Technology and Archaeology

Heather Pringle at Archaeology has this bit on the Shroud of Turin:

Many believe the Shroud of Turin is the winding cloth that covered the body of Jesus of Nazareth after his crucifixion.  It bears a faint and terribly sad image of a man.  In 1988, the Catholic Church gave the University of Arizona and two other institutions the task of dating the Shroud of Turin, hoping to shed light on its mysterious origins.  On the morning of April 21, 1988,  a group of scientists and clerics convened in the sacristy of Turin Cathedral to trim tiny samples from the famous shroud. Each of the labs then received four identical stainless steel containers,  one holding a shroud sample and three containing samples from other ancient textiles to allow blind studies. 

Ancient Art

Came across this article in the New Yorker about the study and meaning of cave paintings. This quote in particular caught my eye:

 ”It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.”