Month: August 2009

Early humans used fire to make stone tools

Ancient, Treasures

A study of a prehistoric site in Mossel Bay, South Africa has found evidence that early humans used fire to heat hard-to-carve stones. Once heated, even the toughest stones chip more easily leaving a sharper cutting edge.

The heat transforms the stone so that it’s harder and more brittle, which allows it to be more easily chipped away into a sharper edge. It also gives the stone a special sheen, which helped the archaeologists identify the tools as resulting from fire treatment.

“The most noticeable thing about heat-treated stone is that it has a luster or a gloss to it that’s fairly distinctive,” Brown said. “A stone that’s heated will only show that gloss if it’s been flaked after it’s heated.”

The sheen evidence was then confirmed by archaeomagnetics (measures iron particles realigned by heat) and thermoluminescence (a dating technique that identifies when an object was fired).

Some of the stones on the site date to having been cooked as far back as 164,000 years ago. The process seems to have been in common use by 72,000 years ago. That’s 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.

This is a whole new point on the human-fire continuum. We know people started cooking with it 800,000 years ago. Ceramics kick in 10,000 years ago, and metal extraction just 5,000.

This step follows easily from people cooking with fire — you’ve always got rocks around a fire — and the engineering aspect sets up the transition to hardening clayware by firing it.

New theater finds old theaters

Modern(ish), Treasures

The Smock Alley Theatre was the first theater built in Dublin in 1662, after the Restoration of the monarchy brought fun back the British empire. It was home to the Theatre Royal for almost a hundred years after that.

It was rebuilt twice over the years, then finally demolished and replaced in with a 1813 with the Catholic Church of St Michael and St John.

The church in recent years had become the Viking Adventure Centre, which sounds both fun and slightly pathetic, and since that business failed, the building had stood vacant.

Now the Smock Alley Theatre has gotten a grant to rebuild a theater and acting school on the site. In preparation for the new construction, archaeologists excavated the site and found to their surprise the walls of the all three of the original theaters and all kinds of period artifacts.

Smock Alley Theatre director Patrick Sutton said leading archaeologists Margaret Gowan and Lindzi Simpson got more than they bargained for when excavators exposed the walls of the original theatre’s horseshoe-shaped ampitheatre as well as the theatres’ other incarnations in 1700 and 1735 after digging about two feet down.

“We didn’t expect to find the walls of the original three theatres but through this scraping away we unearthed the three lives of the theatres. It’s a great day for the country and the world history of theatre,” he told the Irish Independent. […]

They also unearthed some fascinating artefacts including a ceramic curler used by one of the actresses, pieces of the original mosaic floor tiling, a broken wine bottle and oyster shells left behind by theatre patrons who snacked on oysters during performances.

As Sutton points out in the article, the Globe theater, famous as it is, didn’t get to be built on the original site, so this is a great coup.

The artifacts will be moved to the National Museum and the foundations sealed for their preservation, but the hope is that once the new theater complex is finished, there will be a space to display all the finds.

John Quincy Adams on Twitter

Modern(ish), Multimedia

Two hundred years ago last Wednesday, John Quincy Adams set out as the first ambassador from the United States to Russia, appointed by James President Madison. He kept a detailed journal of the trip, but also kept a separate diary that described each day in one line.

Now the Massachusetts Historical Society is using John Quincy Adams’ daily summations to class up Twitter. You too can follow his voyage of one-liners exactly 200 years after they happened.

Since part of his 140 characters are dedicated to his current longitude and latitude, you can even follow along on Google Maps as he moves. The nice people at the MHS courteously provide a link and everything.

Interesting highlights for me:
1. he loves him some Plutarch,
2. passing other ships seems to have been a regular, sometimes daily, occurence,
3. John Quincy Adams would totally be a Weather Channel junkie if he were with us today.

You can also read his full diary entries on the MHS website. They have a complete digital archive of the scanned pages. It’s a bit of a challenge to navigate and read, so you might want to start here.

Adams ambassadorship was an eventful one. He was on the job when Napoleon made the damn fool decision to invade Russia He stayed until 1814, when he was recalled to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war with Britain that had seen the burning of the White House.

Borg technology reveals ancient colors

Ancient, Multimedia, Treasures

Scientists at museum like the Met are using silver nanoparticles to analyze microscopic fragments of ancient art. This is a major advance because more conventional analysis requires a fairly sizable sample, which in some cases can be destructive to the artifact.

The nanoparticles also do a fantastic job highlighting ancient dyes, so you get to see the palette of antiquity in a whole new light.

Silver nanoparticles work by absorbing tiny amounts of dye molecules and enhancing the reading of diluted dyes. The nanoparticles also prevent otherwise fluorescent substances from reflecting too much light when a laser is shined on them.

Using such a tiny sample is important when art historians and scientists study small fragments of 4,000-year-old Egyptian letters. Removing even a tiny sample often destroys important details about the available technology and materials available to ancient civilizations.

Using silver nanoparticles, Met scientist Marco Leona has identified a particular red dye called madder lake, derived from the madder plant.

Making the dye from the plant is a complex chemical process, so the fact that the ancient Egyptians were making it as early as 1900 BC means they were even better chemists than we give them credit for.

Leona was also able to identify the same dye made from the shells of an Asian insect on two different 12th c. French statues. That suggests that Asian-European trade networks were more complex than previously imagined, even in the Middle Ages.

Bronze Age cist burial found on Scottish royal site

Ancient, Treasures

Archaeologists excavating the Forteviot site in Perthshire, Scotland, since 2006, have found evidence of the largest Stone Age henge complex in Scotland and now, a unique cist burial.

The 4 ton capstone was found last summer, but they weren’t able to lift it them. Now thanks to an industrial crane, the capstone has been removed to reveal a cist — a small buried coffin made of stone — containing artifacts and traces of human remains known infelicitously as “grave wax”.

“The real treasure of this burial is not the metal objects in it, but the organic remains,” [Aberdeen University’s Dr Gordon Noble] said. “This sort of material rarely survives in Scotland and it gives us an insight into what other objects were being used, not just the things that usually survive such as flint tools.

“The objects in the grave and its construction could equate to a high-status person to warrant such a burial,” he added. “To move a four-ton slab of stone in the Bronze Age was quite an undertaking.” […]

The capstone was found to have a unique carving of a spiral and axe shape on the side facing into the burial, while the cist itself had several axes or other weapons carved into the stone at the end where the head of its occupant is likely to have been.

The grave dates to between 2200 and 2100 BC, which is 400-500 younger than the estimated age of the huge henge.

The Forteviot site was an important one in the Middle Ages as well. A “palace” in Forteviot is mentioned as the death place of one of the first kings of united Scotland, Kenneth MacAlpin, who died in 858 AD.

Archaeologists are excavating a high-level medieval cemetary on the site hoping to find clues to the whereabouts of the purported palace, which isn’t likely to have borne much resemblance to our current notions of what a palace looks like.