No scientific evidence of Hinduism-Buddhism in Bujang Valley?

Prominent Malaysian archaeologist Prof Mokhtar Saidin came out with two important findings during the two-day Old Kedah conference in Sungei Petani, recently.

One was that animism, rather than Hinduism or Buddhism, was the dominant form of worship in the Bujang Valley more than 2,500 years ago. Second, that Bujang Valley stands no chance of being gazetted by Unesco because there is no scientific research to date to verify that the temple ruins were Hindu or Buddhist.

I am not sure whether the two statements have any relationship with one another, or whether Mokhtar is trying to say that since there exists no solid proof of the existence of Hinduism or Buddhism, chances are that the religious worship could even be animism.

Anyway, in days or months to come, I hope Mokhtar can prove to the satisfaction of the international researchers that animism was indeed the dominant practice among the ancients.

He laments the fact that widespread existence of Hindu and Buddhist temples in the valley have yet not be proven. There is lack of scientific objectivity and rigour in establishing the truth about the Bujang Valley.

Mere presence of artifacts and architectural comparisons about Hindu-Buddhist temples do not reflect scientific integrity. Even the candi (either temple or burial ground) have been reconstructed from the stones and bricks in the vicinity.

Mokhtar said that no efforts have been made, both in the past and the present, to protect the temple sites in the valley. One candi was completely demolished by a developer in 2013, without any consideration for the heritage status of the land.

Mokhtar’s analysis of the heritage status of the Bujang Valley in the recent international conferences raised a number of questions that need to be addressed, both by archeologists, historians and those in the government.

Already acclaimed as Hinduism-Buddhism site

First, Bujang Valley has been internationally acclaimed as an ancient site of Hinduism-Buddhism, that is, before the advent of Islam. If there exists no evidence, whether scientific or not, then there is need to explain how this valley received such an acclaim.

Second, Mokhtar is well-known as an archaeologist and researcher, but for him to say that there is no scientific evidence to prove that the Hindu-Buddhist status of the Bujang Valley raises questions as to what our local researchers have been doing all the while.

Many excavations have been done in the past and many more are being planned, so, can I ask what is the purpose?

Third, colonial structures in Malacca and Penang have received the heritage status from Unesco. Is it really true that Unesco is withholding the conferment of heritage status on the Bujang Valley because there is no scientific evidence to authenticate the Hindu-Buddhist origins?

If other ancient sites around the world have received Unesco heritage status, what is preventing Bujang Valley from receiving such an award?

Fourth, apart from the lack of scientific rigour or evidence, who is responsible for initiating the area or place to be designated as heritage and what is the role of the state and federal governments?

Is the federal government dragging its feet on this matter simply because it is politically not conducive to do so?

Fifth, if local researchers do not have the technology or the skills, then maybe it is necessary to bring in foreign experts to determine whether there was such a thing as Hindu-Buddhist presence in the Bujang Valley.

Sixth, Saidin wants to prove that animism was widespread in the Sungei Batu area of the Bujang Valley more than 2,500 years, a site older than Borobodur and Angkor Wat.

As I have argued earlier, this might be so. It does not prove that Hinduism-Buddhism was non-existent but all these religions could have co-existed before the rise of monotheism.

Seventh, is there a relationship between the presence of animism and the lack of evidence on Hinduism-Buddhism?

P RAMASAMY is Deputy Chief Minister II of Penang and the state assemblyperson for Perai.

IS extremists loot, destroy ancient sites

For more than 5,000 years, numerous civilizations have left their mark on upper Mesopotamia - from Assyrians and Akkadians to Babylonians and Romans. Their ancient, buried cities, palaces and temples packed with monumental art are scattered across what is now northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

Now much of that archeological wealth is under the control of extremists from the Islamic State group. The militants have demolished some artifacts in their zealotry to uproot what they see as heresy, but they are also profiting from it, hacking relics off palace walls or digging them out to sell on the international black market.

Antiquities officials in Iraq and Syria warn of a disaster as the region's history is erased.

In Iraq, black market dealers are coming into areas controlled by the Islamic State group or in safe regions nearby to snap up items, said Qais Hussein Rashid, head of the staterun Museums department, citing reports from local antiquities officials still in the area.

When the militants overran the northern city of Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province in June, they captured a region where nearly 1,800 of Iraq's 12,000 registered archeological sites are located. They took even more as they pushed south toward Baghdad.

Among the most important sites under their control are four ancient cities - Nineveh, Kalhu, Dur Sharrukin and Ashur - which were at different times the capital of the mighty Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians first arose around 2,500 BC and at one point ruled over a realm stretching from the Mediterranean coast to Iran.

The heaviest damage confirmed so far has taken place in the grand palace at Kalhu, from which Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II reigned in the 9th century BC, Rasheed said. The palace walls are lined with reliefs describing the king's military campaigns and conquests or depicting him hunting lions or making sacrifices to the gods.

"They are cutting these reliefs into small parts and selling them," Rashid said. "They don't need to excavate. They just need a chainsaw to cut (off) the king's head or legs if they want."

Recently they carved off a relief depicting a winged demon holding a sacred plant and sold it abroad, he said. "It is now beyond borders."

Authorities fear other sites will soon face destruction, including Mosul's city museum, which has rare collections of Assyrian artifacts, and the 2,300-year-old city of Hatra, a well-preserved complex of temples further south. From both locations, militants ordered out antiquities officials, chastising them for protecting "idols," Rashid said. So far, it appears the militants have not done anything with the artifacts at the sites because they are awaiting instructions from their religious authorities, he said.

The Islamic State terrorists seek to purge society of everything that doesn't conform with their strict, puritanical version of Islam. That means destroying not only relics seen as pagan but even some Islamic sites - Sunni Muslim shrines they see as idolatrous, as well as mosques used by Shiites, a branch of Islam they consider heretical.

In and around Mosul, the militants destroyed at least 30 historic sites, including the Islamic mosque-shrines of the prophets Seth, Jirjis and Jonah. The shrines were centuries old in many cases.

But their extremist ideology doesn't prevent them from also profiting from the sale of ancient artifacts, either by selling them themselves or taking a cut from thieves who are increasingly active in looting the sites.

Backhoe cuts into dinosaur's tail, revealing rare fossil find

(CNN) -- It's like a scene out of a Flintstones comic. Fred is running a backhoe and drops its shovel right on top of a dinosaur's tail.

It happened in Canada this week when the backhoe laid bare an extremely rare find, the fossil of a dinosaur millions of years old.

A whole 35-foot dinosaur may be slumbering inside the rock a construction worker hit while clearing a site in the town of Spirit River. He was making way for an oil pipeline.

The company stopped work and called around to find someone who knew something about dinosaurs.

Word got to paleontologist Matthew Vavrek, who went out to inspect. He wasn't expecting to see what he found on the side of a sandstone boulder.

"As we walked around it, we saw this whole part of a tail of a dinosaur. To see something like that is pretty incredible," he said.

Paleontologists usually find fossils jumbled up, broken apart, crushed and spread out over a large area, not in one piece like this one.

"The last time I've seen something like that was in a museum. I've never found something like this before," he said. He has rarely ever even heard of a find like this anywhere in the world.

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Delicate dinosaur

Had the backhoe kept going, this fossil would have turned to mush, too.

The chunks that the shovel picked up, quickly fell to pieces. The driver noticed this and immediately halted it.

The dinosaur may have been tough when it was alive, but its fossil is as fragile as crumb cake.

"You handle it carefully, or it's just going to shatter," Vavrek said.

The Tourmaline Oil Corp has enlisted its workers and machinery to help Vavrek and his colleagues remove it gingerly and slowly.

That could take weeks, if the weather holds, or months, if there is a cold snap that freezes the dino in the ground.

The first flakes have already fallen, Vavrek said. Workers are in a race to beat Alberta's usually heavy snow fall.

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Slow revelations

As they go, they will reveal just how big of a find this is.

"We don't know for sure that the rest of the animal is there," Vavrek said. "Sometimes, all you get is what you see."

They will take it out surrounded by much of the soil it's buried in then cart it off to a place where they can slowly clean and prepare it for study and identification.

Technicians will use tiny jackhammer-like instruments to buzz away the dirt and reveal the stony skeleton.

But even then, they still might not know what kind of dinosaur it is. If it is a textbook specimen that scientists are already familiar with, it could take years to categorize it.

New dinosaur is a primitive bird

"If it turns out to be something new, never found before ... it would take even longer," Vavrek said.

If they do pull a whole dinosaur out of the ground, Vavrek thinks it will be about mid-size as dinosaurs go, or a little larger.

Its happenstance discovery by a backhoe seems ironic to Vavrek.

He is used to grueling prospecting tours for much smaller fossils in the Alberta wilderness, where he has to keep an eye out for dangerous wild animals.

He has had some encounters with black bears and grizzly bears. But they've gone well so far.

Humans may have left Africa for Eurasia earlier than believed

These small hand axes are at least 100,000 years old. A team of scientists found these tools in the United Arab Emirates.

Scientists have discovered new evidence suggesting that modern humans first left Africa to explore Eurasia much earlier than previously thought.

An international team of scientists has uncovered a tool kit that indicates that modern humans, who looked and perhaps behaved much like us, must have lived in eastern Arabia about 100,000 to 125,000 years ago. The collection of small hand axes, scrapers and other tools was found in Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates. A report about the discovery appears in the journal Science.

The people who made these tools "are our ancestors, I have no doubt about that," said Hans-Peter Uerpmann, of the University of Tubingen in Germany, who collaborated on the project, at a press teleconference Wednesday.

But the findings still do not prove definitively that modern humans made these tools, as the researchers did not find human remains near them, said Ted Goebel, anthropologist at Texas A&M University, who was not involved in the study. They potentially could have been made by Neanderthals or Neanderthal-like hominids, who were already in Eurasia at that time, Goebel said.

Previous research suggested that modern humans first left Africa along the coast by way of the Indian Ocean rim about 60,000 years ago, based on genetic evidence.

But the tool kit suggests that humans arrived on the Arabian Peninsula much earlier. Scientists say the tool shapes, indicative of what would have been made in Africa, indicate that humans did not need technological innovation to get there.

Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois who was not involved in the research, agreed that the structure of the axes found at the site are indicative of human-made objects from East Africa.

But, as Goebel said, human skeletons are needed to prove the connection.

"It's in Africa they produce hand axes, but also what are called foliates, leaf-shaped bifacial pieces. These simply do not occur in the rest of southwest Asia," Anthony Marks, study co-author and retired professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas said at the teleconference.

Instead, the researchers say, environmental factors aided the humans' departure. There was a global ice age between 200,000 and 130,000 years ago, during which global sea levels fell and desert belts expanded, Marks said. During that time, modern humans would have had to stay in East Africa, as it would have been hard to cross the deserts.

But then, warmer temperatures came in about 130,000 years ago in the "interglacial" period, giving way to savanna grasses with lakes and rivers. Around that time, Marks said, the southern Red Sea had water levels about 328 feet (100 meters) lower than what's found there today, and was also much narrower. This would have facilitated an easier crossing into Arabia.

The humans could have walked, or used rafts or boats, which they were capable of making, Uerpmann said. Their descendants may have moved toward the Persian Gulf, which was smaller then, and into Mesopotamia, or eastward along the Iranian coast to the Indian subcontinent, he said.

Although there has been extensive genetic study pointing to humans' departure 60,000 years ago, there is no archaeological evidence for this, Marks said. Genetics give a sequence of happenings, but cannot say how and when the events occurred, Uerpmann said. The archaeological record is better than genetics for this reason, he said.

Still, Goebel says he is cautious because the method for dating in the study, called luminescence dating, is not much more precise than extrapolating dates from genetics, and gives a large range of possible dates of origin for objects.

Pyramid that Contains Maya Tomb at Palenque Archaeological Zone Restored

MEXICO CITY.- The pyramidal building known as Temple 20 at Palenque Archaeological Zone, in Chiapas, where the existence of a funerary chamber that contains the remains of a high rank character has been confirmed, is being reinforced and restored by specialists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) with the aim of guaranteeing its structural stability and the possibility of public visit in the future.

The work part of the site’s Management Plan gives continuity to exploration conducted by archaeologists Merle Greene and Alfonso Morales between 1999 and 2003. Martha Cuevas, researcher at INAH, directs to present the stabilization labors at the 1,400 years old Prehispanic construction.

According to archaeologist Cuevas, the relevance of Temple 20 lies in its dating, which goes back to the Early Classic period (430-600 AD), lapse with little evidence found at Palenque, mainly from the architectural category.

Temple 20 “illustrates an obscure moment of occupation of the ancient city: almost every construction we can admire today dates from the Late Classic period (600 to 850 AD); earlier stages of the site are scarcely known”.

Martha Cuevas explained that “unlike other Mesoamerican cities, it is not easy to detect early stages of buildings at Palenque. In the case of the main temple of Tenochtitlan, Templo Mayor, a base and a temple were built over other similar structures; in Palenque, they dismantled the upper part of the constructions and raised new buildings”.

Regarding the funerary chamber inside the pyramid, the specialist from the INAH Direction for Archaeological Monuments and Zones Public Registration, declared it was identified in 1999 by caving a probing well and introducing a camcorder.

A funerary chamber with mural paintings was captured: on the floor, remains of a person and ceramics allowed determining that the inhumation dates from the Early Classic period, approximately 550 of the Common Era.

“The video recording shows flat vessels and dishes inside the tomb, as well as jade beads, some tesserae, and shell fragments that must have been part of a mask that the entombed personage carried on the belt.

“There are no sarcophagi from the Early Classic period, as the cases of the Reina Roja (Red Queen) or Pakal II; this important character was deposited on slabs directly on the floor of Temple 20. Images do not allow seeing the complete skeleton; apparently, there are just fragments, but this will be confirmed once the mortuary chamber is explored”.

The INAH Council of Archaeology determined that the pyramidal base must be stabilized before exploration to prevent filtration or collapse, safeguarding the conservation of the funerary context. Once this labor ends, investigation at the chamber will be resumed.

Archaeologist Edwin Angulo Torres, in charge of work at Temple 20, mentioned that labor focused on the exploration of the base and the consolidation of the superior temple, resulting in the identification of 2 constructive stages of the building, the first from 430-600 AD and the second from 750-900 AD.

Angulo mentioned that the temple was constructed on a rocky promontory, and Mayas leveled it with gravel and clay fillings that loosened with time, causing foundation laying problems in the northwest area of the building.

“Data obtained by using probing wells and other excavation methods allow us reconstructing hypothetically how the construction’s façade looked like, its bodies and the height of each of them, giving us the approximate appearance of the construction”.

Intervention of Temple 20 also had the objective of “giving the upper temple architectural and structural support, key for conservation of the substructure and the funerary chamber”.

After commenting that in 2011 will take place the second field season, archaeologist Edwin Angulo concluded that the project contemplates the integral consolidation of the base, adding that in 2010, the main façade consolidation was finished, except the staircase.