Stonehenge builders had geometry skills to rival Pythagoras

From the independent.co.uk article:
Stone Age Britons had a sophisticated knowledge of geometry to rival Pythagoras – 2,000 years before the Greek “father of numbers” was born, according to a new study of Stonehenge.

Five years of detailed research, carried out by the Oxford University landscape archaeologist Anthony Johnson, claims that Stonehenge was designed and built using advanced geometry.

The discovery has immense implications for understanding the monument – and the people who built it. It also suggests it is more rooted in the study of geometry than early astronomy – as is often speculated.

Mr Johnson believes the geometrical knowledge eventually used to plan, pre-fabricate and erect Stonehenge was learnt empirically hundreds of years earlier through the construction of much simpler monuments.

He also argues that this knowledge was regarded as a form of arcane wisdom or magic that conferred a privileged status on the elite who possessed it, as it also featured on gold artefacts found in prehistoric graves.

Read the article here.

The Shape of Music

How do harmony and melody combine to make music?

From the seedmagazine.com article:
Roughly 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras observed that objects, such as the anvils he purportedly studied, produced harmonious sounds while vibrating at frequencies in simple whole-number ratios.

More complex ratios gave rise to more dissonant sounds, which indicated that human beings were unconsciously sensitive to mathematical relationships inherent in nature. By showing that the world could be described mathematically, Pythagoras not only provided an important inspiration for physics, but he also discovered a particular affinity between mathematics and music–one that Gottfried Leibniz was to invoke centuries later when he described music as the “unknowing exercise of our mathematical faculties.”

For a thousand years, Western musicians have endeavored to satisfy two fundamental constraints in their compositions. The first is that melodies should, in general, move by short distances. When played on a piano, melodies typically move to nearby keys rather than take large jumps across the keyboard. The second is that music should use chords (collections of simultaneously sounded notes) that are audibly similar. Rather than leap willy-nilly between completely unrelated sonorities, musicians typically restrict themselves to small portions of the musical universe, for instance by using only major and minor chords. While the melodic constraint is nearly universal, the harmonic constraint is more particularly Western: Many non-Western styles either reject chords altogether, using only one note at a time or build entire pieces around a single unchanging harmony.

Together these constraints ensure a two-dimensional coherence in Western music analogous to that of a woven cloth. Music is a collection of simultaneously occurring melodies, parallel horizontal threads that are held together tightly by short-distance motion. But Western music also has a vertical, or harmonic, coherence. If we consider only the notes sounding at any one instant, we find that they form familiar chords related to those that sound at other instants of time. These basic requirements impose nontrivial constraints on composers–not just any sequence of chords we imagine can generate a collection of short-distance melodies. We might therefore ask, how do we combine harmony and melody to make music? In other words, what makes music sound good?

Read the article here.

The Lost Gods

From smithsonianchannel.com:
The ancient world was filled with innumerable Gods, but what happened to these forgotten entities- where have the old Gods gone? The rise and fall of the ancient civilizations are highlighted: the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Celts, the Romans, the Maya and the Inca. Journey through faith and time in this enlightening series.

There are some nice sneak peek videos from the full Episodes.

Go here to see the videos.

Stonehenge centre ‘will be ready for Olympics

From the .guardian.co.uk article:
Ambitious plans for a world-class visitor centre for Stonehenge may have dwindled to a world-class prefab, but yesterday both English Heritage and the government pledged it would be built in time for the 2012 Olympics.

After over 20 years of bitter public debate, and an estimated £9m spent on consultants, designs and planning inquiries, the proposed £57m visitor centre collapsed last year when the government abandoned, on cost grounds, the plan to tunnel the A303 where it passes one of the world’s most famous prehistoric monuments.

Ordered by culture minister Margaret Hodge to sort the site in time for the expected Olympics tourism bonanza, English Heritage yesterday launched yet another public consultation, this time on a new quick fix solution: a “temporary” building lasting up to 20 years, costing up to £20m, and providing a café, a shop and twice as much parking.

It could be achieved either by drastically upgrading the present site – damned almost 20 years ago by a parliamentary committee as “a national disgrace” – or on one of four other sites scattered across the edge of the world heritage site: some on National Trust land, others on privately owned or Ministry of Defence land.

In most options there would be park and ride schemes leaving visitors to walk the remaining 1.25km to the stones, across a landscape spattered with other monuments completely overlooked by most visitors today. In every case the A344 branch road, which passes within yards of the stones, would be closed and turfed over.

Read the article here.

Italy declares Pompeii emergency

From the bbc.co.uk article:
The ancient city of Pompeii has fallen into such disrepair that the Italian government has declared a “state of emergency” in a bid to save the ruins.

Ministers intend to appoint a special commissioner to oversee the site, and have earmarked extra funding for it.

According to analysts, the ruins have suffered from lack of investment, mismanagement, litter and looting.

Pompeii was buried by a volcanic eruption in AD79 and was not rediscovered until the 18th Century.

The volcanic debris preserved many of the city’s buildings, frescos, silverware, mosaics and other artefacts.

But experts complain that the relics are now in danger.

“Every year at least 150 sq m (1,600 sq ft) of fresco and plasterwork are lost for lack of maintenance,” Antonio Irlando, a regional councillor responsible for artistic heritage, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

“The same goes for stones: at least 3,000 pieces every year end up disintegrating,” he said.

Read the article here.
There is also a short video describing the situation.

Ancient River Camps Are Oldest Proof of Humans in Paris

From the nationalgeographic.com article:
Hunter-gatherers who made temporary camps along the Seine about 9,500 years ago were among the earliest “residents” of what is now Paris, archaeologists say.

A recent dig near the river revealed thousands of arrowhead bits and animal bones from about 7600 B.C. that scientists say are the oldest evidence of human occupation within modern city boundaries.

Previously the oldest such evidence was a 4500 B.C. fishing village near the current Gare de Lyon railway station.

Nomadic tribes camped at the newfound site for periods of days or even weeks while they collected flint to make arrowheads for hunting, the dig team believes.

Read the article here.

Bugatti Veyron Sang Noir

Twelve images of the Bugatti Veyron Sang Noir here.

The 500,000 Artifacts of George Washington

From the slate.com article:
How did archaeologists find half a million objects at one site?

Archaeologists announced on Wednesday that they had unearthed George Washington’s boyhood home at a site not far from Fredericksburg, Va. Over the course of a seven-year excavation, the researchers found more than 500,000 artifacts. How can there be half a million artifacts at one site?

Almost everything you find counts as an artifact, as long as it was made or impacted by people. The objects comprise more than just materials from George Washington’s home; archaeologists excavated a full acre of land, and the items they collected spanned 10,000 years of history—from rocks used to sharpen prehistoric stone tools to Civil War-era buttons. The collection does include an expensive tea set thought to be owned by the Washingtons and a pipe bearing a Masonic crest, but most of the objects are far more mundane, like nails, broken glass, or cracked egg shells. The only artifacts that weren’t removed from the site are remnants of old buildings—either architectural fragments that are still intact or foundation stones that were weighed and left at the site.

Read the full article here.