Lost city of Atlantis - new claims!

A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of "memorial cities," built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team's findings will be unveiled on Sunday in "Finding Atlantis," a new National Geographic Channel special.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the "twist" of finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain's southern coast.

"We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense," Freund said.

Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as "an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules," as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity. Using Plato's detailed account of Atlantis as a map, searches have focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the best possible sites for the city.

Tsunamis in the region have been documented for centuries, Freund says. One of the largest was a reported 10-story tidal wave that slammed Lisbon in November, 1755.

Debate about whether Atlantis truly existed has lasted for thousands of years. Plato's "dialogues" from around 360 B.C. are the only known historical sources of information about the iconic city. Plato said the island he called Atlantis "in a single day and night... disappeared into the depths of the sea."

Experts plan further excavations are planned at the site where they believe Atlantis is located and at the mysterious "cities" in central Spain 150 miles away to more closely study geological formations and to date artifacts.

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Greg McCune) / Source

Ancient party garden!

A newly discovered 7th century B.C. palace garden near Jerusalem could reveal details about how royals liked to let loose in ancient times.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University and Germany's Heidelberg University uncovered the royal garden at the site of Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz (communal farm) in Israel, and are leading the first full-scale excavation of this type of archaeological site in Israel.

"We have uncovered a very rare find," archaeologist Oded Lipschits of Tel Aviv University said.

The garden was a massive and lush green space royals would use to relax. Such pleasure spots were once the ultimate symbol of power, according to the researchers.

Read more here

Stop looting via Google

This is a good news story that began with some exceedingly grim news.

This grim news came to light in the late spring of 2003, after the dust had begun settling from the invasion of Iraq and archaeologists began taking stock of the country’s looted archaeological sites. To measure the severity of the problem and determine when most of it had occurred, Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, purchased a series of high-resolution commercial satellite images taken of southern Iraq just before and after the invasion. Stone pored over them, examining known sites and measuring the extent of looters’ pits over time. These scars on the landscape can be seen from space.

Much of looting, Stone discovered, occurred just before and just after the invasion. And the total area pillaged, she noted in a 2007 paper in Antiquity, “was many times greater than all the archaeological investigations ever conducted in southern Iraq and must have yielded tablets, coins, cylinder seals, statues, terracottas, bronzes and other objects in the hundreds of thousands.”

It was a grave situation, one requiring intervention from Iraq’s new government, and Stone let everyone know what she had learned. At one point, she flew out to California to give a lecture on the subject at Stanford University, and as sometimes happens, her talk galvanized a young post-doc, Daniel Contreras. Contreras had put in several field seasons as an archaeologist in Peru: he had found the scale of looting there staggering. “You can’t drive down the Panamerican highway without seeing looters’ pits,” he says. “So looting is really never off the radar there.”

Contreras wanted to start quantifying looting in Peru, à la Stone. But satellite photos are pricey, and Contreras couldn’t afford to buy them. So he and Stanford colleague, Neil Brodie, an archaeologist who specializes in looting issues, started casting around for something much cheaper. What they discovered is that Google Earth photos work just fine. So in the current issue of Antiquity, Contreras publishes the results* of his Google Earth study of looting in Peru’s Vir’u Valley, concluding that a whopping 116 acres of sites in this relatively small valley show intensive damage.

Ok, I know, this still doesn’t sound like good news. But I thought Contrera’s study was ingenious, so I called him up this week to talk about it. Just before hanging up, I asked him whether this might be the beginning of a much larger project, one that enlists the sharp eyes of the Google Earth community and anyone else with an interest in archaeology to keep an eye on the world’s looting hotspots. Could archaeologists crowdsource the monitoring of the our collective archaeological heritage?

“Definitely,” he said, without a moment of hesitation. In fact, he’s now thinking of how to go about doing just that. The technology is all there, he said, it’s just a question of how to administer it. “And I think this would make people a little more aware of the problem of looting, as well as providing a tangible source of documentation for archaeologists.”

Facts and figures of this type are exactly what archaeologists need the next time they press for stricter laws on the looting and sale of antiquites. And I think this new Google Earth study is very good news.

(Story Source)

*Antiquity

Volume: 84 Number: 324 Page: 544–555

Huaqueros and remote sensing imagery: assessing looting damage in the Virú Valley, Peru

Daniel A. Contreras*

*Archaeology Center, Stanford University, P.O. Box 20446, Stanford, CA 94309, USA (Email: dcontre@stanford.edu)

This article presents a new initiative in combating looting from the air, building on previous work in Iraq and Jordan. Looted sites in the Virú Valley, Peru, are visible as pit clusters on dated versions of Google Earth. Compare these with earlier air photographs and Gordon Willey's famous survey of the 1940s, and we have a dated chronicle of looting events. This makes it possible to demonstrate that modern looting is certainly taking place and linked to an upsurge in the antiquities trade. As well as being a new instrument for managing heritage, the author shows that the looting survey offers an important research dividend: the location of cemeteries not previously systematicalldocumented, with potential for more thorough investigation even of already looted areas.