tv Archeology 2.0 Deutsche Welle April 11, 2020 10:15am-11:01am CEST
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still i wish everyone a happy face to make the best of it happy. you're watching data will you news from more news headlines at the top of the al and don't forget you can stamp today on our web site that's d w dot com i'm rebecca races in the end thanks very much for watching. stan for. language courses. video audio. anytime anywhere. w.
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p taking issue with the technological advancement is rapid motion are just so rapid it's almost impossible to keep up in the space of a lifetime. we have discovered for thousands of new sites from a range of different periods. via the tanker announcers to shop in the focus of our inquiry and pinpoint exactly where to befall my day.
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in archaeology state of the art technology sometimes assumes the guise of an antiquated handcart. while archaeologists route boys in and rose and shot set up their equipment on a meadow their colleagues nearby are preparing a device that does look more high tech. the geomagnetic apparatus is so heavy it has to be towed by a vehicle both devices do the same thing only this one is larger and can survey a wider area.
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a group of german an irish archaeologists have met up at the old church at screen a 15th century site steeped in mysticism but the church ruin is almost young compared to the an ancient monuments the top the surrounding area. northwest of dublin the hill of screen is located opposite island's cultural treasure the hill of tara a millennia old place of assembly. the region is also home to giant megalithic tombs unique monuments built around 3000 b.c. by people who left nothing behind but their graves. a digital reconstruction lens an impression of the graves interiors many built in alignment with astronomical events.
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the archaeologists dragged the census across the meadow to determine what lies beneath the surface. is finished on this device is to me just wide and equipped with 5 sensors so you can cover $2.00 to $3.00 actors a day with a device like this so it's a fast way of collecting and evaluating archaeological data. and equipped with 16 senses their colleagues magnetometer is even more effective in gathering archaeological evidence that humans were going to so we need to be careful here because if we swap the cables then the sensors will transmit the wrong positions but that's why we do a final check to see that everything's working so the proof of this or this from so that the team is scouting for traces of ancient life underground without the intervention of a shovel it's
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a noninvasive technique called prospects and we. have been doing it now hooking up the geomagnetic device to the computer. the computer has the task of recording all the measurement data and showing us where we have to prospect even when we are driving across the terrain invicta over to. the $0.16 a device is used to take g.m. magnetic measurements of the ground. and a lot of rain but really trying to figure out. the landscape harbors a history that began thousands of years ago the archaeologists job description calls the knowledge not just of history but technology to. and today it helps if
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they don't mind being followed by curious horses we don't know exactly where the foxes found it and we also want to know that or more about the history prior to the earliest documentary sources because we have some reference to say from the the 8th century in the 10th century referring to the telescreen being the place of birth. it was called macross and showers are exact position. with the help of g.p.s. data the archaeologists can steer their vehicle across the meadow with the precision they need to generate a comprehensive ground image. the sensors drag in behind their vehicle measure the earth's magnetic field which lies underground like an invisible vial the presence of walsall grades alters the pattern of magnetism in the soil. and that is exactly
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what the senses can measure the computer registers these disturbances to reveal a long forgotten structure a shadow of the past. 1700 kilometers further east in berlin work is underway on a different type of digital archaeology in game developer thomas premise studio for virtual reality. it looks like a game but it isn't. the game designers are working with berlin archaeologist can i call maya hit technology made ancient history their cooperation has yielded some surprising discoveries for example the hittites had not unusual reading technique. these are here for this one from left to right this one from right to left this one from left to right this again from right to left then back again. yeah like in wavy lines that's awesome.
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is it's a business in that archaeologists are anchored in past centuries and that applies to their methodology to. the actually the rapid development of computer technology in general but also a virtue archaeology is still something we need to get our heads around that you know man come on and when i tell people i'm working with a game designer they just shut down because gaming technology sounds so frivolous but in fact this work is just the opposite views on where this is your god is with his mom. this looks like a video game but in fact it's a highly accurate copy of a real temple it's the temple of the weather god from aleppo one of the most important day it is in the ancient middle east the oldest parts of the temple date from the 3rd millennium b.c. with visualization software the operator can make the summarize and set allowing
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for a view of the complex in changing daylight the viewer gets a sense of space size and proportion. does have provided instruments with the we are not really standing in this temple we can judge and see things very differently than we could on a normal computer monitor as well as a religion computer morning and. just the fact that i can stand here and for example squat down and actually get a 3 dimensional view of the object is not something i can do on a normal computer monitor at all. aleppo in syria the temple was located in the heart of the city in the medieval city del from 2012 rebels holed up inside use the citadel to fire on government troops the result 5000 years of history turned to dust in a brutal so. in early 2011 the temple was still intact coal mines team from girl in
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was on site to scan the complex security in the country still seems so stable that the professor didn't just bring along his students he also took his young daughter on the trip. went to him you know the law a 1000000 you'll see another representation of the weather god mounting his chariot here he's presented his combat ready. what's this that's the symbol for god and that's a makes. initially it was so only research but the dasher acquired new significance through the ravages of the syrian civil war. don't have to be a pretty fifty's and. we had an unimaginably large amount of data but when the civil war erupted and we couldn't get there anymore we were left wondering what do we do now. with mommy needs or didn't it's that sounds almost cynical
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now but we were in an ideal position we were the only team of near eastern archaeologists to have scanned everything in 3 d. . says it was a ton of good fortune in the mists of terrible misfortune that only look. the temple was badly damaged in the war but at least its memory has been digitally preserved. the scanned data is so precise the inscriptions are even more legible in virtual reality than they were in real life. that's because the mount up when i learned to dig i had a piece of paper and a pencil that was all put together today we can use a scanner that is much more accurate than any reproduction on a sheet of paper lists of of course that also gives rise to new fields of inquiry
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into can see that the holy father still has clout. the generation of exact copies is a field that also interests maritime archaeologists all over the world measuring and marking shipwrecks underwater is one of their most demanding and arduous tasks and the conditions are not always as good as they are here in the baltic sea off the german island through can. only exceptional shipwrecks a salvaged and restored like the 14th century braman kong one of the world's largest ship finds. it took 18 years of expensive conservation work to restore it to its full glory to learn more about this merchant ship from 39000 archaeologists created a digital model of the congo. it's on
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a ship sponsored the construction of a ship like this is quite specialist saying everything in the vessel is interconnected if you move one part by just 2 centimeters and it distorts the entire shape of the ship so the computer gives you an overview. you're not dealing with a 23 metre long shape you don't have to search the entire vessel for the place responsible for a deformation instead you can clearly see how every step you take impacts the entire structure and check whether a given step is change the overall shape that. the technology allowed researchers for example to find out how the quote was silent without ever having to lower it into water. if there is a shipwreck off reuben that is not with recovering but it is never the less of interest to our here ologists. just as all of us
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want special about this find is that it dates from the middle or perhaps even the early 16th century a period from which very few ships have been found. and there's evidence that the word may have come from hamburg the bizarre you heard saw some box dams or. even today certain details of the ship can be more clearly rendered if they're copied underwater by hand. but the main job is done by a special camera it takes hundreds of images that are then used to generate a 3 d. computer model of the shipwreck while the wood has been perfectly preserved in the nutrient pool water of the baltic the current has a road at the rate down to its floor. divots stop by a so it's
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a great thing about it is you never see the wreck like this on a dive because visibility is poor. so you can create a model like there's even if you have a visibility of just 30 centimeters you know you just have to take enough photos so they overlap then you're looking at something no one has ever seen in that shape or form. for example the frigates ballast stones that still lie along the ship floor without them the vessel couldn't have carried its cargo of heavy canons. one of the most spectacular exhibits in the collection of burnin snoozy in a bizarre make art goes largely unnoticed by visitors to the digital world is coming to its rescue can i call my eyes latest project is the richly carved wood done that was originally house in the next red palaces of the world famous alhambra in grenada spain in berlin the dome is forced to lead
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a wallflower existence for conservation reasons. you believe the dome is very poorly illuminated here in berlin and visitors can appreciate the way they could amid the light conditions in the alhambra for them so our aim is to recreate those lighting conditions virtually to allow visitors both here in the berlin museum and visitors to the alhambra and experience of the dome in its original context on the invasion context before. in 8091 the banker arthur fund grinnell was granted permission by the spanish authorities to move the john to germany he had acquired a small palace on the alhambra from a spanish opera singer and later bequeath it to the spanish state but he decided to keep the don't feed himself for a time it decorated his villa in berlin before he donated it to the museum.
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the dome was originally painted and gilded it's crafted from cedar and popular wood and consists of dozens of parts a star ornament of heavenly beauty. one of the world's most important prehistoric landscapes is located in a bend of a highlands river boy me northwest of dublin. the passage graves of new grange down and now we're designated the unesco world heritage site in 1903 the central neolithic mt of now has a set conference the 275 meters and is surrounded by 20 smaller tombs. the significance of numerous in grave stones remains a mystery many stories and legends are associated with the enormous mounds they are said to be the birthplace of heroes the hidden dwellings of elves and kings.
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the mount graves of newgrange doubt and now are all the catered within sight of each other. it's long been standard practice in archaeology to use drones to get an overview of the landscape the drones gather data to build digital terrain models on the computer sites with churches dating from the middle ages often have an older heritage invisible underground. then a split the good idea of all rulers seeking to exert political military or religious control over a territory but occupy any place that carried a particular significance so we use these old science as a starting point because it's easy to imagine that with christian eyes asian these ancient sites were chosen as places to build churches. and in fact when it comes time to evaluate the data from the g.m.
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magnetic survey the archaeologists discover round. structures that appear to predate the small metal village. lights and they may be traces of circular graves in closing burial mounds or they could be round house. in that distribution these objects make no reference to this ditch complex so one can assume that they date from another period so they would have to. discovering hidden relics without taking draws on technology that originated in military applications . seem to give us a colorful certainty of physical methods are based on measuring differences in the earth's magnetic field to the technology comes from hunting submarines which could be located underwater because they created disturbances in the magnetic field. but this is a method that we now use in a modified form in archaeology or look you've been.
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suppose luciani is surrounded by traces of the past his work focuses on the mountain plateau of glauber need frankfurt it was 1st settled thousands of years ago the celts in particular left their mark on the area today it is known at the plateau was surrounded by a magnificent wall it did not serve as a fortification but the slope was steep enough rather it was designed to signal the power and splendor of the celtic princes the french young began here in the so-called nearly think age with the emergence of the 1st farmers and cattle breeders in the region of the better of the 1st settlement up here the missiles but culture had no ramparts development continued into the late bronze age and by the early are an age around $500.00 b.c. to deal with it so it was settled by the 1st people we could classify as celts and they were also the 1st to 45 this plateau over fist on. an in conspicuous aerial
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photo taken in 1908 open the door to one of the most spectacular discoveries in archaeology in germany archaeologists have been using aerial photography for decades to identify structures in the ground but this method only yields results following long periods of drought. aka a lot in the field here you can see a darker structure relatively clearly in the great order which indicates that the grain is being supplied with more moisture in this particular place but ordered that so it can be assumed that there is a ditch there that retains the moisture better as a whole can count. the grave of a cultic prince was discovered deep in the field at the foot of the glasberg the corresponding burial mount had been plowed away long ago the huge hill has since been reconstructed and a museum installed behind the hill. for. a life
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size sandstone figure was found near the grave. the figure was in doubt with decorative chains and rings it was lying in a ditch together with fragments from other statues the celtic prince is crowned by a strange head piece. a golden chain was found in the prince's grave the stone figure was depicted wearing exactly the same chain. it's likely that the stone were a prince of cloud bed is the exact likeness of a person who lived more than 2 and a half 1000 years ago. the body in the tomb was found with the same strange headpiece as the one crowning the stone figure.
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in subsequent years ariel archaeology has made further strides. we are made in the closet and in addition to classical aerial archaeology now carried out digitally we also have other computer assisted methods of nondestructive testing to obtain information about archaeological remains in the last inch off. the most important of these methods is the lie down scan the scanner is fitted to an airplane and surveys the landscape below light as scanning was originally used by surveyors for archaeologists the data has proved a quantum leap in knowledge even in flight outer rain models look somewhat on spectacular at 1st glance. what makes the lidar scan so invaluable is the methods ability to remove the noise of trees and vegetation from the data.
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driven off the lot from the ground penetrating radar shoots electromagnetic pulses into the earth from airplanes and sometimes helicopters. these signals are reflected back by any underground structures and the difference in the laser return times makes it possible to create a 3 d. image of the terrain it works in the forest as well because enough laser light can penetrate through the trees so that we achieve a relatively exactly surface image even in the forest come on this image of you can follow the course of the roman lemus the border between the roman empire and none occupied regions and this here may have been a watch tower for. and here and here in the forest the remnants of a field of burial mounds this one here could theoretically be a burial mound that was opened in the past my guess would be sometime in the 18th century at the time people typically entered from the top we call it funneling so
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they dug a funnel into the mound to extract burial objects or skeletons and what remained where these small holes at the top of the mount these faint traces indicate that it's what happened here and also was an actual post lucian he discovered a large burial mount very close to the grave of the celtic prince a tiny dot on the scan a image not visible as a great image the thicket of the forest multiple layers of our past live beneath the ground we walk on we just can't see it digital archaeology makes the invisible visible. in ireland to the number of discovered monuments has increased 100 fold with the use of modern prospecting methods one particularly spectacular example is the hill of tara the mysterious national treasure it was the seat of irish kings and pagan priests at
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the height of their power. after. the hell of tara exudes an air of magic an island. back in 1000 sentry an irishman would gather here for that and swear a holy o. not to rest until the land had won its independence and there was a reason they did it here in the town. today self proclaimed druids inhabit the area at night you can hear them playing their harps christians built a church into. ruth boys in rows and shot systematically stride the length and breadth of the meadow on the expansive plateau with them magnetometer.
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here in town it's a safe bet they'll find something interesting and they do the digital data shows numerous circles below the surface grave mounds or maybe sites of assembly. when we 1st started investigating tile there were about $25.00 monuments known these mines that are visible but through geophysical survey we know there's more than $100.00 monuments a lot of which you can't see above ground are buried beneath the surface. old maps can give clues to vanish structures. the people of tara lived thousands of years before the invention of writing they
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recorded their history in the ground and crafted sankranti landscapes that only need to be deciphered. a deep channel on the plateau was probably once the processional route it's clearly visible on the mind our scan it leads directly to the in a century the retina re a large ringwald complex in fact it's a professional way and believe this is the route that the king elect would take on his way up to the summit of the hill of tara to be inaugurated. to the left and right of the processional route ramparts was built to direct the marches gaze to keen on humans. interestingly there are a number of gaps along the length of the banks in which you can get a view out by significant monuments and in particular burrow my limits. so it seems prehistoric builders knew all about visual effects.
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but they also threw in from the one i personally find particularly appealing is that up here you're afforded a wider view of the landscape surrounding tara. and there are similar monuments on many of these mountains and held tops. not in the abundance we find on the heloc tyra that is truly unique but there are also individual monuments which ultimately may have a common point of reference. and i never thought. the hill of war is another sign that harbors a mysterious century students from dublin are digging their way into the hill at precisely defined points according to legend halloween of each nation on the hill of ward a pagan festival of fire on the night of october 31st. and in fact the students do find a large amount of animal bones an indication that people here may have come together for large celebrations with countries amounts of food and irish
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archaeologists stephen davis has surveyed the hill but he was unable to find anything with g.m. magnetics he has a simple explanation one of the probably isn't magnetic survey here which is what we might use across the rest of it is all this heavy groaning that we've seen behind you with all this heavy burn it really is very very magnetic just because it's been burned so the whole thing really griped up and you can't see anything at all so with with resistance in this case so we can see that this big mound behind us here is actually defined by a stone wall which is actually what we're taking out now in this case so that's why that's why we dug here we've dug a small section into the side of this mound with a stone wall in the center. geo electric surveys measure the soil resistance and create images of structures underground only now can research is identify the various walls and ditches in the complex. where the rituals really celebrated in
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large bonfires ignited here overnight on october the 31st archaeological clues could confirm the theory. they were burning. ok so the burning took place before whatever happened to your little falling down onto itself this extends all the way over here. we have a fire festival here now but it's hypothesized to fire 1st we're going back almost into the eye and there are many evil references to the creature from a very it's meeting here and lighting a great file for. those references would be several 100 years off it would have happened so when we were treated with a certain skepticism. we are finding a lot of evidence of fire so who knows. aside from graves and ritual sites the people who built these complexes left only one thing behind the bodies of their murdered kings their boat bodies are on display at the national museum of ireland
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in dublin the graves in their dead at the early testimony of early arash papal a people who had no written language. like in tara a processional route can be made out in the digital data from the hill of ward a road that is no longer visible in the meadows. the same was true of the celtic burial ground on the glauber bag. here it's not just the burial mound it's been reconstructed but also the processional route leading up to the hill it was flanked by deep trenches and originally much longer this is clear from the digital data a geomagnetic survey has revealed to roads further course.
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today it's known that the road was bordered by a high wall which was up to 12 meters wide at the bally's visitors could only see the great mound after turning the corner researchers believe the hill was even whitewashed like an island the structures here were designed with visuals in mind and astronomically aligned. others it's kind of it's not a road that marks a path from a to b. it's aligned with the southern major lunar standstill an astronomical phenomenon that occurs every 18.6 years so it was possible to be. units of time without a calendar without a watch over a longer period of time from his youngest. the
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ol humdrum in grenada there are a few other sites in europe that draw as many tourists. every day only 5000 visitors are allowed to enter the castle the tickets are sold out weeks in advance call my feels privileged to work here. call my and his team have been working for days at the plant see odell part on the villa the belong to a sultan then to an opera singer and then a german banker from berlin it was from here that our tour fund winner removed the decorative dome in 1901. it was replaced by a poor copy. of this one type of
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food it's really a great feeling to be able to get a sense of the dome's original setting with this. mind of the the aromas the views through the windows all make for an entirely different experience than if you're standing in a museum and looking up in a dimly lit room and look at know all. every detail of the chamber is carefully documented with a high performance scanner. watching the lengths being gone to here one can't help but ask why berlin doesn't just return the dome to its original home the archaeologist call such considerations a historical. people previously gonna believe that on the dome was brought to berlin legally there's no question about it it now has its own story and that story includes that of its previous owner the german banker who acquired it and brought it to germany. if you don't know which he incorporated it into his own villa there
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and then by a detour it arrives at the berlin museum in this story belongs to the objects provenance it can't be ignored his wish list significance of the piece. the digital reconstruction reveals the change is long lost splenda the original dime housed in the berlin museum has been integrated into this virtual reality experience. the dome from this chamber was one of the oldest components of the alhambra probably cost around $1320.00. even if the dome was still in place here the tower chamber is too small to accommodate the alhambra $5000.00 daily visitors no one would ever get a glimpse of 18 are. you.
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running. in places where the walls are too high for the scanner another method is used photo grama tree a 3 d. model is generated using thousands of overlapping photos principio glad this is in principle i think it's a good idea to upload 3 d. images of these objects to the internet so. because then everyone can access them to freedom. in ireland scientists are a step ahead many scanned objects have already been posted on the internet.
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before the german archaeologists return home they take a few soil samples it's an inexpensive substitute for an excess of asian. the researches are in doubt an area dotted with prehistoric burial mounds in medieval farms a power cable runs underground through a small medieval settlement geomagnetic down to helps archaeologists of boyd hitting an electric cable rather than a medieval d.h. . doesn't like it well that's the big difference today in the ideal scenario i already know a tremendous amount about the site before i start my day and that enables me to plan the dig very precisely generally the areas of excavation a much smaller than they used to be because i simply don't have to search as much as i used to with was looking was. the archaeologists are
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drilling at a location they suspect harvest of waste. like modern garbage bins their historical previous s's say a lot about the living conditions of the people who lived here. the team can tell immediately that their technicians have hit the right spot you know when you're going to do what you can see quite well here is the lowest layer that we still had on the drill head and that there is charcoal in it it's called the. so we already know we're in the middle of the occupation layer i'm a bit of a but i can't say i'm surprised because we already knew from the geomagnetic data that there's a structure here which we've already been able to classify fairly accurately and if we hadn't found this would be an indication that we've messed up our measurements. but it was accurate of our.
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their arms as a fugitive always collected a lot of information without ones driving our shovel into the soil and what is particularly satisfying is what we found in the core sample namely charcoal. through radio carbon dating we'll be able to establish how all this charcoal as well which doesn't mean we'll know how old the ditch is that's how we proceed one step at a time and of course when the botanists then examine the charcoal forest we'll know what type of trees were burned here. ah. the soil samples undergo further testing in frankfurt this small pieces of charcoal from the historical way spit a treated with the same 10 to love and care as any ancient ceramic shod
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finally the soil is pulsed with x. rays to break down its chemical components canoed rassmann is hunting for a very specific element. a mensch there fired in a human excretes about one kilogram a fast 1st per year in cattle it's about 80 kilograms. or if we have a lot of phosphorous it's probable that it's from the feces of humans and animals. so it's an early indicator of the length of time they spot was settled and if there was the sediment used for a short time or a longer duration the higher the fast for its impact the higher the probability that the settlement was used for a long time even vaguely like that's how it goes for in this. with their high tech equipment archaeologists have pinpointed many places where they could dig but they don't because digging destroys traces that hold out the
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promise of key insights with future as yet undeveloped methods you have you know and if. we shoulder a responsibility here with archaeology is a finite field besides do not grow back and things that have been excavated are lost to research is unfortunately this is an inherent part of archaeological excavation in the us you look stupid it's all scams. digital archaeology is the future of historical research but even today we can't do everything on a computer justina you know we're standing here on the landscape and we feel what's unique about it we see the hill of tara we see the topography we get a holistic sense of the place it's not possible to reproduce that in a virtual world technology provides us with useful tools but the archaeologist still has to do fieldwork.
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do you not. just go over your concept discover it with the box of. a school. project after 100 years the idea. those of the bombs more relevant today than they were a. 100 years ago visionaries reshaped. people understood designs where she forms a sorry. about house and does cost on her. with ideas that are part of our future fix our house a car to our. world new car documentary stories we may change oh you.
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play. this is data news line from the end because of it 19 death toll in the us souls past 2000 in one day it's the highest anywhere in the world president donald trump says he wants to re-open america but the world health organization is warning that lifting restrictions too early could lead to a deadly resurgence also coming out of poverty pushes millions in india to defy the national law for down to it's a question of survival as the poorest of forced to scavenge for food. and 75 years.
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