Sunday, April 17, 2005

A rare weekend appearance for the ArchaeoBlog staff with a few items of interest.

Mohr from Mehr Ancient sites and monuments discovered near Pasargadae

A team of archaeologists working at the Mashhad-e Morghab plain near Pasargadae in Fars Province recently discovered historical sites and monuments dating back to ancient times.

The director of the research section of the Pasargadae Complex said on Friday that the discovery includes a total of seventy-seven ancient sites, caves, mounds, mines, dams, and monuments.

“The findings include twelve caves, five prehistoric mounds, four mines, two furnaces, three dams, ten Achaemenid era mounds, seven open sites from the Sassanid era, five graveyards, as well as several water mills, castles, and mosques dating back to the Islamic era,” Mr. Rakhshani said.


Yet mohr from Mehr 16 foreign archaeological teams heading to Iran

Sixteen teams of foreign archaeologists are to work with Iranian experts at several of the country’s historical and ancient sites during the current Iranian calendar year, an official of the Center for Archaeological Research said on Saturday.

“The teams will be from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Germany, and Japan,” Karim Alizadeh added.

A group of archaeologists from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, which have worked at Iran’s ancient sites since 2002, have asked for permission to continue their activities.



And still more from Iran

International archaeologists who left Iran some 25 years ago are making a return to the land that cradles an ancient civilization, historical sites, and remnants of predecessors treasured by experts all around the world.

Many archaeologists went back home when the Islamic Revolution took place in 1978, leaving their work on the table. But since last year more than 50 experts from all around the world, including experts of universities in United States, Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, Australia, and Japan, have traveled to Iran to take part in explorations of the historical sites scattered all around the country, which Holly Pittman, archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, calls “Archaeologists’ Heaven”. Last year 9 teams of foreign specialists helped Iranians excavate the sites.


Kind of old news that we've been reporting on for a while.

Ancient shipwreck determined to be source of Lewes artifacts

State archaeologists now say the source of artifacts deposited on Lewes Beach near the Roosevelt Inlet this winter are from the earliest shipwreck ever found in Delaware waters.

“It could be as much as 50 years earlier than the DeBraak,” said Dan Griffith, director of the newly formed Lewes Maritime Archaeological Project overseeing research into the artifacts.

Griffith said the DeBraak, a British warship, sank in 1798 and archaeologists are dating the Lewes Beach wreck to between 1750 and 1760.



Fight! Fight! Forestry battle continues at Recherche Bay

Conservationists are pushing ahead with efforts to stop forestry work at Recherche Bay in southern Tasmania.

They are angry that the Federal Government has refused an emergency heritage listing for the historical area and are planning a protest walk tomorrow morning.

Geoff Law from the Wilderness Society believes people power is now the only thing that will stop logging on the peninsula.


Still not exactly sure what's there, but it sounds important.

Interesting non-archaeological story Prehistoric jawbone reveals evolution repeating itself

A 115-million-year-old fossil of a tiny monotreme, an egg-laying mammal related to the platypus, provides compelling evidence of multiple origins of acute hearing in humans and other mammals.

The discovery of a prehistoric jawbone, reported in February in the journal Science, suggests that the transformation of bones from the jaw into the small bones of the middle ear occurred at least twice in the evolutionary lines of living mammals after their split from a common ancestor some 200 million years ago.

“The earbones are still attached to the lower jaw, which implies this shift had to occur in later monotremes and independently of the shift occurring in the common ancestor of marsupials and placentals,” said James Hopson, Professor in Organismal Biology & Anatomy and an author of the paper.