Hacker News with Generative AI: Archaeology

'Once-in-a-century' discovery reveals luxury of Pompeii (bbc.com)
After lying hidden beneath metres of volcanic rock and ash for 2,000 years, a "once-in-a-century" find has been unearthed in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in Italy.

Archaeology, History, Pompeii, Italy, Ancient Rome

13 points by pseudolus 15 hours ago | 8 comments

'Once-in-a-century' discovery reveals luxury of Pompeii (bbc.co.uk)
After lying hidden beneath metres of volcanic rock and ash for 2,000 years, a "once-in-a-century" find has been unearthed in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in Italy.

Archaeology, History, Ancient Rome, Italy

11 points by gadders 17 hours ago | 0 comments

Ancient Phoenician Shipwreck Recovered, Sank 2.6k Years Ago Off Coast of Spain (smithsonianmag.com)
Archaeologists have raised a 2,600-year-old shipwreck from the waters near southeastern Spain.

Archaeology, History, Shipwrecks, Phoenicians

5 points by bookofjoe 1 day ago | 0 comments

What Roman Coins Reveal About the People Who Made Them (lithub.com)
“In a way the coin is our superior. The hardness of its metal secures for it ‘eternal’ existence. A coin does not grow, it issues ready-made from the mint and should remain as it then is; it should never change.” –Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

History, Archaeology, Numismatics, Ancient Rome

3 points by bookofjoe 2 days ago | 0 comments

2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past (resobscura.substack.com)
In 2019, construction workers in Carmona, Spain uncovered something remarkable underneath a very old house: an access shaft that led them to a Roman tomb which had remained perfectly sealed for two thousand years.

History, Archaeology, Ancient Rome

236 points by benbreen 2 days ago | 86 comments

A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet (universityofcalifornia.edu)
In 2004, while she was still a meticulous young graduate student, Elaine Sullivan made a discovery that would deepen the history of human writing.

Archaeology, History, Language, Writing Systems

141 points by diodorus 4 days ago | 46 comments

The Curious Gems of the River Thames (atlasobscura.com)
On the banks of the River Thames, when the tide is low, a person walking along the shore can see all kinds of things. With a keen eye, you can spot blue-and-white shards of 19th-century pottery, delicate stems of 18th-century clay pipes, brass buttons from coats, and coins dating back to the Romans.

History, Archaeology, London, River Thames

73 points by alt227 4 days ago | 24 comments

New, big-headed archaic humans discovered: Who is Homo juluensis? (livescience.com)

Paleoanthropology, Human Evolution, Archaeology, Anthropology

3 points by zfg 5 days ago | 0 comments

Early Iron Age horse sacrifice at a royal tomb in southern Siberia (cambridge.org)
Horses began to feature prominently in funerary contexts in southern Siberia in the mid-second millennium BC, yet little is known about the use of these animals prior to the emergence of vibrant horse-riding groups in the first millennium BC.

Archaeology, History, Siberia, Horses, Funerary Practices

5 points by senderista 6 days ago | 2 comments

Archaeologists just mapped a Bronze Age megafortress in Georgia (arstechnica.com)
A sprawling 3,500-year-old fortress offers tantalizing clues about a culture that once dotted the southern Caucasus mountains with similar walled communities.

Archaeology, History, Georgia, Ancient Civilizations, Bronze Age

4 points by thunderbong 8 days ago | 0 comments

Haniwa (wikipedia.org)

Japanese Culture, History, Archaeology

6 points by Thevet 9 days ago | 0 comments

The Curious Gems of the River Thames (atlasobscura.com)
On the banks of the River Thames, when the tide is low, a person walking along the shore can see all kinds of things. With a keen eye, you can spot blue-and-white shards of 19th-century pottery, delicate stems of 18th-century clay pipes, brass buttons from coats, and coins dating back to the Romans.

History, Archaeology, London, River Thames

5 points by geox 9 days ago | 1 comments

Bad Moon Rising (archaeology.org)

Archaeology, Folklore, Astronomy

42 points by samclemens 9 days ago | 55 comments

Vikings Settled in North America in 1021AD (bbc.com)
Vikings had a settlement in North America exactly one thousand years ago, centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, a study says.

History, Archaeology, Vikings, North America

16 points by mads 10 days ago | 0 comments

Stone selection by wild chimpanzees shares patterns with Oldowan hominins (sciencedirect.com)
The use of broad tool repertoires to increase dietary flexibility through extractive foraging behaviors is shared by humans and their closest living relatives (chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes).

Chimpanzees, Archaeology, Tool Use, Animal Behavior, Evolution

36 points by benbreen 11 days ago | 4 comments

Ancient DNA may rewrite prehistory in India (bbc.com)
New research using ancient DNA is rewriting prehistory in India - and shows that its civilisation is the result of multiple ancient migrations, writes Tony Joseph.

Ancient History, India, Genetics, Archaeology, Migration

4 points by akbarnama 11 days ago | 1 comments

High-resolution genomic history of early medieval Europe (nature.com)
Many known and unknown historical events have remained below detection thresholds of genetic studies because subtle ancestry changes are challenging to reconstruct.

Genetics, History, Europe, Archaeology

47 points by bookofjoe 13 days ago | 11 comments

Chimpanzees' stone tool choices may mirror ancient human ancestors' techniques (phys.org)
An international team of paleobiologists, anthropologists and behavioral scientists has found that the process used by modern chimps to select tools for cracking nuts may be similar to how ancient human ancestors chose their tools.

Chimpanzees, Archaeology, Primates, Tool Use, Ancient Humans

35 points by pseudolus 13 days ago | 22 comments

Inside the hands-on lab of an experimental archaeologist (arstechnica.com)
Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic.

Archaeology, Anthropology, Experiments, Science, History

13 points by bookofjoe 14 days ago | 3 comments

UK's biggest dinosaur footprint site unearthed (bbc.com)
The UK's biggest ever dinosaur trackway site has been discovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire.

Paleontology, Archaeology, United Kingdom, Dinosaurs

87 points by peutetre 15 days ago | 14 comments

Tel Dan Stele (wikipedia.org)
The Tel Dan Stele is a fragmentary stele containing an Aramaic inscription which dates to the 9th century BCE. It is the earliest known extra-biblical archaeological reference to the house of David.

Archaeology, History, Ancient Languages, Israel

4 points by handfuloflight 16 days ago | 0 comments

Reading the Unreadable: Seales and Team Reveal Dead Sea Scroll Text (uknow.uky.edu)
LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 23 2020) — It’s a 25,000-piece puzzle that researchers have longed to solve. That’s because the 25,000 fragments represent the Dead Sea Scrolls, and inside are ancient secrets — mysteries that have been locked away for 2,000 years.

Archaeology, History, Ancient History

3 points by handfuloflight 17 days ago | 0 comments

How AI is unlocking ancient texts (nature.com)
From deciphering burnt Roman scrolls to reading crumbling cuneiform tablets, neural networks could give researchers more data than they’ve had in centuries.

Artificial Intelligence, History, Archaeology, Language

204 points by Marceltan 19 days ago | 61 comments

Storing 3D scans in a grain of wheat (wafaabilal.com)
Splicing ancient Mesopotamian civilization with post-cultural planetary futures through a poetic act of preservation, my latest work, In a Grain of Wheat, is an interdisciplinary artwork that archives the 3,000 year-old Winged Bull of Nineveh inside the DNA of Iraqi wheat seeds.

Art, Biotechnology, Archaeology, Ancient History

20 points by whoisstan 21 days ago | 4 comments

Ancient Indus Valley Script Deciphered (indusscript.net)
The official Indus inscriptions repository

Ancient History, Archaeology, Linguistics, India

8 points by samagra14 22 days ago | 2 comments

Ancient copper industry in King Solomon's mines did not pollute environment (eurekalert.org)
A new study from Tel Aviv University overturns prevailing scientific beliefs that King Solomon’s Mines not only harmed the health of workers in the ancient copper industry but also pose risks to the health of modern residents living near the site.

Archaeology, Environmental Science, History, Israel

18 points by instagraham 23 days ago | 4 comments

The rock houses of England's last cave people (bbc.co.uk)
It was the middle of the 20th Century when England's last cave dwellers gave up their homes in a rural part of the country near Birmingham.

History, Archaeology, England, Culture, Housing

12 points by gnufx 23 days ago | 2 comments

Ossuaries and the Burials of Jesus and James (jstor.org)

History, Religion, Archaeology

6 points by handfuloflight 23 days ago | 0 comments

Neanderthals cold-adapted? Ribcage reconstruction may hold the answer (phys.org)
Researchers at the Department of Paleobiology, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid report that analysis of a Neanderthal ribcage from a cave in Iraq exhibits a "bell-shaped" thorax configuration typical of Neanderthals elsewhere, differing from that of modern humans.

Neanderthals, Paleontology, Anthropology, Human Evolution, Archaeology

54 points by wglb 25 days ago | 49 comments

Giant sloths and mastodons lived with humans for millennia in the Americas (phys.org)
For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.

Paleontology, Archaeology, Extinction, History, North America

75 points by wglb 26 days ago | 22 comments