So guys if you haven't heard about anchor it's the easiest way to make a podcast. Let me explain it's free. There's creation tools that allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or your computer and anchor will distribute your podcast for you. So it can be heard on Spotify Apple podcast and many more you can make money from your podcast with no minimum listenership everything. You need to make a podcasts in one place download the free anchor app or go to Anchored FM to get started. Welcome to the human History Podcast interlude series. I'm James Baldwin. Thank you so much for being here. This is just going to be the first of more short episodes as part of an interlude series element not only to create more. Assistant content but also as a way to keep up with all the amazing archaeological finds happening every day all over the world. My plan is to start doing a weekly or excuse me bi-weekly every two weeks Roundup of interesting archaeological and historical discoveries. Keep you updated on interesting news related to the world of archaeology. These interlude episodes are going to be shorter than normal episodes and the hopefully You something to supplement the more in-depth episodes, which I'll be releasing every month or about every six weeks to start out for the first installment in our interlude series. I thought given the time of year that it would be appropriate to start off by sharing a short list of some of the best finds from the last decade. So without further Ado. This is my top five. best finds of the decade in chronological order So number five from 2010. We had a new hinge discovered near Stonehenge. So there was an ancient henge site. It was only about a few thousand feet from the famous Stonehedge site as discovered by researchers who were conducting a survey of the land around the famous monument. It's believed that 4,000 year old site. This new site is about Four thousand plus years old. It's believed to be contemporary with the building of Stonehenge. So right around the same exact time, but it was believed to be construction of constructed of Timber. So obviously the timber is no longer there but the researchers were able to use this survey technology this ground-penetrating radar and I believe that they use magnetometry. Yeah. So they were able to kind of see where the post holes used to sit and they could see that they were situated in a circle and the specific way the kind of made it obvious that there was a they believe that there that there was a hinge there. It's actually interestingly. It's oriented in the exact same direction as its more famous cousin. One of the archaeologists for Stonehenge. Dr. Amanda Chadbourne. She said quote this new monument is part of a growing body of evidence which shows how important the summer and winter solstices were to the ancient peoples who built Stonehenge. So researchers used a combination, like I said researchers used a combination of ground penetrating radar Imaging and magnetometry, and this is a technique that map's the change. Hundreds of magnetism in the soil which can help to build a picture. What's underneath? And this is all part of huge joint effort called the Stonehenge hidden Landscapes project from the University of Birmingham in the UK, Birmingham. I should say it's not an Alabama quote the project aims to map 14 square kilometers of the Stonehenge landscape using the latest geophysical Imaging techniques to recreate visually the iconic prehistoric. Newman and its surroundings and transform how we understand this technique this unique landscape and its monuments and quote. So it's pretty cool. And actually I think this is like a three-year project that they're doing and they found this henge or obviously, it's alright, this is 2010. So the project is already over but this was a three-year project and they found this new hinge in I think the first two weeks of the project, so it's pretty cool. Sure, you know sure if you were to go and and look you'd see that they probably found some other very interesting things in those surveys. Okay number four from 2012. There's a brand-new Honduran civilization discovered. So it was the Honduran in the Hunter and jungle researchers used lidar detection technology to fly over and penetrate the canopy. And what they were looking for was the fabled White City, which is also referred to as the city of the monkey god and legends. This is a city that That locals had spoken about that archaeologists and historians who had visited the region in the past had documented references to but no one had ever actually been able to find it or ever seen it. So this is from the Nat Geo article quote archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas Earthworks. Ends in an Earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago and then vanished so it's pretty amazing what they were able to see with this lidar technology. They were able to kind of see that there was this kind of vast network of you know different features that were hidden by the jungle that really made it clear that there wasn't just a city there if there was an entire civilization. And you know in contrast to the popularity of the Maya Who be the neighbors of the civilization. There's not even a name for these peoples really didn't even understand that they existed until until this, you know, this first exploration in 2012 using lidar research is actually went back in 2015 to kind of Follow up on what they had found with the initial lidar scanning and that's kind of, you know, when they came across they were able to verify a lot of these features that they had seen in the lidar. So just survey it initially 2012 the researchers Enlisted the help of the center for Airborne laser mapping at the University of Houston. They used a small. Airplane the Cessna skymaster which carried $1,000,000 lidar scanner Flew Over the Valley probe the jungle canopy with a laser. So for those of you that don't know why it R is able to map the ground even through dense rainforests uses lasers similar to regular radar but uses lasers obviously helps to delineate any archaeological features. That might be present. So they process these images and they just saw features that stretched over a mile of terrain. And then as I said, they went back with an expedition and that was able to confirm on the ground all the features that they saw in the lidar images along with a lot more and like I said, it was an ancient city, but the archaeologist They didn't believe there was an existence of a single lost city as the Legends described, but they really looks off found that there was several Lost Cities taken together representing an entire Lost Civilization, which is pretty incredible to be honest. Like if you really think about it, it's 2012 and In 2012 are still finding out that there were entire civilizations of people who existed on this Earth before us who we had no idea ever existed. number 3 on 2013 This is kind of a 2012/2013 story Richard the Third King Richard the third his remains were confirmed in 2013. So Richard the third was the last of the plantagenet Kings. He was the last English king to die in battle. Actually, he fell to Henry Tudor's forces near town called Market Bosworth and 1485 after the battle. His body was taken to Leicester where it was buried without much ceremony as original tomb was believed to have been removed during the English Reformation in the 16th century. And a lot of people actually thought that his body was thrown into the river. But in 2012 the Richard the third Society commission and archaeological excavation the old site of greyfriars Priory Church during which the skeleton was uncovered under the parking lot. Actually. If you haven't heard this story or looked into this story much. I would highly encourage you to I'm only doing you know an overview of the stories here, but this this story is actually pretty crazy the hole just the whole process of finding it in the clues that they followed in the fact that they actually found it. It's all it's pretty it's pretty amazing and it wasn't until 2013 that the DNA evidence was actually used as the final piece of evidence which length the bones to Richard the third. They also used radiocarbon dating and contemporary reports of his appearance, which they matched against features that they cleaned from the skeleton. And they actually the DNA evidence. It's very interesting. So they took DNA obviously they were able to extract some DNA from the skeleton and they compared that to mitochondrial DNA of two descendants of Richard III's oldest Sister Anne of York who were obviously still alive in 2012 and 2013 and in that way they were able to Really put that final nail in the coffin. I guess as a bad expression to using this and this instance, but either way it's pretty amazing. And like I said, if you if you have the chance, I would strongly encourage you to look more into the entire story because it's pretty incredible. Number 2 from 2017 the earliest hydraulic Enterprise in China 50 100 years ago. So this is from my source on this article is all from penis publication on the National Academy of Sciences talks about the Les anges you culture of the Yangtze Delta and they were dated from around 3,000 to 2300 BC unlike other cultures in the area. They were peoples who lived by the monsoonal seasons and presumably this was one of the reasons for the war. Engineering that was discovered but religious and political political reasons may have also played a part in in the projects as far as creating labor and forced labor and a lot of there's it's the paper goes into a lot. I'm trying I'm trying to keep it short and simple here. It's really interesting though. So actually there were few Farmers a couple local farmers who were who are out digging and what they thought they were digging on a small hill it actually they uncovered a piece of one of the high dams of this ancient hydraulic water system and from that they were able to uncover more of the high dams and then discovered the low dams and then eventually the levees and Well of the different systems. And so this is from one of the researchers on the project. I'm sorry. This is just from the this is from the Academic journal the scientific journal written after the excavation quote the recently excavated. Liang's you hydraulic system in the Yangtze Delta has pushed back the date of formalized water Engineering in China to approximately 50 100 years ago so much earlier than they previously thought that any sort of project of this scale was going on in that area of the world, you know, and not even just that Area it represents one of the largest hydraulic landscape engineering projects in all of the ancient world including it has dams levees canals reservoirs a lot of other features and in the paper says that they estimated it took about three thousand people around eight years to move the nearly 2.9 Million cubic meters of Earth and I look that up just out of curiosity to do a conversion. Asian and you know, obviously there's different variables there's moisture in the soil and things that can affect its weight. But just as a general marker you can think of 2.9 Million cubic meters of Earth in terms of pounds weighing about three and a half trillion pounds. That's about how much Earth at light that's like the minimum from what I looked up, you know, that's a minimum of what they Probably need to move over the course of this eight year period in order to build this so it's pretty incredible and really why I find this the one why this one stood out to me and one of the questions that the researchers had even after all of this excavation is how such a system originated and developed in a largely isolated Realm of the ancient world. Not as part of a greater Empire or some equivalent. Rise The Landings you seem to seem to have been you know very much on their own and in their own small area, but they were able to build this really Monumental engineering project, which is really incredible. To think about 3,000 or 5,000 years ago and they were building large scale multi-year. Water engineering projects. It's pretty incredible. So number one from 2019. There's a 5000 year old city discovered in Israel. So the archaeological site of n is sewer as in the Wadi era Valley North of Tel Aviv and archaeologists discovered an ancient city there that was home to as many as 6,000 people. Yeah, and it's dated to our five five thousand years ago surrounded by a fortification wall. They were able to find intricate intricate residential and public areas streets and alleys. Which you know which points to relatively organized society and this is a quote from there was a statement released by The excavation directors, which I'll share a few different statements from the directors apologize if I mess up any of these pronunciations, the directors were ete lad Yitzhak pause and Dina Shalem. So this is a quote from them quote such a city could not develop without having behind it a guiding hand and an administrative mechanism. It's impressive planning the tools brought to Israel from Egypt found at the site and it's seal impressions of proof of this and quote. So, yeah also found at the site where millions of artifacts and these provided even more evidence for the complex nature of the society that was living there. They found Pottery fragments. Flint tools Basalt Stone vessels in the temples Courtyard, they found a huge Stone basement a huge Stone Basin which held liquids which the from the statement they said it was likely used for religious rituals another quote from the directors quote. This is a huge City megalopolis and relation to the early Bronze Age where thousands of inhabitants who made their living from agriculture lived and traded with Current regions and even with different cultures and Kingdoms in the area and quote. So it's pretty amazing. You know, we're still even in 2019 still kind of discovering these these sites where you know in ancient times and in areas where we thought that hunter-gatherers and only small villages had cropped up, you know, we're finding cities of thousands of people with intricate networks of Streets and public areas and artifacts that tell of extensive trade so, you know, there's always it's just always amazing the things that are out there to be found and one of the you know, it's kind of one of the offhand comments that was mentioned in the article, but something that I thought was really cool and it said that below some of the houses in the city the archaeologists also uncovered evidence of Neiman older City. Which dated back around 7,000 years ago to the early coverage. So again all so many things to be discovered and you know, there's obviously a lot of things I wasn't able to include but I would love to see what your list looks like. So if you head to the Instagram at human history pod find the post for this episode leave a comment with your top five archaeological finds of the decade next week. I'll be back with the first weekly Roundup. So make sure to subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to all so don't hesitate to share this podcast with anyone interested in archaeology or history. The last thing I am in the process of working on a new podcast that will explore the intersection between science and technology and archaeology. I'll be doing episodes on the Technique used by modern archaeologists from lidar to strategic Rafi to electron microscopes and also on the different techniques and disciplines employed by archaeologists like geology geology and botany. So keep an eye out for that. Thanks again so much for being here until next time be excellent to each other.
Welcome to the first installment of The Human History Podcast: An Interlude. This is a place for shorter episodes on interesting topics like the top archaeological finds of the decade and also weekly roundups on archaeology news and discoveries. This first episode is going to be my list of The Top 5 Archaeological Finds of the Decade (2010-2019). There was a new henge found at stonehenge (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2010/07/22july-stonehenge.aspx), a new civilization discovered in the Guatemalan jungle (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-honduras-lost-city-monkey-god-maya-ancient-archaeology/), discovery and confirmation of the remains of King Richard III (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-32054214), one of the most complex water engineering project in the ancient world discovered in China (https://www.pnas.org/content/114/52/13637), and a 5,000 year old city discovered in Israel (https://www.livescience.com/ancient-city-discovered-israel.html). Other sources for this episode: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-10718522 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/7/100723-stonehenge-woodhenge-twin-timber-circle-gaffney-science/ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882  ---   This episode is sponsored by  · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. 