Exciting archaeological discoveries....

[Twit]

Moderately repulsive thing on Roman sewer full of human excrement and some moderately interesting other things. I recently saw an entire highly scientific book on coprolites and the archaeological usage of human excrement to understand things about the past; I cannot say that I would wish to specialize in this, but what the heck.

You'd be amazed what you can learn from it! One of my friends has pretty much made his career from human waste of different sorts! I'm an archaeologist by qualification, but defected to anthropology pretty quickly... A lot of my friends didn't and they seem to thoughly enjoy wading knee deep through it at some points.

On a completely unrelated point I once knew a girl who differentiate between London's stratographic layers just by how coarse, or not, the brick dust was! I found it amazing, that has to be the best archeo-geek party trick! And I speak as one...

 

[dhermann1]

It's over a year since anything was posted on this thread, so I'm glad I saw this story. Here's a thousand year old statue, discovered by Nazi archaeologists in 1939, with a swastika on its tummy, made from a super rare piece of meteorite. Paging Indiana Jones!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19735959

 

[Story]

I'm glad you posted that - straight out of Lovecraft viz Indiana Jones.

 

[DesertDan]

I was thinking HPL as well.

 

[dhermann1]

Here's a neat article about the decipherment of a secret text from the 1700s.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/all?mbid=ob_ppc

 

[DesertDan]

Yep, I read that over the weekend.
A very facinating article indeed.