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[yialousa1971]

The Illyrians - Οι Ιλλυριοί

[yialousa1971]

6,000-Year-Old Wine Found In Greece; Ancient Samples May Be Oldest Unearthed In Europe

The Huffington Post | By Meredith Bennett-Smith Posted: 10/03/2013 8:41 am EDT | Updated: 10/03/2013 8:41 am EDT

Conventional wisdom agrees that a fine wine generally gets better with age -- good news for the 6,200-year-old wine samples unearthed in Greece, huh?

Researchers working at an ongoing dig site in northern Greece recently announced that the final results of residue analysis from ancient ceramics showed evidence of wine dating back to 4200 B.C., according to the Greek Reporter. The excavation, located at a prehistoric settlement known as Dikili Tash, is situated 1.2 miles from the ancient city of Philippi and has been inhabited since 6500 B.C., according to the researchers' website.

The analysis was not conducted on liquid wine, though. The passing millennia have erased nearly all tangible evidence of the drink, Dimitra Malamidou, a co-director of the most recent excavation, told The Huffington Post in an email.

"All [that] is left from the liquid part is the residue in the surface of the ceramic vases," she said. "Recent residue analysis on ceramics attested [to] the presence of tartaric acid, indicating fermentation."

Malamidou is part of a joint Greek-French excavation that began in 2008. The team recently wrapped up excavation of a neolithic house from around 4500 B.C. This is where they found wine traces in the form of "some thousands of carbonized grape pips together with the skins indicating grape pressing," Malamidou said.

Radiocarbon dating was used to pinpoint the age of the finds.

Dikili Tash researchers believe they have found the oldest known traces of wine in Europe. Previous studies have unearthed a 6,100-year-old Armenian winery, as well as traces of a 9,000-year-old Chinese alcohol made from rice, honey and fruit.

"The find is highly significant for the European prehistory, because it is for the moment the oldest indication for vinification in Europe," Malamidou said. "The historical meaning of our discovery is important for the Aegean and the European prehistory, as it gives evidence of early developments of the agricultural and diet practices, affecting social processes."

The societal changes that may have been influenced by the consumption of alcoholic beverages is currently an issue of debate among researchers, Malamidou said. Evidence of wine during this early time period will "shed new light" on these discussions, she said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/0 ... 27039.html

[supporttheunderdog]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2456139/Were-dazzling-artefacts-King-Stonehenges-burial-site-Britains-Crown-Jewels.html

A new museum is opening to show off Bronze age treasures

image.jpg

These are just a few of the items made by peoples who Kuru called Berry eaters, probably some hundreds of years before the treasures found by Schliemann were made , and who probably spent 30 million man hours building Stonehenge.

[supporttheunderdog]

An interesting article on Cyprus and its importance in the Bronze Age as a major hub for trade.

http://www.heritagedaily.com/2013/09/evidence-of-production-of-luxury-textiles-and-extraction-of-copper-from-unknown-part-of-cypriote-bronze-age-city/98898

[bill cobbett]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2456139/Were-dazzling-artefacts-King-Stonehenges-burial-site-Britains-Crown-Jewels.html

A new museum is opening to show off Bronze age treasures

image.jpg

These are just a few of the items made by peoples who Kuru called Berry eaters, probably some hundreds of years before the treasures found by Schliemann were made , and who probably spent 30 million man hours building Stonehenge.

Gosh... those are gems... wow...!!!

Deffo worth a vist to Devizes, Wiltshire to see them. ... and soon.

... and it just so happens that Devizes is the home of two other GB National Treasures, the Caen Hill Locks and the Wadworth Brewery, ...

[Archimedes]

Archaeologists Find Cultural Connections With Europe In Ancient Jordanian Settlement



University of Gothenburg

Swedish archaeologists in Jordan led by Professor Peter M. Fischer from the University of Gothenburg have excavated a nearly 60-metre long well-preserved building from 1100 B.C. in the ancient settlement Tell Abu al-Kharaz. The building is from an era characterized by major migration.

New finds support the theory that groups of the so-called Sea Peoples emigrated to Tell Abu al-Kharaz. They derive from Southern or Eastern Europe and settled in the Eastern Mediterranean region all the way to the Jordan Valley.

“We have evidence that culture from present Europe is represented in Tell Abu al-Kharaz. A group of the Sea Peoples of European descent, Philistines, settled down in the city,” says Peter Fischer. “We have, for instance, found pottery resembling corresponding items from Greece and Cyprus in terms of form and decoration, and also cylindrical loom weights for textile production that could be found in central and south-east Europe around the same time.”

Tell Abu al-Kharaz is located in the Jordan Valley close to the border to Israel and the West Bank. It most likely corresponds to the biblical city of Jabesh Gilead. The Swedish Jordan Expedition has explored the city, which was founded 3200 B.C. and lasted for almost 5 000 years. The first excavation took place in 1989 and the most recent in autumn 2013. All in all, 16 excavations have been completed.

Peter M. Fischer and his team of archaeologists and students have surveyed an urban settlement that flourished three times over the 5 000 years: around 3100–2900 B.C. (Early Bronze Age), 1600–1300 B.C. (Late Bronze Age) and 1100–700 B.C. (Iron Age). These are the local periods; in Sweden, they occurred much later.

Remarkably well-preserved stone structures have been exposed during the excavations. The finds include defensive walls, buildings and thousands of complete objects produced locally or imported from south-east Europe.

“What surprises me the most is that we have found so many objects from far away. This shows that people were very mobile already thousands of years ago,” says Fischer.

The scientists have made several sensational finds in the last three years, especially during the excavation of the building from 1100 B.C. where containers still filled with various seeds were found. There are also finds from Middle Egypt that were exported to Tell Abu al-Kharaz as early as 3100 B.C.

The exploration of the 60-metre long building discovered in 2010 continued during the most recent excavation. It was originally built in two levels of which the bottom level is still standing with walls reaching 2.5 meters in height after more than 3 000 years.

The archaeologists found evidence indicating that the Philistines who lived in the building together with local people around 1100 B.C. utilized a defense structure from 3 000 B.C. in the form of an old city wall by constructing their building on top of it. In this way, they had both easy access to building material and a solid surface to build on.

“One of our conclusions after the excavation is that “Jordanian culture” is clearly a Mediterranean culture even though the country does not border the Mediterranean Sea. There were well-organised societies in the area long before the Egyptian pyramids were built,” says Peter M. Fischer.

The excavations in Tell Abu al-Kharaz are funded mainly by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Only about 20 per cent of the city has been exposed so far, and in some places just the top layers. The Swedish Jordan Expedition 2013 consisted of professional archaeologists and students from Sweden, Austria, Germany, Iceland, Poland, Switzerland and Jordan.

—

On The Net:

University of Gothenburg

Read more at http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/11 ... myd7j7F.99

[Archimedes]

Europe’s Oldest Written Text Found in Greece

CultureArchaeologyLifeJan 19, 2014



Michael Cosmopoulos, professor of the University of Missouri- Saint Louis (UMSL), is returning the oldest written text of Europe on a ceramic tablet, to Messenia, northern Greece, the place where he excavated and brought it to light.

Mr. Cosmopoulos has been working in that area every summer for the last 10 years. His team which consisted mostly of students and volunteers, are about to live an unprecedented experience.

Mr. Cosmopoulos found the tablet in summer 2010. His discovery of the ceramic tablet in Linear B writing, about 3,500 years old, has changed the educational and bureaucratic history in the western part of the world.

As Mr. Cosmopoulos described, the tablet was found in an ancient trash-can in which he had set fire to burn some garbage. The plate, saved by accident from the fire, constitutes the greater surprise of this long-lasting program.

Tablets in Linear B writing were mostly used in Mycenaean palace as accounting archives. This fact raises questions as to the usage of the plate which have yet to be answered.

http://greece.greekreporter.com/2014/01 ... in-greece/

[supporttheunderdog]

[youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuOXF81GMvY[/youtube]

A documentary about a fascinating British Neolithic site which I think fairly well shows the sophistication of the ancient British. A site occupied for about 800 years from 3200 bc or so, with some of the largest Neolithic stone buildings found.

[supporttheunderdog]

And now a post about the sophistication and modern attitudes of the ancient Greeks.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/06/worlds-earliest-erotic-graffiti-astypalaia-classical-greece,

[yialousa1971]

'Exosuit' Mission to 2,000-Year-Old Shipwreck Begins
By Megan Gannon, News Editor | September 16, 2014 11:47am ET

A group of marine archaeologists kicked off a mission this week to explore an ancient shipwreck at the bottom of the Aegean Sea — not with a sub, but with a semi-robotic metal diving suit that looks likes it was taken straight out of a James Bond movie.

Sponge divers first discovered the 2,000-year-old shipwreck off the Greek island Antikythera in 1900. They recovered fragments of bronze statues, corroded marble sculptures, gold jewelry and, most famously, the Antikythera mechanism, a clocklike astronomical calculator sometimes called the world's oldest computer. Teams led by Jacques Cousteau pulled up more artifacts and even found human remains when they visited the wreck in the 1950s and 1970s.

But none of those previous expeditions had access to the Exosuit, a one-of-a-kind diving outfit that weighs 530 lbs. (240 kilograms), and can plunge to the extraordinary depths of 1,000 feet (305 meters) and stay underwater for hours without the diver being at risk of decompression sickness. [See Photos of the Exosuit and Antikythera Shipwreck]

Brendan Foley, a maritime archaeologist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts, is co-director of the 2014 Antikythera mission, in partnership with the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities.

"It's likely that sediment will hold the kind of stuff we can't even imagine," Foley told Live Science back in June, when the team was preparing to observe and collect bioluminescent organisms off the coast of Rhode Island. "Our eyes light up thinking about it. It's the kind of thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night. These are artifacts that have never been seen since the time of Caesar."

The Antikythera wreck settled more than 200 feet (60 m) below the surface during the 1st century B.C., but some of the cargo onboard dated back to the 4th century B.C. Historians have speculated that the vessel was carrying loot from Greece to Rome during the era of Julius Caesar.

An Exosuit-clad archaeologist could unearth artifacts that help scholars learn more about the ship's story. During a preliminary expedition to the site in 2012, Foley and his colleagues used sonar to detect intriguing targets at the wreck site, which look like boulders but could be huge statues, according to WHOI's Oceanus magazine. The team also plans to explore a second wreck nearby that could have been the Antikythera ship's traveling companion, as well as the bottom of an undersea cliff — potentially around 400 feet (120 m) deep — where additional artifacts from the wreck may have slipped over the years, beyond the reach of divers.

Made by the Canadian company Nuytco Research, the Exosuit has four 1.6-horsepower thrusters that can propel a diver up, down, forward, backward, right or left. The Exosuit protects its wearer from decompression sickness because it maintains the level of air pressure humans experience at the surface. Without the threat of the bends, a diver can be pulled up to the surface in just two or three minutes if anything goes wrong.

The team is posting updates about its mission on a blog and on Facebook.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.


http://www.livescience.com/47860-exosui ... wreck.html