In yet another act of idiocy, vandals have spray-painted graffiti on prehistoric rock art in Nevada’s Red Rock Canyon. Woody Smith paused Monday to admire the view as he walked past a manzanita shrub on Red Rock Canyon’s Lost Creek trail only to see the sight that vandals had left: 2-foot-tall letters, “NHC,” glaring in [...]
The burials of 400 ‘poor’ people, dating back between 2,700 to 2,000 years ago, have been found on the Giza plateau in Egypt. The burials were found beside a 200-meter long ancient wall called the ‘Wall of the Crow,’ that was first constructed in the time of the pyramids. “These graves are generally poor, with [...]
A ship dating back to the 1600s has been found near a hotel in central Stockholm. “The discovery of the wreck is extremely interesting given the place where it was made,” Maritime Museum Director Hans-Lennarth Ohlsson said in a statement from the Stockholm museum’s website. “There was a naval shipyard on this spot until the [...]
Fragments of 400-year-old smoking pipes, bearing what may be the earliest printing in English America, have been found in Jamestown, Virginia. Stamped with the names of Sir Walter Raleigh and other eminent men back in England, the pipes may have been intended to impress investors—underscoring Jamestown’s fundamentally commercial nature. “Finding these pipes has illuminated the [...]
Pablo Picasso’s former electrician has come forward with the astounding news that he owns 271 previously unknown artworks from the artist. The treasure trove of 271 pieces includes lithographs, cubist paintings, notebooks and a watercolour and is said to be worth about 60m euros (£50.6m). Pierre Le Guennec, 71, reportedly says Picasso gave him the [...]
New research into Christopher Columbus’ background is suggesting that he may be of Polish origins. The fresh evidence about Columbus’ background is revealed in a new book by Manuel Rosa, an academic at Duke University in the United States. He says the voyager was not from a family of humble Italian craftsmen as previously thought [...]
Parts of a religious building and a wall that encircled a town dating back to 100 B.C. have been found in Myanmar. The town remnants were found after an excavation in two sites in Wadee in central Myanmar during July-August this year, Xinhua reported citing the official daily New Light of Myanmar. The new find [...]
Hundreds of never-before-seen official photographs of Adolf Hitler, taken by his personal photographer, are set to hit the auction block. ”We’ve got somewhere around 800 negatives and maybe 600 stills, some from these negatives and other stills that don’t have a negative that they were developed from,” he said. ”They were all taken by Hitler’s [...]
What may be the remain as of a Neolithic farm have been unearthed at the site of a new bridge in Scotland. Trial trenches have been dug in a field on the outskirts of South Queensferry on land reserved for the planned Forth Replacement Crossing (FRC). Archaeologists plan further excavations to confirm what they believe [...]
The Battle of Towton in 1461 has been identified as the locale where the world’s first gunfight took place. It was the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil and changed the course of history. But a remarkable archaeological discovery means the Battle of Towton on March 29, 1461, will go down in history for [...]
How did mammals grow so large after dinosaurs died off? According to a new study, the answer all boils down to ecology. The herbivores grew large first, perhaps because they had an advantage in eating the vegetation left flourishing after the plant-eating dinosaurs were gone. Just like with today’s lions and elephants, the largest carnivores [...]
Construction of a wheelchair ramp at the Pirate & Treasure Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, has turned up artifacts that date back to the 18th century. A battered piece of bronze is the most significant item found so far, says John Powell of the Colonial Spanish Quarter Living History Museum. “It’s the hilt fragment of [...]
Egypt’s Al-Ahly Bank has released to the Supreme Council of Antiquities 200 artifacts that have sat unclaimed in their vaults since the late 19th and 20th centuries. These antiquities collectors had stored their collection inside boxes in the vaults of the Al-Ahly Bank, according to Tarek Amer, chairman of the bank. Since the early 20th [...]
A veritable trove of insects found preserved in amber for millions of years is raising questions about how long India was isolated before it merged with the Asian continent. The insects – bees, termites, spiders, and flies – had been entombed in the vast Cambay deposit in western India for about 50 million years. Scientists [...]
Looking to own a piece of American history? A copy of the first edition sheet music for “The Star-Spangled Banner” is set to hit the auction block. It’s estimated to go for $200,000 to $300,000 at the sale early next month. Christie’s auction house says it’s the only known copy in private hands and one [...]
Extremely well-preserved trees, which were buried in a landslide 50,000 years ago, have been uncovered by transportation works digging into a hill in Oregon. “They were cedar logs and they had bark on them. They had root wads on them. There were small branches,” he said. “You don’t see well-preserved wood 150 feet below grade [...]
Over 400 photographs taken during the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo have been found tucked away in a box in a dusty storeroom. Read more about Sutton Hoo here. “The whole story surrounding these photographs is something of a mystery. We know very little about the two women themselves – nothing except what we have [...]
The Egyptian temple dedicated to the god Ptah, located in Memphis, is surrounded by a lake of sewage due to neglect by sanitation authorities. The temple, built during the reign of Ramesses II (1279 BC – 1213 BC) and once a major tourist attraction, now serves as a home for stray dogs, reports Almasry Alyoum. [...]
Genetic testing performed on residents of a remote village in China have shown that they may be descended from a “lost legion” of Roman soldiers. Tests found that the DNA of some villagers in Liqian, on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in north-western China, was 56 per cent Caucasian in origin. Many of the [...]
Scientists have played a 3,000-year-old conch shell found at a pre-Inca site in Peru. You can click here and here to listen to some samples. “You can really feel it in your chest,” says Jonathan Abel, an acoustician at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. “It has a rough texture like a [...]
Skeletons dating back to the Stone Age have been discovered at Tal El-Karkh, in northwest Syria. A necklace of beads made of miscellaneous jewels, awls made of bones and multi-usage stone tools dating back to the late Stone Age were also discovered, said Syrian State-run news agency. ”The finds reflect the lifestyle prevalent at that [...]
A wooden ship dating back to the 13th-14th centuries has been found at a building site in China. Archeologists inspect a newly excavated sunken ship of ancient China’s Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368) in Heze of east China’s Shandong Province, Nov. 23, 2010. Archeologists in Shandong on Tuesday announced that they have discovered an ancient sunken ship [...]
Scientists have successfully revived ancient bacteria trapped in salt crystals for thousands of years. Lowenstein’s team, which has been pursuing this problem for years, began by examining the fluid inclusions under a microscope. “Not only did we find bacteria, we found several types of algae as well,” he said. “The algae actually may be the [...]
Ning Brought to you by Search Sign Up Sign In Teaching Digital History using documents , images , maps and online tools Main My Page Members Photos Videos Blogs Forum All Discussions My Discussions Add a Discussion Narrative map histories Posted by John Lee on November 22, 2010 at 4:02pm in Visual historical inquiry View Discussions 1507 Martin Waldseemüller map Online at the Library of Congress here C-Span Book Talk with Toby Lester on his book The Fourth Part of the World : The Race to the Ends of the Earth , and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name Free Press , November 3, 2009 Available online at http : www.c-spanvideo.org program Partof Examine the North Carolina Historical Map Overlay Project at the Carolina Digital Library and Archive . Available online at http :