Archivo etiqueta «Arqueología»
Por José María Lancho, abogado (ABC, 30/11/11):
En pocos países el pasado necesita tanto tiempo. Sin duda existe un tipo de pasado, específicamente español, con el que demostramos tener una relación muy compleja: aquí es donde la memoria histórica se regula por ley, donde somos mucho más inconformistas con el pasado que con el presente, hasta el punto de que nuestra incapacidad de adaptación a la propia historia ha llegado a generar una disciplina única y original en universidades extranjeras, denominada hispanismo.
Recientemente, una sentencia en el circuito de apelación en EE.UU. vino a otorgar a nuestro país la … Seguir leyendo
Por Mario Vargas Llosa. © Derechos mundiales de prensa en todas las lenguas reservados a Ediciones EL PAÍS, SL, 2011 (EL PAÍS, 27/02/11):
La civilización más antigua de América floreció hace unos cuatro o cinco mil años y ha dejado unos testimonios impresionantes de su complejidad y poderío a unos 200 kilómetros al norte de Lima. Nunca sabremos cómo la llamaban y se llamaban entre sí sus pobladores, pues el nombre con que ahora se la conoce -Caral- apareció seguramente en la región muchos siglos después de que aquella notable sociedad se hubiera extinguido tan brusca y misteriosamente como … Seguir leyendo
By Roger Atwood, a contributing editor at Archaeology magazine and the author of Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers and the Looting of the Ancient World (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 13/10/09):
As United States troops begin withdrawing from Iraq, we should take stock of the staggering damage that Iraq’s ancient archeological sites have suffered from looting over the last few years. After the 2003 invasion, swarms of looters dug huge pits and passages all over southern Iraq in search of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals. At Isin, where a Sumerian city once stood, I watched men sifting through tons of … Seguir leyendo
By Simon Jenkins (THE GUARDIAN, 26/09/08):
I knew God was a Trotskyite. Cern’s absurdly oversold answer to the who-is-God question was snuffed out in Switzerland last week by a celestial helium leak. Don’t dabble with the big bang: the curse will get you.
Meanwhile, who-are-we questions are being answered as never before – and at a fraction of the cost. Archaeologists excavating at Stonehenge, for the first time in half a century, are rewriting the map of British prehistory. Once again it is our old friend, Preseli bluestone, that is hero of the hour. Its glories shall not go unsung.… Seguir leyendo
By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 04/04/08):
For the first time in a generation, archaeologists have begun to sift through the most sacred soil in Britain, in search of the secret of Stonehenge.
The full artillery of modern science will be trained on a trench of earth, measuring 11 feet long and eight feet wide, inside the great stone circle. Pollen grains, tool fragments, snail shells, and chips of the original bluestone pillars will all be carbon- dated, to try to answer a question that had intrigued thinkers since medieval times: how and why, some 4,500 years ago, did our ancestors … Seguir leyendo
By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 07/09/07):
I had always imagined the Terracotta Army in the tomb of China’s first emperor to be the expression of one man’s sublime madness, a posthumous game of toy soldiers on a megalomaniac scale. Who but a lunatic would force an army of workers to build an 8,000-strong army from baked mud to march him to the afterlife? The photographs of the inhuman warriors always seemed to me slightly chilling, row upon row of identical imperial army grunts two millennia old, entombed by a dictator’s pride.
That was before I met them. Last month I … Seguir leyendo
By Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the author of numerous history books (THE TIMES, 03/01/07):
History has the best stories, and Maya history is particularly rich in them. Mel Gibson could have made a movie of the adventures of Siyaj Kak, the 4th-century kingmaker, who crossed mountains and jungles to found a new dynasty in one of the greatest Maya cities; or of rulers, more than half a millennium later, ritually piercing tongue or penis for sacrificial blood to legitimate their wars or postpone the collapse of their kingdoms. Or he could have made a film about Gaspar Antonio Xiu, the 16th-century … Seguir leyendo
By Craig Childs, the author of the forthcoming “House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest” (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 02/01/07):
A FEW years back, while traveling in the Sierra Madre Occidental of northern Mexico, I came upon a canyon packed with cliff dwellings no one had lived in since before the time of Christopher Columbus. On the ground were discarded artifacts, pieces of frayed baskets, broken pottery and hundreds of desiccated corn cobs — the ruins of an ancient civilization.
I reached down to pick up what I thought was a dry gourd, and instead … Seguir leyendo
By Simon Jenkins (THE GUARDIAN, 01/12/06):
The Stonehenge mystery is solved. I always knew there was something odd about the “Amesbury archer”. He died circa 2300BC and was rediscovered near the henge in Wiltshire in 2002, one of the most sensational prehistoric corpses ever found. His hair was laced with gold, the earliest found in England. His grave contained traces of fine clothes and implements of archery and copper-working. Analysis of his bones and teeth revealed that he came from central Europe, probably Switzerland, with possessions from Spain and France. Was this evidence of invasion? Was the Amesbury archer a … Seguir leyendo