Turkey
Continuing from the most recent post about Ziyaret Tepe, this article complements the previous one with more detail about the dam and the frantic excavations.
But it’s not just the famous Assyrian city that will be lost – up to 500 ancient sites will also be gone.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/archaeologists-discovered-an-ancient-assyrian-city-only-to-lose-it-again

Turkey
Another tepe (hill) – this one less famous than Gobekli – was once the frontier of the Assyrian empire, rather like Hadrian’s Wall was to the Romans. Ziyaret Tepe (known as Tushhan in antiquity), however, was on the doorstep of its own empire, unlike the barren, far-away-from-home wall dividing the Roman-ruled south from the Barbarians on the northern side.
Just a couple of decades before the rise of the Persian empire that would sweep across the whole of Anatolia and almost alter the world as we know it today, this relatively small hill would be at the centre of the battles with the Anatolians. But this hill was not a wall built by the Assyrians – it was a busy, ancient town with a heavy military presence. The fact the Assyrians didn’t cross the land beyond and conquer the whole of Anatolia suggests they simply didn’t want to, rather than attributing this inability to any great effort on the part of those attacking the hill and other sites.
Ancient Tushhan is due to be swallowed up by the waters of a newly built dam, which is a dreadful shame for such an ancient and important site.
This article sheds a lot of light on the frantic excavations carried out prior to its coming destruction. The pebble mosaics are especially notable.

https://popular-archaeology.com/article/end-of-empire-the-archaeological-excavations-at-ziyaret-tepe/

The World
Something very close to our hearts in modern times – the gap between rich and poor and wealth inequality – has been determined using economic measurements.
We all know the rich are becoming richer and the poor poorer, and this is being exacerbated by our incessant thirst for goods we don’t need, causing the destruction of the natural world on a scale never seen before.
But what was it like in ancient times? Has the gap between rich and poor always been the same or similar to the current state of affairs?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/aracheology-wealth-inequality-180968072/

The World
I am, of course, absolutely and utterly unsurprised by this notion being put forward by Professor Daniel Everett.
This would go a long way to dismissing many of the ridiculous ideas constantly being put forward by archaeologists and, most importantly, another theory that kills off the out-of-Africa model.
I would be much more comfortable with a homo sapiens ‘out-of-Africa’ model that utilises sea going vessels to leave the continent, rather than the current model that suggests we walked out of Africa and into the near east, and from there spread around the world. It is quite clear to me humans arrived in the Americas by boat, long before the accepted model, and if Homo erectus was canoeing around the world long before human beings even evolved then that is more than a smoking gun.
I take my hat off to Professor Everett for thinking outside of the box.
Again, the tide is slowly turning…

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/20/homo-erectus-may-have-been-a-sailor-and-able-to-speak

England
Aethelflaed – the warrior queen trying to oust Boudica!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-44069889