New museums in Qatar

Oil and gas-rich Qatar which is poor in archaeological sites is vying to create a cultural scene through building museums and acquiring precious masterpieces.


"We have an immense collection of pieces coming from several countries, collected over 15 years, which will be displayed in a series of museums, the first of which should be inaugurated by the end of 2007 or early 2008," said Sabiha al-Khemir, the director of Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070427/wl_mideast_afp/qatarcultureartmuseum_070427144056;_ylt=ApfmC1sM_zz4lj_y9nMj60tFeQoB

Venus goes home to Libya

"Italy can return to Libya an ancient statue of Venus taken to Rome during Italian colonial rule in 1912, after a court ruled on Monday it was not part of Italy's cultural heritage.

The headless "Venus of Cyrene" was carried away from the town of Cyrene -- an ancient Greek colony -- by Italian troops and put on display in Rome."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070423/sc_nm/italy_libya_venus_dc_1;_ylt=A0WTUe.80TBGZx4BtRNFeQoB

U B U W E B

This website is quite intriguing, but very quirky. Almost like walking into a complete digital museum.

"UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s). UbuWeb is completely free."

There's a large collection of famous works -- poetry, video, art, and a number of mishmashed genres.

UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print
LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we
post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with
unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass
hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and
videos.

Sounds like a marginal situation? Hardly. We've won many prestigious
internet awards and are acknowledged web-wide as the definitive source for
Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry. UbuWeb is on the syllabus of countless schools;
we've gotten queries from Ph.D. candidates seeking information to third-graders
researching a paper on concrete poetry. UbuWeb embodies an unstable community,
neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a
4-dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction,
growing "rhizomatically" with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.

New issue of Archaeology Magazine

The new issue of Archaeology Magazine (May/June 2007) is out and filled with all sorts of fun archaeology news:

How the Pyramids were built p22 by Bob Brier (everyone’s favorite mummy dude)

India’s forgotten cave temple p38

Symbols of Roman power discovered p34

Along with other information on radioactive isotopes, Viking experiments, chimp artifacts and archaeology at war.

Now on newsstands…

No nudes in Mexico!

Mexico is unlikely to allow U.S. artist Spencer Tunick stage a nude photo shoot at its famous Teotihuacan pyramids, citing possible damage to the ancient site.

Tunick has asked Mexican archaeological authorities for permission to photograph masses of naked people at Teotihuacan, Mexico's oldest major ruins, on May 6.

"The application has been filed and the National Anthropology and History Institute is evaluating it, but it looks like they won't let him. It's not the last word but they have told me it will be rejected," Alejandro Sarabia, who runs the Teotihuacan site, told Reuters on Monday.

Tunick has caused controversy by staging nude photo shoots in cities from Dusseldorf to Caracas. Organizers say the Mexico City event might top his record of 7,000 naked people photographed in Barcelona in 2003.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070416/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_mexico_tunick;_ylt=Ah4UMcn2ESNwyrZIm0npJgbMWM0F

Hobbit hominids lived the island life

A tantalizing piece of evidence has been added to the puzzle over so-called "hobbit" hominids found in a cave in a remote Indonesian island, whose discovery has ignited one of the fiercest rows in anthropology.

Explorers of the human odyssey have been squabbling bitterly since the fossilized skeletons of tiny hominids, dubbed after the diminutive hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkien's tale, were found on the island of Flores in 2003.

Measuring just a metre (3.25 feet) tall and with a skull the size of a grapefruit, the diminutive folk lived around 20,000 and 80,000 years ago and appear to have been skillful toolmakers, hunters and butchers.

They have been honored with the monicker Homo floresiensis by their discoverers, who contend the cave-dwellers were a separate species of human that descended from Homo erectus, which is also presumed to be the ancestor of modern man.

That claim has huge implications and has been widely contested.

If true, it would mean that H. sapiens, who has been around for around 150,000-200,000 years, would have shared the planet with rival humans far more recently than thought.

And it implies that H. sapiens and H. floresiensis lived side by side on Flores for a while -- and, who knows, may even have interbred, which could have left "hobbit" genes in our DNA heritage...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070418/sc_afp/scienceanthropology_070418104350;_ylt=Aslp2DWTp99yAREpt6VlAwhFeQoB

Elivs returns!

Casinos were always lucky places for Elvis Presley, so maybe he left just enough luck behind to rescue a piece of his legacy blown out of a Mississippi casino by Hurricane Katrina.

Or at least that's one way to look at the remarkable recovery and restoration of the badly damaged Army uniform costume Presley wore in 1960's G.I. Blues, the first movie he did after getting out of the Army himself. The khaki costume, which he wore to sing the film's title track, had just been installed in the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Biloxi when Katrina destroyed the gambling barge just days before its grand opening in 2005.

The costume, acquired by Hard Rock in 1988, floated out into the Gulf, along with other rock memorabilia collected by Hard Rock. Like so much else destroyed by Katrina, it was thought to be gone for good.

And then, incredibly, the costume washed up on shore days after the storm, complete with its Army green service cap. It was a mess — torn, stained with oil, rust and mildew, encrusted with salt and smelly. But it was still recognizable...

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2007-04-09-elvis-costume_N.htm

Joan of Arc remains not real

A rib bone supposedly found at the site where French heroine Joan of Arc was burned at the stake is actually that of an Egyptian mummy, according to researchers who used high-tech science to expose the fake.

The bone, a piece of cloth and a cat femur were said to have been recovered after the 19-year-old was burned in 1431 in the town of Rouen. In 1909 — the year Joan of Arc was beatified — scientists declared it "highly probable" that the relics were hers.
But starting last year, 20 researchers from France, Switzerland and Benin took another look. Even they were surprised to find the rib bone came from an Egyptian mummy. Their best guess is that the fake was cooked up in the 19th century, perhaps to boost the process of Joan of Arc's beatification. She was canonized as a saint in 1920 by the Roman Catholic Church.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070404/ap_on_re_eu/france_joan_of_arc


So if Joan is not really Joan it makes you wonder about other items...

Sinai pumice linked to ancient eruption

Egyptian archaeologists showed off white pumice Monday that they theorize was swept onto the northern Sinai desert by a tsunami triggered by the ancient volcanic eruption on Santorini island 530 miles away...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070403/ap_on_sc/egypt_ancient_eruption_5;_ylt=AvnnrU0MKhFaWd7E62kFpLNFeQoB

Mexico's buried treasures

Archaeologists in Mexico City announced plans Friday to hold tours of inaccessible buried ruins via glass-covered shafts looking down on the sites.

Two daylong guided tours of the sites, known as "archaeological windows," are scheduled for April, and will take visitors to about 20 sites currently open to the public, as well as 20 more "windows" hidden beneath stairwells, floors and patios of buildings normally not open to the public.

The underground ruins — some swallowed or encased by the foundations of the Spanish buildings constructed atop them following the 1521 conquest — cannot be fully excavated without destroying the crumbling colonial buildings above them...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070331/ap_on_sc/mexico_window_archaeology_3;_ylt=AsVRnBZtg8FuMm9Be2Zc87BFeQoB