This fragment of organic glass was found inside the skull of a victim of Mount Vesuvius' ancient eruption. (Credit: Pier Paolo Petrone)
Researchers say they’ve solved a nearly 2,000-year-old cold case, sparked by the catastrophic volcanic eruption that destroyed the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum: What caused a victim’s brain to fuse into bits of glass?
The victim’s remains were unearthed in the 1960s, amid the ruins of a building in Herculaneum known as the Collegium Augustalium. In 2020, researchers announced that obsidian-like glass fragments found in the victim’s skull were actually vitrified bits of brain.
Archaeologists suspect that the victim was a guard who was caught up in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in the year 79. The man died instantly, but how? For years, scientists have been debating the scenarios for vitrifying the brain in a way that’s never been seen elsewhere. Now an Italian-German research team has laid out a plausible explanation in research published by Scientific Reports.
Fragments of alabaster jars bearing the names of King Thutmose II and his principal wife, Queen Hatshepsut, were found within a newly explored tomb west of Egypt's Valley of the Kings. (Credit: Egypt Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)
Archaeologists are showing off artifacts from what they say is the first royal tomb to be found in Egypt since the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s resting place in 1922.
But this tomb, located west of the Valley of the Kings, contains no solid-gold mummy case or glittering treasures. In fact, it took some effort to determine that it was made nearly 3,500 years ago for King Thutmose II, an ancestor of King Tut.
Left: Ramesses II statue at Grand Egyptian Museum. Right: Tutankhamun golden mask at Egyptian Museum. (Composite by Alan Boyle)
GIZA, Egypt — Twenty years may sound like a long time for building a monument like the Grand Egyptian Museum, but if you visit, all you have to do is look out the window to spot a historical precedent.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, which is a mile and a half away, took about the same amount of time to build 4,500 years ago. Now it’s the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that’s still standing.
Will the billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum be seen as a wonder as well? Just three months after its soft opening, the GEM has established its status as a must-see jewel for fans of ancient Egypt. But if you want to see the greatest hits of Egyptian archaeology, one museum — even a museum with more than 5 million square feet of floor space and 100,000 artifacts destined for display — still isn’t enough.
Stonehenge's partially covered Altar Stone is indicated in orange in this overhead view of the ancient English monument. (Nature via YouTube)
Scientists say the most mysterious stone in England’s ancient Stonehenge monument appears to have been brought to the site thousands of years ago from northern Scotland, about 435 miles away.
The findings, reported in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, resolve a long-running debate over the origins of Stonehenge’s Altar Stone. Previously, the consensus view was that the 6-ton monolith was transported from a spot that was much closer: the Preseli Hills of western Wales, which was the source of Stonehenge’s “bluestones.”
Today, the central Altar Stone is partly covered by two other rocks in Stonehenge’s stone circle. But in ancient times, scientists suspect that it played a central role for the people who built and maintained the monument. The stone lies across Stonehenge’s solstice axis: On the day of the summer solstice, the sun would have arisen over the Altar Stone, framed by stones on the circle’s rim. There would have been a similar alignment at sunset on the day of the winter solstice.
Recovery team members examine jars brought up from an ancient shipwreck. (Israel Antiquities Authority Photo)
Israeli archaeologists say the world’s oldest known deep-sea shipwreck has been discovered about 55 miles off the coast of northern Israel, lying on the mile-deep bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
The 3,300-year-old cargo vessel was found during a routine survey conducted by Energean E&P, a natural gas company that operates several offshore drilling fields, the Israel Antiquities Authority said today. The shipwreck, which is about 42 feet long, contained hundreds of intact clay storage jars known as amphorae. Such jars were typically used for transporting oil, wine, fruit or other agricultural products.
Geomorphologist Eman Ghoneim studies the surface topography of the section of the ancient Ahramat Branch. (Credit: Eman Ghoneim / UNCW)
Why were more than two dozen of ancient Egypt’s pyramids — including the Great Pyramid of Giza — clustered in a narrow strip of desert? Scientists say they’ve come up with a solution to the mystery: Thousands of years ago, a river ran through it.
The research team, led by Eman Ghoneim of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, identified the extinct riverbed with ground-penetrating radar and some geological sifting and sleuthing. They call this dried-up branch of the Nile “the Ahramat Branch” — a name derived from the Arabic word for pyramid.
Confirming the existence of the Ahramat Branch could resolve some of the questions relating to how ancient Egyptians were able to accomplish the monumental task of building the pyramids.
“Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past,” the researchers write in a paper published today in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
“We suggest that the Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites,” they say.
A wall painting shows Helen of Troy meeting Paris, with a handmaiden and a dog between them. (Credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii)
Archaeologists in Pompeii have unveiled an ancient Roman banquet hall featuring a cleverly conceived set of frescoes inspired by tales of the Trojan War.
The 50-by-20-foot (15-by-6-meter) room was recently unearthed as part of a project aimed at shoring up the front of a perimeter between the excavated and not-yet-excavated areas of the Pompeii site near Naples, Italy. Pompeii’s archaeological park preserves sites that were buried in ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.
During Pompeii’s heyday, the “Black Room” opened onto an open courtyard with a long staircase leading up to the home’s first floor.
The banquet room’s frescoes — portraying heroes and deities associated with the Trojan War — were apparently meant to entertain banquet guests and serve as conversation starters. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said the frescoes took advantage of painterly tricks to serve that purpose.
As the world’s best-known fictional archaeologist goes after what may be his last ancient mystery in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” new generations of real-life archaeologists are ready to dig in with 21st-century technologies and sensibilities.
Harrison Ford, the 80-year-old actor who’s played Indiana Jones for 42 years, has said “Dial of Destiny” will be his last sequel in the series. And this one is a doozy: The dial-like gizmo that gives the movie its name is the Antikythera Mechanism, a real-life device that ancient Greeks used to predict eclipses and other astronomical events. The Lance of Longinus, the Tomb of Archimedes and the Ear of Dionysius figure in the plot as well.
Indy and his mysteries will be missed. Sara Gonzalez, a curator of archaeology at Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, says her favorite movie about her own field is “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the 1981 film in which Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) made his debut. But that’s not because it’s true to life.
Gonzalez said researchers from the University of Washington’s Department of Anthropology, where she’s an associate professor, recently took a field trip to a local cinema where “Raiders” was playing.
“They have something called HeckleVision, where you can text onto the screen and see it,” she said. “There was this great, fun discussion, happening virtually live, with a whole bunch of anthropologists sitting and watching a movie that we love to deride. But we still kind of love the story and the angle, and we also love educating people about what’s real and what’s fictional about archaeology.”
That’s the subject of the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, focusing on the intersection of science and fiction.
Endoscopic imagery shows a hidden passage within the Great Pyramid of Giza. (ScanPyramids / Egyptian Min. of Tourism and Antiquities)
Archaeologists have discovered a long-lost passageway within Egypt’s 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, thanks to 21st-century technologies including muon tomography and endoscopy.
It’s the latest find made possible with the help of ScanPyramids, an international effort that started documenting Egypt’s best-known archaeological sites with high-tech tools in 2015.
Over the past eight years, ScanPyramids’ team has identified several voids within the Great Pyramid. The passageway described today lies just beneath the pyramid’s north face, about 23 feet (7 meters) above the main entrance. It’s 30 feet (9 meters) long, about 7 feet (2.1 meters) wide, and high enough for a person to stand in.
An ancient city once known as "The Rise of Aten" has been unearthed in Luxor. (Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)
Egyptian archaeologists unearth a 3,000-year-old lost city, magnetic readings from muons could lead to new physics, and Elon Musk’s Neuralink venture has monkeys playing video games with neural impulses. Get the details on the Web:
The city was at one time called “The Rise of Aten,” reflecting the religious shift brought about by Akhenaten. Today it’s being called the “Lost Golden City.” During the past seven months of excavation, several neighborhoods have been uncovered, but the administrative and residential district hasn’t yet been brought forth from the sands. “The discovery of this lost city is the second most important archaeological discovery since the tomb of Tutankhamun,” said Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University.
Anomalous results from a Fermilab experiment have added to the suspicion that scientists have finally found a flaw in one of their most successful theories, the Standard Model of particle physics. The anomalies have to do with the strength of the magnetic field for a weightier cousin of the electron, known as the muon. Data from Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment supported previous findings from Brookhaven National Laboratory that the muon’s magnetism is ever-so-slightly stronger than predicted by the Standard Model — just 2.5 parts per billion stronger.
If the results hold up, physicists might have to consider far-out explanations — for example, the existence of scads of particles that haven’t yet been detected, or a totally new take on the foundations of physics. But the findings will require further confirmation. Grand discoveries, like 2012’s detection of the Higgs boson, typically have to be confirmed to a confidence level of 5-sigma. Now the muon findings have hit 4.2-sigma — which doubters would say is still substandard.
In a Twitter exchange, Musk said human trials of the mind-reading system would begin, “hopefully, later this year.” He said Neuralink’s first brain-implant product would enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs. “Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again,” Musk tweeted.
