad in 2003, will this happen again? I hope that lessons will have been learned. But this is something to bear in all places that have become politically destabilized.

GELLERMAN: Before we go Professor, I’ve gotta ask you about your name, Ur. UR, the ancient city of Ur, that was part of the area that we are talking about, it was Mesopotamia right?

UR: Certainly, yes.

GELLERMAN: So…

UR: Well, I’ve been accused of having a stage name, uh, but in fact, this is a perfectly good Hungarian name. How I ended up as a Mesopotamian archeologist with this name could be subconscious, I would guess, but I was very close to becoming a Mayanist, which would have meant that this name would have been meaningless.

GELLERMAN: (Laughs.) Well, Professor Ur, thank you for coming in.

UR: Oh Bruce it was my pleasure!

GELLERMAN: Jason Ur teaches urban archeology at Harvard University.

Discarded butts a lesson on modern archeology

Seems like a waste of effort to me... aren't there real archaeological sites they could be investigating?

From Journal Advocate: Discarded butts a lesson on modern archeology
STERLING -- Archeology students at Northeastern Junior College spent Thursday morning searching for cigarette butts on the lawn outside E.S. French Hall.

The search was part of a self-lead project designed to teach students about real-life archeology searches and how materials left behind can provide cultural information.

Sophomore Zachary Swiger, who led the project, said the idea for the project came about when students went to look outside for archeology class one day and noticed a lot of cigarette butts on the ground.

"In archeology any object is relevant," he said. "It's a reflection of the culture."

Swiger pointed out that a lot of people just discard their cigarettes in the area outside E.S. French. Everyone thinks pop cans are trash, he said, but not cigarette butts.

"I think this (project) will say a lot about the smoking society, at least on this part of the NJC campus," he said.

Swinger said the project is neat because it's psychological and sociological in a lot of ways.

To get started, the students mapped out a grid across the lawn, with 10 by 10 boxes. Then they counted the number of light, regular and menthol cigarettes in each box.

"We want to develop a frequency of how many cigarette butts there are in each grid," Swinger said. "It's like a giant game of cigarette Battle Ship.

Once the students finished counting cigarette butts they planned to put the information into a spreadsheet and compile it into classes based on width and sample size. Then they planned to look at the number of light, regular and menthol cigarettes in each class and create a sample summary.

Once they have the statistics they planned to make a color-coded map.

"Then we'll figure out where people enjoy smoking most, where they're least likely to travel and how to attribute that to real archeology," Swiger said.