Technology Archives - Page 27 of 33

Wednesday Roundup

A 600-lb metal anchor from the Byzantine period has been discovered off the coast south of Tel Aviv. The find led investigators to two others in the area. Photos are available from the IAA in a zip file. The Sound the Shofar exhibition opened last week in Jerusalem with more than 140 of the horns on display at the Bible Lands Museum. The story includes a two-minute video. The Jerusalem Post has more information about Google Street View in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Wayne Stiles takes readers on a visit to Shiloh, the longtime home of the tabernacle. The Archaeology of Libya is discussed in this week’s radio program at the Book and the Spade. (Here’s the direct link to the mp3 file). ATS Pro Terra Sancta has plans to renovate “the Holy Place of Sebastia.” I certainly support improving the conditions at the ancient city of Samaria, though it strikes me as odd to consider as holy the place where Ahab built a temple for Baal worship and Herod built another for the worship of the Roman emperor. An inscription in Aramaic and Greek on a stone lintel has been discovered in the area of ancient Sepphoris. The report is in Hebrew and includes a photograph. A Roman-era style bathhouse was constructed in the middle of a Early Islamic period fortress, say archaeologists excavating at Yavneh-Yam on Israel’s coast. HT: Joseph Lauer, Jack Sasson Yavneh-Yam

Tagged Discoveries, Galilee, Jerusalem, Museums, Samaria, Technology, Weekend Roundup

Kinect Game System To Be Used in Jordan Excavation

From Popular Science:

Archaeological digs are a painstaking process even after the earth has been excavated — artifacts must be carefully catalogued so researchers know exactly where they were found, which tells information about their past. On an upcoming dig in Jordan, a modified Kinect could serve as a 3-D scanner, making this process simpler — and decidedly more high-tech.
Researchers hope students traveling to an archaeological dig in Jordan will use a hacked Microsoft Kinect as a mobile scanning system, making 3-D models of ancient sites that can then be visited in a virtual-reality environment.
[…]
The modified ArKinect — archaeology and Kinect — would scan an entire dig site, and the data would be used to reconstruct the site in 3-D. Calit2 has an immersive VR system called StarCAVE, a 360-degree, 16-panel setup, which allows researchers to interact with virtual objects. A realistic 3-D portrayal of ancient cookware, for instance, would be a lot more valuable than a 2-D photograph, because it would show more detail and craftsmanship and even help researchers understand how an artifact was used.

The full story is here.

HT: Charles Savelle

Tagged Excavations, Technology

Weekend Roundup #2

X-ray analysis may help scholars to determine where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.

Christopher Rollston has posted his detailed observations about the Mariam-Yeshua-Caiaphas ossuary. Among other things, he suggests that Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Shephelah preserves the name
of Caiaphas.

Israel has 6,000 miles of trails. A new article at Israel’s MFA describes some of Israel’s favorite hikes, including the Israel Trail, the Burma Road, Nahal Ammud, Nahal Darga, Nahal Yehudiya,
Wadi Qilt, and Mount Zephahot. Some courageous tour guide should offer a two-week tour of these fabulous trails.

The Jewish Magazine has a post about Khirbet Karta, the ruins of a Crusader castle near Atlit.

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is offering “Dig Into History: An Archaeology
Experience Camp for Adults” in July and August.

Israel’s History – a Picture a Day: This new blog presents images taken in the late 1800s or early 1900s, primarily from the collections of the Library of Congress. (Some of these photographs will be familiar to users of the American Colony and Eric Matson Collection.)

Jerusalem Post: “A leader of Egypt’s most influential secular party…said American soldiers ‘with double Israeli nationality and Jewish religion’ stole Jewish antiquities from the Babylonian exile period and reburied them in Jerusalem to cement their historical claim on the city.” At least he’s not denying that Jewish antiquities have been discovered in Jerusalem.

HT: Joseph Lauer

Tagged Jerusalem, Technology, Tourism, Weekend Roundup

Weekend Roundup

Gordon Franz has updated his article about Simcha’s nails, including statements from several authorities that deny that the nails came from the tomb of Caiaphas.

The excavators of Tel Burna have posted the report on the first archaeological season.

James Hoffmeier is lecturing on “The Exodus from Egypt in Light of Recent Archaeological and Geological Work in North Sinai” in Houston on May 21.

The Global Heritage Fund has created “its own spy agency, created to allow armchair archaeologists (as well as real ones), to watch for looting, disasters and other calamities at some of the most endangered sites of human history.”

This July, Thomas Davis will become Professor of Archaeology and Biblical Backgrounds at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Forth Worth, Texas. Davis is author of Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology. One clear result of the fall of biblical archaeology is that professors now have significantly different titles.

If you believed the recent report about dishonesty by the author of Three Cups of Tea, perhaps you were unaware that it was the work of 60 Minutes. These are the same folks who brought us the report exposing the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Tablet as forgeries. The heart of their case was the on-screen confession of an Egyptian artisan. Yet Hershel Shanks has investigated and determined that it was all a lie. And 60 Minutes knew it all along.

Tagged Egypt, Pseudo-Archaeology, Shephelah, Technology, Weekend Roundup

The Colors of Ancient Marble Statues

A free exhibition at Stanford University reveals the bright colors that once covered the ancient sculptures of Greece and Rome. From the Stanford Report:

With the silent attentiveness of a physician, Ivy Nguyen passes her hands over the recumbent white lady in the darkened lab. She cradles a handheld black light in her fingers.
Under the Stanford sophomore’s skillful watch in the Cantor Arts Center lab, long-dead colors on marble come alive after two millennia.
The results of Nguyen’s painstaking efforts are on display in “True Colors: Rediscovering Pigments on Greco-Roman Marble Sculpture” at the Cantor. The exhibition runs until Aug. 7. Admission is free.
Though we still think of ancient Greece and Rome in terms of white marble sparkling under a hot Mediterranean sun, the new exhibition shows at least one Greco-Roman lady as she was meant to be seen – in Technicolor. Not everyone may take to Stanford’s painted lady, but first impressions can change. “It’s very different – some have called it kind of garish,” admitted sophomore Nguyen, but she confesses that she’s gotten used to it.
We’ve always known that ancient statues were painted: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a vase, circa 360-350 B.C., depicting a man painting a statue of Herakles. The most important evidence is on the statues themselves – traces of paint that time did not wash from the creases and crevices in porous marble.

The full story includes a photo and a video.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Greece, New Exhibits, Technology

X-ray Vision for Archaeologists: The “Multi-PAM” Tool

Being able to clearly see what lies underground would solve many headaches for archaeologists.

There is a certain level of guesswork that goes into planning a dig, and only after the available time, money, and manpower has been spent does it become clear whether or not it was worth the investment. However, a professor at Tel Aviv University has developed a new tool that potentially could offer some help in taking the guesswork out of deciding where to dig.

Reported recently in the journal Advances of Geosciences, Prof. Eppelbaum’s new tool gathers data from a number of sources — including radio transmitters used to communicate with nuclear submarines and detailed magnetic field observations — and applies an original algorithmic approach to the measurements to make sense of what lies below the earth’s surface at depths of up to several dozen yards. His tool can help people “see” meaningful objects, artefacts or civilizations — – and lay them out in a four-dimensional chart.

While methods exist for scanning sites of potential archaeological and geological importance, such tools produce significant background noise or inconclusive readings, Prof. Eppelbaum says. …

His tool can be used to evaluate the possible archaeological significance of any given area under scrutiny. Providing rapid results within days or even hours, the algorithm can “read” extensive data before any digging or exploration begins. Financially, technically and ecologically, this tool offers an optimal way to localize and classify ancient buried objects and estimate the potential of the further archaeological investigations, he says.

Prof. Eppelbaum’s solution is called the “multi-PAM,” which stands for “physical — archaeological models.” The tool first interprets what it “sees” by recognizing image targets; then the interpretation can be used to develop a four-dimensional model which can be presented to archaeologists hoping to explore a particular region.

Placed in a small unmanned airplane hovering several yards off the ground and scanning wide tracts of land along the earth’s surface, Prof. Eppelbaum says, the tool can reveal unexplored sites of historical and archaeological significance.

You can read the full post here. A shorter article can be found here.

According to one of the posts, this tool is already in use in some archaeological projects. Does anyone have any personal experience with one? Would you care to share your opinion?

Update:
The catalyst for this news event apparently was a post on the website of the American Friends of Tel Aviv University. This post looks back at the publication of a paper that Prof. Eppelbaum presented in April 2009. The paper is titled: “Archaeological geophysics in Israel: past, present and future.” This paper (along with several others on similar topics) was published in the open access journal called Advances in Geosciences (ADGEO) in 2010. The abstract of Eppelbaum’s paper and a link to download the article can be found here. A list of all the articles in that volume can be found here. For those who desire to learn more about modern techniques for non-intrusive archaeological investigation, this volume is a good place to start.

HT: Joseph I. Lauer

Tagged Excavations, Technology