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This link  found by  tommynodot

The science of detecting fakes and forgeries       Click here to watch video

 

The spiralling prices paid for antiquities have boosted the quantity, range and sophistication of fakes. As knowledge of the appropriate materials and techniques used to make the genuine objects become more widespread, so the copies become ever more convincing. Join Paul Craddock, a materials scientist at the British Museum, to explore some of the scientific approaches to revealing the fakes and unravelling the true history of suspect pieces.

 

Paul Craddock

The British Museum

Darwin Centre Live Online

The Natural  History Museum,  London

Recorded in 2003

26 minutes with 9 minutes of fairly interesting Q&A session

 

You will need WMP9 or quicktime installed  and preferably be on broadband!

 

Briefly covers and is useful for very new collectors rather than us anncient ones:

 

  • X-Ray fluorescence anaylsis to detect zinc in a copy of an Etruscan bronze
  • Dendrochronology... ..did you know that not only can this go back up to 24,000 years  but can give indication of where the wood grew!
  • Charles Dawson of the Piltdown Man Forgery. Here they look at The Pevensey Tile
  • Radiocarbon dating of the the Shroud of Turina nd Don Bailey's famous gladiator lamp........fake! Or was it???
  • Microscopy and wire production. Drawplate vs strip twist and rod twist manufacture. They examine an Egyptian gold wire bracelet.

 

Some interesting ponts arise in the Q&A session:

  • deep metal corrosion: the fake bulls heads of a few years ago
  • The finders' exlanation of why so many Hacilar forgeries don't pass TL testing!

http://tinyurl.com/7g8ql  in case my link does not work.

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And listen to a silver trumpet found in the tomb of Tutankhamun!

www.soundex.co.uk/projects/downloads/trumpet.zip

 

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Here  you can HEAR the most ancient written music in the world; a Hurrian hym from the 13th century BC

 

128.97.6.202/urkeshpublic/music.htm

 

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Here you can read about and LISTEN to some ancient Greek and other very early music.

 

You need Quicktime installled to the two above.

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Arms and Armor in Iran: Bronze age to Pahlavi

Moshtagh Khorasani on Arms and Armor in Iran.

The lecture is part of MIT Iranian Studies Group lecture series and was held at MIT on May 8, 2006.

1 hour 32 minutres

 

        CLICK HERE to watch video


 

Ancient Pottery Recorded Audio

 

A video (in French) in which Belgian archaeologists discuss how they were able to "use computer scans of the grooves in 6,500-year-old pottery to extract sounds -- including talking and laughter -- made by the vibrations of the tools used to make the pottery."

 

The  video  is fairly good quality and would lead you to believe that it might be real, if it weren't for the premise being pretty farfetched (and not reported anywhere else in the news). and was  created last year as an April Fool's Day hoax.

 

 

The video you can view by clicking on  

http://www.zalea.org/article.php3?id_article=496  

when you get to that page, click on:  Lire la video

in this link contains sounds that have been derived by analyzing the grooves laid on a piece of pottery that was made at Pompeii over 2,000 years ago. There are words and, amazingly, human laughter. It seems that pottery all over the world contains sound in its groves, picked up naturally as the pots were made, in much the same way that an old wax recording was made.

 

 

Such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do sometring else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made. ..What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE1. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter's wheel from a pot... Years later, similar experiments were made in Gothenburg, Sweden by archaeology professor Paul Åström and acoustics professor Mendel Kleiner2. Their experiments were dedicated to the analysis of the forces acting on a stylus or its equivalent (feather, vane etc.) while working on a soft surface, and to the actual recording of sound on a clay cylinder that was subsequently fired. 1.Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity, by Richard G. Woodbridge, III (Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 57, No. 8, August 1969, pp. 1465-1466). 2.The Brittle Sound of Ceramics - Can Vases Speak? by Mendel Kleiner and Paul Åström (Archaeology and Natural Science, vol. 1, 1993, pp. 66-72, Göteborg: Scandinavian Archaeometry Center, Jonsered, ISSN: 1104-3121).

 

The joke was inspired by a book published in 1979

 

Time Shards  Gregory Benford

 

A researcher attempts to listen to the voices of people from a thousand years ago by reading grooves on pottery. Amazingly, this is a hard science fiction story based on actual research, and it may be possible to do this some day!

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A 2 minute animated geographical illustration of the History of the middle East By Maps of War.

Strangely interesting!

http://www.mapsofwar.com/ind/imperial-history.html?GXHC_GX_jst=8258c07950ea6