Wednesday 20 October 2010

Archeologists aim to shed light on Sherwood Forest ancient monument

ARCHEOLOGISTS are bidding to shed light on one of Notts' most mysterious ancient monuments.

Three years ago the Forestry Commission revealed that the Friends of Thynghowe had found a Viking meeting place in the Birklands, part of Sherwood Forest, near Mansfield.

The earthen mound has now been listed on English Heritage's National Monument Record.

New studies have also found the name Thynghowe in an ancient Sherwood Forest book dated to around the 1200s.

But more research is needed to understand its mysterious story.

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Sunday 17 October 2010

Who Ate All the Pigs in Medieval Denmark?

It’s fair to assume that Valdemar the Conqueror, while ruling over Denmark in the early 1200s, ate like a king. But, what was the diet like for the peasants below him? The answer depends on where in Denmark the peasants called home.

Radford University anthropology professor Cassady Yoder researched the diets of peasants of medieval Denmark and found a significant difference in the foods consumed by those living in rural areas as opposed to city-dwelling peasants. Yoder’s research was published in the September issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

As part of her research, Yoder examined the diet of Dane peasants in Ribe, Denmark’s largest city during medieval times, the mid-sized city of Viborg and the population buried at a rural Cistercian monastery. Yoder found significant regional variation among the different sites. She says the city dwellers in Ribe and Viborg ate more protein rich foods such as meat from cows, pigs and fish.

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Tuesday 12 October 2010

Hungate dig to feature on Time Team

The Hungate excavation is the biggest ever archaeological dig in York city centre.

Highlights of the dig include uncovering part of a 1,700 year old Roman cemetery and learning more about Viking York.

The dig began in 2007 and is scheduled to take five years, at a cost of £3.3 million.

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Viking treasure discovered in North Yorkshire village

A VIKING treasure pendant, which has laid buried for more than 1,000 years, has been unearthed by an amateur archaeologist.

The silver pendant, known as Thor's Hammer, has been declared treasure at an inquest in Harrogate.

It had been found near Coprove in September last year, by metal detectorist Michael Smith, who, not knowing what it was, had dismissed it as worthless.

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Monday 11 October 2010

Weymouth's Vikings set for Time Team

THE Vikings are coming… on a Time Team special featuring war graves on the Weymouth relief road route.

The mass burial pit was unearthed in June, 2009 on the top of the Ridgeway with 50 decapitated skulls and the bodies strewn nearby.

The grim discovery will be included in a show called In The Real Vikings: A Time Team Special on Monday, October 11 at 8pm on Channel 4.

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'Mini-Pompeii' Found in Norway

Norwegian archaeologists have unearthed a Neolithic “mini Pompeii” at a campsite near the North Sea, they announced this week.

Discovered at Hamresanden, not far from Kristiansand’s airport at Kjevik in southern Norway, the settlement has remained undisturbed for 5,500 years, buried under three feet of sand.

“We expected to find an 'ordinary' Scandinavian Stone Age site, badly preserved and small. Instead, we discovered a unique site, buried under a thick sand layer,” lead archaeologist Lars Sundström, of the Museum of Cultural History at the University in Oslo, told Discovery News.

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Archaeologists find ‘mini-Pompeii’

The most well-preserved pottery from the Stone Age ever found in Norway has turned up in an unspoiled dwelling site not far from Kristiansand. The find is considered an archaeological sensation.

The discovery of a “sealed” Stone Age house site from 3500 BC has stirred great excitement among archaeologists from Norway’s Museum of Cultural History at the University in Oslo. The settlement site at Hamresanden, close to Kristiansand’s airport at Kjevik in Southern Norway, looks like it was covered by a sandstorm, possibly in the course of a few hours.

The catastrophe for the Stone Age occupants has given archaeologists an untouched “mini-Pompeii,” containing both whole and reparable pots.

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Monday 4 October 2010

New images may yield Viking ships

Archaeologists think they have found two more Viking ships buried in Vestfold County south of Oslo. The biggest may be 25 metres long, larger than any found so far.

This image, and another like it, may lead archaeologists to the discovery of more Viking ships buried south of Oslo. PHOTO: LBI ArchPro/NIKU

Road construction near the old Viking trading center at Kaupang has led to the discovery of two large ship silhouettes on ground radar pictures. The pictures have been made possible through a venture involving the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, NIKU) and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archeological Prospection and Virtual Archeology.

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