archeology (Page 2)

We recently wrote about how some modern miseries aren’t so modern after all. But good things happened in the past, as well. The oldest remains of a seafaring ship ever found has just been discovered in a cave in Egypt.

Florida archeologist Cheryl Ward found wooden planks found in the manmade caves in Egypt that are about 4,000 years old, making them the world’s most ancient ship timbers. Scholars have long known that Egyptians traded with cultures in what is now Ethiopia and Yemen, but they weren’t sure if they traveled by land or by sea, since many scientists thought the ancient Egyptians did not have the naval technology to travel long distances on open water.
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An abcnews.com exclusive reports that many archeologists work in the midst of wars and sometimes they have even started wars.
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Archeology is too exclusive and too commercial, and only benefits a limited circle of academics instead of the general public, according to Simon Thurley, the retiring director of the Museum of London.

Thurley says that property developers in London spent millions on archeological excavation over the past ten years, yet the vast majority of finds made in Britain remain unseen and unheard of by ordinary people.

Ninety per cent of the tens of thousands of finds made each year are never shown to anyone except a few scholars. ?If that?s the case,? he says, ?Why are we digging them up? It?s not a question of money, but of imagination and determination.?
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On the National Geographic website, Bijal P. Trivedi reports on an NPR interview by Alex Chadwick of Charles ?Chip? Stanish, a UCLA archaeologist who is searching in the remote highlands of Peru for the lost temples of the Pukara, an ancient people that preceded the Inca by more than 2,500 years.

Stanish thinks that ancient Pukara was one of the first civilizations to engage in regional trade. He looks for sites along a 2,000 year-old road linking the Peruvian highlands with Amazonian lowlands, where he believes he will find important trade goods buried among the ruins.
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