Month: November 2008

Lapis Niger uncovered by rain

Ancient, Roma, Caput Mundi

The Lapis Niger is a slab of black marble said to memorialize the spot where the co-founder and first king of Rome, Romulus, was torn to pieces by pissed off senators. (The alternate story is he was assumed whole body into heaven and deified as Quirinus, the spirit of the city itself, but Plutarch and Livy smelled a regicidal rat with that story.)

It was discovered in 1899 and covered with cement for its own protection in the 50s. Now that cement covering has been damaged by rain, so for the first time in 50 years, people will get a chance to see the Lapis Niger while archaeologists restore it.

A canopy would be erected over the exposed “murder site” – first discovered in 1899 – so that archeologists could work on it while visitors to the Forum watched.

Tourists don’t often get to see archaeologists at work in the city, so that’s a big thing.

For a rivetingly detailed description of the Lapis Niger site from 1906, see Lacus Curtius’ transcription of The Roman Forum by Christian Hülsen.

The awesome bit about all the different things ancient Romans thought the Lapis Niger commemorated is worth reading through the second paragraph at least.

Buddha relic found in mini pagoda

Ancient, Treasures

Or so archaeologists in Nanjing think.

The four-storey pagoda, which is almost four feet high and one-and-a-half feet wide, is thought by archaeologists to be one of the 84,000 pagodas commissioned by Ashoka the Great in the second century BC to house the remains of the Buddha. […]

The pagoda found in Nanjing is crafted from wood, gilded with silver and inlaid with gold, coloured glass and amber. It matches a description of another of Ashoka’s pagodas which used to be housed underneath the Changgan Buddhist temple in Nanjing.

A description of the contents of the pagoda was also found: a gold coffin bearing part of Buddha’s skull inside a silver box. Although scans have confirmed that there are two small metal boxes inside the pagoda, experts have not yet peered inside.

The pagoda was found in August on the site of a temple, encased in an iron box. They’ve removed the pagoda from the box and put it on display in the Nanjing Museum, but they haven’t opened the little metal boxes which are expected to contain the piece of Siddhartha Gautama’s skull.

It’s not like the many, many pieces of the “true cross” floating about out there. This is the only known pagoda to have contained remains of the Buddha’s skull, so there’s of excitement, and I would imagine, trepidation.

If there’s nothing in there, it’ll be a massive disappointment and blow to the huge potential pilgrim tourism. If they open it wrong and damage such a unique, religiously important relic, it would be a horrid black eye.

Confirmed: Copernicus is dead

Modern(ish), Renaissance

Also, he looked just like James Cromwell. Seriously. They could be twins.

Polish archaeologists found what they thought were Copernicus’ remains in 2005. A facial reconstruction of the skull matched contemporary portraits of the astronomer (and of James Cromwell), but they didn’t know for sure until they compared the DNA from the skeleton with DNA from two hairs found in a book Copernicus owned.

Swedish genetics expert Marie Allen analyzed DNA from a vertebrae, a tooth and femur bone and matched and compared it to that taken from two hairs retrieved from a book that the 16th-century Polish astronomer owned, which is kept at a library of Sweden’s Uppsala University where Allen works.

“We collected four hairs and two of them are from the same individual as the bones,” Allen said.

That was the easy part. It took archaeologists 2 years to locate Copernicus’ grave, and they already knew which church it was in.

Copernicus was known to have been buried in the 14th-century Frombork Cathedral where he served as a canon, but his grave was not marked. The bones found by Gassowski were located under floor tiles near one of the side altars.

Gassowski’s team started his search in 2004, on request from regional Catholic bishop, Jacek Jezierski.

“In the two years of work, under extremely difficult conditions — amid thousands of visitors, with earth shifting under the heavy pounding of the organ music — we managed to locate the grave, which was badly damaged,” Gassowski said.

So organ music literally moves the earth. The more you know.

Another Bulgarian Chariot

Ancient, Looting, Treasures

Bulgaria lands another excellently-preserved ancient chariot.

The latest find is an 1,800-year-old Thracian chariot uncovered in the village of Karanovo, south of Sofia.

The bronze-plated wooden chariot is decorated with scenes from Thracian mythology, including figures of a jumping panther and the carving of a mythological animal with the body of a panther and the tail of a dolphin, Ignatov said.

He said the chariot, with wheels measuring 1.2 meters (four feet) across, was found during excavations in a funerary mound that archaeologists believe was the grave of a wealthy Thracian aristocrat, as he was buried along with his belongings.

The team also unearthed well-preserved wooden and leather objects, some of which the archaeologists believe were horse harnesses. The remains of horses were uncovered nearby.

There are an estimated 10,000 Thracian tombs spread all over Bulgaria, but (surprise, surprise) looting has destroyed 90% of them. Until this August, the only chariots archaeologists found were in pieces because looters got to the site first.

Oh, and check this: Veselin Ignatov, the head of the Karanov dig, got a whopping $12,500 from the Bulgarian Culture Ministry for the entire excavation. :angry:

The 10 million dollar mammoth

Ancient, Modern(ish)

Scientists at Penn State think all it would take to cook up a woolly mammoth in the lab is a little genome decoding and 10 million bucks. Cheap! Steve Austin was way smaller than a mammoth and it cost 60% that price to make him better, stronger, faster.

There is no present way to synthesize a genome-size chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a shortcut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million. “This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive,” he said.

“Could” being the operative word. There are many ifs involved in resurrecting the mammoth. Ancient DNA is usually damaged and/or contaminated beyond recovery, although the DNA in hair, protected by keratin, tends to be in much better condition.

Also, the DNA of living cells takes ages to modify one site at a time, but there too our Penn State Frankensteins have an ace in a hole: Dr. George Church, a genome technologist who claims he has a new method that can modify 50,000 genomic sites at once.

Yes, yes, but they can make a pig-sized woolly mammoth for the designer pet market? They’d make that 10 mill back in a week, guaranteed.