"Ancient Stonehenge faces modern problems with plans for a nearby tunnel to ease traffic" PBS NewsHour 3/17/2021
Excerpt
SUMMARY: The Stonehenge landscape, one of the most visited ancient sites in England, is in the spotlight as a possible solution to a modern problem. Could tunneling through it help ease heavy traffic flow in the surrounding streets? Archeologists and activists warn the construction would place the cherished site under threat. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports.
SUMMARY: Archaeologists in Egypt have completed the first phase of a new search for King Tut's tomb. The question at hand: Could the tomb contain the undiscovered burial place of Queen Nefertiti? NewsHour's Ivette Feliciano reports.
SUMMARY: On a years-long hike across the globe, journalist Paul Salopek is following the path humans took after the Ice Age. One of the most important human migration sites in the world is in Dmanisi, Georgia, where people have walked for nearly 2 million years. Hari Sreenivasan joins Salopek in learning more about the first pioneers to wander that part of the world.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The fog-shrouded fields and rolling hills of Southern Georgia are much more than a waypoint for Paul Salopek. We were nearing the ancient city and archaeological site of Dmanisi.
PAUL SALOPEK, Journalist/National Geographic Fellow: So, Dmanisi is finally in sight and this is probably one of the most important human migration sites outside of Africa proper.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Salopek is following the path humans took after the Ice Age, 70,000 to 100,000 years ago. But here in Dmanisi, that path is much older.
Along these green and jagged river gorges, we have walked in one form or another for nearly two million years. The history here is stacked high, part of what Salopek calls the layer cake effect of the Caucasus. With a happy dog welcoming us, we passed what was likely an outer defensive tower of the 1,400-year-old city of Dmanisi.
This has been a crossroads for a long time.
PAUL SALOPEK: From day one. And pretty much everybody invaded it.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And was this a trading route?
PAUL SALOPEK: This was a Silk Road trading route city, a big shining city on the hill, very rich, until the Mongols came and plundered it. And then they were here a few hundred years until the Georgians and Armenians pushed them out.
HARI SREENIVASAN: It’s an archaeological gold mine. With the summer digging season finished, we arrived at a sort of bunk house for archaeologists to rest for the night.
PAUL SALOPEK: If we did, by some miracle, get a clear sky, it really will change everything completely.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The next morning, a miracle had indeed swept away the fog. Within what you’re seeing is nearly two million years of history, the medieval city, whose walls still stand, built on top of a Bronze Age settlement that’s 5,000 years old, and still beneath that, the 1.8 million-year-old remains of one of modern human’s earliest ancestors.
Salopek, Dima Bit-Suleiman, his walking partner in Georgia, and I were joined by the director of Georgia’s National Museum, David Lordkipanidze, for the walk up to the hilltop dig site.
SUMMARY: In northern Peru, workers are fortifying the ancient site of Chan Chan, once the largest city in the Americas and the largest adobe city on the world. Earlier this year climatologists predicted strong El Nino weather effects in 2015, threatening rain in a desert climate that rarely gets any. Jeffrey Brown reports on the efforts to preserve and protect Peru’s heritage from the elements.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): It looks like a giant sand castle, its walls and towers slowly being reclaimed by the earth.
This is the ancient city of Chan Chan. Nine square miles-wide, it was once the largest in the Americas and the largest adobe city in the world. It served as the center of political, legislative and religious life for the Chimu people, who ruled this region from the ninth century until the late 1400s, when they were conquered by the Incas.
Here, you get a hint of the splendor before and after restoration of palace ceremonial halls, all of it in one of the driest regions on the planet.
LUIS JAIME CASTILLO, Deputy Minister of Culture, Peru: This is much more of a desert than Saudi Arabia. There’s no rain for 15 years, and then one day, boom.
JEFFREY BROWN: Booming, rushing, flooding. These images from February 1998 show the impact of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino at its worst, drenching the region, destroying homes, bridges and endangering the lives of those who live nearby, as well as the thousands of archaeological sites that dot the land here, slicing through centuries-old adobe walls and smearing away paintings more than 1,000 years old.
Peru’s deputy cultural minister, Luis Jaime Castillo, was a young archaeologist when one of the most devastating El Ninos hit his country.
LUIS JAIME CASTILLO: In ’83, when I was like in my early 20s, the El Nino happened and took everybody by surprise. I mean, we were not prepared. In the past, the Chimu would do lots of human sacrifices to prevent the rain from falling. We cannot do that anymore.
JEFFREY BROWN: No, that’s not allowed, even at the Culture Ministry.
LUIS JAIME CASTILLO: No. No. Well, but we can invest some money, which we can put, unleash the archaeologists to do their work.
JEFFREY BROWN: It can look as simple and as daunting as this, a local worker with a syringe squirting water into a crack to reinforce an adobe wall.
SUMMARY: An icon of ancient democracy, the story and significance of Athens’ Parthenon has been reinterpreted by numerous cultures. Joan Breton Connelly, author of “The Parthenon Enigma,” joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss the landmark’s meaning and whether the Parthenon sculptures (also known as the Elgin Marbles) should be returned to Greece.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Taking a fresh look at a timeless treasure.
Jeffrey Brown has our book conversation.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): It’s perhaps the most famous building in the world, the Parthenon in Athens, Greece. Built in the fifth century B.C., it’s become a symbol of the very idea of democracy in Western civilization, as well as an architectural model for other important structures, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
A new book, “The Parthenon Enigma,” tells the story of the people who built it and how it’s been understood, rightly and wrongly, to our own day.
Author Joan Breton Connelly is a classical archaeologist and professor at New York University.
It’s now home to space scientists, but a NASA complex in Maryland was once the stomping grounds of a prehistoric dinosaur.
Amateur dinosaur hunter Ray Stanford announced last week that he had discovered a rare cretaceous footprint from a nodosaur at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, likely left more than 110 million years ago.
"This is really quite a rare find,” Stanford said in a video posted to NASA’s website this week.
“Nodosaur tracks are not often found,” he added. “There are some out West and up in British Columbia and Canada, but we don’t have a whole lot of them in the U.S.”
Stanford told the Washington Post that the plant-eating dinosaur made the nearly 14-inch-wide imprint with his back left foot.
He believes the dinosaur was running — potentially away from a predator — when it left the print.
NASA scientists, excited by the discovery, have accepted Stanford’s research, and will reportedly bring in more expert opinions to fully confirm the finding.So far, the professionals seem sold.
“Ray showed it to me, and I was overwhelmed,” Johns Hopkins dinosaur expert and “Jurassic Park” consultant David Weishampel told the Post. “As a scientist, I’m skeptical of things like this. But it has all the detail you want. It’s got toe prints and sort of a heel print that’s starting to erode away.”
Stanford showed off his discovery to NASA officials and local media on Friday, dusting off the print with a paintbrush to show off the detail.
NASA’s federal preservation officer suggested once they are able to preserve it properly, the footprint could be put on display for visitors — though that is a ways off.
“It’s not something I want to make a tourist attraction at this point,” she said.
“We don’t want people barreling down there with shovels,” she added, though “ultimately, we want people to be able to see it, because it’s very exciting.”
In his announcement to reporters, Stanford urged more efforts toward conservation, arguing that finds like this could be under our noses all the time.
“What really threw me about this one was because I found it at Goddard Space Flight Center and I love the paradox,” he said.
“Space scientists walk along here, and they're walking exactly where this big bungling heavy armored dinosaur walked maybe 110 to 112 million years ago.”
