Articles tagged with: Archaeology
Vikings Navigated With Translucent Crystals?
In some Icelandic sagas—embellished stories of Viking life—sailors relied on so-called sunstones to locate the sun’s position and steer their ships on cloudy days.
The stone would’ve worked by detecting a property of sunlight called polarization.
Polarization …
Modern Tools Reveal World War I Tunneling Tricks
On the battlefields of the Somme, history and geology meld. Beneath the chalky earth, men carved messages, memorials and poems into the walls of tunnels that were dug almost a century ago during the First …
NASA to Launch Guidelines to Protect Lunar Artifacts
This story appeared in Science Magazine [pdf] and online [html].
NASA is unlikely to be the operator of the next spacecraft to land on the moon, but the U.S. space agency is considering sending along some …
Early Oils
Buddhist artists in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, may have painted with oils centuries before European Renaissance painters developed the technique.
A team led by Marine Cotte at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, has analyzed tiny …
Probing Stonehenge
Archaeologists broke ground at Stonehenge last week for the first time since 1964, with the aim of using modern technology to pinpoint just when builders dragged the first bluestone pillars to the site some 4500 …
Pass the Salt
Since ancient times, people have been salting meat for storage. Now Iranian archaeologists are using the same trick to preserve the body of a man who mined some of that salt millennia ago.
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