"Experts say the site is the country's most important archaeological find for 40 years and have kept the exact location of the dig a secret to stave off thieves."
The remains of the lord or prince haven't been discovered. Archaeologists believe his ashes may be inside a cauldron found in the grave:
"The cauldron, the focal point of the mounded tomb, is surrounded by six women buried in a radial alignment from the pot, like the hands of a clock, The Times reports.
"Researchers say these may well have been concubines or widows belonging to the person being buried, but it remains a mystery as to whether they were slain for the burial or sacrificed themselves."
Note: "Salisbury Plain is famous for its history and archaeology. In the Neolithic period, Stone Age people began to settle on the plain, most likely centred around the causewayed enclosure of Robin Hood's Ball. Large long barrows such as White Barrow and other earthworks were built across the plain. By 2500 BC areas around Durrington Walls and Stonehenge had become a focus for building, and the southern part of the plain continued to be settled into the Bronze Age." (Wikipedia)
Video from 2013.
Salisbury Plain has been used as a cemetery for a very long time. According to a 2008 NY Times story, "New radiocarbon dates from human cremation burials among and around the brooding stones on Salisbury Plain in England indicate that the site was used as a cemetery from 3000 B.C. until after the monuments [Stonehenge, etc] were erected around 2500 B.C. ..."
"Have you ever heard the story of a wizard battle that supposedly took place when an early church was constructed? Or how about the story of a border guard who defied King Herod's orders and spared Jesus' life? Scholars have now translated these and other 'apocryphal' Christian texts (stories not told in the canonical bible) into English for the first time." Source: Live Science.
"...One of the newly translated texts tells of a battle against 'diabolical' wizards who are trying to destroy an ancient church being built as a dedication to the Virgin Mary in the city of Philippi in Greece.
"The text is written in Coptic, an Egyptian language that uses the Greek alphabet, and may have originally been written around 1,500 years ago, Paul Dilley, a professor of religious studies at the University of Iowa, who translated the text, wrote ... The story is told in two texts that were both from the Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in Egypt. At that time, much of the population around the Mediterranean had converted to Christianity, although some still followed polytheistic faiths."
Note: The monastery contains many relics of saints, including some supposed remains of John the Baptist. I'm not sure what those remains are exactly, since the body of John the Baptist is supposed to have been scattered all over the place. According to Wikipedia, "A crypt and relics said to be John's and mentioned in 11th- and 16th-century manuscripts, were discovered in 1969 during restoration [that took place at the monastery]."
"Ancient Roman emperors' faces have been brought to life in digital reconstructions; the unnervingly realistic image project includes the Emperors Caligula, Nero and Hadrian, among others." Source: Live Science.
"The features of these long-dead rulers have been preserved in hundreds of sculptures, but even the most detailed carvings can't convey what these men truly looked like when they were alive. To explore that, Canadian cinematographer and virtual reality designer Daniel Voshart used machine learning — computer algorithms that learn through experience — in a neural network, a computing system processes information through hierarchies of nodes that communicate in a manner similar to neurons in a brain."
Comment: Interesting project, but who knows how accurate these images are? As usual with these reconstructions, details like hair, eye and skin color are mostly conjectural. In this case, Voshart used primary sources and artwork when available and based his reconstructions on busts believed to be the most skillfully done or thought to have been made when the emperor was still alive. He used a program called Artbreeder and sometimes let it guess at things like skin color. All of the faces can be seen at his website.
"Chromium steel - similar to what we know today as tool steel - was first made in Persia, nearly a millennium earlier than experts previously thought, according to a new study." Source: Science Daily.
"The discovery, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, was made with the aid of a number of medieval Persian manuscripts, which led the researchers to an archaeological site in Chahak, southern Iran."
"'...'This research not only delivers the earliest known evidence for the production of chromium steel dating back as early as the 11th century CE, but also provides a chemical tracer that could aid the identification of crucible steel artifacts in museums or archaeological collections back to their origin in Chahak, or the Chahak tradition,'" according to one of the researchers.
"PARIS (AP) — With precision and boundless energy, a team of carpenters used medieval techniques to raise up — by hand — a three-ton oak truss Saturday in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, a replica of the wooden structures that were consumed in the landmark’s devastating April 2019 fire that also toppled its spire." Source: AP (9/19/20).
"The demonstration to mark European Heritage Days gave the hundreds of people a first-hand look at the rustic methods used 800 years ago to build the triangular frames in the nave of Notre Dame de Paris."
Comment: I'm glad to see that this demonstration of medieval techniques included the use of ye olde buzz-saw and authentic safety helmets, ear protectors and plandemic face masks from the period.
Nitpicking aside, the French do seem to have decided to restore the cathedral to its original state as much as possible. That's good news. For a while there it looked like they would turn the church into some postmodern monstrosity.
Video from July 2020.
Moving right along, I have to point out -- again -- that we still don't have any real explanation for what caused the fire. The Paris prosecutor announced on the day after the fire that there was no evidence of arson. How he could have known that is anybody's guess, but it's not hard to figure out why he would say it considering all the attacks on churches which were taking place in France at the time.
Arson was ruled out immediately, before any investigation could have been conducted. The official line now is that the fire was accidental.
There was some speculation at first that the fire might have been caused by a cigarette dropped by one of the construction workers doing restoration work on the cathedral, but it didn't seem very likely that a burning cigarette could have set off a conflagration like that:
"As of September, five months after the fire, investigators thought the cause of the fire was more likely an electrical fault than a cigarette. Determining the exact place in which the fire started was expected to take a great deal more time and work. By 15 April 2020 [1], investigators believed 'the fire to have been started by either a cigarette or a short circuit in the electrical system'." (Wikipedia)
And that's that. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any more news about the fire investigation since April of this year. I haven't run across anything in English, anyway. Aside from occasional items about the restoration work the story seems to have vanished into a black hole.
[1] Note the date: April 15, 2020. Curiously enough, ArtNet posted an article about the fire on the same date which mentioned that "experts still haven’t been able to gain access to the area where the blaze is believed to have begun." Maybe I'm missing something, but if the cathedral was still so damaged and fragile that investigators couldn't access the area where the fire apparently started, then how could they say anything about what caused it?
"Rodent mothers produce more offspring after smelling odors produced by frightened males. This is reported by a team of biologists from Finland and the Netherlands and bring new information the proximate and ultimate explanations of small mammal behavioral responses." Source: Phys.org (2018).
"Fear of being eaten has the power to shape populations and drive evolution. The effect the authors report is large: exposed mothers produce litters with about fifty percent more pups compared to unexposed control mothers."
Comment: If the rat population can grow so explosively in places like India where they're venerated, I hate to think how quickly they reproduce when living in a state of fear. Rats, of course, are considered to be vermin in the West but they're actually nothing to be afraid of according to the noted English rat expert, James Herbert.
"Reindeer hunters in Siberia have unearthed the remains of an extinct ice age beast: a mummified cave bear — the only adult of its species ever discovered that still has intact soft tissues, including its fur and even its black nose, according to news reports." Source: Live Science.
Note: "Between the years 1917 and 1923, the Drachenloch cave in Switzerland was excavated by Emil Bächler. The excavation uncovered more than 30,000 cave bear skeletons. It also uncovered a stone chest or cist, consisting of a low wall built from limestone slabs near a cave wall with a number of bear skulls inside it. Also, a cave bear skull was found with a femur bone from another bear stuck inside it. Scholars speculated that it was proof of prehistoric human religious rites involving the cave bear, or that the Drachenloch cave bears were hunted as part of a hunting ritual, or that the skulls were kept as trophies." (Wikipedia)
"These excavations in the ancient city on the outskirts of Kapıdağ Peninsula were resumed by a team headed by professor Nurettin Koçhan from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Bandırma Onyedi Eylül University on July 2. The excavation team continues to work at the temple, which is named after the Roman Emperor Hadrian."
"Throughout history, people have used everything from their own hands to corn cobs to snow to clean up after bowel movements. One of the oldest materials on record for this purpose is the hygiene stick, dating back to China 2,000 years ago, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Hygiene sticks, also called bamboo slips, were wooden or bamboo sticks wrapped in cloth." Source: Live Science.
"During the Greco-Roman period from 332 B.C. to 642 A.D., the Greeks and Romans cleaned their derrières with another stick called a tersorium, according to a feature in the BMJ. The tersorium, which had a sponge on one end, was left in public bathrooms for communal use. Some scholars argue that the tersorium may not have been used to clean people's behinds but the bathrooms they defecated in. People cleaned the tersorium by dumping it in a bucket of salt or vinegar water or by dipping it in running water that flowed beneath the toilet seats."