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Unexpected and Gruesome Battle of 1250 BC Involved 4,000 Men from Across Northern Europe

As it is, no one knows who these people were who fought on the banks of the Tollense River in northern Germany near the Baltic Sea because there are no written records from the time. But analysis of the remains of the 130 men, most between ages 20 and 30, found so far shows some may have been from hundreds of kilometers away—Poland, Holland, Scandinavia and Southern Europe.

What is fascinating to me, is an amateur archeologist stumbles across a find. As he, soon joined by others, continues to examine the surrounding area, it turns out to be an historic unrecorded battle. Add to that input from various fields of specialization, and we are able to determine the approximate era, ages, geographic locations . . . all of this well after the fact.

Edited by dream_weaver
Renamed thread.
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  • 1 month later...

K’aak Chi, meaning Fire Mouth, as dubbed by William Gadoury. Kudos, William Gadoury!

Canadian Teenager Discovers Ancient Mayan City Lost In Jungles Of Mexico

William Gadoury, 15, was fascinated by the ancient Central American civilization and spent hours poring over diagrams of constellations and maps of known Mayan cities. 

And then he made a startling realisation: the two appeared to be linked. 

Constellations change locations and orientations in the sky due to the earth's orbit around the sun.

In hundreds of years of scholarship, no other scientist had ever found such a correlation.  

Studying 22 different constellations, William found that they matched the location of 117 Mayan cities scattered throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. 

When he applied his theory to a 23rd constellation, he found that two of the stars already had cities linked to them but that the third star was unmatched. 

William took to Google Maps and projected that there must be another city hidden deep in the thick jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. 

The Canadian Space Agency agreed to train its satellite telescopes on the spot and returned with striking pictures: what appears to be an ancient Mayan pyramid and dozens of smaller structures around it. 

What we do know of the Mayan culture indicates astronomy was important to them. This discovery, would indicate that it permeated more than their perpetual calendars and other astronomical writings.

“What is fascinating about the project of William, is the depth of his research,” said Daniel de Lisle.

“Linking the position of stars and the location of a lost city and the use of satellite images on a tiny territory to identify the remains buried under dense vegetation, is quite exceptional.” 

 

From the Journal de Montréal [in French—includes a map with locations indicated—it would be informative to learn which constellations and at what time(s) of the year and which cities were instrumental.]

as an aside, here, in America, I pick this up from an intriguing headline on the Drudge report, linking to The Telegraph in the UK, referencing a publication in Montréal, Canada. I digress.

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This is just like old times. Archaeology started out as the province of (usually rich) amateurs well before it was a formal academic field: Pompeii, the Rosetta Stone and Tutankhamen's tomb are some cases in point.

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I'll let the pun slide, albeit this brief tip of the hat acknowledging and slight rise upon it entering the thread.

I was drawn by the role of inductive inference, the latter more explicit of these two particular stories. Rand had also studied history, to induce the ideal of man.

I've more familiarity with the Rosetta Stone than your other two contemporaries.

Allocating archaeology to the province of amateurs (rich or benefactors of the rich) resonates with a passage from For The New Intellectuals where she states:

Historically, the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. There were no professional <ftni_13> intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of capitalism, the men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the writers, the early scientists—were men without a profession, that is: without a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a livelihood. Intellectual pursuits had to depend on the accident of inherited wealth or on the favor and financial support of some wealthy protector.

 

In a small way, stories like these give me hope, laying bare a raw insightful process or tapping into longer threads of the inductive processes honed over years of examinations.  It is almost if there were a subcategory of "journalistic art" plying for a place within the realm of a selective recreation of reality . . .

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  • 2 years later...

The Dispilio Tablet - the oldest known written text

The tablet has been dated from the 5000 BC era.

Depending on the merit of this assessment: Dispilio tablet deciphered – a proof of the oldest script in the world? the alphabet appears to be a mix of the Phoenician and the Glagolitic alphabets with a mention of a disputed Vinča symbols.

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Earliest known drawing found on rock in South African cave

Archaeologists found the marked stone fragment as they sifted through spear points and other material excavated at Blombos cave in South Africa. It has taken seven years of tests to conclude that a human made the lines with an ochre crayon 73,000 years ago.

Not much to go on. The size of a couple of fingernails, possibly a chunk broken off something bigger. The facts that it was human made, and 73,000+ years old stand out the most.

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  • 11 months later...

8000-Year-Old Shipyard Located off English Coast is World’s Oldest

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The latest discovery under the waters of the Solent is a further indication of a sophisticated  Mesolithic society, that once thrived in this area. It is demonstrating that the people in this era were much more technologically advanced than previously thought. It appears that they had certain capabilities up to 2000 years earlier than once believed. This is dramatically changing our understanding of the  Stone Age .

 

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