Latest news with #artifacts
Bloomberg
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
At London's New Design Museum, Visitors Get Hands-On Access
A new museum opens in London this weekend that offers visitors a highly unusual experience among collections globally: the chance to request and view unique and priceless objects one-on-one. The museum in question is V&A East Storehouse, a tall, spacious warehouse that gives the public unprecedented access to over 250,000 artifacts not usually on display from the collection of West London's Victoria and Albert Museum, Britain's national museum for the applied arts. While most of the remarkable collection — which includes items as eclectic as medieval horse armor, musical instruments and an original Frankfurt Kitchen — is displayed in glass storage cases, members of the public will also be able to get up close and personal by requesting to view a specific object in one of the storehouse's dedicated viewing spaces. The result could prove to be one of the most accessible museum set-ups in the world.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'Trash' found deep inside a Mexican cave turns out to be 500-year-old artifacts from a little-known culture
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. While investigating a cave high in the mountains of Mexico, a spelunker thought she had found a pile of trash from a modern-day litterbug. But upon closer inspection, she discovered that the "trash" was actually a cache of artifacts that may have been used in fertility rituals more than 500 years ago. "I looked in, and it seemed like the cave continued. You had to hold your breath and dive a little to get through," speleologist Katiya Pavlova said in a translated statement. "That's when we discovered the two rings around the stalagmites." The cave, called Tlayócoc, is in the Mexican state of Guerrero and about 7,800 feet (2,380 meters) above sea level. Meaning "Cave of Badgers" in the Indigenous Nahuatl language, Tlayócoc is known locally as a source of water and bat guano. In September 2023, Pavlova and local guide Adrián Beltrán Dimas ventured into the cave — possibly the first time anyone has entered it in about five centuries. Roughly 500 feet (150 m) into the cave, the ceiling dipped down. The pair of explorers had to navigate the flooded cave with a gap of just 6 inches (15 centimeters) between the water and the cave ceiling. "Adrián was scared, but the water was deep enough, and I went through first to show him it wasn't that difficult," Pavlova said. While taking a break to look around, Pavlova and Beltrán were shocked to discover 14 artifacts. "It was very exciting and incredible!" Pavlova said. "We were lucky here." Related: 2,500-year-old burials of 3 people discovered in a cave in Mexico Among the artifacts were four shell bracelets, a giant decorated snail shell (genus Strombus), two complete stone disks and six disk fragments, and a piece of carbonized wood. Pavlova and Beltrán immediately contacted Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which sent archaeologists to recover the artifacts in March. Given the arrangement of the bracelets — which had been looped over small, rounded stalagmites with "phallic connotations" — the archaeologists speculated that fertility rituals were likely performed in Tlayócoc cave, they said in the statement. "For pre-Hispanic cultures, caves were sacred places associated with the underworld and considered the womb of the Earth," INAH archaeologist Miguel Pérez Negrete said in the statement. RELATED STORIES —Cave of Crystals: The deadly cavern in Mexico dubbed 'the Sistine Chapel of crystals' —Mysterious Maya underground structure unearthed in Mexico —'Stunning' discovery reveals how the Maya rose up 4,000 years ago Three of the bracelets have incised decorations. An S-shaped symbol known as "xonecuilli" is associated with the planet Venus and the measurement of time, while the profile of a human-like figure may represent the creator god Quetzalcoatl. Pérez dated the artifacts to the Postclassic period of Mesoamerican history, between A.D. 950 and 1521, and suggested that they were made by members of the little-known Tlacotepehua culture that inhabited the region. "It's very likely that, because they were found in a close environment where humidity is fairly stable, the objects were able to survive for so many centuries," Pérez said.
The Review Geek
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Review Geek
The Librarians: The Next Chapter – Season 1 Episode 1 Recap & Review
And the Deadly Drekavac Episode 1 of The Librarians: The Next Chapter begins in Belgrade, Serbia in 1847. A charismatic man named Vikram stands alongside the fearsome General Gregor. Four black-robed magicians move some boulders blocking a cave entrance, and down they descend. Deep underground, Gregor feasts his eyes on the Sword of Mars, which is an artifact allegedly powered by the Roman God of War. With this, Gregor is determined to rule Europe in his image. However, Vikram shows his true allegiance, announcing himself as the new librarian. As the librarian, he has sworn an oath to the library in order to protect powerful magical objects like the sword from falling into the wrong hands of evil men. It works quite well as an introduction to how magic works in this world, especially when Vikram pulls out the Scarab of Horus. This freezes its host in time, and that's precisely what happens to Vikram. Thankfully he's saved from the same fate by the most unlikely of people (and familiar to fans of The Librarians!) Jake Stone. He's the librarian in our era, and tasked with keeping Vikram in check. However, Vikram ignores all the ground rules, including the very real possibility that going back in time could bring about another apocalypse. Jake, Cassie and the others have had more than their fair share of those! Vikram doesn't listen though, as he wants to get back to his beloved, Anya. As he rushes off to the castle, intending to find that route back, we meet a couple of newcomers to the group. There's podcaster, genius historian and 'spectral snoop' Connor Green, who has been researching the artifacts inside the library and is determined to find out the truth. He's lost his job as a result of pursuing what many are calling a conspiracy theory, but Connor is adamant he's on the right path. There's also Lysa Pascal, a super smart science whizz but also a new inheritor of this castle, which also happens to be the old spot for the library. There's also the small subject of a startlingly similar portrait of her being painted in the basement (which we later learn is actually Vikram's beloved, Anya), and a disappearing realtor. Naturally, Vikram's desire to bring the library back crosses with Connor and Lysa's journey when he unleashes magic into the world. They're shocked when they find themselves inside the new Annex, which materializes around them. This connects to the Library itself but in the shock and awe of it all, the two newcomers have touched the stone of Kraljevic. Why is that a problem? Well, it's just the small matter of summoning the spirit of the Drekavac. Woopsie! Jake Stone is not happy when he finds out and despite stopping the monster temporarily in the hallway, this fight is far from over. The creature is lying in wait, rejuvenating its strength before attacking again, so it's up to this plucky trio to track it down before it's too late. Following Vikram and his scrying glass, they're side-tracked by a little excursion to the church to pick up some Holy Water, which is apparently what's needed to stop the beast. It doesn't take long before they find it terrorizing the city. Thankfully, they're saved by Charlie Cornwall, who happens to be the new librarian's guardian. She rides in on a motorcycle and immediately sends the monster reeling. There's another problem here though, as this Drekavac is now possessing the body of a human, so they need to set out and figure out who it is and safely contain the monster without killing its human host. Thanks to both Connor and Lysa's areas of expertise, they track it down to the Lynch family, who are living on the outskirts of Belgrade. Unfortunately, the cult of Gregor's Hammer happens to be at this address, marked by their familiar sigil, linking everything to the beginning of the episode. Charlie and Vikram race in anticipating a big fight… and find the place occupied by a heavy-metal band setting up their gear. While they try and track down exactly where Lynch – their head singer – may be, Jake is preoccupied with trying to plug the Well again, which is going haywire with magic spiralling around the castle. That night, Vikram and the others get a taste of heavy metal at the venue. Unfortunately, at that volume the Drekavac cries could be amplified and infect the 300 people in attendance. Connor and Lysa are going to be the bait here, bringing out the creature and dousing it in Holy water when it reveals itself. It doesn't seem to do the trick though and even worse, they lose the Scrying glass in the skirmish. Eventually, in the tunnels underground and with newly uncovered Holy Water, the group manage to freeze the Drekavac in place. It begins crying, prompting Vikram to come up with a solution. He realizes they need to absolve the sins of this creature by blessing it with its own tears and subsequently baptizing it. This would then give the creature eternal rest. This does the trick, freezing Lynch from the creature's grip and prompting the scars from Connor and Lysa's hands to disappear. The group eventually gets back to the library, courtesy of Jake's newly constructed teleporting door. After Vikram unleashed the magic into the air, Jake is concerned that this magic may have travelled thousands of miles and hit a bunch of different artifacts through time. Vikram takes responsibility and decides to help, joined by Lysa and Connor who have their own reasons for joining as the new librarian group. As they take off, we discover that Anya is actually Gregor's fiancé. To complicate matters further, the Lynch band members find Gregor, with help from the scrying glass, as he pops out from a painting and begins laughing maniacally. Uh oh! The Episode Review If ever there was a definition of a guilty pleasure series, The Librarians is it. The show's four seasons struck the right chord of cheesy drama and fantasy shenanigans, wrapped up with a tongue-in-cheek humour and self-aware tone that really leaned into all the tropes of the genre. The episodic format worked well and the eclectic cast bounced off each other nicely. It was never the best show on TV, nor was it trying to be. It was a family fun ride that never took itself too seriously – and it was all the stronger for it. The Librarians: The Next Chapter then is an interesting proposition. With an abundance of different shows on TV, Next Chapter is very clearly intending to channel the same energy and it does work reasonably well, albeit with a Pilot episode that feels quite rough around the edges. The introduction for our new librarian, Vikram, is quite good but the same can't be said for the new companions. Connor and Lysa are very archetypal and Charlie doesn't really have anything that helps her stand out. Some of the writing is also a bit clunky, like Charlie listing all of Vikram's virtues on her fingers, telling us rather than showing us his quirks. The vibe here between a returning Christian Kane as Jake Stone and the new librarian Vikram is arguably the best part of the episode, and feels quite reminiscent of Angel's final season with the feud between Spike and Angel elevating the material. Here though, it seems like Jake is only going to be in this for one episode so the real test will be the episodes that follow here. However, the comedy is intact, the action-packed plot is fun and fast-paced, and there's enough mystery and intrigue to keep this one interesting. Roll on the next episode! Next Episode Expect A Full Season Write-Up When This Season Concludes!
New York Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Conversations With Emotionally Stunted Friends
In pre-20th-century China, the widespread practice of binding young girls' feet — breaking and disfiguring them with the goal of restricting their permanent size to the three-inch 'golden lotus' ideal — was said to serve an aesthetic purpose, making young women more attractive to potential husbands. The physical reality of this excruciating, yearslong process, often performed by the child's own mother, told a different story: of forced subservience, of entrapment inside the home, of mass suffering. Putting together an exhibition of handmade, delicately embroidered Qing dynasty footwear at a Philadelphia museum, the narrator of 'Gingko Season,' a 25-year-old archivist named Penelope Lin, tries and fails to persuade her boss to allow visitors to touch the impossibly small artifacts on display, and to project images of actual women wearing them onto the walls. Only then, she argues, can the viewer grasp the shoes' actual function: 'to mask man-made deformity with prettiness.' Naomi Xu Elegant's superb debut novel opens in September 2018, as Penelope is reeling from a breakup that has locked the emotional doors she shut long ago, when her bipolar mother abandoned her at 13. (Penelope's drug-tripping, narcissistic artist father has abandoned her emotionally ever since.) Raised in Beijing until she attended university in America, she's repressed these memories to the point that 'I felt pity for the child who experienced them, but I no longer felt that child was me.' She prefers instead to 'intellectualize' her feelings in theoretical debates about the uncomfortable overlap between aesthetic pleasure and historical pain, between beauty and deformity, love and abjection. This she does not only at work, but also with her two best friends, Apple and Inno, both opinionated, self-torturing corporate types who don't get along (when the 2016 election results came in, 'Apple started to cry at almost the exact moment that Inno burst out laughing,' and that was that). Penelope shares a cramped apartment in Chinatown with a white finance bro and an older couple: 'Xinwei was from Guangdong, and I spoke with her in Mandarin; Raymond was from Philly, half-Vietnamese and half-Chinese, and I spoke with him in English; to one another they spoke in Cantonese.' 'Gingko Season' is as much a love story as it is a subtle experiment in the ways language can be manipulated either to reveal or conceal its speaker. Over the ensuing fall, winter and spring, Elegant quietly disrupts Penelope's safe, boring 'equilibrium of habit, solitude and friendship' with the arrival of Hoang, a tall and handsome research lab tech who, upon encountering Penelope in a random waiting room, immediately divulges a secret: He's been releasing the lab mice he was supposed to euthanize. Why is he telling her this? 'I'm a trusting person,' he says. From there the two embark on a drawn-out, will-they-or-won't-they courtship that consists mostly of handwritten letters scrawled on postcards and pages torn from books (Hoang is the kind of guy not to have a phone), and of Penelope's overthinking. After the all-consuming 'black hole' of her last relationship with the arrogant and inaccessible Paul, she thinks, 'This time around, I had to enforce my passivity.' But when Hoang forms a worker's union at the hotel where he bartends, Apple pushes Penelope to volunteer in the effort, claiming, 'this is the closest you've gotten to having sex in like five thousand years.' Some novels announce themselves with virtuosic plotting or language, headline-worthy conceits, Big Ideas. This is not one of them, and it's better for it. Most of the book consists of fickle, comically punctuated conversations between educated but directionless 20-somethings about sex and dating and effective altruism and classical Chinese poetry and Napoleon and the ways in which their world is bad and they'd like to make it better. In a Sally Rooney novel, such conversations usually further the protagonists' relationships; in 'Gingko Season' they are often a means of distancing Penelope and her friends from their feelings, of deflecting. The exception, of course, is Hoang, whose resilient openheartedness in the face of his own personal tragedy offers Penelope an alternative model to her withdrawal. The delayed gratification of their epistolary romance and the relief of Hoang's unguarded candor recast language and beauty as expressions of, not distractions from, honest feeling. 'Thought of you this morning when I jumped into a freezing lake,' he writes to Penelope, merging physical sensation and emotional intimacy into a single, pure experience. 'The water was like fire, I never felt so alive.'
Arab News
20-05-2025
- Arab News
Met returns looted Mesopotamian artifacts to Iraq after investigation
DUBAI: Three ancient Mesopotamian artifacts once housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have been returned to Iraq after an investigation into art trafficking linked to the late British antiquities dealer Robin Symes, authorities announced on Monday. For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @ The return was confirmed in statements by the Met and the Manhattan district attorney's office, which led the criminal investigation. The artifacts — a Sumerian gypsum vessel from about 2600-2500 BC and two Babylonian ceramic heads dated about 2000-1600 BC — were among 135 looted antiquities linked to Symes and seized earlier this year. According to The New York Times, the male head sculpture was sold to the Met by Symes in 1972, while the female head and the Sumerian vessel were gifts from a private collection in 1989. All three are believed to have originated from ancient Mesopotamian sites, including Isin and Ur, now in modern-day Iraq. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. said the seizure and return are part of broader efforts to undo the 'significant damage traffickers have caused to our worldwide cultural heritage.' The repatriation was formalized in a ceremony in Lower Manhattan attended by Iraqi officials and Met representatives. The museum said that it had acted upon 'new information' received through the DA's investigation that clarified the artifacts' illicit provenance. Authorities estimate the value of the 135 items trafficked through Symes and recovered in New York at $58 million.
