| From: LindyBill | 3/31/2016 7:55:17 PM | | | | | | After Columbus discovered America, it never had to be discovered again.
View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America
Douglas Bolender, left, and Sarah H. Parcak, right, looking for evidence of a Viking presence in Point Rosie, Newfoundland. If confirmed, the site would be the second known Viking settlement in North America. Credit Greg Mumford A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.
The new Canadian site, with telltale signs of iron-working, was discovered last summer after infrared images from 400 miles in space showed possible man-made shapes under discolored vegetation. The site is on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, about 300 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, the first and so far only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, discovered in 1960.
Since then, archaeologists, following up clues in the histories known as the sagas, have been hunting for the holy grail of other Viking, or Norse, landmarks in the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.
By PBS NOVA Play Video “Vikings Unearthed”
Video “Vikings Unearthed”
To discover how far the Vikings went in their seafaring explorations, archaeologists are using new technologies.
By PBS NOVA on Publish Date March 31, 2016.
But last year, Sarah H. Parcak, a leading space archaeologist working with Canadian experts and the science series NOVA for a two-hour television documentary, “Vikings Unearthed,” that will be aired on PBS next week, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of Greenland, to Massachusetts. She found hundreds of potential “hot spots” that high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one particularly promising candidate — “a dark stain” with buried rectilinear features.
Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosie, a grassy headland above a rocky beach an hour’s trek from the nearest road, showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.
In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise. The experts are to resume digging there this summer.
Photo
A lump of what scientists say is bog iron ore, and one of the samples being tested from the possible Viking site at Point Rosie. This roasted ore is a sign of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region. Credit Greg Mumford “It screams, ‘Please excavate me!,’ ” said Dr. Parcak, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite images to expose the looting of ancient Egyptian antiquities and is using it to globally crowdsource new archaeological sites from space.
The NOVA program will stream online at pbs.org/nova in the United States at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Eastern time, (along with a BBC program in England), and will be broadcast on PBS at 9 p.m. Wednesday.
Given the dashed hopes of previous searches and the many spurious claims of Viking presence in the Americas, scientists on the project as well as outside experts have voiced caution.
Photo
One of the satellite images used by Sarah H. Parcak to identify potential Viking settlement sites along North America’s Atlantic coast. Darker areas were seen as potential structures. Credit DigitalGlobe “Tremendous, if it’s really true,” said William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center and Curator in Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. “It wouldn’t be unexpected,” he said, but added that he wanted to see the data.
“There’s no lock that it’s Norse, but there’s no alternative evidence,” said Douglas Bolender, a research assistant professor at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archeological Research and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who joined the expedition. He said a buried structure there could be a smithy for longboat nails and weaponry, another strong indicator of Viking presence.
“It would just be logical that there’s more than one site,” said Gerald F. Bigelow, a lecturer in history at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and a specialist in archaeology of the North Atlantic.
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Davide Zori, an assistant professor of archaeology at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., and a specialist on Viking expansion in the North Atlantic, called the find potentially “very important.”
Much depends on what else is found at the site. In archaeology, context is everything. A famous prehistoric site in Brooklin, Me., yielded an 11th century silver Norse coin but it is believed to have landed there through trade and not as proof of Viking settlement.
Master shipbuilders and seafarers, warriors, traders and raiders, the Vikings boiled out of the Scandinavian fjords starting around the 8th century, marauding through Asia and the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The Vikings focused particularly on the British Isles, and west to Iceland and Greenland, as memorialized in oral narratives and later recorded as the sagas by 13th-century Icelandic monks.
More Reporting on Archaeology Around 1000, Leif Ericson led an expedition to what became known as Vinland at the northernmost point of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows (the name an obscure corruption from the French) where explorers starting in 1960 discovered remnants of an extensive colony, including dwellings, a forge, and carpentry workshop — the Vikings’ first and so far only known landmark in the New World. They appear to have been routed by indigenous people the Norse called Skraeling.
One intriguing find was the seeds of a butternut tree, which did not grow that far north and hinted of travels to milder climates in the Gulf of St Lawrence. But evidence of other Viking settlements has been lacking.
Dr. Parcak (pronounced PAR-kak) began her research by using a commercial satellite called WorldView-3, belonging to the company DigitalGlobe, to search known Norse sites on minuscule Papa Stour in the Shetland Islands of Scotland. Using the near-infrared spectrum invisible to the human eye, the satellite detected buried walls, and digging yielded a carnelian bead from India similar to those found at other Viking sites. Dr. Parcak then focused her satellite search on thousands of miles of coastline from the Canadian Arctic to New England.
After two weeks of digging at Point Rosie, an unexpected find in a flooded trench excited the explorers — several seeds, or perhaps blueberries, which were hurriedly sent for testing. The dates came back wildly off — 700 years after the Vikings, maybe even contemporary. They seem to have migrated onto the site much later.
“You feeling nervous, Sarah?” a NOVA reporter asked Dr. Parcak.
“No, I’m not,” she said.
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| To: LindyBill who wrote (4440) | 3/31/2016 8:04:36 PM | | From: DMaA | | | | The Vikings couldn't gain a foot hold in America because the skraelings were strong and healthy.
The English waltzed in on the heals of a horrendous die off from the diseases the Spaniards brought with them. |
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| To: Tom Clarke who wrote (4435) | 4/1/2016 12:16:45 PM | | From: Greg or e | | | | Possible Viking Find Could Rewrite North American History
Archaeologist Sarah Parcak used satellite data to find the Canadian site.
A team of archaeologists say they’ve made a potentially “seismic” discovery in Canada that could “rewrite the history of Vikings in the New World” — and they did it with the help of medieval sagas and the latest satellite technology.
Medieval sagas, considered to be masterpieces of literature from the Middle Ages, capture the stories of the intrepid Vikings — the master seafarers and warriors who, starting around the 8th century, ventured beyond their Scandinavian homelands to raid and trade in foreign lands.
According to these stories, many of them featuring “larger-than-life heroes,” the Vikings had made the first European voyage to North America — at least 500 years before Christopher Columbus.
But the question has long remained: Just how much fact was interwoven into these sagas, which Icelandic monks wrote in the 13th and 14th centuries? And if laced with truth, just how much of the New World did the Norse really explore?...... Read the rest at
huffingtonpost.com
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| From: Snowshoe | 4/5/2016 1:18:46 PM | | | | | | Has Hannibal's route across the Alps been uncovered? Scientists use 2,000-year-old trail of dung to track legendary general
telegraph.co.uk
Hannibal's 30,000-strong army trudged through deep snow in the grip of winter in 218BC with more than 15,000 mules and horses before crossing into Italy where they nearly made it to the gates of ancient Rome.
But, according to experts, such a large movement of men and animals must have left what they describe as a "mass animal deposition event".
And at a patch of swampy ground near the Col de la Traversette, a narrow pass between Grenoble in France and Turin in Italy, they think they have found it in an unusual layer of muck about 16in beneath the surface.
In a blog post, Chris Allen, a senior lecturer in environmental microbiology at Queen's University Belfast, said: "Using a combination of microbial genetic analysis, environmental chemistry, pollen analysis and various geophysical techniques, we unveiled a mass animal deposition of faecal materials – probably from horses – at a site near the Col de Traversette.
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| From: isopatch | 4/5/2016 10:01:20 PM | | | | | | Reminder from Dante for us all no matter what our personal challenges might be. That we don't sit around in idleness and shirk our responsibilities to ourselves AWA others who care about us.
OK, enough with the preaching..))
Cool 17th Century painting on marble. Don't see many of those.
Iso
Italian School, 17th Century
Dante and Virgil at the terrace of the Slothful, Purgatory; and A further scene from the Divine Comedy
a pair, oil on marble
8.4 x 13.9cm (3 5/16 x 5 1/2in). (2)
http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/23252/lot/1/
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