Teaching history and archaeology to kids

The ancient Minoans were genetically European, DNA study reveals.

The Romans were undoubtedly master engineers. They were experts at civil engineering, building roads, improving sanitation, inventing Roman concrete, and constructing aqueducts that adhere to tolerances impressive even by today’s standards. Perhaps the best evidence of their aptitude is the fact that many of those structures still stand today, almost 2000 years later. They even began dabbling in technology vastly ahead of their time. Hero of Alexandria drew up plans for a rudimentary steam engine in his Spiritalia seu Pneumatica. He called it the aeolipile.

ON FEBRUARY 26, 1974, a young geologist managed to stretch Australian history by 20,000-odd years when he found 40,000-year-old human remains buried in a dry lake bed in south-western New South Wales.

The discovery, made in the midst of the Aboriginal rights movement – which would quickly intergrate the findings into its slogans – would later double the time that Australia's first humans were thought to have arrived on the continent.

Jim Bowler, now in his 80s, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne, was with the Australian National University when he came across the remains at Lake Mungo, about 700 km west of Sydney.

An ancient gold ring thought to have inspired JRR Tolkien to write The Hobbit goes on display at a Tudor house in Hampshire.

Preservation of a body is an interesting phenomenon, whether it be the evanescent embalming at a funeral home to prevent the body from decaying at the wake, or preservation for hundreds of years as is the case with Rosalia Lombardo in the Palermo catacombs. 

Embalming is a three-fold process of sanitation, presentation and presentation. While the process has ancient roots and is found throughout the world, the modern technique was not possible until the Civil War, when the high number of bodies needing to be shipped over distances necessitated research and led to Dr. Thomas Holmes discovering a method of arterial preservation.

This was later improved in 1867, the August Wilhelm von Hofmann discovered formaldehyde. Primarily it involves the replacement of fluids and blood with chemicals to prevent putrefaction.

Turkey: Italian archaeologists find Gate to the Underworld, In the ancient city of Hieropolis, in Phrygia, According to Greco-Roman mythology and tradition, the Gate to the Underworld, also known as Pluto's Gate - Ploutonion in Greek, Plutonium in...

A pre-Viking woolen tunic found beside a thawing glacier in south Norway shows how global warming is proving something of a boon for archaeology, scientists said on Thursday.

The greenish-brown, loose-fitting outer clothing — suitable for a person up to about 5 feet, 9 inches tall (176 centimeters) — was found 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level on what may have been a Roman-era trade route in south Norway. Carbon dating showed it was made around the year 300.

"It's worrying that glaciers are melting, but it's exciting for us archaeologists," Lars Piloe, a Danish archaeologist who works on Norway's glaciers, said at the first public showing of the tunic, which has been studied since it was found in 2011.

At some moment a few years after Jesus Christ died but before the second century began, someone made a brick on the island that would become the cornerstone of Great Britain.

The area was controlled by Rome then, and known as Britannia  and as the brick lay green, awaiting the kiln, a cat walked across the wet clay and left its footprints before wandering off to do something else. The clay was fired, the prints fixed, and the brick itself presumably became a piece of a building or road.

Two thousand years later, a Sonoma State master's student named Kristin Converse was poking around the holdings of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state. She was writing her thesis on the business and technology of brickmaking in Portlandia (known more formally as the Willamette Valley). A brick caught her eye. It was part of an odd group that was not of local origin. In one corner, there were the footprints of a cat. Where had this cat lived?