Roman road pre-dating Hadrian’s Wall discovered in Northumberland
An ancient Roman road (formerly) linking north to south has been discovered off the coast of Northumberland. The discovery, which was almost two thousand years old, was made at one of the Settelingstone sites during construction on the water network.
They are thought to be from the road’s foundations and built by Agricola or his successors about AD80, although no evidence of its exact date was found. Archaeologists said given its location it was an “important part” of the early northern Roman frontier.
The ancient remains were discovered by Northumbrian Water when it began improvement works at the site of The Stanegate road, which linked Corbridge and Carlisle. It is a £55,000 investment scheme at Stanegate Roman Road, near Settlingstones, Hexham.
Brian Hardy, Northumbrian Water project manager, said: “We are delighted to have uncovered this important piece of hidden heritage and play our part in helping to protect it.
“We have successfully delivered our investment work, through the use of alternative methods and techniques, to not only enhance and futureproof our customers’ water supplies but also protect this suspected integral part of surviving Roman archaeology.”
The utility company called in its own experts and notified relevant authorities to record and help preserve this important heritage finding.
The relic remnants of the road itself, monitored by Archaeological Research Services Ltd, pre-dates Hadrian’s Wall and had forts along its length – within one day’s march of each other.
This is why the well-known fort at Vindolanda is sited south of Hadrian’s Wall on the course of the Stanegate.”
Philippa Hunter, senior projects officer at Archaeological Research Services Ltd, said: “While monitoring the excavation pit, our archaeologist identified a deposit of compacted cobbles thought to be the remains of the Roman road’s foundations – it is believed to have been built by Agricola or his successors around 80 AD.
The remains are part of The Stanegate – a Roman road which ran east-west south of Hadrian’s Wall
“Here, the road was constructed using rounded cobbles set in a layer measuring around 15cm deep, with around 25cm of gravel surfacing laid on top.
“Unfortunately no dating evidence or finds have been recovered to confirm the precise date of the archaeological remains.
“However, given the location of the cobbles along the projected route of the Roman road and its depth below the modern road surface, we are confident the remains identified form an important part of the early northern Roman frontier.”
The remains are part of The Stanegate – a Roman road which ran east-west south of Hadrian’s Wall
Roman settlements, garrisons, and roads were established throughout the Northumberland region after Gnaeus Julius Agricola was appointed Roman governor of Britain in 78 AD.
Hadrian’s Wall was completed by about 130 AD, to define and defend the northern boundary of Roman Britain with Stanegate and Dere Street the major road links.
200,000-year-old tools from Stone Age unearthed in Saudi Arabia
A team of Saudi scientists from the Heritage Authority recently discovered stone tools used by the inhabitants of Assyrian civilization in the Paleolithic time period that date back to 200,000 years.
While exploring the site near Shuaib Al-Adgham in the Al-Qassim area, the Heritage Authority found a range of Neolithic tools: iron knives, scrapers, axes, and stone pierce tools from the Middle Paleolithic period.
These are unique and rare stone axes that were characterized by the high precision in manufacturing that these human groups used in their daily life.
The abundance of stone tools discovered from this site indicated the numerical density of prehistoric communities that lived in this region.
It is also a clear indication that the climatic conditions in the Arabian Peninsula were very suitable for these human groups as they benefited from the natural resources available therein.
The satellite images showed that the Shuaib Al-Adgham and other sites were connected with passages of rivers to confirm that humans used rivers to reach deep into the interior regions of the Arabian Peninsula in ancient times.
According to the wide spatial distribution of the Assyrian sites, they were the largest concentrations of human inhabitance worldwide.
It also indicates that human groups in the Arabian Peninsula were able to cross through vast swathes of geographical distances, while the large number of sites centered around ancient valleys and rivers indicated that these groups were gradually spreading and discovering new sites when they needed them.
These sites were characterized by the spread of broken stone fragments and manufactured tools.
The authority stated that a huge amount of new environmental and cultural information has been collected, and the results showed that there were significant changes in the environments, ranging from very arid to humid.
The current evidence strongly supports the assertions of the existence of the “Green Arabian Peninsula” many times in the past.
During the wet phases of human civilizations, there were rivers and lakes throughout the Arabian Peninsula, which led to the spread and expansion of these human groups.
This confirms that the Arabian Peninsula was a major crossroads between Africa and the rest of Asia throughout prehistoric times and that it was one of the places of settlement in the period of the Stone Ages.
It is believed that the ancient migrations of these human groups were through two main passages — the Bab Al-Mandab Strait and the Sinai Peninsula Corridor.
3-Billion-Year-Old Spheres Found in South Africa: How Were They Made?
In the small town of Ottosdal, in central North West Province of South Africa, miners working in pyrophyllite mines have been digging up mysterious metal spheres known as Klerksdorp Spheres.
This dark reddish-brown, somewhat flattened spheres range in size from less than a centimetre to ten centimetres across, and some of them have three parallel grooves running around the equator.
The most striking examples have the uncanny appearance of being something manufactured. But here is the kicker — these metallic objects have been dated to 3 billion years old, a time when the Earth was too young to host intelligent life capable of creating these spheres.
No wonder, these objects have attracted attention and speculation from not only the scientific community but various fringe groups including creationists and advocates of “ancient astronauts theory”.
Klerksdorp Spheres are often classified as “Out-of-Place Artifacts”, a term coined by an American naturalist and cryptozoologist to indicate objects of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest found in a very unusual or seemingly impossible context that could challenge conventional historical chronology by being “too advanced” for the level of civilization that existed at the time.
These objects claim to provide evidences that suggest the presence of intelligent beings well before humans were supposed to exist. Klerksdorp Spheres, however, aren’t out-of-place. Neither they are mysterious.
These spheres are actually concretion formed by the precipitation of volcanic sediments, ash, or both after they accumulated 3 billion years ago. Concretions are often ovoid or spherical in shape because of which they are commonly mistaken to be dinosaur eggs, or extraterrestrial debris or human artefacts, in this case.
Examples of calcareous concretions, which exhibit equatorial grooves, found in Schoharie County, New York.
The latitudinal ridges and grooves exhibited by Klerksdorp Spheres are also natural and are known to occur in concretions found elsewhere on earth.
Notable examples include “Moqui marbles” found within the Navajo Sandstone of southern Utah and carbonate concretions found in Schoharie County, New York. Similar concretion as old as 2.8 billion years were also found in Hamersley Group of Australia.
Many false claims have been made regarding these objects. An often-repeated claim is that testing by NASA found the spheres to be so precisely balanced that they could have only been made in zero-gravity.
Not only there is no record of NASA ever saying that the objects aren’t spherical at all as evident from these images.
Another claim is that the spheres are manufactured of a metal “harder than steel”, a statement which is rather meaningless as steel can vary in hardness depending on the type of alloy and treatment.
Specimens of Klerksdorp Spheres are housed in Klerksdorp Museum in Klerksdorp, a city about 70 km away from Ottosdal.
Moqui Marbles, hematite concretions, from the Navajo Sandstone of southeast Utah show similar grooves and shape.
Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand is another example of spherical concretion.
Scientists discover 280-million-year-old fossil forest in Antarctica
Antarctica wasn’t quite a region of ice for most of the year. It is widely believed that millions of years ago, when the planet earth was already a massive landmass called Gondwana, trees flourished near the South Pole.
Now, newfound, intricate fossils of some of these trees are revealing how the plants thrived — and what forests might look like as they march northward in today’s warming world.
“Antarctica preserves and ecologic history of polar biomes that ranges for about 400 million years, which is basically the entirety of plant evolution,” said Erik Gulbranson, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
A reconstruction of what the ancient forest look liked 385 million years ago, drawn by Dr. Chris Berry, co-author of the study describing the fossil trees.
TREES IN ANTARCTICA?
It’s hard to look at Antarctica’s frigid landscape today and imagine lush forests. To find their fossil specimens, Gulbranson and his colleagues have to disembark from planes landed on snowfields, then traverse glaciers and brave bone-chilling winds. But from about 400 million to 14 million years ago, the southern continent was a very different, and much greener place.
The climate was warmer, though the plants that survived at the low southern latitudes had to cope with winters of 24-hour-per-day darkness and summers during which the sun never set, just like today.
Partial tree trunk with the base preserved, at the site in Svalbard (left) and a reconstruction of what the ancient forest look liked 380 million years ago (right)
During this event, as many of 95 per cent of Earth’s species died out. The extinction was probably driven by massive greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes, which raised the planet’s temperatures to extreme levels and caused the oceans to acidify, scientists have found.
There are obvious parallels to contemporary climate change, Gulbranson said, which is less extreme but similarly driven by greenhouse gases.
Prior to the end-Permian mass extinction, the southern polar forests were dominated by one type of tree, those in the Glossopteris genus, Gulbranson told Live Science. These were behemoths that grew from 65 to 131 feet (20 to 40 meters) tall, with broad, flat leaves longer than a person’s forearm, Gulbranson said.
Erik Gulbranson on site in Antarctica.
A photograph taken by Captain Scott on his final expedition of Dr Edward Wilson sketching on Beardmore Glacier.
Before the Permian extinction, Glossopteris dominated the landscape below the 35th parallel south to the South Pole. (The 35th parallel south is a circle of latitude that crosses through two landmasses: the southern tip of South American and the southern tip of Australia.)
BEFORE AND AFTER
Last year, while fossil-hunting in Antarctica, Gulbranson and his team found the oldest polar forest on record from the southern polar region.
They haven’t dated that forest precisely yet, but it probably flourished about 280 million years ago before being rapidly buried in volcanic ash, which preserved it down to the cellular level, the researchers said.
On Thanksgiving Day, Gulbranson will return to Antarctica for more excavations at two sites. Those sites contain fossils from a period spanning from before to after the Permian extinction.
Scientists have since uncovered further evidence of plant life on the continent, including this fossilized fern from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) fossil collection.
This partial trunk fossil was cracked near its base, but two distinct patterns are still visible in the rock: oval leaf bases at the bottom and diamond-shaped leaf bases moving up the trunk toward the top.
After the extinction, Gulbranson said, the forests didn’t disappear, but they changed. Glossopteris was out, but a new mix of evergreen and deciduous trees, including relatives of today’s gingkoes, moved in.
“What we’re trying to research is what exactly caused those transitions to occur, and that’s what we don’t know very well,” Gulbranson said.
The plants are so well-preserved in the rock that some of the amino acid building blocks that made up the trees’ proteins can still be extracted, said Gulbranson, who specializes in geochemistry techniques. Studying these chemical building blocks may help clarify how the trees handled the southern latitudes’ weird sunlight conditions, as well as the factors that allowed those plants to thrive but drove Glossopteris to its death, he said.
This season, the field team will have access to helicopters, which can land closer to the rugged outcrops in the Transantarctic Mountains where the fossil forests are found.
Subsequent expeditions to the Antarctic Peninsula have unearthed hundreds of amphibian and reptile fossils. This lobster fossil (Hoploparia stokesi) from the BAS fossil collection was found in the Upper Cretaceous (100.5 – 66 million years ago) when the dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth.
The team (members hail from the United States, Germany, Argentina, Italy and France) will camp out for months at a time, hitching helicopter rides to the outcrops as the fickle Antarctic weather allows. The 24-hour sun allows for long days, even middle-of-the-night expeditions that combine mountaineering with fieldwork, Gulbranson said.
Treasures dating back some 9,500 years is uncovered in Alpine glaciers as climate change causes ice to melt
The group climbed the steep mountainside, clambering across an Alpine glacier, before finding what they were seeking: A crystal vein filled with the precious rocks needed to sculpt their tools. That is what archaeologists have deduced after the discovery of traces of an ancient hunt for crystals by hunters and gatherers in the Mesolithic era, some 9,500 years ago.
It is one of many valuable archaeological sites to emerge in recent decades from rapidly melting glacier ice, sparking a brand-new field of research: glacier archaeology. Amid surging temperatures, glaciologists predict that 95 per cent of some 4,000 glaciers dotted throughout the Alps could disappear by the end of this century.
While archaeologists lament the devastating toll of climate change, many acknowledge it has created “an opportunity” to dramatically expand understanding of mountain life millennia ago.
“We are making very fascinating finds that open up a window into a part of archaeology that we don’t normally get,” said Marcel Cornelissen, who headed an excavation trip last month to the remote crystal site near the Brunifirm glacier in the eastern Swiss canton of Uri, at an altitude of 2,800 metres (9,100 feet).
‘Truly exceptional’
Up until the early 1990s, it was widely believed that people in prehistoric times steered clear of towering and intimidating mountains. But a number of startling finds have since emerged from melting ice indicating that mountain ranges like the Alps have been bustling with human activity for thousands of years.
Early humans are now believed to have hiked up into the mountains to travel to nearby valleys, hunt or put animals out to pastures, and to search for raw materials. Christian Auf der Maur, an archaeologist with Uri canton who participated in the crystal site expedition, said the find there was “truly exceptional.”
Laced shoe found with the remains of a prehistoric man dating to around 2,800 BCE.
“We know now that people were hiking up to the mountains to up to 3,000 metres altitude, looking for crystals and other primary materials.”
The first major ancient Alpine find to emerge from the melting ice was the discovery in 1991 of “Oetzi,” a 5,300-year-old warrior whose body had been preserved inside an Alpine glacier in the Italian Tyrol region. Theories that he may have been a rare example of a prehistoric human venturing into the Alps have been belied by findings since of numerous ancient traces of people crossing high altitude mountain passes.
One of the most famous discovers in the Alpine was ‘Otiz’ (pictured) in 1991, which was the preserved body of a 5,300-year-old warrior found in the Italian Tyrol region
Rare organic materials
The Schnidejoch pass, a lofty trail in the Bernese Alps 2,756 metres (9,000 feet) above sea level, has for instance been a boon to scientists since 2003, with the find of a birch bark quiver – a case for arrows – dating as far back as 3,000 BCE. Later, leather trousers and shoes, likely from the same ill-fated person, were also discovered, along with hundreds of other objects dating as far back as about 4,500 BCE.
“It is exciting because we find stuff that we don’t normally find in excavations,” archaeologist Regula Gubler told AFP. She pointed to organic materials like leather, wood, birch bark, and textiles, which are usually lost to erosion but here have been preserved intact in the ice.
This blackened braided basket from the Neolithic Age is from the Bernese Alps.
Just last month, she led a team to excavate a fresh finding in Schnidejoch: a knotted string of bast – or plant – fibres believed to be over 6,000 years old. It resembles the fragile remains of a blackened bast-fibre, braided basket from the same period, brought back last year.
While climate change has made possible such extraordinary finds, it is also a threat: if not found quickly, organic materials freed from the ice rapidly disintegrate and disappear.
‘Very short window’
“It is a very short window in time. In 20 years, these finds will be gone and these ice patches will be gone,” Gubler said. “It is a bit stressful.”
Cornelissen agreed, saying the understanding of glacier sites’ archaeological potential had likely come “too late”.
“The retreat of the glaciers and melting of the ice fields has already progressed so far,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll find another Oetzi.”
The problem is that archaeologists cannot hang out at each melting ice sheet waiting for treasure to emerge. Instead, they rely on hikers and others to alert them to finds. That can sometimes happen in a roundabout way.
When two Italian hikers in 1999 stumbled across a wood carving on the Arolla glacier in southern Wallis canton, some 3,100 metres above sea level, they picked it up, polished it off, and hung it on their living room wall. It was only through a string of lucky circumstances that it 19 years later came to the attention of Pierre Yves Nicod, an archaeologist with the Wallis historical museum in Sion, where he was preparing an exhibition about glacier archaeology.
In 1999, Italian hikers found a wood carving on the Arolla glacier in southern Wallis canton and instead of alerting experts, they hung it on their living room wall
He tracked down the 52-centimetre-long human-shaped statuette, with a flat, frowning face, and had it dated. It turned out to be over 2,000 years old – “a Celtic artefact from the Iron Age,” Nicod told AFP, lifting up the statuette with gloved hands. Its function remains a mystery, he said.
Another unknown, Nicod said, is “how many such objects have been picked up throughout the Alps in the past 30 years and are currently hanging on living room walls.
“We need to urgently sensibilise populations likely to come across such artifacts.” “It is an archaeological emergency.”
Large Hidden Lakes Found Draining Below Antarctic Glacier
Thwaites Glacier on the edge of West Antarctica is one of the planet’s fastest-moving glaciers. Research shows that it is sliding unstoppably into the ocean, mainly due to warmer seawater lapping at its underside.
Thwaites Glacier reaches speeds of more than 33 feet (11 m) per day. The black box shows the location of four subglacial lakes that drained in 2013, increasing the glacier’s speed by about 10 percent.
But the details of its collapse remain uncertain. The details are necessary to provide a timeline for when to expect 2 feet of global sea-level rise, and when this glacier’s loss will help destabilize the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Recent efforts have used satellites to map the underlying terrain, which affects how quickly the ice mass will move, and measure the glacier’s thickness and speed to understand the physics of its changes.
Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh used data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 to identify sudden drainage of large pools below Thwaites Glacier, one of two fast-moving glaciers at the edge of the ice sheet.
The study published Feb. 8 in The Cryosphere finds four interconnected lakes drained in the eight months from June 2013 and January 2014. The glacier sped up by about 10 percent during that time, showing that the glacier’s long-term movement is fairly oblivious to trickles at its underside.
The ice surface above the lakes sank by as much as 20 meters (66 feet) in less than a year due to the drainage. Subglacial lakes are commonly seen with fast-flowing glaciers.
“This was a big event, and it confirms that the long-term speed-up that we’re observing for this glacier is probably driven by other factors, most likely in the ocean,” said corresponding author Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “The water flow at the bed is probably not controlling the speed.”
Other glaciers, like some in Alaska and Greenland, can be very susceptible to changes in meltwater flow. The water there can pond beneath the glacier until it lifts off parts of its bed and suddenly surges forward. This can increase a glacier’s speed by several times and account for most of its motion.
Researchers were not certain whether such an effect might be at play with Thwaites Glacier.
Part of the Thwaites Glacier on the edge of West Antarctica.
“It’s been difficult to see details about water flow under the ice,” Smith said.
A new technique revealed how meltwater from lakes beneath Thwaites Glacier drained into the sea. It is the largest outflow from sub-glacial lakes reported for this region of West Antarctica.
For the new study, the authors use a new technique to discover drops at the glacier’s surface of up to 70 feet (20 meters) over a 20 kilometer by 40-kilometer area. Calculations show it was likely due to the emptying of four interconnected lakes, the largest about the size of Lake Washington, far below.
The peak drainage rate was about 8,500 cubic feet (240 cubic meters) per second, about half the flow of the Hudson River — the largest meltwater outflow yet reported for subglacial lakes in this region.
“This lake drainage is the biggest water movement that you would expect to see in this area, and it didn’t change the glacier’s speed by that much,” Smith said. The reason is likely that Thwaites Glacier is moving quickly enough, he said, that friction is heating up its underside to ice’s melting point. The glacier’s base is already wet and adding more water doesn’t make it much more slippery.
The new study supports previous UW research from 2014 showing that Thwaites Glacier will likely collapse within 200 to 900 years to cause seas to rise by 2 feet. Those calculations were made without detailed maps of how water flows at the glacier’s underbelly. The new results suggest that doesn’t really matter.
“If Thwaites Glacier had really jumped in response to this lake drainage, then that would have suggested that we need a more detailed model of where water is flowing at the bed,” Smith said. “Radar data from NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge program has told us a lot about the shape of Thwaites Glacier, but it’s very difficult to see how water is moving. Based on this result, that may not be a big problem”
Melting at the ice sheet base would refill the lakes in 20 to 80 years, Smith said. Over time meltwater gradually collects in depressions in the bedrock. When the water reaches a certain level it breaches a weak point, then flows through channels in the ice. As Thwaites Glacier thins near the coast, its surface will become steeper, Smith said, and the difference in ice pressure between inland regions and the coast may push water coastward and cause more lakes to drain.
He hopes to apply the same techniques to study lake drainage below other glaciers, to understand how water flow at the base affects overall glacier movement. When NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite launches in 2018 the calculations will be easy to do with high precision.
“In 2018 this changes from a hard project to an easy project, and I’m excited about that,” Smith said.
Other co-authors are Alexander Huth and Ian Joughin at the UW and Noel Gourmelen at the University of Edinburgh. The research was funded by NASA and the European Space Agency.
The archaeologist J.A. Clason finds extensive accounts of Viking voyages in earlier Icelandic sagas. They describe a mysterious “sunstone”, which Scandinavian seafarers used to locate the Sun in the sky and navigate on cloudy days.
So, What is Iceland spar?
Iceland spar is a crystal of calcite (calcium carbonate). Calcite is a fairly common mineral and comes in a spectacular range of colors caused by the impurities it contains.
Iceland spar is rather unique among the calcites. It contains no impurities, so it’s nearly colorless and transparent to both visible and ultraviolet light.
For centuries, the only source of this pure calcite was located near Reydarfjördur fjord in eastern Iceland, hence most of the world called it Iceland spar (spar means a crystal with smooth surfaces). The Icelanders just called it silfurberg, meaning silver rock.
A crystal of Iceland spar has two very interesting properties. First, it is a natural polarizing filter. Second, because of its natural polarization, Iceland spar is birefringent, meaning light rays entering the crystal become polarized, split, and take two paths to exit the crystal – creating a double image of an object seen through the crystal.
There is good evidence that the Vikings used the polarizing effect of Iceland spar to navigate the North Atlantic. The constant fog and mist in the North Atlantic often make navigation by stars or sun impossible.
The Vikings called Iceland spar a ‘sunstone’ because the polarizing effect can be used to find the direction of the sun even in dense fog and overcast conditions. It can even find the direction of the sun when the sun is actually below the horizon, as happens when you’re sailing above the Arctic circle.
The polarizing effect of Iceland spar can accurately locate the sun even through heavy clouds or mist. If you’re a Viking. I’ve tried it and had no success at all.
The second interesting feature of Iceland spar is birefringence, meaning it refracts light into two separate images, which is more noticeable.
The double image may just seem mildly interesting to you and me. But it turned the scientific world (at least the optical part of it) upside down back in the 1600s.
A piece of Iceland spar on my worktable, doubly refracting the gridlines.
How did that help the Vikings?
Researchers studied a piece of Iceland spar discovered aboard an Elizabethan ship that sunk in 1592.
They found that moving the stone in and out of a person’s field of vision causes them to see a distinctive double dot pattern that lines up with the direction of the hidden Sun.
Screenshot from the TV show Viking
The polarization of sunlight in the Arctic can be detected, and the direction of the sun identified within a few degrees in both cloudy and twilight conditions using the sunstone and the naked eye.
The process involves moving the stone across the visual field to reveal a yellow entoptic pattern on the fovea of the eye, probably Haidinger’s brush.
When light passes through calcite crystals, it is split into two rays. The asymmetry in the crystal’s structure causes the paths of these two beams to be bent by different amounts, resulting in a double image.
Giant Headless Buddha Statue found Beneath Chinese Apartments
In the old neighborhood of Chongqing, southwest China, people had passed by two residential buildings constructed upon a steep hill, indifferent to what lay underneath. It turns out that these two apartment buildings that sit upon the cliff face had been carved by Lord buddha.
The massive statue — about 30-feet tall and with its head missing — was hidden by a dense coating of foliage, and only exposed during recent repairs to the residential building, according to the local Nan’an district government.
Photos of the enigmatic headless sculpture have gone viral on Chinese social media since the accidental discovery, where many have referred to it as “the Buddha,” attracting headlines and stirring instant curiosity in its history and origins.
The seated Buddha sculpture uncovered in Chongqing is missing its head.
Now only partially covered in moss, the statue is depicted seated with its forearms resting on its lap and its hands holding what appears to be a round stone. The folds and some details of the figure’s clothes are also visible.
The statue is believed to have been built during China’s Republican era (1912-1949), according to a national survey of cultural relics.
While that study was conducted just over a decade ago, the sculpture had been neglected and appears to have been completely forgotten until recently.
Its head was likely destroyed during the 1950s, and the apartment buildings around it were built in the 1980s, said the district government on China’s Twitter-like platform, Weibo.
The ‘Buddha’ statue (location identified with the red square) used to be covered by dense foliage. ( Weibo)
However, experts invited by the district’s cultural relics management office to study the statue said it was not of Buddhist origin and is likely related to folk religion.
A temple dedicated to the Daoist god of thunder was once built next to the statue, though it was dismantled in 1987, the district government told state-run media outlet The Paper.
The religious statue was already designated as a district-level cultural relic before 1997, it added.
That the statue could be so quickly hidden is perhaps, a reflection of the rapid urban expansion that has unfolded in Chongqing.
In recent decades, countless structures have been built to accommodate a bustling population of over 30 million people, sometimes at the expense of historical and cultural relics. Because of the city’s mountainous terrain, many homes are built on hillsides.
