Archaeologists do it in holes: Tales from the stratigraphy

[Tamas]

https://telex.hu/english/2022/11/24/cannonball-from-ottoman-times-found-in-koszeg-while-gardening

[mongers]

https://telex.hu/english/2022/11/24/cannonball-from-ottoman-times-found-in-koszeg-while-gardening

Woah, that's quite something, who new bubblewrap was that old.

[The Brain]

That's shed dinosaur skin.

[Tamas]

  Its probably because it was handled by military engineers since they were alerted initially (folks not knowing if it had any explosives in it).

[viper37]

His companions were standing down in the trench, while he had climbed up and was resting his arms on the parapet while observing the progress of the siege. There was another Swedish trench being driven forward in front of him, supposedly that's mainly what he was observing. He remained up there much longer than needed to take a peek, possibly for morale reasons to show the soldiers that the king was there, sharing their dangers and observing their work. As an aside, in battle he typically (not always!) fought in the front rank, personally fighting and killing enemy soldiers. Just a few days earlier he had led the storming of an outwork, sword in hand.

I did not know that.  Thanks. Quite reckless of him, for a King and general.

He wasn't hated by the soldiers at least. More like worshipped, by this point he had been a living legend for longer than some soldiers remembered. But of course there very likely existed individual soldiers who hated him.

That's about what I remember reading about him.  Hated by individual soldiers, sure, but to commit murder with impunity would require a little planning since it's a King, not just a regular officer that you kill in a fit of a rage.  That's why I found it strange that there where suspicions surrounding his death.

He was also an absolute ruler of a country that was being squeezed for every possible resource to fight a desperate war against many enemies. Anyone who had major beef with the Swedish government by definition had major beef with him, even if I suspect that many of those people thought "oh the King is the King bless him, it's probably his damn poor advisors who are to blame...".
The most popular murder theory has to do with the succession. Charles had no kids and hadn't named an heir. There were two factions jockeying for position, one centred around his younger sister and her husband, and one around his deceased older sister's son. The younger sister's husband, the future Frederick I of Sweden, acted very quickly upon the King's death to secure the succession for his wife (and eventually himself). This has looked suspicious to some people. I'm not convinced, making plans for what to do on the death of the King seems like common sense since the King was famously unconcerned with his personal safety.

Well, palace intrigues are one thing, but to arrange for murder by his soldiers, whom for most worshiped him would have required a lot of planning, much more than someone could be capable of doing from a distance.

Thanks for the details. Didn't know a lot about his death, except he died in battle.

[jimmy olsen]

Cypher used by Charles V to his French ambassador cracked.

I'm surprised the cypher was so strong that it took them 6 months to break it even with modern computers.
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-emperor-charles-secret-code-centuries.html

[viper37]

Medieval manuscripts discovered in Romania could rewrite European history

The title seems clickbait more than anything.  The olders manuscripts date from the Carolingian era and are mostly fragmentary.  The more complete works date from the 15th-17th century.

It still quite an impressive collection.

An unprecedented discovery

A team of researchers in Romania has discovered a treasure trove of forgotten medieval manuscripts that have the potential to redefine what we know about Eastern Europe's early history. 

Discovered in the small town of Mediaș in the Ropemakers' tower of St. Margaret's Church, the find included over 200 books and manuscripts with fragments of printed work that date back to the 9th century. 

139 books dating between 1470 and 1600 were found in good condition and many manuscript fragments were found inside the books, some of which date from as early as the Carolingian era and may date back to the 9th century.

[...]

[jimmy olsen]

Lee Berger claimed in presentation today that he's found strong evidence that H. naledi was using fire in the Rising Star chamber

https://twitter.com/carnegiescience/status/1598474246862290944

[jimmy olsen]

Article on the above story. Looks great, but the ash really needs to be dated.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homo-naledi-pre-human-ancestor-fire-tool-south-africa/

Pre-human ancestor believed to have used fire as a tool, researchers say
cbs-mornings
BY DEBORA PATTA

DECEMBER 2, 2022 / 9:53 AM / CBS NEWS

A momentous discovery in South Africa could turn our understanding of human history on its head. A non-human creature dubbed Homo naledi was discovered nearly a decade ago — and researchers now believe the creature may have had a head start on Homo sapiens, or humans, in using fire as a tool.

Renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger drew sharp criticism for hypothesizing Homo naledi was deliberately placing its dead in a dark, dangerous underground chamber in the Rising Star caves just outside Johannesburg, South Africa. Some argued it wasn't possible to navigate the complex chamber without light.

"And the reason they didn't believe it was because Homo naledi, with its tiny little brain just bigger than a chimpanzee, couldn't have had fire," Berger told CBS News.

The controlled use of fire was supposedly unique to humans, and for nearly 10 years Berger's team found no evidence the species used fire — until Berger lost over 50 pounds so he could squeeze through the narrow corridors himself for the very first time in August.

It was torture all the way down and he was exhausted when he finally reached the bottom.

"I looked up. And I realized the ceiling was black. It was burnt. It was covered in soot. It had been right above our heads the entire time," Berger said of his discovery.

It's undeniable evidence of fire. The same day, lead investigator and paleoanthropologist Keneiloe Molopyane was making another remarkable find nearby: "Pieces of bone ... burnt bone," she said, which indicated they were eating there.

After that, the team saw fire everywhere.

"I suspect based on what we're seeing, they're not just carrying fire. I think they're making it," Berger said. "And it's done hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps, before maybe humans were doing it."

Berger believes the discovery will challenge our assumptions about human uniqueness.

"It should make us think deeply about that way we have placed ourselves on a pedestal as something special, because Homo naledi is beginning to prove that it may have happened many times in the past," he said.

"One of the reasons that humans are so harmful to the environment, to this world, is because we think we have some ownership of it," he said.

For Molopyane, a South African woman, it's not just about a groundbreaking discovery.

"For a very long time, archeology and anthropology, all these discoveries made in Africa, have been made by men, mostly," White men, she said. "That is when we start taking back the narrative as Africans and we get to tell our stories now."

[jimmy olsen]

Neat!

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg3gw9v7jnvo

PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem

...

Sanskrit, although not widely spoken, is the sacred language of Hinduism and has been used in India's science, philosophy, poetry and other secular literature over the centuries.

Panini's grammar, known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences.

However, two or more of Panini's rules often apply simultaneously, resulting in conflicts.

Panini taught a "metarule", which is traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning "in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar's serial order wins".

However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.

Mr Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule. Instead, he argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.

Employing this interpretation, he found the Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.

...

[Tamas]

Grave of a Roman doctor who died in his 50s in 1st century AD was found in Hungary (quite a bit east of the Danube which I find odd) under a layer of Avar and other graves.

The cool thing is that he was buried with a whole set of doctor's and herbalist's tools, allegedly it's a remarkable loot the likes of which has only been found in Pompei so far.

[viper37]

Neat find!

[Admiral Yi]

Did Dacia extend up to Hungary?

[Tamas]

Did Dacia extend up to Hungary?

You could start some bar fights in Hungary or Romania with that line.

[Syt]

Did Dacia extend up to Hungary?

You could start some bar fights in Hungary or Romania with that line.