The British Museum is trying to raise enough money to purchase a brass astrolabe quadrant unearthed three years ago in an old inn outside the city walls of Canterbury. The astrolabe has been dated to about 1388, and is thought to have been carried as an every-day item by a cleric or merchant.

Archaeologist Mark Horton spotted a floor made of Portland cement at England’s Bristol Docks. The floor is thought to be the first industrial use of the material, invented by Joseph Aspdin in 1824. The floor once supported a ship-building factory designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1839. “We already associate Brunel with a long list of world-firsts, but now we can add cement to this. His genius lay in identifying the revolutionary materials that built the modern world,” Horton said.

In Cambridge, the foundations of the world’s largest telescope from the late Victorian era were uncovered. “With its perfect circle looking in the ground rather like a prehistoric monument, in its time the telescope was referred to as an ‘imperial philosophical machine’: a tool by which western science could measure or control universal space/time. Interestingly enough, this is also exactly how many archaeologists interpret Stonehenge and other early monuments!” exclaimed Christopher Evans, director of the University of Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

A cave in Oregon has yielded 14,300-year-old feces thought to be the oldest biological evidence of humans in North America. “The pre-Clovis genie is sort of out of the bottle, and there’s no way of stuffing it back in,” commented Southern Methodist University archaeologist David Meltzer.

Two miles east of Old Jerusalem, Oded Lipschits of Tel Aviv University was excavating what was thought to be a Judean palace from 700 B.C. Now he thinks the building was used by Assyrian rulers. “The Assyrians kept a watchful eye, but didn’t let the locals feel a dominant foreign presence,” he explained.

Colonial-era root cellars built by Moravians have been discovered at a building site at Moravian College. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission had recommended that the root cellars be preserved, but the school has decided to dismantle them.

New excavations will take place at Rome’s Circus Maximus. “We will clean up the whole site to make it practicable and legible, and give it a simple curved enclosure,” said Eugenio La Rocca of Sapienza University.

Poor kid. Even Indiana Jones was only nicknamed Indiana.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, April 3, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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