Tag: archaeology

The world’s oldest winery

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
January 12, 2011
4 mins to read
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/The-Worlds-Oldest-Winery.mp3[/podcast] My wife and I are wine enthusiasts. We belong to all the local wine societies, have written about wine for local magazines, occasionally conduct wine tastings and we’ve even got our own wine-related website, The Willetts on Wine (www.willettsonwine.com). That being the case, I keep an eye on wine news: and this past week …

The people of Frijoles Canyon

By Edward Willett in Blog
August 19, 2008
5 mins to read
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From Denver, site of last week’s column, I and my family headed south to the Land of Enchantment, a.k.a. New Mexico. It’s a state famous for many things: beautiful scenery (it greeted us with a vast vista of green plains, blue mountains, and a rainbow); the fact that I was born there (okay, maybe “famous” …

A passport to the past

By Edward Willett in Blog
May 23, 2007
6 mins to read
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This week’s CBC Web column (listen tomorrow for the audio version!)… *********** “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote in his 1953 book The Go-between (well, at least the quote is famous; I’m not so sure Hartley or his book are any more–I had to Google …

The real-life Atlantis?

By Edward Willett in Blog
April 23, 2007
1 mins to read
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Well, this is interesting. Reports the BBC: The legend of Atlantis, the country that disappeared under the sea, may be more than just a myth. Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe’s earliest civilisation was destroyed by a giant tsunami. As John Scalzi, over at Ficlets, notes: Of course, this leaves Aquaman without …

The Dead Sea SCrolls

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 20, 2001
6 mins to read
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Two thousand years ago mass-produced books did not exist. Knowledge was handed down from generation to generation either orally, or in fragile, handwritten documents. Because of that only fragments of the knowledge of that time survives today: inscriptions on stone, a few papyrus and parchment fragments. Creating an image of the distant past is like …

Herakleion

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
June 19, 2001
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In Disney’s new summer animated blockbuster Atlantis, a team of intrepid explorers searches the sea-bottom for the legendary lost continent. Atlantis is only a legend, but in the non-animated world, real researchers have recently made discoveries almost as sensational, locating the fabled city of Herakleion, along with two of its suburbs, Canopus and Menouthis, underwater …

The Lost City of Hamoukar

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
May 30, 2000
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These days, when the world is covered by cities, we can be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing much special about them. You get a bunch of people together, you put them in houses, you add a few businesses, and presto! Instant city. But in fact cities are a relatively recent invention. Modern humans have …

Pyramids

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
June 10, 1999
4 mins to read
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The Great Pyramid at Giza recently reopened after a year of restoration, allowing visitors to Egypt to once again see where King Khufu was entombed more than 4,500 years ago. The Great Pyramid is an astonishing human achievement, on a scale that impresses even now, in the age of Superdomes and skyscrapers. Originally 145.5 metres …

Megaliths

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
May 11, 1998
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As we lie on our couches and flick our TV remotes, we tend to think we are far more advanced than our distant ancestors, who mostly just struggled to stay alive. But every so often we run across something that reminds us that lack of technology does not equal stupidity. An example recently turned up …