18 Excellent Archaeological Facts

hello everybody welcome back to another side projects video in this one we're gonna do something a little bit different i thought i'd make an extra long one for you guys and it's just a bunch of archaeology facts because who doesn't love those let's just jump in [Music] finders not keepers unlike a stereotypical dude with a metal detector waving it over the beaches and fields looking for lost roman hordes archaeologists do not keep anything they find well they're not supposed to anyway i mean seen indiana jones does he keep stuff it's been a long time in fact by law in the u.s at least anything found on state and federal land belongs to the public archaeology is concerned with gathering as much information about the history and culture of a site as possible every shard seed or bone they find is bagged tagged and photographed as well as researched and catalogued it sounds like something from csi bag and tag it boys the most common thing archaeologists find a bits of glass metal artifacts and bricks obviously these played an important role in the lives of people living at the time but once you've seen one bit of broken brick you've probably seen them always a bit just like as a kid i like archaeologists they just find loads of gold most of the excavated stuff is kept in archive somewhere but the most interesting examples make it into exhibitions for the general public to view cheese dreams wouldn't it be nice to always have your favorite snack on hand whenever you felt like you could just nibble off a chunk i mean yeah it's called a kitchen or perhaps you have a food you like so much you could eat it forever maybe that's what the mummies unearthed in the chinese taklaman district were thinking when they headed off to the afterlife nearly 4 000 years after they were buried archaeologists excavated their tombs and found several mummies sporting fetching necklaces made of what could be the world's oldest cheese nobody actually tasted the ancient treat that was probably smart but after analysis in the early 2000s it was confirmed as something without rennet and similar to kefir maybe the cheese had some powerful beauty properties too as the mummies weren't pretty good nick for being several millennia-old might have all said something to do with the mummification process less also that it didn't give them strange dreams for all eternity which is a myth by the way i know we're just using it as a funny thing here but the thing about drinking wine and cheese at the same time giving in bad dreams that's a myth found that in another video i made let's move on under the sea if digging through the dirt isn't really your thing but you still have a treasure-hunting itch to scratch and a wetsuit fetish to satisfy hey we're not judging maybe underwater archaeology is the discipline for you there are definitely easier ways to satisfy your wetsuit fetish all right over 70 of the earth's surface is water after all so just imagine the hidden artifacts waiting to be brought to the surface and it's not all about shipwrecks either following natural disasters or just the passage of time whole cities can end up submerged beneath the waves currently what is recognized as the oldest submerged city to be discovered is pablo petri in the south of greece and is thought to be over 5000 years old underwater vehicles and sonar may be used to identify and measure possible sites when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of excavating an area while most the handles used are actually the same as for traditional archaeology albeit with a waterproof twist artifact to the stars possibly the first underwater archaeological excavation which was carried out in 1901 recovered one of the most interesting objects ever found the anti-kythera mechanism named after the island that it was found near this ancient greek artifact was recovered from a shipwreck that wrecked itself being dated to somewhere around 80 to 50 years bc what made this find so unusual was that the mechanism was made up of intricate gears and cogs predating the next instance of such technology by at least a thousand years as only fragments were found the workings of the device have always been a mystery but in 2020 researchers at university college london finished recreating a digital model with the entire thing what they found is a sort of hang cranked astronomical calendar capable of tracing and predicting the position of planets solar and lunar cycles and eclipses i actually this has come up in a video i recently made and i was reading the comments and someone said there was a youtube channel who was trying to recreate this thing from tools that were available at the time rather than using modern technology and i have no idea what it was called but i'm sure if you look at the comments someone's going to point to that because it's incredible stone temple giants have any for rock concerts merlin's personal mode of transportation a very large clock for an incomplete circle of standing rock stonehenge sure does a lot to keep its name in the papers the stones located in wiltshire england have baffled historians and archaeologists alike for hundreds of years and new discoveries are being made all the time as recently as 2019 researchers found the remains of a matching circle in wales leading them to believe that this was the original location of the stonehenge bluestone circle before it was lugged all the way over to the current site jeffrey of monmouth who we can thank the popularizing the legends of king arthur wrote that the wizard merlin captured a stone circle called the giants dance and had actual giants move it to wheelchair just spoiler alert here that isn't what happened another location has been confirmed as broadly matching jeff's description who's to say this isn't in fact how the stones were i am that's not how they were moved don't believe the stories the cave of horror ah the cave of horror what would you expect to find in there pretty painted pots and delicate gold jewelry well no as the name suggests this cave in israel became the graveyard for 40 people who seemingly starved to death in it before the bach aqua revolt around a.d 132-135 and ultimately unsuccessful uprising by jews against the roman empire but wait there is more in the last few years as well as a 6 000 year old mummified child's body various arrowheads and some fragments of translated dead sea scrolls archaeologists also discovered the world's oldest basket clocking in at 10 000 years old fascinating old baskets exactly what we love to cover on side projects so there you go maybe not a cave of wonders exactly but not all horror after all but certainly certainly a fair dose of horror with the people who starved to death in the cave my little unicorn imagine holding onto a secret belief all your life no matter what anyone else said and then one day it comes true that's what happened for otto van gorick when he found what he thought to be proof of unicorns existing in 1663. excited by a load of old bones that had been discovered near the town of gwedenbergy set to work fashioning them into the skeleton of the mythical creature or maybe what it could have looked like if it had no back legs or much of a body of any sort at all true there was a large horn in the bone horde but to any trained eye or just probably most regular eyes it clearly came from an ice age woolly rhino and not unfortunately a delicate and not actually real horned horse van gurik did manage to get an illustration of his weird-looking creature published and the author of the book gottfried leibniz also believed this was some sort of hybrid creature of legend in the years since other bones from the skeleton have been identified as those of woolly mammoths so well sorry otto wild power but it looks like your imagination just stepped a little bit too far unicorns not real the spider god is coming as if 2020 wasn't already a nightmare year on its own thank god it's over try stepping into the shoes or maybe those snazzy striped sandals of the archaeologists in peru who discovered a mural of a massive spider on the side of an ancient temple and this isn't just any massive spider it's a massive spider holding knives the spider dates back over 3000 years and is believed to be a depiction of a spider god which is related to weather infertility yeah i mean nothing says making babies like a giant spider with knives the spider was only discovered accidentally when local farmers began demolishing the area to use for crops but it has now been recognized as an archaeological site and work will continue there once the covered pandemic is over or maybe just when the scary spider god goes to sleep with his knives the og archaeologist when thinking about non-hollywood archaeologists you tend to imagine studious people from the present day or recent past investigating human history or possibly victorian era fellows mounting expeditions to the far off lands of egypt indeed i have a friend who is a real life archaeologist he's a very normal dude he doesn't carry a giant whip he mostly works in a lab i think but what about before then were people just not interested in their shared past well no of course they were the first archaeologist is thought to be king nobody's of the neo-babylonian empire who ranged from approximately 556-539 bc now that is a long time ago to start with but he ended up starting the first archaeological excavations when he found temple foundations dating all the way back to 2200 bc setting a great example for the future he recorded his findings dated them but he was off by a couple of thousand years and even restored the temples his exploits were recorded for posterity on clay cylinders and depending on how good your cuneiform is you can read them for yourself for the british music if anyone actually reads uniform watching this video hit me up in the comments i'd be amazed don't worry translations are also available for everyone else of course what came first sometimes archaeological findings can be cause for big disputes take the ayodhya site in india for example a mosque had been on the site since the 16th century but some hindus believe it had been built over the birthplace of a hindu deity lord ram in 1992 a wave of violence swept the area and the mosque was destroyed in 2002 the archaeological survey of india examined the area and found that while there had been a structure there before the mosque there was only evidence of a large wall and some pillar bases in its report the asi stated that whatever had been there before was pretty big so sure a temple to lord ram could have existed there it did not say that it could have been any number of other things in fact pointed out by subsequent researchers who thought it more likely that two mosques had been there originally nevertheless in 2019 india's supreme court ruled that the site at ay huda must be given over to the government to build a hindu temple to lord ram in this case it seems that politics won out over facts not exactly a unique example of that is it the past just got hotter we've all heard of carbon dating and counting tree rings but are there any other ways for archaeologists to date things well yes absolutely one really clever way is by using something called thermoluminescence no that isn't the stuff they splash around crime scenes to find blood splatter that's luminol you learn something new every day it's a process of heating things to find their age it's especially useful with pottery and ceramics or any things that have previously been exposed to high heat after a piece of pottery is barred it naturally absorbs environmental radiation if it is then reheated in the future the radiation is released as a measurable amount of light this is the aforementioned thermoluminescence which is also quite a word to say this amount can then be backtracked to the original date that the artifact was created thermoluminescent dating or tl why didn't we just call it tl all along could date things up to about 200 000 years ago let's get experimental so you've identified and excavated a site you found some clues as to how people lived in that era and you've got nearly all of the pieces but some are missing well what to do well if you were an archaeologist in the 1970s you could go to little butter in england and experiment away now known as butter ancient farm this site has played home to experimental archaeologists through the years testing theories on the way people worked and lived from the stone age on lots of buildings boats and even toilets have been recreated to test different building techniques and ancient crops and rare breed animals also live at the farm it's a pretty cool way of being able to experience the past and actually get up close and personal with our ancestors day-to-day lives don't get too close to the toilets though ancient plumbing not brilliant beware of greeks bearing ships has anything ever struck you as fishy about the trojan horse story you know a load of greek warriors hide inside a giant wooden horse which was delivered to troy's mysterious gift and said greek warriors hop out in the night to take the city well the reason it sounds fishy is because the whole thing is a legend yes if it sounds unlikely then you could be right and we've been misunderstanding the brief mention in homer's odyssey all these years back then it was very common for ships to have wooden horse heads on the front and they were even known as horse ships armed with this knowledge it makes more sense that the horse reference was to be a ship given as a gift again a far more common occurrence than hastily erected giant wooden animals also a ship would have been a better hiding place turkish archaeologists have recently discovered pieces of wood at the site of troy which they had declared to be part of the trojan horse however these were the same type of wood used for shipbuilding lending even more credence to the idea that an actual horse structure was well just a load of manure blow up pompeii pompeii is arguably the most famous archaeological discovery of all time but did you know that it houses a more recent and deadly secret that's correct hidden among the parts of the city yet to be fully excavated to several unexploded bombs from world war ii the historical site was bombed by the allies in 1943 to disrupt supply routes and due to incorrect intelligence about the german army being camped there damaged buildings were reconstructed after the war but seemingly shoddy modern techniques couldn't hold a candle to the romans as one of these rebuilds the house of gladiators collapsed in 2010. while archaeologists have discovered and diffused nearly 100 bombs from the pompei site wait the archaeologists are doing the actual defusal sure they're probably calling it experts i would think it is estimated that there could still be as many as 10 unexploded surprises waiting to be uncovered these are all in areas well away from the touristy part so you don't have to watch your step just yet how old is old when does the contemporary become the historic how old does something have to be to be thought of as historically interesting according to the smithsonian anything older than 50 years old can potentially be of archaeological significance that seems pretty recent but good news is still going to be a couple of decades before unearthing beanie babies becomes a worthwhile pursuit in belgium in the early 2000s archaeologists were asked to research the location of a planned motorway as it was going to cut through part of the country that had seen heavy action during world war one apparently this time period was not considered that interesting yeah world war one nothing interesting there as it was not that long ago and there was also plenty of historical and physical evidence using cutting-edge aerial technology and sensors so as not to disturb the existing landscape the archaeologists discovered miles of trenches artifacts and human remains the site was considered so important to the understanding of the first world war that the motorway project was ultimately abandoned stone cold shoulder found in 1799 the rosetta stone is a thoughtfully future-proof guide to translating egyptian hieroglyphs the large stone which was discovered by french soldiers has three examples of the same royal decree carved out in three languages greek egyptian demotic and hieroglyphics scholars were able to use current knowledge of greek to translate the other portions even though it still took them over 20 years to work out that the hieroglyphics were actually phonetically based and not just symbols being discovered in egypt written in greek and recovered by the french the rosetta stone is of course housed in the british museum and by the way in my mind before i saw the rosetta stone i was like it's like this big in reality the rosetta stone is big worth going to see in the british museum of all places it's protected from the public now but in the past anyone could touch it if they so choose you can still touch it they built a giant replica of it and you can touch that which is cool thankfully in spite of the many manual intrusions none of the meanings of the hieroglyphics would change during that time unsurprisingly egypt has regularly petitioned the british museum for the return of the stone to its homeland but has so far been met with a wall of silence although the brits were kind enough to send a replica in 2005. maybe some things are lost in translation after all the modern mummy any hoax takes dedication and no small amount of hudsper to pull off so you can't help but admire the perpetrators behind the case of the persian princess mummy following an earthquake in iran at the beginning of the 21st century a sarcophagus was discovered with a mummy inside the mummy had a breastplate stating that she was the daughter of xerxes which immediately set archaeological hearts fluttering as no persian royal mummies had ever been found before the carp sarcophagus itself was pretty convincing and no flags were raised until further detailed tests were carried out it turned out that not only was this not a two and a half thousand-year-old mummy it was in fact the body of a woman who had died less than five years previously her cause of death was given as a broken neck but the jury remains out on her identity and whether she was murdered as if leaving historians with egg on their faces wasn't bad enough this has to be one of the most elaborate ways in history of getting rid of a body just say no mad drugs have been a controversial yet integral part of humanity since time began in 2013 archaeologists in southern russia discovered some paraphernalia belonging to the saiyan nomads who were renowned for being pretty scary horse-riding warriors around 700 to 200 years ago in 2013 archaeologists in southern russia discovered some paraphernalia belonging to the scythian nomads who were renowned for being pretty scary horse riding warriors around 700 to 200 years bc intricately carved golden objects with what was confirmed as traces of cannabis and opium inside were excavated from a burial mound and confirmed historical reports that the scythians seriously liked to party as well as indulging in narcotics and wine they also liked to take baths where they would chuck hemp seeds onto hot stones and breathe in the vapors which takes the idea of a relaxing bath and sauna to a whole new level it wasn't all hedonism though drug taking was also performed as part of their religious rituals and someone had to stay sober enough to craft all of those gold pieces in the first place although not much is known about these fierce nomadic people it seems that they would have been fun at parties if they weren't trying to kill everyone that is so i really hope you enjoyed these quick hitting archaeological facts if you enjoyed this sort of video let me know in the comments below we could do another one like this if you have a topic suggestion for a future sort of list video like this why not let me know smash that like button don't forget to subscribe and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 408,088

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects

Id: dp1j64l9fMM

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021