Uncategorized Archives - Page 453 of 557

New Technology Gives 3-D Positions of Archaeological Finds

New Scientist has a popular version of an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science about recording the locations of archaeological artifacts using acoustic signals.

Every object unearthed by an archaeological dig must have its exact position recorded. This is normally a painstaking process involving measuring rods and string, but a device that uses technology originally developed to guide robots could speed up the process.
Gran Dolina in central Spain is a Palaeolithic site that contains important hominin remains which date from between 780,000 and 300,000 years ago. Thousands of fossils are discovered there every year, but registering them all by hand makes progress frustratingly slow. So archaeologists working on the site contacted Angélica de Antonio Jiménez and Fernando Seco at the Institute of Industrial Automation in Madrid, to see if they could come up with a better way.
Antonio Jiménez and Seco were working on an ultrasound system to help blind people and robots navigate, in which a mobile transmitter sends signals to a network of fixed nodes. The time taken for the signal to arrive at each node determines the precise location of the transmitter. To adapt the system for archaeological sites, Antonio Jiménez developed a 2-metre-long pointer, like a big pencil, to act as the transmitter. To prevent the user’s body blocking the signals, it has two transmitters, one at the top and one 70 centimetres below it.
When a researcher finds an object, they trace its outline with the pointer, transmitting ultrasound data to a network of nodes above the site.
Software then reconstructs not only the position of the object, but also its size, shape and orientation, to an accuracy of about 5 millimetres (Journal of Archaeological Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2009.06.027).

The New Scientist article continues here.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Excavations

Khirbet Qeiyafa Photos from 2009 Season

Ferrell Jenkins has posted a few photos from the current excavation of Khirbet Qeiyafa. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because I wrote a number of posts about this site last summer (start here), suggesting that it may have been the location of the Philistine encampment at Ephes-dammim. The excavator believes that the site is biblical Shaaraim. I am pretty confident that it is not Shaaraim and look forward to the time when I can articulate my reasons more carefully. In the meantime, you can see an impressive photo of a gatehouse as well as a glass bottle discovered at the site this season.

Tagged Shephelah

Temple Institute Building Jerusalem’s Sacrificial Altar

I’m a day late on this article, but some will undoubtedly be interested anyway. From Arutz-7:

The Temple Institute will begin building the sacrificial altar on Thursday, Tisha B’av, a fast day when Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple some 2,000 years ago. The sacrificial altar was located in the center of the Temple, and upon it the Kohanim (priests) offered the numerous voluntary and obligatory sacrifices commanded in the Bible. The Temple Institute, which has already built many of the vessels for the Holy Temple, such as the ark and the menorah, has now embarked on a project to build the altar. Construction begins Thursday in Mitzpe Yericho (east of Jerusalem) at 5:30 p.m. “Unfortunately, we cannot currently build the altar in its proper place, on the Temple Mount,” Temple Institute director Yehudah Glick said. “We are building an altar of the minimum possible size so that we will be able to transport it to the Temple when it is rebuilt." Even a minimum size altar will work out to be approximately 2 meters tall, 3 meters long, and 3 meters wide. Workers have collected around 10 cubic meters of rocks weighing several tons already. The rocks were gathered from the Dead Sea area and wrapped individually to assure they remain whole and are not touched by metal, as the Bible requires. “The Torah says that no iron tools should be used on the altar’s stones,” Glick explained. “The altar represents a connection to life and to the creation of the world. Iron is the opposite – it is used to build tools of war, death, and destruction.”

The story continues here and includes a photo, a video, and an illustration.

Tagged Jerusalem, Temple Mount

The Quran vs. Muslims on the Existence of Jerusalem’s Temple

On the traditional anniversary of destruction of Jerusalem’s two temples, Stephen Rosenberg writes an article in the Jerusalem Post on the evidence for the existence of the temples in light of the Muslim denials.

There is a persistent narrative by the Islamists to deny any past Jewish presence on what they call Haram al-Sharif. Like the cult centers of Mecca and Medina, they call it the Noble Sanctuary rather than the Temple Mount. The propaganda is spreading throughout the Arab world, and would deny any legitimacy to our claim to have experienced the destruction of two Temples on the site. All the evidence, the propaganda goes, is written by Jews and is therefore suspect. The claim for the building of the First Temple comes from the Book of Kings. It is a detailed description, but nothing of the structure has been found. The inscription on a little pomegranate showing it to have been part of a priestly scepter from the First Temple has recently been denounced as a later forgery. The parallels with temples in Syria are fine, but no proof that one existed in Jerusalem. What evidence is there that a Jewish Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians? There is a tablet in the British Museum that Nebuchadnezzar came to Jerusalem in his seventh year (597 BCE) and captured the city, but he destroyed no temple and only set up a "king of his own heart" (Zedekiah). The tablet goes up to the year 594 and then stops. The following years are missing and the next tablet restarts in 556 BCE. The crucial year 586 is lost.

The article continues here.

Tagged Jerusalem, Temple Mount

Ten-Line Inscription on Mount Zion

A “clear but cryptic” ten-line inscription from the 1st century A.D. found in excavations of Mount Zion is reported in an article in the the Jerusalem Post. This discovery was mentioned previously on this blog here and by excavation director James Tabor on his blog here.

A unique ten-line Aramaic inscription on the side of a stone cup commonly used for ritual purity during Second Temple times was recently uncovered during archaeological excavations on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion, The Jerusalem Post learned on Wednesday. Inscriptions of this kind are extremely rare and only a handful have been found in scientific excavations made within the city…. The new Aramaic inscription from the first century CE is currently being deciphered by a team of epigraphic experts in an effort to determine the meaning of the text, which is clear but cryptic. The dig also produced a sequence of building remains dating back to the First and Second Temple periods through to Byzantine and Early Islamic periods. From the Second Temple period, archaeologists uncovered a house complex with an mikve (purification pool) with a remarkably well preserved vaulted ceiling. Inside this house were three bread ovens dating back to the year 70 CE when Titus and the Roman troops stormed the city.

The Jerusalem Post article includes a photo of two lines of the inscription. I do not recall seeing an image of the inscription in previous reports.

Tagged Discoveries, Jerusalem

Weekend Roundup

The Israel Antiquities Authority has posted a 9-minute video tour of the City of David led by archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukrun. Sites visited include Warren’s Shaft, Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the Siloam Tunnel, the Pool of Siloam, and the recently discovered Herodian street.

The cover story of this month’s Smithsonian magazine is the tomb of Herod the Great at the Herodium. If you don’t have access to the beautifully illustrated print edition, you can read it online here.

A review of last year’s work at Khirbet Qeiyafa (aka “Elah Fortress, Shaarayaim) is the subject of a two-part radio interview at Arutz-7.

Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the government must establish a national park along part of the eastern wall of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in order to protect important antiquities from the

expanding Muslim cemetery.
Five well-preserved Roman shipwrecks dating from the 1st century B.C. to the 4th century A.D. have been found off the western Italian coast.

The Biblical Archaeology Society has just produced a free 45-page e-book entitled, From Babylon to Baghdad: Ancient Iraq and the Modern West. The four articles are:

The Genesis of Genesis, by Victor Hurowitz
Backward Glance: Americans at Nippur, by Katharine Eugenia Jones
Europe Confronts Assyrian Art, by Mogens Trolle Larsen
Firsthand Report: Tracking Down the Looted Treasures of Iraq, by Matthew Bogdanos

Elad has asked the city of Jerusalem for permission to construct in the City of David “several apartment buildings, a 100-car-capacity parking lot, a synagogue, a kindergarten, roads and additional tourism infrastructure.”

HT: Joe Lauer and Explorator

Tagged Herod's Tomb, Italy, Jerusalem, Shephelah