Starting with the first volume from 1665, he worked his way through the heavy journals, placing the finished volumes into neat, chronological piles on his bedside shelves.
#Obsidian scalpel demonstration full#
He acquired a full set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (supposedly for the library of Raffles College, Singapore, where he had just taken up a teaching position) and used them as bedtime reading.
When British-born physicist Derek de Solla Price decided to teach himself the history of science in the late 1940s, he didn't mess around. Although this might sound quite geeky, this finding was completely unexpected and has some fascinating implications, which I'll be writing about very soon.Īnyway, I'm telling you all this now because the lovely people at the Getty Villa have just posted a video of the March event, which was called Tracking the Cosmos: The Technology of the Antikythera Mechanism. He concludes that the movement of the sun was represented not with a pointer moving at varying speed as previously thought, but with a pointer moving at constant speed around an unequally divided dial. Evans' measurements of the 360 divisions on this dial show that they were unevenly spaced, in quite a deliberate way. Very briefly, the device has (among other things) a zodiac dial on the front, on which pointers moving at varying speeds were thought to show the varying movements of the sun, moon and five known planets through the sky. Evans also summarised some new research he and his colleagues had just published on the mechanism in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. We discussed the history of research on the mechanism, as well as the latest ideas on what it was, who might have made it and why. He is an expert in the history of astronomy, and author of The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, which came in very useful when I was writing Decoding the Heavens. I spoke along with Jim Evans of the University of Puget Sound in Washington. You can read more about all this in my interview, published in this week's New Scientist.īack in March, I travelled to Los Angeles to participate in an event dedicated to the Antikythera mechanism, held at the beautiful Getty Villa (pictured). The skulls show signs of healing, so the patients clearly survived, at least for a few years. Bilgi says that the surgery appears to have been done for medical reasons such as relieving a build-up of blood during a brain haemorrhage, removing a tumour, and fixing up a head injury.
A very sharp tool (Bilgi reckons obsidian would have been the only material around at the time that was sharp enough) has been used to cut rectangular openings in the skulls. In a graveyard on a nearby hilltop, the researchers found 700 skulls, of which 14 appear to have been operated on. Each is still incredibly sharp: "they would still cut you today," says Bilgi. So what about the surgery? It turns out Bilgi's team has found two scalpels, which are each about four centimetres long and double-sided (see top photo). "It is well-known that Anatolia was the homeland of mother goddess and bull cults," says Bilgi. The plaques are decorated with spirals, or bulls' horns, while the pendants are carved into crescent or disc shapes, probably representing the Moon and the Sun, or into female figures. Other finds include a range of abstract religious symbols, such as plaques and pendants. Bilgi thinks this may have been a ceremonial platform and that the spearhead was used in some kind of ritual performance. For example, they found a huge copper alloy spearhead, 58 centimetres long, next to a circular clay platform with a hole in the centre. The researchers have also gained an insight into the spiritual life of the villagers. During 37 years of excavations, Bilgi's team have found items such as loom-weights and spindle-whirls used in textile production, bone piercers, flintstone and stone tools, copper pins, small stone hand axes, and fragments of pottery bowls, jugs, jars, beakers, tea pots and pitchers.
They mined copper in the local mountains, then alloyed it with arsenic to make weapons, tools, jewellery and religious symbols. The inhabitants lived in rectangular log houses with courtyards and ovens in front, and they were skilled in metallurgy. He gave me some more information about the find and sent me some photos, so here's an update.īilgi told me that life in the early Bronze Age settlement of Ikiztepe was relatively sophisticated. Since then I've managed to track down the director of the excavation, Onder Bilgi, at his dig site in Ikiztepe near the Black Sea. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the Turkish discovery of a 4000-year-old scalpel made of obsidian, along with skulls that had clearly been operated on.
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