Archive for 14th of May, 2005
Golden Tunic of Ancient Courtesan Discovered
May 14th
I’m tending not to reprint the press releases I get sent as they can be read on anyone else’s site. But this one seems to have slipped by unnoticed, which is a shame as it’s rather cool. A golden tunic has been discovered in the Ukraine. I assume it’s the lack of pictures which does it. It’s amazing given the fuss over an Iron Age earlier in the week. If there was one artefact guaranteed to be sexy you would have thought it would be the clothes of a hetaira, a courtesan.
Specialists of Kharkov National University named after V. Kazarin have managed to disclose one of mysteries of antique beauties’ attires. They investigated a rare finding – a fragment of antique goldwoven brocade discovered in the burial place of Roman times in the National Preserve of Tauric Khersones located in the territory of contemporary Sevastopol.
To read it all click: (more…)
The Stonehenge Enigma
May 14th
After yesterday’s review I thought I’d add another of an episode of Meet the Ancestors. I’ve been ambivalent to Meet the Ancestors since its early days. It looked like BBC2 executives had examined Time Team thoroughly and decided what made it so popular was it had a gimmick. So Meet the Ancestors had a gimmick too. They reconstructed the face of someone found at the site during the course of the programme. It was a mixed success. It was interesting the first time, tolerable the second. By the later episodes in the first series you knew that after Julian Richards had intelligently explained the mysteries of rural life in early Christian Ireland and the limits of what we can know from the archaeological evidence that he’d wheel out a portrait “…and here’s what she looked like!” He also did Blood of the Vikings, a history of Viking Britain. The gimmick being that it tied into a genetic survey of the country. If the BBC ever decide to investigate archaeological sites whilst breathing helium from party balloons, you can bet Julian Richards will be first choice for squeaky-voiced narrator.
And that’s a shame because this programme showed that if he can talk about More >
