this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023

60 points (94.1% liked)

Archaeology

3315 readers

149 users here now

Welcome to c/Archaeology @ Mander.xyz!

Shovelbums welcome. 🗿

Notice Board

This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.

2023-06-15: We are collecting resources for the sidebar!
2023-06-13: We are looking for mods. Send a dm to @fossilesque@mander.xyz if interested!

About

Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

Rules

Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.
No pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology.

Links

Archaeology 101:

Historic England's Guides for the Archaeological Sciences

Get Involved:

University and Field Work:

Jobs and Career:

Professional Organisations:

FOSS Tools:

Diamond Open Access in Archaeology
Tools for Quantitative Archaeology – in R
Open Archaeo: A list of open source archaeological tools and software.
The Open Digital Archaeology Textbook

Datasets:

Fun:

Time Team from the BBC

Other Resources:

Similar Communities

!openscience@lemmy.ml

Sister Communities

Science and Research

!scicomm@mander.xyz

Biology and Life Sciences

Plants & Gardening

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Memes

Find us on Reddit

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

fossilesque@mander.xyz

recreationalplacebos@midwest.social

SciBot@mander.xyz

FlyingSquid@mander.xyz

US accused of sending fake Roman mosaics back to Lebanon (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 years ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to c/archaeology@mander.xyz

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Authorities in New York have been accused by leading academics in France and Britain of repatriating fake Roman artefacts to Lebanon.

Eight out of nine mosaic panels that the US authorities recently returned to the Middle Eastern country are not what they seem, according to claims made by Djamila Fellague of the University of Grenoble.

She claims to have uncovered proof that forgers had copied designs from original mosaics in archaeological sites or museums in Sicily, Tunisia, Algeria and Turkey. “Eight of the nine ‘returned’ mosaic panels were fakes that [are] relatively easy to detect because the models used are famous mosaics,” says Fellague.

top 17 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 11 points 2 years ago

It's like an onion article

[–] Hupf@feddit.de 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

https://youtu.be/H6yQOs93Cgg

[–] Hominine@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

It's a mistake

[–] autotldr 1 points 2 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

She singled out a panel depicting an Anguiped Giant, that she believes is based on a section of the famous mosaics in the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily, a Unesco world heritage site.

Christos Tsirogiannis, a guest lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a leading expert in looted antiquities and trafficking networks, believes the evidence is irrefutable.

He said that were the revelation to be shown to be true it would be extremely embarrassing for the office of the Manhattan district attorney (DA), which had announced the repatriation of antiquities to Lebanon on 7 September.

He added that the alleged forgers had made the mistake of copying well-known mosaics, which have been extensively photographed by tourists with images widely available on the internet and in academic publications.

Tsirogiannis leads research on illicit antiquities trafficking for the Unesco chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece.

“At first I fought against this idea, telling myself that an investigation that led to a warrant arrest, a red notice from Interpol and a restitution to a country must have been the subject of a rigorous scientific study,” she said.

The original article contains 708 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[+] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com -16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I geuss the US response would be the usual we're the big guys here, what you gonna do about it ? and fuck you.

They did it when the whole mass surveillance thing was unveiled so I don't think some poor archeologists can do much about this, can they ? I even think that the US archeologists that were tasked to analyze the authenticity are more than likely forced to comply and lie or risk being fired

[–] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I think you've misunderstood the article. What happened was a district attorney in the united states caught someone smuggling antiquities into the country. So the district attorney who caught them had everything sent back to the country of origin, exactly what they should do with smuggled antiquities. It turned out the guy was trafficking in mostly forgeries of pieces that are in other known locations and were never brought to the united states. The experts the district attorney used thought they were authentic. What on earth do you think the new york DA did wrong here? I guess they could hire better experts. But if they have what they think to be authentic artifacts that were smuggled out of countries, they did the right thing and sent them back to the country of origin. They're saying this is just embarrassing for the DA because they billed this guy as a smuggler in their court case, but actually he's a forger. I don't see any reason for anyone to be outraged though, except maybe at the forger.

[–] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

But the USA is always bad!! /s

[–] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It was a loaded headline meant to trick people into clicking. If you just read the headline you'd think the United States government was stealing artifacts, forging them, and sending the forgeries back or something. Which has like nothing in common with the actual story in the article. Always pretty easy in the comments to tell who actually read the article and who made up an imaginary article in their head based on the headline.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I know titles are fake as shit. I read the post summary and the autotldr summary both didn't contain anything explaining about any of what you said. Both actually renforce the idea that the antiques where sent as knowingly as fake.

[–] jadero@mander.xyz 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I sympathize. I've been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.

I don't know if it's real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.

Now that I've written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being "high information" and garbage articles as "low information", summarizing will always be more likely to cause important "damage" the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not only are good and compact articles few and far between. The problem is that nowadays, a lot of the article you click on will have a paywall so reading them is impossible ( unless using barley functioning services that claim to remove it) After a while, you expect the article to be paywalled and either move on or comment based on the provided info.

[–] jadero@mander.xyz 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That, too! I've taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a "proper" title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I'll go read the article.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 years ago

It only happened with me once in lemmy and it contained the same amount of info but in a wordier version. I usually read the autotldr bot summary and if it's not there I check the article but even then there's a 50/50 chance it's locked.

[–] Ranvier@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Those auto tldr summaries can be super random and misleading too regardless. The auto tldr summary doesn't imply anything like this either. It's just a section of the article with an expert making fun of whatever expert the DA hired who missed that it was a forgery and thought it was authentic. So it's embarrassing because they told this country, he we recovered your priceless artifact and threw the guy in jail who smuggled it. And the country is like, oh well that's nice but the artifact was never missing in the first place. If you want to comment on something at least read the article first, or you'll just be spreading misleading clickbait headlines even more.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I reckon I made a mistake here. I usually read the article but since what feels like almost 1 of 3 of shared articles here are locked behind paywalls I don't bother anymore.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

The response at the end of the article is funny though. "No you" but in DA.

[–] Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com -4 points 2 years ago

I gave an exemple above of why it's actually plausible for the US to do so. Heck, if you want a real reason why " USA is always bad" just look at the map of USA backed coup.

Yes, I expect USA do such things.