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More criticism of language origin in Southwest Africa paper (Hunley et al. 2012)

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The second co-author, Claire Bowern, writes to me:
Language is great for looking at the Holocene, but it changes too fast for it to be useful for more remote relations. The point is not to question the origin of language in Africa, but to question the utility of modern linguistic data for providing answers to such questions.
From the paper:
we find that the correlation between phoneme levels and distance from putative origins is most negative when the origin is located in Eurasia, not Africa (figure 3d), implying that phonemic diversity has not been moulded at the global level by the same evolutionary processes that shaped neutral genetic diversity.

Also contrary to the predictions of SFE, the correlation between phoneme inventory size and geographical distance was most positive when the origin was located in Oceania rather than in the Americas. This is because there is a relative deficit of total and private phonemes in Oceania, and an excess in the Americas.

...

The non-tree-like pattern of phonemic variation is also inconsistent with the predictions of SFE. Because we were unable to construct a robust phoneme tree, we are unable to determine whether the observed correlations between phonemic difference and geographical distance are a by-product of the SFE process or the result of phonemic exchange between neighbouring languages. The fact that the correlations exist within regions independent of language family status, however, indicates that local exchange is responsible for at least some of the correlation.

...

Having diversified within the last 10 000 years, currently attested language families are young relative to the age of our species, and specialists have had success reconstructing the evolutionary process in many of them [3,24–28]. Only the IE correlation reached statistical significance, but the correlation was positive.
The paper also has free supplementary material here, from which the tree of Indo-European languages (left) is taken. The numbers attached to languages indicate the number of vowels/consonants in their phonemic inventory.

Another recent paper by Cysouw et al. here, also critical of the Atkinson (2011) paper.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.2296


Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic and linguistic coevolution

Keith Hunley et al.

Recent genetic studies attribute the negative correlation between population genetic diversity and distance from Africa to a serial founder effects (SFE) evolutionary process. A recent linguistic study concluded that a similar decay in phoneme inventories in human languages was also the product of the SFE process. However, the SFE process makes additional predictions for patterns of neutral genetic diversity, both within and between groups, that have not yet been tested on phonemic data. In this study, we describe these predictions and test them on linguistic and genetic samples. The linguistic sample consists of 725 widespread languages, which together contain 908 distinct phonemes. The genetic sample consists of 614 autosomal microsatellite loci in 100 widespread populations. All aspects of the genetic pattern are consistent with the predictions of SFE. In contrast, most of the predictions of SFE are violated for the phonemic data. We show that phoneme inventories provide information about recent contacts between languages. However, because phonemes change rapidly, they cannot provide information about more ancient evolutionary processes.

Link

CFP: Hierarchy/ies in the Theory and Practice of Greek and Roman Drama

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Seen on the Classicists list:

12th ANNUAL POSTGRADUATE SYMPOSIUM ON ANCIENT DRAMA, JUNE 2012:

‘Hierarchy/ies in the Theory and Practice of Greek and Roman Drama’

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are happy to announce the Annual Joint Postgraduate Symposium on the Performance of Greek and Roman Drama, co-organised by the APGRD, University of Oxford and the University of London. This two-day event will take place on Monday 18th June at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies (University of Oxford) and Tuesday 19th June at The Central School of Speech & Drama (University of London).

ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM

Organised by postgraduates, this annual symposium focuses on the reception of Greek and Roman drama, exploring the afterlife of ancient dramatic texts through re-workings of Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy by writers and practitioners. Speakers from a number of countries will give papers on the reception of Greek and Roman drama. This year’s guest respondent is Professor Judith P. Hallett (University of Maryland).

PARTICIPANTS

Postgraduates from across the globe working on the reception of Greek and Roman drama are welcome to participate, as are those who have completed a doctorate but not yet taken up a post. The Symposium is open to speakers from different disciplines, including researchers in the fields of classics, modern languages and literature, or theatre studies.

Practitioners are welcome to contribute their personal experience of working on ancient drama. Papers may also include demonstrations. Undergraduates are very welcome to attend.

Those who wish to offer a short paper (20 mins) or performative presentation on ‘Hierarchy/ies in the Theory and Practice of Greek and Roman Drama’ are invited to send an abstract of up to 200 words outlining the proposed subject of their discussion to postgradsymp AT classics.ox.ac.uk by Thursday 30th MARCH 2012 AT THE LATEST (please include details of your current course of study, supervisor and academic institution).

There will be no registration fee but participants will have to seek their own funding to cover travel and accommodation expenses.

This year’s organisers are Brad Wilson (Oxford), Dan Goad (London). CONTACT FOR ENQUIRIES: postgradsymp AT classics.ox.ac.uk


Interedition Symposium – Scholarly Digital Editions, Tools and Infrastructure

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Interedition Symposium – Scholarly Digital Editions, Tools and Infrastructure
Huygens ING, The Hague, The Netherlands, 19-20 March 2012

Program online

Huygens ING is pleased to host a symposium to mark the achievements of Interedition, COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action IS0704. This event will also serve as a springboard for further work based on the principles of interoperability promoted by Interedition within the domain of digital scholarly editing and research.

One of the key objectives of Interedition has been to produce a ‘roadmap’ conceptualizing the development of a technical infrastructure for collaborative digital preparation, editing, publication, analysis and visualization of literary research materials. Interedition has approached the problem of interoperable infrastructure from the perspectives of methodology, technology, and community. At present Interedition is realizing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of a bottom-up generalizable architecture, focusing on the development community and the prototyping of distributed lightweight services. This grassroots approach is emerging from the ‘engine rooms’ where Web 2.0 digital editions are being built and embodies a generalizable and viable approach to collaborative digital humanities tool building.

The symposium promises to give a good and comprehensive overview of current trends in practices of building digital editions, related digital tools and infrastructures, digital text analysis and annotation, and community aspects.

The symposium will be held in conjunction to a bootcamp and Management Committee meeting, from 19-20 March 2011. Venue is the Huygens Institute for the History of The Netherlands (Huygens ING, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) The Hague, The Netherlands.

Athens Coin Collections Under Attack

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It appears that Greece's two major coin collections, those of the Alpha Bank and National Numismatic Collection, were subject to attack during the recent spate of rioting, but they are probably safe for now.

First, the ground floor of the Alpha Bank was set ablaze, but hopefully the coin collection on the eight floor of an adjacent building is still secure.

Second, there was also apparently an attack on the Government Numismatic Museum in the old Schliemann mansion, but hopefully the collection is safe behind security.

Recently, the State Department Bureau of Educational Affairs and US Customs imposed import restrictions on undocumented ancient Greek coins. Any coins that are forfeited under these regulations will go back to an uncertain future in Greece.

Archaeological bloggers remain in a state of denial about the implications of all this. And the State Department and US Customs presumably could care less about what they have wrought.

TEXTUS: an open source platform for collaborating around collections of texts

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Textus is an open source platform for working with collections of texts. It harnesses the power of semantic web technologies and delivers them in a simple and intuitive interface so that students, researchers and teachers can share and collaborate around collections of texts. TEXTUS is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

The dream of a unified text is one in which you would be able to explore, seamlessly, online, every text ever written. With the click of a button I can go from Pynchon to Proust, from Musil to Machiavelli, from Homer to Hugo.

In this dream not only can you read, but you are able to contribute, to write upon these texts — to annotate, to anthologize, to interlink, to translate, to borrow — and to share what you do with others.

You can see what others have shared, what notes they have added, what selections they have made. You can see the interweaving of these texts created by borrowing, by inspiration, by reference, all made concrete by the insight and efforts of myself and others and their ability to layer their insights freely upon those original texts — just as those writers built upon the works that had gone before them.

And while each text still can stand still stand alone we have something new, a single unified corpus woven together out of this multitude of separate text.

A whole that is a concrete instantiation in an immaterial realm of the cultural achievement of mankind as expressed in the written word.

We have within our grasp, the realisation of the dream of a unified text. Combining text and technology we can create something truly extraordinary.

Archaeology in the News!

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A British excavation has struck archaeological gold with a discovery that may solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba of biblical legend derived her fabled treasures. An enormous ancient goldmine, together with the ruins of a temple and the site of a battlefield, have been discovered in her former territory in Ethiopia.

A research team in Croatia has discovered what may be the world’s oldest astrologer’s board, an ivory board dating back more than 2,000 years and engraved with zodiac signs. Found with Hellenistic drinking vessels, archaeologists are not sure how the board ended up in a cave overlooking the Adriatic.

According to 3,000-year-old evidence discovered by two Bryn Mawr College excavations in Sharjah, people in what is now the UAE were probably the first to domesticate the wild camel. The excavations have revealed almost 10 times as many bones of domesticated dromedaries as at any other single site in the Middle East and show an unusual pattern of expansion during dry periods.

A battle over historic artifacts hidden below the surface of Alabama’s rivers, lakes, and bays is surfacing in advance of the opening of Legislature’s 2012 regular session on Feb. 7. In the proposed version, the law would still require permits for recovery of artifacts related to shipwrecks and would forbid disturbing Native American burial sites, but treasure hunters would otherwise be able to search state waters and keep what they find.

Action from expanding development pressures began to inch closer to three Maya archaeological sites in northwestern Belize, sites that have not yet been badly damaged by bulldozing. To protect one of the sites the Maya Research Program (MRP), a U.S.-based non-profit corporation, archaeologists, preservationists and donors purchased the Grey Fox site and now hope to protect it for future conservation and research.

The remains of the first HMS Victory are to be raised from the sea bed nearly 300 years after it sank. The vessel, predecessor of Nelson’s famous flagship, went down in a storm off the Channel Islands in 1744, taking more than 1,000 sailors to their deaths, along with a possible  £500 million in gold coins.

Ancient Egyptians paid special attention to the organs of their dead, embalming them so they would continue to function in the afterlife. Now it seems they did the same for sacrificed ibis birds, and even packed their stomachs with food so they wouldn’t go hungry.

Since the discovery of its ruins more than a century ago, the 2,500-year-old site of Chandraketugarh in West Bengal has only been partly excavated. Looting, neglect and decay have been the banes of its existence for decades. But now the site is to be excavated and turned into a “heritage village.”

Moa bones and other relics of an early Maori settlement around Redcliffs have been found during excavations in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The ancient remains of four prehistoric bears, in some cases near human skulls, have been uncovered by archaeologists diving in underwater caves in Mexico.

Achill-henge, modern tribute to Stonehenge or blight on the Irish landscape?

Anthropology professor Stephen Lubkemann thinks his planned trek into the sea will soon help shape the understanding of one of the ugliest aspects of human history: the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Stories of Bronze Age Scandinavian invaders killing men and enslaving women may have to be rewritten thanks to discovery of a series of virtual “time capsules” in the Outer Hebrides. A synthesis of 20 years of research  the research challenges the existing belief that the Norse period marked a cataclysmic change in the Hebridean way of life.

New technology may help Waikato University researchers pinpoint the origins of Maori human remains. The Te Papa Museum in Wellington is been responsible for the country’s international repatriation efforts and for helping identify the origins of Maori remains held in foreign institutions.

British researchers are reexamining the Piltdown Man remains in an attempt to discover who carried out the hoax.

The Best Evidence for the Documentary Hypothesis is in the Psalms

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Students of the Bible learn about the Documentary Hypothesis, the view that the Pentateuch was put together using multiple earlier written sources, traditionally identified using the abbreviations JEPD. Sometimes challenges have been raised to such source criticism on the grounds that varying the way one refers to God is quite common within unified religious traditions and their musical expression of their faith.

For me, the strongest support for the Documentary Hypothesis’ distinction between sources based on different ways of referring to God comes from the Psalms, specifically Psalm 14 and Psalm 53. If you read them both side by side, you’ll see that they are both essentially the same psalm, the only major difference being that one addresses God using the divine name YHWH, and the other does not.

I don’t see any way of accounting plausibly for these two psalms being part of this collection other than in terms of there being different groups, or regions, or kingdoms, which had different preferences regarding how to refer to and address God. And that makes it seem plausible to account for the different passages in the Pentateuch which refer to God in different ways in terms of those same distinct traditions or groups.

Here’s a graphic which I found on the web page I link to here, which explores the two psalms and conveniently provides both in interlinear form with differences highlighted.


Online media

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The videos of Michael Jursa's lectures at the Collège de France are available online

Recent book

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Christopher Ratté, Lydian Architecture: Ashlar Masonry Structures at Sardis, Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, Report 5, Cambridge MA / London 2011.

Penn students gain a window into current Museum research

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How many undergrads get to see current archaeological research up close—as in, under a microscope? The 15 Penn undergraduates taking Dr. Marie-Claude Boileau’s new Spring semester course “Archaeology and Science” got to view samples of ceramic and metal objects from Ban Chiang, a site excavated by Penn Museum in Northeast Thailand. One year after the Museum’s Archaeological Ceramics Lab opened, it is bustling with classes, students, and researchers.

Image 1
Students in Dr. Boileau’s course are looking at ceramics and clays from Ban Chiang in the Museum’s Ceramics Lab. This hands-on experience with thin-section petrography, using the Lab’s transmitted-light microscopes, helps demonstrate if pots were made locally or in another village far away. Petrography is also a powerful tool for technology-related questions, such as how potters processed the raw materials (clays and tempers) and how pots were made and fired.

 

Image 2
Annie Chan, a student in the course, is examining hand specimens with matching thin sections from the Ceramics Lab rock collection.

 

Image 3
Dr. Elizabeth Hamilton, guest lecturer in the course, shares her knowledge of archaeometallurgy with the undergrads. One of the microscopes in the Ceramics Lab can also be used for metallography, the microscopic observation of metal objects. Here, Dr. Hamilton, the metallurgist for the Ban Chiang Project, is showing students the steps to identify how a metal object was made, using reflected-light microscopy. Analysis of this sort helps to demonstrate how different cultures manufactured metal objects, such as ornaments, tools, and weapons. This study can also show the level of sophistication of past technologies and how metal artifacts were used.

 

Image 4
A photomicrograph from a Ban Chiang metal droplet. The large blue shapes show that the object is a droplet of tin bronze, probably splashed out during casting, and was allowed to cool.

About the author: Beth Van Horn has volunteered with the Ban Chiang Project since 2004. She retired from Verizon in 2003, where she was a new product manager in the Marketing department. Beth was responsible for the MMAP 2005 website and the blog that followed the team’s progress. She returned to Laos in 2009 and wrapped up the season by participating in an ambitious exhibit in Luang Prabang that summarized 5 years of MMAP work in Laos.

Germany in charge of Greece...the history

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250px-Distomo_massacre
To vary the diet of misery stories about Greece and Germany, newspapers have turned an occasional backward glance to World War II. It's hardly surprising, so the argument goes, that the Greeks -- particularly the elderly ones -- don't have much time for the Germans. Look at what the Germans did in the war. One intrepid Telegraph reporter made it all the way up the motorway from Athens, to the village of Distomo (near the monastery of Hosios Loukas), where one of the most notorious German massacres took place. More than 200 civilians were killed in terrible reprisals for the murder of three German soldiers. . .  and reparation claims are still on-going (the bleak memorial is above).

There the reporter dug out an octogenarian survivor of the massacre, three years old at the time, who dutifully -- and poignantly, to be honest -- talked about "a German knife held to our throats" (he was actually talking about now not then... but the point was made).

What's odd is that there hasn't been such interest in the first time, more than a hundred years before World War II, that Greece was quite literally under German rule.

After the ghastly series of massacres (even worse than Distomo) that are now glorified with the title "Greek War of Independence", the "Great Powers" were faced with what to do with this wrecked and bankrupt country. They got together and looked around the Western world for a suitable monarch. Unsurprisingly perhaps, some of the most plausible candidates didn't much fancy being parachuted into the new nation. But eventually, in 1832, they found Prince Otto, the teenaged son of Ludwig of Bavaria (OK not technically "Germany", but you know what I mean), who didn't or couldn't say no.

He turned up in Greece, with a retinue of German advisers and architects. Many of them had been brought up on a diet of ancient Greek literature and art, and that formed their vision for the new country country too. Its unifying symbols were to be the heroes of art, culture and politics (minus the democracy) of fifth-century BC Athens. The first plan was that Otto would have his palace on the Acropolis itself (with the Parthenon as a rather posh garden ornament), but Ludwig had security concerns for his boy and insisted on the palace being built down below (it's now the Greek parliament building). Instead archaeologist moved onto the Acropolis, they started to excavate the monuments (and in the process remove anything -- Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman -- that didn't date to the favoured fifth century BC).

One of those extraordinary nineteenth-century spectacles took place to inaugurate the digging in 1834. To the accompaniment of bands playing and girls in mock-up ancient dress, waving laurel wreaths and banners depicting the goddess Athena, Otto rode up to the top of the Acropolis and was installed on a throne in the Parthenon (the bones left over from recent conflicts had presumably been cleared up). Grand speeches were given in German, before Otto took up his digging trowel and tapped it against a column to inaugurate the excavations.It was also the start of a long reign.

But what happened to young Otto in the end? Well German rule finally didn't work out. There were attempted assassinations and coups, and eventually in 1862 he was lifted out, back to Bavaria, by a British gunboat.

The next man on the Greek throne was another teenaged European prince -- this time a Dane, George 1. A moral?

Phil not as Exciting as they Say

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The BBC carries a breathless story about another "ancient treasure" found by those awfully nice chaps with metal detectors. This is a coin of William the Bastard (known to his friends as P[h]illiam) wielding the Bastard's Sword in order to show those islanders who's boss and why. It was the sixth type struck by the bloke since he arrived in Britain in 1066. Most of us reckon though that most coins of William I are pretty distinctive in style, but the metal detectoress, Maureen Jones - a member of Taynton Metal Detecting Club - who found this admits she did not recognise it. Despite what the ACCG coineys assert to always be the case, The silver coin had not travelled very far from the mint before it was lost, it had been minted in Gloucester by a moneyer called Silacwine (I know a bloke called Silaction, I wonder if they are related?). The BBC journalist and coin dealer Dave Welsh across the sea are getting very excited and saying that it somehow vindicates Britain's policies on metal detecting because... "it is unique". To be more precise its the only coin of this phase of William's minting which is so far known to have been struck in Gloucester which allowed the FLO his trite news-media story: "the find "filled in the hole" in the dates the Gloucester mint was known to have been operating" and pandering to the crass question "wot it's werth then", says "the penny coin would have been "quite valuable" at the time that it is thought to been lost by its owner more than 900 years ago".

The trouble is, with sixty mints, with several times that number of moneyers in operation 1066-1087, and a relatively small number of coins of William the Conquerer which survived later reminting, it is relatively easy in the issues of William I and his immediate successors to point to very many coins which are one-of-a-kind. As jeered the hammered Coin Collectors Yahoo forum, in this type of collecting coins of which four examples survive are considered 'relatively common'. Mr Adams, the FLO quoted in the BBC interview would, surely, have known that, overseas professional numismatist Dave Welsh perhaps not, but should have checked before shouting his mouth off parroting what some journalist scribbled.

This is a typical example of the PAS making a media mountain out of a molehill, desperately trying to keep the PAS in the news, with yet another "exciting find well worth thirteen million quid thrown at the Scheme so far".

What really would make news would be if Ms Jones from Taynton could tell us what her searches had revealed about what was happening in that field in the late eleventh century which provides the context for that coin turning up precisely where it did, and how that fitted into the cultural landscape of the region around. If a metal detectorist was able to do that in a manner that would allow the results to be documented properly, that would be newsworthy. Just another coin however is not, not really. One can get coin fatigue looking at the PAS database, too many coins, not enough proper archaeology.

Vignette: William (Phil) the Bastard looking a bit miffed that Ms Jones did not recognize him.

First look at Turkish and Kyrgyz data from Hodoğlugil & Mahley (2012)

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The authors of the recent paper on Turkish population structure were kind enough to share their data with me. I will be sure to use this data in future experiments, such as the ChromoPainter and fastIBD analysis of Balkans/West Asia, as well as a ChromoPainter analysis of Altaic speakers, following on the footsteps of my recent analysis of Afroasiatic speakers.

PCA


As a first step, after processing the new data, I carried out a PCA analysis (in smartpca with no outlier removal iterations), combined with various Turkic groups, as well as a few neighbors of Anatolian Turks, combining data from the literature and the Dodecad Project.


The Turkic cline from East to West Eurasia, observed by myself and others in various experiments is again evident.

The blowup of the above, focusing on the West Eurasian portion (top right) is easier to read:

As always, population labels are placed in the average position of each population. So, for example, the Behar et al. Iranians_19 sample is shifted to the left, because of the existence of a few African admixed individuals in this sample. The Iranian_D sample of Project participants seem to lack this admixture.

Also, note that since there is no South Asian reference in this first experiment, Iranians overlap with Turks along the first two dimensions. As we've seen in the Dodecad Project, both Iranians and Anatolian Turks are "eastward-shifted" relative to other West Eurasians, but the former have a strong South Asian- and the latter a Central Asian- tendency.

The new Kyrgyz sample falls between the Kazakh and the Altai along the cline, and is more "eastern" compared to the Uygurs and Uzbeks, and more "western" compared to Altai, Tuva, and Dolgans.

Kayseri and Istanbul Turks overlap with Behar et al. Turks as well as the Turkish_D sample. The Aydin sample appears to be more heterogenous, with a more eastern overall center of weight. More on this below.

ADMIXTURE


I also carried out a K=3 ADMIXTURE analysis of the dataset.


Below are the population portraits for the three new Turkish samples, as well as the Kyrgyz sample:


It is obvious that many Turks have low levels of Asian admixture, lacking in their geographical neighbors, but this is quite variable on an individual basis.

UPDATE (17 Feb):


I have also assessed the new data with the K12b calculator. Below are the normalized median proportions.



Call for Proposals: Gerda Henkel Foundation M4HUMAN Fellowship programme

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The Gerda Henkel Foundation is offering fellowships for experienced researchers in the humanities – including Archaeology, Art History, Prehistory and Early History. Applications close 15 June 2012.

Call for Proposals: Marie Curie Fellowships of the Gerda Henkel Foundation

Starting in 2011, the Gerda Henkel Foundation is offering Marie Curie Fellowships in the M4HUMAN (Mobility for experienced researchers in historical humanities and Islamic studies) programme aimed at supporting outstanding scholars. This funding initiative is co-financed by the European Commission under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research. One objective of this fixed-term programme is to increase networking between researchers in the historical humanities at the international level, including researchers in religious, cultural and political sciences under the special programme “Islam, the Modern Nation State and Transnational Movements”. Other goals include the promotion of trans-national academic exchange, increasing transnational mobility, facilitating further education and the positive and long-term influencing of the research environment in both origin and destination countries. Research scholarships can be requested for a larger-scale research work or in connection with a research project.

For more details about this fellowship opportunity, see here.



FORGOTTEN KINGDOM OF TUWANA BEING UNCOVERED IN SOUTHERN CAPPADOCIA -- TURKEY

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Numerous archaeological excavations are underway at a huge site in Anatolia which will uncover an ancient and rich
yet forgotten kingdom known as Tuwana from the darkness of history, which will be featured in an open-air museum.

The news was reported by Lorenzo d'Alfonso, an Italian archaeologist leading the joint mission by the University of Pavia and NYU, who provided details on the excavation campaign in a press conference in Istanbul this month, during which the details of the Italian archaeological missions in Turkey were explained. This "new discovery" from the pre-classical age which "needs to be continued" in southern Cappadocia took place in Kinik Hoyuk, the scholar said, referring to a site mainly involving the beginning of the first millennium BC.

The area is "fully" part of the "forgotten kingdom" of Tuwana, said d'Alfonso,known until now through hieroglyphics and from several sources from the Assyrian Empire, but "never studied archaeologically": "A completely intact
site that has been left untouched", trying to "place it historically to understand which civilization belonged to and what it's role was in the region".

Kinik Hoyuk, the archaeologist said, is "one of the major sites" in terms of size in pre-classical Anatolia, if you leave the capital of the Hittites out: the most conservative estimates say that it spans 24 hectares"but topographers say that it could cover 81 hectares". "...its importance emerged in a campaign that we conducted," said d'Alfonso, who said that "southern Cappadocia is important because it controlled the Cilician Gates, or the passageway between the East and the West and between Europe and Asia": essentially, "one of the most important junctions" in the world during that period and at the "center" of which lies Kinik Koyuk.

Tuwana was a small buffer state between the Phrygian kingdom and the Assyrian Empire "and this is why it was particularly rich": "one ofthe great subjects of our study involves the cultural richness of this kingdom," said D'Alfonso, referring mainly to the development of the alphabet. He pointed out that three steles from the Iron Age were uncovered in the area, "which are not very well preserved", but which do say a lot "about the importance that the site had".

The strategy of the excavation, said the archaeologist, was guided by "geomagnetic surveys in 2010 which revealed particularly significant remains of the acropolis wall and buildings at the centre of the acropolis itself": "monumental" walls excavated "to a height of 6 metres" in an outstanding state of preservation. The excavation campaign was "planned from the very beginning to be transformed into an open-air museum": Kinik Hoyuk, underlined D'Alfonso, is "easily accessible". Its "strength" is that it is only 45 minutes from the major tourist attractions in Cappadocia (and less than 2km from one of the major 4-lane roads in the region).

http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/nations/turkey/2012/02/10/visualizza_new.html_77413658.html

A NEWLY TRANSLATED ANCIENT TABLET (3,500 YEARS AGO) READS OF SEX, POLITICS AND BEER-DRINKING

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Millennia before modern-day Americans made fun of their politicians or cracked crude jokes over a cold one, people in ancient Mesopotamia were doing much the same thing. The evidence of sex, politics and beer-drinking comes from a newly translated tablet, dating back more than 3,500 years, which reveals a series of riddles.

The text is fragmentary in parts and appears to have been written by an inexperienced hand, possibly a student. The researchers aren't sure where the tablet originates, though they suspect its scribe lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, near the Persian Gulf.

The translation, by Nathan Wasserman, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology, and Michael Streck, a professor with the Altorientalisches Institut at Universität Leipzig, is detailed in the most recent edition of the journal Iraq.

RIP Dato Adi Taha

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This sad news is a little late – I learnt from the EurASEAA 14 Facebook page that Dato’ Adi Taha passed away earlier this month:

Please see this sad message from Peter Bellwood:

I have just been informed by Adi Taha’s eldest daughter Adrina, that Adi died on 4th February, after battling prostate cancer since 2005. Adi was formerly the Director-General of Museums and Antiquities in Muzium Negara (National Museum), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He also served as President of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association from 2000-2004. He completed his MA in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at ANU in 1981, on his excavations in the Hoabinhian to Neolithic rock-shelter of Gua Cha in Kelantan. His PhD (2000) was on his further excavations in the two rock-shelters of Gua Peraling and Gua Bukit Chawas, also in Kelantan (Nenggiri River).

Adi was a valued colleague, and many will remember him from past IPPA congresses, not least the one held in Melaka in 1998, which he and I organized. He emailed me just before last Christmas from hospital, asking for articles to read on Southeast Asian prehistory. I am not sure if he had time to read them.

See original post here.


Questions About Two Bearded Blokes: The Montreal Thefts

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.I have been looking at that Egypto-Roman head stolen last October from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and wondering where it came from. What actually is it? It is described in the media reports as
"a marble head from the Roman Empire, dating from the first century AD. [...] small, about 20 by 21 centimetres, and had been part of the permanent collection of the Montreal art institution for decades.
The only photo released at the time of the announcement of the theft (for example the one above from the Montreal Gazette) is not too informative. I would like to see some shots from other angles. On what basis is its authenticity affirmed? What stylistic parallels are there in fact and how close are they? How did it enter the national collections and where in "the Roman Empire" was it dug up/knocked off from? Or did it just "surface"? Like Montreal's Fraggonard drawing for example? Looks a bit odd to me from the material presented in all the news releases.

While we are at it, could the Museum tell us how the knocked off bit of Achaemenid palace relief ("Head of a Guard, Fragment of a low relief 5th c. B.C. Sandstone 21 x 20.5 x 3 cm") got from Persepolis (really?) into their collections? Why is the top corner rounded off so oddly? What has been done to turn a piece of monument into (too, it seems) portable art? Is this real or recently produced? What is its collecting history? According to the Montreal Gazette: "The Persian piece [was] donated to the MMFA by Cleveland Morgan in 1950...", where was it before then?
Does it not too look rather suspicious, for example when you compare the spear (and in particular its length) with those with the soldiers on the actual walls? Is not the head dress rather crude and linear compared to those on the walls, and for example this example sold recently by Christie's? Why does it have vertical tooling on the stone not visible on blocks on the wall even if photographed in raking sunlight?

Even if they are kosher antiquities with unimpeachable collecting histories establishing they really were both knocked off real monuments, what is the point of displaying these trophy pieces extracted from a larger whole in a Canadian museum? What does the museum goer get from looking at a sawn-off bit of a relief that says nothing about the message of the actual art-work concerned, which was the whole relief? Surely is this Persepolis relief fragment not a good case for going back to the site with the long-term aim of restoring the wall it came from?

The Art Market in action Persepolis April 2009
(Photo Copyright Sanaz Shirshekar).
What kind of person would buy such a block with the marks of the circular saw visible on all four edges? Somebody who cares about the heritage of the past, or some selfish lout who does not care as long as he gets his hands on a bit of it all for himself? (and it makes no difference if they then try to offload it onto a local museum afterwards)

Photo for Today - The Ramesseum

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