Word: basalt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most famous Olmec artifacts are 17 colossal stone heads, presumed to have been carved between 1200 B.C. and 900 B.C. Cut from blocks of volcanic basalt, the heads, which range in height from 5 ft. to 11 ft. and weigh as much as 20 tons, are generally thought to be portraits of rulers. Archaeologists still have not determined how the Olmec transported the basalt from quarries to various settlements as far as 80 miles away--and, in San Lorenzo, hoisted it to the top of a plateau some 150 ft. high. "It must have been an incredible engineering effort," Joralemon...
...what may be the most important of these discoveries, a team of archaeologists uncovered a 9th century B.C. inscription at an ancient mound called Tel Dan, in the north of Israel, in 1993. Words carved into a chunk of basalt refer to the "House of David" and the "King of Israel." It is the first time the Jewish monarch's name has been found outside the Bible, and appears to prove he was more than mere legend...
...French scholar Andre Lemaire reported a related "House of David" discovery in Biblical Archaeology Review. His subject was the Mesha Stele (also known as the Moabite Stone), the most extensive inscription ever recovered from ancient Palestine. Found in 1868 at the ruins of biblical Dibon and later fractured, the basalt stone wound up in the Louvre, where Lemaire spent seven years studying it. His conclusion: the phrase "House of David" appears there as well. As with the Tel Dan fragment, this inscription comes from an enemy of Israel boasting of a victory - King Mesha of Moab, who figured...
According to Renne, these traps (from trappa, the Swedish word for stairs) are composed mainly of glassy basalt, laid down by huge rivers of flowing lava. But amid the basalt, which extends across an area of a million square miles, scientists have also found telltale pieces of tuff, a type of rock indicative of powerful explosions. What this means, says Renne, is that the volcanoes could have easily hurled sulfur dioxide and other gases high enough into the atmosphere to block sunlight and cause substantial cooling. And if the earth cooled enough--locking up more and more water in polar...
...rock structure convinced them that the site would make an ideal superbunker. An April 1953 bureau study concluded that "the rock in the area . . . is exceptionally hard and tight." There were few faults or fissures; most of the rock was epidosite and greenstone, a local name for a Precambrian basalt that had metamorphosed into an extremely dense formation...