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One of the red granite quarries that provided stone for Ancient Egyptian temples and statues still holds a giant and unfinished obelisk.

The obelisk is roughly dressed and was in the process of being 'cut free' of the surrounding rock. A flaw in the stone developed, which is still very visible, and the work was abandoned. It is thought that this was the pair of the Lateran Obelisk, which is now in Rome, which originally stood before Karnak Temple and was commissioned for Tuthmosis III.

From the chisel marks and the ancient tools found in the area, some of the ancient quarry techniques have been determined. These include soaking wooden blocks to encourage the rock to crack and also using quartz sand slurry as an abrasive. The huge effort required to free this Obelisk is staggering, especially considering the basic tools and lack of any non-manual techniques. If the piece was freed an equally monumental effort would have been needed to move it 220 Km from the Quarry to the Nile, and then to Karnak.

Not my own site, I just love web1.0 looking sites.

New research suggests that the people who buried the young woman took precautionary measures to stop her from coming back to life and exacting revenge on them

What did these items signify? Researchers led by Dariusz Poliński, an archaeologist at Poland’s Nicolaus Copernicus University, have spent the past four years trying to find an answer, and now, they’ve published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The team’s analysis suggests that locals viewed the woman—now dubbed “Zosia”—as a threat, blaming her for misfortunes such as disease and famine for reasons that still remain unclear. To prevent Zosia from rising from the dead and causing further mayhem, they initially put a lock around her toe, then later returned to the grave to place the sickle over her neck.

The Aquiry geoglyph builders inhabited an area almost as large as the Maya, with a population as large as 3 million people at it's height, but their earthworks and monuments have gone largely undiscovered. A new LIDAR study just uncovered almost 400 new structures though, and researchers expect another 24,000–30,000 earthworks and geoglyphs might still remain. ( original article in Nature ).

Communities living in Colombia thousands of years ago achieved an engineering wonder of the world based on cooperation among family groups without top-down government, a new study shows.

The wreck, measuring about 21 metres long and 6 metres wide, was described by Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, as “one of the most important underwater archaeological discoveries of recent years”.

link to open access paper

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0338509

The results demonstrate that Homo sapiens during the late MSA mastered precise, pre-planned patterns anchored in specific geometric affordances: orthogonality and parallelism. These affordances were related and organized through a distinct set of cognitive operations: rotation, translation, iteration, and embedding.

Our dataset is particularly well represented by rotation, translation, and iteration, as these operations enable the construction of simple yet recurrent combinations, including aligned sets of lines and repeated angular configurations. Notably, the analysis revealed that some of these combinations generate a defined spatial framework within which embedding occurs. This framework represents a zero level—a reference plane—within which features and operations are nested to form highly structured, regularly spaced patterns such as hatched bands, grids, and diamonds.

What emerges is a ‘geometric grammar’, that is a coherent and procedural system of operations through which patterns are constructed according to a stable internal logic.

Fig 2. A synthesis of a spatial and chronological assessment of the EOES motifs. Data elaborated from Texier et al. [2]; Heshilwood et al. [3]; Jacobs et al. [29]. We have associated the two fragments from Apollo 11 to the ‘sub-parallel intersecting lines motif’ as, in our statistical analyses, they display the same values in terms of regularity of line alignments, consistent with the fragments in the same category from Diepkloof.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0338509.g002