Soldiers, some of whom have suffered double amputations, gunshot wounds, explosions while in vehicles and burns, worked on the site digging trenches and revealing the walls of a Roman building.
The groups have been staying and socialising in the area all week, giving soldiers from the same regiment the opportunities to make friends and build a network of support.
Story: South Wales Argus | Photo: South Wales Argus
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Jarrod Burks explains how radar technology has changed the way archaeologists dig in the dirt.
“Instead of throwing a dart into the middle of 40 acres, this accurately says ‘Here’s a bulls-eye,’ ” said Rick Perkins, chief ranger at the Hopewell Cultural National Park.
Outside his office at Ohio Valley Archeology on Sinclair Road, Burks recently demonstrated the technology. He peered down at a screen on a radar machine that he slowly rolled over a stretch of blacktop.
A black arch appeared – a pipe, he said, about 3 feet below the surface.
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In the most depressing public statement since Magic Johnson’s 1991 press conference, Shia LaBeouf recently said Steven Spielberg “cracked” the story for Indiana Jones 5. The only people less excited than movie fans: real archaeologists.
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The world’s oldest submerged town, Pavlopetri in Greece, is undergoing an indepth survey by underwater archaeologists armed with the latest technology.
Dr Henderson and his team will carry out a detailed millimeter accurate digital underwater survey of the site using an acoustic scanner developed by a major North American offshore engineering company. The equipment can produce photo-realistic, three dimensional digital surveys of seabed features and underwater structures to sub-millimetre accuracy in a matter of minutes.
Dr Henderson said: “The ability to survey submerged structures, from shipwrecks to sunken cities, quickly, accurately and more importantly, cost effectively, is a major obstacle to the future development of underwater archaeology. I believe we now have a technique which effectively solves this problem.”
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As Iraq prepares for increased tourism, archaeologists are concerned that the restorations of many ancient sites is actually doing more damage than good.
“In Saddam’s time we dealt with officials who had a primary school education. They didn’t even know who Nebuchadnezzar or Hammurabi was,” he said. “Now in some of these provinces we suffer from the same problem.”
Last month the tourism and antiquities ministry ordered the northern province of Nineveh to halt work on an ancient Assyrian wall when it found out they were using stones cut with electric saws.
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During the reign of Saddam Hussein, and with the war still in progress, archaeology in Iraq has been at a standstill. The Field Museum in Chicago hopes to bring Iraqi archaeologists up to speed with all the technological developments of the last 15 years.
“Their job now is to learn new techniques they were unable to learn about while under the regime of Saddam Hussein, when they couldn’t leave the country,” said Dr. James Phillips, Iraq Cultural Heritage Project director.
Dr. Phillips says that in the past 15 years or so technology in this field has advanced at an incredible rate and these Iraqi archaeologists have not been able to advance with it. But now, with a U.S. State Department grant, in the next two years 18 Iraqis will be trained by the Field Museum and the Oriental Institute.
The article also includes video.
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Mental_Floss has compiled a lit of ten interesting methods scientists use to date things, from extracting DNA from the pages of medieval manuscripts to studying what the climate must have been like in the past through pollen.
Left and right, archaeologists are radiocarbon dating objects: fossils, documents, shrouds of Turin. They do it by comparing the ratio of an unstable isotope, carbon-14, to the normal, stable carbon-12. All living things have about the same level of carbon-14, but when they die it begins to decay at uniform rate—the half-life is about 5,700 years, and you can use this knowledge to date objects back about 60,000 years.
However, radiocarbon dating is hardly the only method that creative archaeologists and paleontologists have at their disposal for estimating ages and sorting out the past. Some are plainly obvious, like the clockwork rings of many old trees. But there are plenty of strange and expected ways to learn about the past form the clues it left behind.
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