A funerary mask from ancient Egypt is among the artifacts from the now-destroyed Museu documented in digital 3-D models. (UFRJ National Museum via Sketchfab)
One of the greatest tragedies in the museum world transpired over the weekend when fire broke out at Brazil’s Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, touching off a mad scramble to save physical and virtual treasures.
Many of the 200-year-old natural history museum’s 20 million artifacts have been destroyed, including irreplaceable fossils and specimens. One heartbreaking videosweeps around a ruined gallery where only a monumental meteorite survived unscathed.
Museum workers managed to save some artifacts from the blaze, and other items survived because they were on loan to institutions elsewhere. But for many of the pieces, the only hope is to build a digital archive containing videos and photos of the museum’s collection.
Egyptian experts open an ancient sarcophagus in Alexandria. (Ministry of Antiquities via Facebook)
Egyptian archaeologists say they’ve opened up a mysterious black sarcophagus found during excavations in Alexandria, and although they didn’t uncover the evil curse that some feared, they did uncover an evil-looking mess.
The coffin was “filled with sewage which leaked through the grove in this area, plus three skeletons,” Mostafa Waziri, general secretary of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, reported today in an Arabic-language Facebook update.
Photos showed the bones sitting in a pool of dark muck.
Experts scan the walls of King Tutankhamun’s tomb with ground-penetrating radar. (Egypt Ministry of Antiquities Photo via Facebook)
Ground-penetrating radar scans have failed to confirm any hints that King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the KIngs contains a hidden chamber.
The announcement from Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities brought a disappointing end to a scientific investigation that began more than two years ago, after British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves put forth the claim.
Workers move a marble slab to expose deeper layers in the Edicule within the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is revered as the site of Jesus’ tomb. (National Geographic via YouTube)
After more than 15 years of study, experts are laying out the evidence revealing how far back the history goes for the room-sized shrine in Jerusalem that’s revered as Jesus’ tomb.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the point of the research. Instead, archaeologists were taking advantage of a conservation effort at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of Christianity’s holiest sites, to look inside the shrine known as the Edicule (which is Latin for “little house”).
A cutaway view of the Pyramid of Khufu shows the location of the “Big Void” as well as a corridor close to the pyramid’s north face. Click on the image for a larger view. (ScanPyramids Illustration)
An international team of researchers has detected a mysterious, previously unknown void deep inside Egypt’s Great Pyramid that may be as large as an art gallery space.
The anomalous space, known as the ScanPyramids Big Void, showed up on imagery produced by tracking concentrations of subatomic particles called muons as they zoomed through the pyramid’s stones.
“We don’t know if this Big Void is made by one structure, or several successive structures,” said Mehdi Tayoubi, president of the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute and co-founder of the ScanPyramids campaign. “What we are sure about is that this Big Void is there, that it is impressive [and] that it was not expected, as far as I know, by any kind of theory.”
Tayoubi and his colleagues report the discovery in a paper published online today by the journal Nature.
San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Don Swanson points to a rock fragment near a large piece of a mastodon tusk at the excavation site. (San Diego Natural History Museum Photo)
Scientists say the patterns of breakage in mastodon bones found 25 years ago near a San Diego highway suggest that humans battered the beast 130,000 years ago.
That’s a shocker, because before now, the oldest widely accepted evidence of human habitation in North America goes back only about 16,000 years. If the scientists are right, that makes the place they studied, known as the Cerutti Mastodon site, the oldest archaeological site in North America.
University of Alabama archaeologist Sarah Parcak checks satellite imagery of a target site. (National Geographic via YouTube)
Armed with a $1 million TED Prize, archaeologists today launched the GlobalXplorer.org crowdsourcing project to scan satellite imagery for signs of ancient settlements.
“Archaeologists can’t do this on their own,” Parcak told National Geographic, one of the collaborators in the project. “If we don’t go and find these sites, looters will.”
The 38-year-old archaeologist from the University of Alabama at Birmingham has already made a good start, by using satellite images to identify buried pyramids in Egypt and a covered-over Viking village in Newfoundland.
Such feats (and her fedora) have earned her a snazzy nickname – “Indiana Jones of the 21st century” – and more importantly, $1 milllion in seed money from the TED Prize program.
That money has gone toward building a platform that takes in high-resolution images from DigitalGlobe’s satellites and sorts them for perusal by registered GlobalXplorer users. Online tutorials train the users to spot and flag potential archaeological sites, based on subtle variations in vegetation. The most promising crowdsourced sites are put on the list for on-the-ground exploration.
Archaeologists Chase Childs and Sarah Parcak remove an upper grass layer at the Point Rosee site in Newfoundland. (Credit: Greg Mumford / UAB)
Archaeologists worked hard to unearth what might well be only the second Viking site ever discovered in North America – but they had a little help from a higher power.
To be precise, 386 miles higher, in the form of DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite.
It was the satellite’s near-infrared imagery that set Sarah Parcak, an archaeologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and her colleagues on a quest to excavate the site on the southwestern coast of Newfoundland, known as Point Rosee.
“It screams, ‘Please excavate me!’” said Parcak, who won a $1 million TED Prize for her satellite sleuthing in Egypt.
A virtual 3-D reconstruction shows King Richard III’s grave. (Credit: University of Leicester)
One year after King Richard III’s remains were reburied, the much-maligned monarch’s skeleton has been exposed once again – this time, in virtual reality.
Internet users can zoom in on the 15th-century remains as they were found in 2012, lying beneath a parking lot in the English city of Leicester. You can change your virtual camera angle on the scene, and get a guided tour by clicking on numbered points of interest.
The virtual reconstruction takes advantage of a photogrammetry program called Agisoft Photoscan and a 3-D sharing platform called Sketchfab – but most of the credit goes to the University of Leicester researchers who snapped so many pictures of the site before the bones were removed.
Archaeologist Sarah Parcak wants to create a crowdsourcing project called Global Xplorer, using $1 million in seed money from TED. (Credit: Ryan Lash / TED)
Space archaeologist Sarah Parcak says she’ll use this year’s $1 million TED Prize to create a game that gives players the chance to make real-life discoveries of ancient sites.
The project, known as Global Xplorer, was announced Feb. 16 at the TED2016 conference in Vancouver, B.C. It follows through on the TED tradition of giving its prize recipients a million dollars to help one of their dreams come true.
“I wish for us to discover the millions of unknown archaeological sites across the globe,” said Parcak, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “By building an online citizen science platform and training a 21st-century army of global explorers, we’ll find and protect the world’s hidden heritage, which contains clues to humankind’s collective resilience and creativity.”
Parcak was chosen to receive the prize last November, in recognition of her use of satellite imagery to look for archaeological sites that have literally been covered by the sands of time.
In 2011, her team at the Laboratory for Global Observation identified 17 potential pyramids in Egypt, plus more than 1,000 forgotten tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements. More recently, the lab has been documenting ancient sites facing destruction due to looting and civil strife in Egypt and the Middle East.
