Word: archaeologist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Roland Besenval is a magician. With a few words and expansive hand gestures, the French archaeologist conjures a magnificent city from the millenniums-old ruins that crown a windswept plateau in Afghanistan's far north. Stabbing a finger in the direction of misshapen hillocks made of eroded mud brick, he describes massive battlements built to repel barbarian raiders from the north. Balkh, as the city was known, would have needed them. More than 1,000 years before Marco Polo visited its ruins, Balkh was renowned throughout the ancient world for its fabulous wealth and advanced culture. It was the birthplace...
...consciousness between creatures. He believed that his greatest discovery was that all animals were kin, and wondered whether an awareness of the continuity of related species could assuage the pain of death. Humanities Center Director and Professor Homi K. Bhabha called the literary critic a “magnificent archaeologist of the soul of the scientist.” Beer said that in Darwin’s writings he used imaginative language to achieve a “reverse anthropomorphism” that nurtured empathy between humans and other living beings. For example, he once observed a plant recoiling...
...following rivers, he would find what others had missed. At stake was not just a material fortune but an intellectual victory. Conventional wisdom said that despite all its lush abundance, the Amazon region could never support an evolved, sophisticated human society--it was, in the phrase of one archaeologist, a "counterfeit paradise." Fawcett believed otherwise...
...strangest twist in the story may be yet to come. Grann doesn't find Fawcett, but he does meet an American archaeologist who lives, Kurtz-like, with a tribe of Indians deep in the jungle. His work suggests that Z may actually have been more than a figment, and that once upon a time the counterfeit paradise was a real one. Fawcett may have been right after all. But he was too late for that...
...prospect of chemical and biological warfare in this age of anthrax scares and WMD can feel - like the threat of nuclear Armageddon before it - like a uniquely modern terror. But a British archaeologist's recent find offers a reminder that chemical weapons are nothing new - in fact, they are nearly 2,000 years old. Simon James, a researcher at the University of Leicester in the U.K., claims to have found the first physical evidence of chemical weaponry, dating from a battle fought in A.D. 256 at an ancient Roman fortress. James concluded that 20 Roman soldiers unearthed beneath the town...