Clare man discovers cliff fort near his home while flying a drone in Ireland
A respected software maker and drone operator have discovered an unexplained cliff near his home in Co Clare.
During the present lockdown Matthiew Kelly, a satellite, communication, and electronics specialist, worked a drone near Crag, Lahinch when he made his archeological discovery.
Kelly, however, has a history in this area having previously uncovered ancient forts in Dundalk in 2018.
His latest find had not been previously recorded in the National Monuments Service (NMS) database but has since been officially added.
Matthew Kelly explained: “I found the fort while flying my drone around the small cliffs at Lahinch during a lockdown.
I have been filming forts and stone circles for years so I knew what it was when I found it. I emailed the National Monuments Service who checked it out and added it to their database which means it is now recorded and protected.”
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Kelly isn’t however claiming all the credit for his latest discovery.
“The artist Jim Fitzpatrick inspired me to get into Irish mythology years ago so I asked him to name the fort. He suggested ‘Cliodna of the Waves’ so we will call it ‘Dun Cliodna’ (Cliodna’s fort).
Clíodhna is the goddess of love and beauty and is said to have three brightly colored birds who eat apples from an otherworldly tree and whose sweet song heals the sick,” Mr. Kelly said.
Matthew worked with artist Jim Fitzpatrick on a video about Newgrange and some of that footage was used on RTÉ’s Nationwide.
“I got into drones a few years ago when they first came out in 2014, my first footage was used on RTÉ’s programming Weather-Beaten in 2014 about the big storm.
I was lucky to work on a small project with Jim Fitzpatrick in 2016 and he encouraged me to visit the ancient sites of Ireland to see if anything new could be discovered with the drone,” Matthew added.
The discovery is now classed as a ‘cliff-edge fort’ in the townland of Crag and is “scheduled for inclusion in the next revision of the RMP (Record of Monuments and Places). “I also want to thank Anthony Murphy for helping me get the find reported to the NMS,” Mr. Kelly added.
The confirmation from the NMS states that the fort is: “Situated on a steep cliff-edge c. 450m S of Lahinch beach backing onto a NE-SW cliff. A sub-circular enclosure reported to the National Monuments Service by Matthew Kelly.”
During the hot summer of 2018, Matthew discovered a group of 5000-year-old forts in Dundalk.
Among the other sites reported over that summer were a prehistoric barrow cemetery found in Redcow near Dundalk, Co Louth by Mr. Kelly who was trying to locate a site once described as Ireland’s Stonehenge. His footage also included two ring-fort enclosures in the townlands of Glebe and Lisdoo.
The NMS estimates the range of monuments recorded across all sites date from 2200 BC to 1000 AD.
The newly discovered ring-fort near Lahinch has been named Dún Clíodna
Kelly is also an award-winning app developer and created a drone search and rescue (SAR) app called DroneSAR now being used by a range of SAR groups.
DroneSAR provides software that enables commercially available drones to maintain autonomous search patterns based on waypoint missions or user-defined search ‘boxes’, reducing risk to search personnel, improving situational awareness, and increasing the chance of finding people in distress, all at a fraction of the cost of a SAR helicopter.
Why ISIS Hates Archaeology and Blew Up Ancient Iraqi Palace
The broken remains of Nimrud tell numerous people different things. To Sheikh Abdullah Saleh, a custodian of the ancient site until he was chased away by Islamic State extremists two years ago, they represent nothing but destruction and loss.
The hulking piles of rock are a big jigsaw riddle for Iraqi archeologist Layla Salih, from which one of the world’s most significant ancient sites might be slowly rebuilt.
Both the sheikh and the scholar have stood in the rubble of Nimrud in the week since the Iraqi military reclaimed what remained of it.
Sheikh Abdullah Saleh in the pulverized ruins of Nimrud in Iraq.
Salih was at the site picking out inscriptions from cracked stone and, in her mind’s eye, reassembling the giant winged buffaloes, known as lamassus, which Isis had laid to ruin among dozens of other priceless artifacts that had been there for almost 4,000 years.
“There are fragments that can be repaired,” she said. “The winged buffaloes in particular. It is not all lost. It was a really sad vision, but what can we do? We expected it. The good thing is we can put it back together.”
Sheikh Saleh points out pieces of a broken statue.
The view looked very different to Sheikh Saleh days after he returned from a year-long exile at the hands of the marauders who had chased him from town for trying to protect what, to him, was both a national treasure and a personal livelihood.
“This has been here for thousands of years, before Jesus,” he said amid piles of rock that had once formed the heart of the city known to the ancient Assyrians as Kalhu. People used to visit from all over the world, especially before 1991. “It used to generate money for our village. Many of our people worked here,” he said.
“Then one-day last year, they came around the village with a truck and loudspeakers. They told us to open our windows because there would be a big explosion. It was so big that our houses were covered in rocks.”
Iraq’s deputy antiquities minister, Qais Rasheed, estimates that as much as 70% of Nimrud has been destroyed by Isis. The scale of the site’s ransacking suggests his estimate might be conservative but Salih said a trained archaeological eye could pick out enough scattered remnants across the landscape to suggest that all might not be lost.
“There were pieces that I could put together in my mind,” she said. “Small things and big things. I hope we can make this happen.”
A screengrab from a video on an Isis-supporting website shows smoke billowing from Nimrud after it was wired with explosives and detonated.
There are some encouraging signs. Salih said a meeting with Unesco and the governor of Nineveh province to yielded a commitment to divert funding from a long-stalled archaeological project into rebuilding Nimrud. “It’s a substantial figure,” she said. “It will get us started. Initially, we will document the losses and protect the site. We hope to start this from the beginning in the coming year.
Sheikh Saleh said the site needed to be protected by guards to stop the pillage of what remains of Nimrud. “We need to put guards there right away,” he said, warning that a failure to lock it down could lead to a repeat of the looting that followed the US invasion of Baghdad in 2003, after which the Iraqi National Museum was pillaged by Iraqi civilians and US forces.
Thirteen years later, many of those stolen artifacts remain unaccounted for and continue to fetch high prices on a lucrative black market for stolen antiquities. Other sites around Iraq have also been looted in the instability that has plagued the country since the US invasion.
The Mosul Museum, where Salih was a curator until 2009, has been largely emptied by Isis since it took the city in mid-2014 and started a rampage to erase anything that pre-dated the Islamic era.
The Nineveh plains, on which Nimrud stands, is one of the world’s cradles of civilisation and is a heartland of Assyrian cities and Christian communities. As well as laying ancient cities to ruin, Isis rampaged over modern towns and villages in the area until the fight to reclaim them began by Iraqi forces and Kurdish peshmerga.
Remains of wall panels and colossal statues of winged bulls destroyed by Isis in Nimrud.
From his vantage point, Sheikh Saleh is sceptical about how the military might that is being brought to the battlefield could do so little to stop Isis as it methodically worked through Nimrud with dynamite and sledgehammers.
“They try to save the oil companies, but they do not try to save Iraq’s history,” he said of the fighter jets that buzz overhead. What [Isis] was doing was so obvious. They do not want to leave intact anything connected to Iraqi civilisation.
This is one of the very few places in Iraq where our history was on the show, how our civilization was organized. Now our history has been destroyed. We have nothing to show the world now and we will miss that.”
Why ISIS Hates Archaeology
While using the destruction of cultural heritage to demonstrate their “piety” and stoke division within local populations, ISIS also sees the practice of archaeology as a foreign import that fans Iraqi nationalism and impedes their ultimate goal, in which modern nations of the Middle East are subsumed into a wider caliphate encompassing the entire Muslim world.
An article on the destruction at the Mosul museum in a recent issue of Dabiq, the online magazine of the Islamic State, makes its position clear: “The kuffār [unbelievers] had unearthed these statues and ruins in recent generations and attempted to portray them as part of cultural heritage and identity that the Muslims of Iraq should embrace and be proud of.”
France digs up bones from 6,000-year-old ‘massacre’
A shattered skull discovered among fractured and fossilized skeletons at the site of an archaeological dig in Alsace, north-eastern France.
Archaeologists had discovered the remains of victims from a 6,000-year-old massacre in Alsace in eastern France that was likely carried out by “furious ritualized warriors”.
The bones of the 6,000- year-old genocide in Alsace, in north-eastern France have been found by archeologists.
According to a team from the National Institute for Preventive Archeological Research (Inrap), the bodies of 10 people have been found in one of 300 ancient silos, used to store grain and other food.
The Neolithic group appeared to have had violent deaths, with multiple injuries to their legs, hands and skulls.
The way in which the bodies were piled on top of each other suggested they had been killed together and dumped in the silo.
The fossilised skeletons of two men with numerous fractured bones.
“They were very brutally executed and received violent blows, almost certainly from a stone axe,” said Philippe Lefranc, an Infrap specialist on the period.
The skeletons of five adults and an adolescent were found as well as four arms from different individuals.
The arms were probably war trophies, like those found at a nearby burial site of Bergheim in 2012, said Lefranc.
The mutilations indicated a society of “furious, ritualised warriors”, he said, while the silos were stored within a defence wall that pointed towards “a troubled time, a period of insecurity”.
Researchers examine human remains at the massacre site.
It is hoped genetic testing on the bones will reveal more information about the killings, but Lefranc said one theory was that a local tribe had clashed with a group arriving from the area around modern-day Paris.
“It appears that a warrior raid by people from the Parisian basin went wrong for the assailants, and the Alsatians of the era massacred them,” he said.
However, in the long run, it was the “Parisians” who had the last laugh.
The local tribe appears to have been supplanted by the newcomers at about 4,200 BC, as demonstrated by new funeral rites, pottery, and hamlets.
Rome Sinkhole Makes Extraordinary Archaeological Find
A sinkhole that appeared outside the Pantheon in Rome last week has revealed remnants of the original imperial flooring in Piazza della Rotonda.
The Roman Archaeologists have confirmed that the sinkhole that opened up in front of the Pantheon in recent days has brought to light the ancient imperial flooring in Piazza Della Rotonda.
In addition, the discovery of the seven travertine slabs, which are situated at about 2.5 meters below piazza level, is, in fact, a rediscovery.
The flooring was uncovered during works in the 1990s but was sealed up again after being documented by archaeologists who have now had a chance to re-examine the ancient remains.
“More than 20 years after their first discovery” – explains Daniela Porro, special superintendent of Rome – “the slabs of the ancient floor of the square in front of the Pantheon emerge intact, protected by a layer of fine pozzolan”, in what he described as “unequivocal proof of the importance of archaeological protection, particular in a city such as Rome.”
In imperial times the square was much larger than the current one, opening out in front of the Pantheon, the temple dedicated to all the Roman gods, built by Agrippa between 27 and 25 BC.
The area was completely transformed in the second century AD, under Emperor Hadrian, with the level of the piazza raised and repaved.
The ancient slabs/pavement unearthed by the Rome sinkhole in front of the Pantheon.
However, the appearance of another sinkhole in the city is also further evidence of why ancient Romans became master hydrologists specializing in systems of channeling and holding water like tunnels, cisterns, spas, bath-houses, channels, and aqueducts.
Only in January this year, The Local reported that a Rome apartment building has been evacuated and that a street was closed after “a sinkhole opened up” near the Colosseum.
Located on Rome’s famous Via Marco Aurelio, near the ancient Roman gladiatorial landmark, an apartment building, and two businesses were evacuated, and the street temporarily closed, as firefighters, police and housing authorities carried out emergency structural checks.
And The Local reported in February 2018 that a massive ten meters (33 feet) deep sinkhole occurred in the Balduina district, a residential area northwest of Vatican City, into which seven parked cars fell, with 22 families being evacuated from the residential area.
Another angle of the floor unearthed by the Rome sinkhole in front of the Pantheon.
Why on Earth, does this sinkhole phenomena occur so frequently in Rome, and not in say Naples or Milan? After the January 2020 sinkhole, the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, told TG24 News that technicians were at something of a loss trying to explain the geological causes of the incident, and she said sinkholes (known as voragine) are a “major problem in central Rome.”
Traditionally, on average every year 30 fresh sinkholes, subsidence, and other collapses are recorded in Rome, but what is alarming, according to The Local, is that since 2008 the annual figure has “tripled.”
Searching for a cause, a 2018 Guardian article asked should we “blame the rain, the government or just geology,” not only for sinkholes but for increasing extreme weather events in Italy, in general?
The article opens with reference to a shocking statistic published in Roma Republica, that in the first four months of 2018, Rome suffered an astonishing “44 sinkholes,” once every two or three days, with an average of “90 sinkholes a year in Rome since 2010.”
Many blame the rain in Rome, because in 2018 it was the wettest six months in living memory, and this may have had catastrophic effects on Rome’s geology, as the city is founded upon a floodplain, and most of it still rests on a sandy, soft soil.
Water finds no resistance in penetrating this permeable substrate, especially now that its gravitational path of destruction is assisted with the cracks caused by the vibrations of thousands of cars, trucks, and scooters buzzing over the aquaplane.
In an attempt to safeguard the city’s residents, or at least to appear to be doing something to support what is a catastrophically neglected city, in 2018, it was announced that a multi-million-euro plan would be launched to fix its streets, but what was reported as ‘slow progress’ has now ground to a halt as Italian emergency authorities are presently struggling to build scaffolding around the perimeters of much more life-threatening, medical sinkhole.
Archaeologists Have a Lot of Dates Wrong for North American Indigenous History — But Are Using New Techniques to Get It Right
It was in 1492 that Columbus reached the Americas. Many Europeans had travelled before, but the century from then until 1609 marks the creation of the modern globalized world.
It gave Europe extraordinary wealth and genocide and disease to indigenous peoples across the Americas.
The dates and the estimates of the settlement in Europe are known from texts and sometimes illustrations, to use the failed colony on what was then Virginia’s Roanoke Island as an example.
However, one thing is missing. What of indigenous history in this traumatic era? Until now, the standard timeline has derived, inevitably, from the European conquerors, even when scholars try to present an indigenous perspective.
This all happened just 400 to 500 years ago – how wrong could the conventional chronology for indigenous settlements be? Quite wrong, it turns out, based on radiocarbon dating my collaborators and I have carried out at a number of Iroquoian sites in Ontario and New York state. We’re challenging existing – and rather colonialist – assumptions and mapping out the correct time frames for when indigenous people were active in these places.
Dating Iroquoia project member Samantha Sanft excavating at White Springs, New York.
Refining Dates Based on European Goods
Archaeologists estimate when a given indigenous settlement was active based on the absence or presence of certain types of European trade goods, such as metal and glass beads. It was always approximate, but became the conventional history.
Since the first known commercial fur trading missions were in the 1580s, archaeologists date initial regular appearances of scattered European goods to 1580-1600. They call these two decades Glass Bead Period 1. We know some trade occurred before that, though, since indigenous people Cartier met in the 1530s had previously encountered Europeans, and were ready to trade with him.
Archaeologists set Glass Bead Period 2 from 1600-1630. During this time, new types of glass beads and finished metal goods were introduced, and trade was more frequent. The logic of dating based on the absence or presence of these goods would make sense if all communities had equal access to, and desire to have, such items. But these key assumptions have not been proven.
16th-century European copper alloy beads from two sites in the Mohawk Valley.
That’s why the Dating Iroquoia Project exists. Made up of researchers here at Cornell University, the University of Georgia, and the New York State Museum, we’ve used radiocarbon dating and statistical modeling to date organic materials directly associated with Iroquoian sites in New York’s Mohawk Valley and Ontario in Canada.
First we looked at two sites in Ontario: Warminster and Ball. Both are long argued to have had direct connections with Europeans. For instance, Samuel de Champlain likely stayed at the Warminster site in 1615-1616. Archaeologists have found large numbers of trade goods at both sites.
Centuries-old maize sample, ready to be radiocarbon dated.
When my colleagues and I examined and radiocarbon dated plant remains (maize, bean, plum) and a wooden post, the calendar ages we came up with are entirely consistent with historical estimates and the glass bead chronology. The three dating methods agreed, placing Ball circa 1565-1590 and Warminster circa 1590-1620.
However, the picture was quite different at several other major Iroquois sites that lack such close European connections. Our radiocarbon tests came up with substantially different date ranges compared with previous estimates that were based on the presence or absence of various European goods.
For example, the Jean-Baptiste Lainé, or Mantle, site northeast of Toronto is currently the largest and most complex Iroquoian village excavated in Ontario. Excavated between 2003–2005, archaeologists dated the site to 1500–1530 because it lacks most trade goods and had just three European-source metal objects. But our radiocarbon dating now places it between about 1586 and 1623, most likely 1599-1614. That means previous dates were off the mark by as much as 50 to 100 years.
Other sites belonging to this same ancestral Wendat community are also more recent than previously assumed. For example, a site called Draper was conventionally dated to the second half of the 1400s, but radiocarbon dating places it at least 50 years later, between 1521 and 1557. Several other Ontario Iroquoian sites lacking large trade good assemblages vary by several decades to around 50 years or so from conventional dates based on our work.
Sturt Manning examining a sample in the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory.
My colleagues and I have also investigated a number of sites in the Mohawk Valley, in New York state. During the 16th and early 17th centuries, the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers formed a key transport route from the Atlantic coast inland for Europeans and their trade goods. Again, we found that radiocarbon dating casts doubt on the conventional time frame attributed to a number of sites in the area.
Biases That Led to Misguided Timelines
Why were some of the previous chronology wrong?
The answer seems to be that scholars viewed the topic through a pervasive colonial lens. Researchers mistakenly assumed that trade goods were equally available, and desired, all over the region, and considered all indigenous groups as the same. On the contrary, it was Wendat custom, for example, that the lineage whose members first discovered a trade route claimed rights to it. Such “ownership” could be a source of power and status. Thus it would make sense to see uneven distributions of certain trade goods, as mediated by the controlling groups. Some people were “in,” with access, and others may have been “out.”
Ethnohistoric records indicate cases of indigenous groups rejecting contact with Europeans and their goods. For example, Jesuit missionaries described an entire village no longer using French kettles because the foreigners and their goods were blamed for disease.
There are other reasons European goods do or do not show up in the archaeological record. How near or far a place was from transport routes, and local politics, both within and between groups, could play a role. Whether Europeans made direct contact, or there were only indirect links, could affect availability. Objects used and kept in settlements could also vary from those intentionally buried in cemeteries. Above all, the majority of sites are only partly investigated at best, some are as yet unknown. And sadly the archaeological record is affected by the looting and destruction of sites. Only a direct dating approach removes the Eurocentric and historical lens, allowing an independent time frame for sites and past narratives.
Dating Iroquoia Project member Megan Conger excavating at White Springs, New York. Some locations have been under-explored, so far, by archaeologists.
Effects of Re-dating Indigenous History
Apart from changing the dates for textbooks and museum displays, the re-dating of a number of Iroquoian sites raises major questions about the social, political and economic history of indigenous communities. For example, conventionally, researchers place the start of a shift to larger and fortified communities, and evidence of increased conflict, in the mid-15th century.
However, our radiocarbon dates find that some of the key sites are from a century later, dating from the mid-16th to start of the 17th centuries. The timing raises questions of whether and how early contacts with Europeans did or did not play a role. This period was also during the peak of what’s called the Little Ice Age, perhaps indicating the changes in indigenous settlements have some association with climate challenge.
Our new radiocarbon dates indicate the correct time frame; they pose, but do not answer, many other remaining questions.
4,200-year-old burial of Bronze Age chieftain discovered under UK skate park
GLOUCESTERSHIRE, ENGLAND—BBC reports that two Bronze Age burials situated within a circular ditch were unearthed in southwestern England by a team including Andy Hood of Foundations Archaeology.
The first burial, placed in the center of the circle, contained the remains of a possible chieftain, who had been placed in the grave on his side in a crouched position.
The skulls and hooves of four cattle, a copper dagger with a whale-bone pommel, a stone wrist guard, an amber bead, and a flint and iron pyrite for starting fires were also found in the grave.
An excavation of the chieftain’s burial
The second grave, found near the first, held the remains of an older man placed in a seated position, and the skull and hooves of one animal.
Radiocarbon dating of the burials indicates the men lived around 4,200 years ago, and the artifacts in both burials indicate the men might have been members of the Beaker culture.
“It’s quite a significant investment of wealth to go into the ground,” Hood added. “There’s a chance that these animals were slaughtered as part of a ceremony related to the burial.”
The age and style of the burials, as well as artifacts found near the chieftain, suggest that these men were part of the Beaker culture, named for its beaker-like ceramic pots.
According to recent DNA studies, the people in this culture arrived from mainland Europe around 2400 B.C. They were an impressive lot who might have been the first to use copper and bronze in Britain, “so we think that their arrival is a fairly important moment in prehistory,” Hood said.
Some of the so-called “head and hoof” remains found in the chieftain’s burial.
The copper dagger that was found in the chieftain’s burial.
The Beaker culture commonly buried its dead with a “standard package” of grave goods: a beaker pot, a copper dagger, a stone wrist guard used by archers, a “strike-a-light kit,” amber beads and sometimes a cattle head and hoof offering, Hood said.
The chieftain had all these goods, except for the beaker pot, the archaeologists found. Because of the missing piece, “we think that this individual was a revered ‘specialist’ within Beaker society — somebody who wasn’t associated with the direct symbolism attached to the Beaker pot itself,” Hood said.
Even so, his grave goods were impressive and included: a copper dagger with a whale-bone pommel (the round knob at the end of the handle), a stone wrist guard, an amber bead, a flint and iron pyrite for starting a fire, and the cattle offerings.
The chieftain was buried at the center of a circular ditch that, at the time of burial, was a barrow, meaning that it had soil piled on top of it. Next to him, just off-center but still within the circular enclosure, were the remains of the older man, who was about 50 to 60 years old when he died.
Other news outlets have speculated that this older man was a shaman who may have been sacrificed to help the chieftain in the afterlife, but there is no evidence to support those claims, Hood said.
“The idea of him being a ‘shaman’ was postulated by some British newspapers,” Hood said, adding that “there is no evidence that he was sacrificed.”
Still, the older man’s burial is odd. “He was buried in an unusual ‘seated’ position — his legs were presently extending downwards towards the base of his grave pit,” Hood said. “We haven’t found a direct parallel elsewhere in Bronze Age Britain.”
Most people buried in Bronze Age Britain were arranged in a crouched position on their sides, as the chieftain was. So the older man’s proximity to the chieftain, as well as the man’s lack of a Beaker “package” and strange burial position, may remain a mystery for the ages.
Studies of bodies buried 500 years ago in Mexico reveal stories of 3 African slaves
The men excavating a new metro line in central Mexico City stumbled on a long-lost cemetery in the late 1980s. Documents showed it had once been connected to a colonial hospital built between 1529 and 1531—only about 10 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico—for Indigenous patients.
Three stood out as archeologists excavated the uncovered skeletons. Their teeth were filed into shapes similar to those of enslaved Africans from Portugal and people living in parts of West Africa.
Chemical and genetic studies also suggest that these people are among the first African generation to arrive in the Americas, likely as early victims of the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade.
The skulls of the men buried in Mexico City whose bodies were found in the 1990s.
Tens of thousands of slaves and free Africans lived in Mexico during the 16th and 17th centuries. Today, almost all Mexicans have little African ancestry
Rodrigo Barquera, a graduate student in archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, suspected the remains might offer a window into lives often left out of historical records.
To confirm their origins, he and his adviser Johannes Krause extracted DNA and analyzed chemical isotopes, including strontium, carbon, and nitrogen, from their teeth.
Their DNA revealed that all three were men with ancestry from West Africa. (Researchers couldn’t connect them to particular countries or groups.) And the ratios of the chemicals in their teeth, which preserve a signature of the food and water they consumed as children, were consistent with West African ecosystems, the researchers report today in Current Biology.
“It’s really nice to see how well the different lines of evidence come together,” says Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist at Arizona State University, Tempe, who wasn’t involved with the research.
All three skeletons, now at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, show signs of trauma and violence.
Remains of the three men show signs of physical abuse, such as the green stains produced by a gunshot wound.
The men were likely in their late 20s or early 30s when they died. Before that, one man survived several gunshot wounds, and he and another man showed a thinning of their skull bones associated with malnutrition and anemia.
The third man’s skeleton showed signatures of stress from grueling physical labor, including a poorly healed broken leg. These signs of abuse make it likely that the men were enslaved rather than free, Krause says.
The two men with malnutrition also carried pathogens linked to chronic diseases, according to a genetic analysis of the microbes preserved in their teeth.
One had the hepatitis B virus, and the other carried the bacterium that causes yaws, a disease in the same family as syphilis.
Both microbes were most closely related to African strains, making it likely the men caught these pathogens in Africa. Or perhaps they picked up the microbes on an overcrowded slave ship voyaging to the Americas, suggests Ayana Omilade Flewellen, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the experiences of enslaved Africans and wasn’t involved in the study.
Such journeys killed millions between the 16th and 19th centuries. Either way, this is direct evidence that the transatlantic slave trade introduced novel pathogens to the Americas, Krause says, just as European colonization did.
The three men survived all these hardships. In fact, researchers still aren’t sure what killed them.
They were buried in a mass grave in the hospital’s cemetery that could be linked to an epidemic, perhaps of smallpox or measles. But researchers didn’t find DNA from deadly infectious diseases in their remains.
The men’s presence in a hospital for Indigenous people highlights the largely forgotten diversity of early colonies in the Americas, Flewellen says. “We need to break out of the binary of just Native [American] and European experiences” and remember that Africans were part of the story as well.
New Virtual Reality Experience Transports Viewer Inside Spanish Paleolithic Caves Seen By Only 50 People In 16,000 Years
In the caves of La Garma mountain in Northern Spain, there were only 50 other people, a novel archeological site with one of the most important international collections of rock art and archeological stays in the Paleolithic age.
Screen shot from virtual reality revel in within La Garma caves in Northern Spain
La Garma is a UNESCO World Heritage site as part of the Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art in northern Spain. La Garma houses five levels of caves and is considered the most important Paleolithic archaeological discovery since the mid-twentieth century.
The cave’s lower gallery, which was discovered in 1995 features the world’s biggest example of paleolithic flooring. The flooring and ancient stays inside the cave have been neatly preserved through a landslide 16,000 years ago that sealed off the cave to the elements.
Two decades after the rediscovery and preliminary learning about the lower gallery at La Garma, scientists saw the need for additional study of the cave’s underground system-its microclimate and microbiology-and assessment of the state of conservation of the rock art.
Still of La Garma cave flooring in Memoria VR revel in
With the support of American shoe dressmaker Stuart Weitzman, who has been producing footwear in Spain for the reason that the 1970s, the World Monuments Fund has been working on a project to conserve and promote La Garma with Morena Films and Overlat studio.
A multidisciplinary team of experts have been studying the cave’s ecosystem and archaeological remains. Two short documentaries and a virtual reality experience have been produced to allow people to enjoy and learn about this extraordinary site.
Now anyone can “travel” to Northern Spain on a virtual consult with those hardly ever visited Spanish caves Memoria: Stories of La Garma, through award-winning VR director Rafael Pavón, is a new virtual reality revel in simply introduced through Viveport, the arena’s first limitless VR subscription service.
This VR experience is really the only way to learn about these fascinating caves due to the danger of the site.
Only 50 people have physically been able to enter them in the past 16,000 years and the caves are off-limits to the public but by mapping them for virtual experiences, they can now be viewed virtually by anyone.
Still from Memoria of cave drawings of animals in La Garma caves
Memoria premiered in 2019 on the Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology of Cantabria in Santander and it used to be this museum’s staff who worked with Rafael Pavon on the VR experience.
Narrated by Geraldine Chaplin (The Crown, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), this VR film is an incredible story from the Paleolithic era about a community who on returning from hunting discovered that the La Garma caves they called home had been blocked off by a landslide, creating a time capsule.
Thousands of relics, from cave-wall paintings of animals and signs to animal bones, seashells, and artifacts carved in bone, remained undisturbed and intact for 16,000 years.
So what is the VR experience like, what equipment is required and how much does it cost? The Memoria: Stories of La Garma VR experience is impressive and is compatible with most VR headsets.
The user can “walk” around three spaces of the cave, captured with millimetric precision using laser scanners and photogrammetry.
The viewer will see paleolithic hunters, a mother, and her child and a cave lion who made his way deep into the cave to live his final days.
You can watch videos about the caves but the nature of VR means people can physically explore the caves, virtually pick things up, and become immersed, as if they were in the caves.
A UK viewer of the content makes an onetime purchase for 4.56 from Viveport and then can view the experience repeatedly.
Alternatively, Viveport has an unlimited VR subscription service called Infinity that can be purchased as a monthly ( 12.99) or annual subscription (works out as 8.99/month), allowing unlimited access to their entire range of content.
