* Astronomy

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RE: Ancient Britains

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Archaeologists have unearthed the tiny skeleton of a 3,500-year-old baby at a quarry near Peterborough, in Eastern England.
The discovery was made close to the centre of a Bronze Age burial mound at Pode Hole - a sprawling gravel quarry west of the village of Thorney, which is about eight miles east of Peterborough.

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More than 10,000 of the most important ancient and historical sites around Scotland's coastline are at risk of being destroyed by the storms and rising sea levels that will come with global warming.
Sites in jeopardy include the neolithic settlement of Skara Brae on Orkney and the prehistoric ruins at Jarlshof on Shetland. Others under threat range from Viking burial boats to Iron Age brochs and Mesolithic middens.
New surveys for Historic Scotland reveal that the remains of communities up to 9000 years old could be lost for ever due to accelerating coastal erosion.

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A DNA sample is to be requested from men in a Moray village to solve a mystery dating back thousands of years.
Tests on the genetic make-up of volunteers later this month will help investigators build up a picture of the origins of the Scots.
The results will be the focus of a research project using genetics to understand relationships among the people of Scotland and their connections with their UK and European "cousins". The whole project is to be filmed for broadcast on a new TV service.
Fochabers has been picked for one of the sample groups along with Islay, Skye, Lewis and Harris and men coming forward to be tested will be able to discover if their Scottish ancestry is linked to the early Pict settlers of Scotland, the colonising Norse Vikings or to those who came across from early medieval Ireland.

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Blobrana · L

Archaeological treasures unearthed in the north-east of Scotland have gone on display. The collection of artefacts, dating back to the Bronze Age, is the subject of a new exhibition at Peterhead's Arbuthnot Museum (Aberdeenshire, Scotland). They include flint axe heads, jewels, urns and funeral pots - all dug up in and around Buchan.
Also on display are mysterious decorative spheres, which are thought to be unique to the north-east. They date back to Neolithic times around 3,000 BCE - and no one knows exactly what they were used for. The most likely explanation is that they were used in some type of ancient ceremony. The spheres can vary from simple round balls to elaborately carved spheres.

"Many of these artefacts were discovered in the 19th century and have been stored very carefully. It is great to be able to bring them together for this display" - Spokesperson for the museum

The exhibition runs until November 21 as part of Scottish Archaeology Month.

Source: The Press and Journal

Blobrana · L

Everyone loves hedgehogs, with their snuffly little noses and punky hairdos. But research into Britain's oldest recipes suggests our ancestors loved them in a rather different way - roasted.
A team from the food science department at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff has discovered that, along with nettle pudding, roasted hedgehogs can be traced back thousands of years. The researchers spent two months scouring Britain's culinary history to reveal what our forefathers ate and drank.

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Blobrana · L

The ancient Egyptians were not the only ones to mummify their dead, according to a study in this month's Antiquity Journal that claims prehistoric Scottish people created mummies too.
The researchers do not think the Egyptians influenced the Scots, but that mummification arose independently in the two regions.
Initial evidence for Scottish mummies was announced in 2005, when archaeologists unearthed three preserved bodies an adult female, an adult male and an infant buried underneath two Bronze Age roundhouses in South Uist, Hebrides, at a site called Cladh Hallan. The bodies date to between 1300 and 1500 B.C.

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Blobrana · L

Ferrybridge Henge

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RE: Ancient Britains

Blobrana · L

A long-standing mystery over the way men's skulls changed from long to round in medieval Europe has been deepened by discoveries at a Yorkshire village.
Huge volumes of data collected at Wharram Percy cast doubt on all current theories about the unexplained blip between the 11th and 13th centuries which has been recorded by archaeologists across the continent.
Immigration and climate change have been the two main hypotheses but neither makes sense of the 700 Yorkshire skeletons. They are expected to cause widespread revision of the period's history, as the first large-scale find from a single, accurately-dated indigenous community.

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