moshita:

Clay Morrow AKA Choking Hazards, is trying to get his Lego skeleton design to be released as an official Lego product and he needs your help! Just give his project a vote HERE. And if he gets at least 10,000 votes it’ll become a reality!

archiemcphee:

Here’s an awesome little piece of history:

Archaeologists in the Burnt City have discovered what appears to be an ancient prosthetic eye. What makes this discovery exceptionally awesome is the striking description of how the owner and her false eye would have appeared while she was still alive and blinking:

[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE. 

So she was an extraordinarily tall woman walking around wearing an engraved golden eye patterned with rays like a tiny sun. What an awesome sight that must have been.

[via TYWKIWDBI]

Transcending the Material

By Ben Cuevas

Mixed media 

Exhibited at the Wassaic Project Summer Music and Arts Festival in New York

Click the photo to see more knitted skelly goodness!

Royal College of Surgeons rejects call to bury skeleton of ‘Irish giant’

Ethics experts say exhibit of 7ft 7in tall man, who lived in the 1780s, should be removed from display and put to rest at sea

Museum chiefs have rejected a suggestion by law and medical ethics experts that the skeleton of an 18th century man known as the “Irish giant” should be removed from display and buried at sea.

Charles Byrne, originally from County Londonderry, stood just over 7ft 7in tall. He found fame in the 1780s exhibiting himself as a curiosity or “freak” in London. Celebrity life eventually got the better of him, and he took to drink and died at his home in Charing Cross aged just 22.

After his death, his body was acquired by the surgeon John Hunter, and his skeleton remains at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

In the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, Len Doyal, emeritus professor of medical ethics at Queen Mary, University of London, and Thomas Muinzer, a lawyer at the School of Law, Queen’s University, Belfast, call for the skeleton to be buried at sea “as Byrne intended for himself”.

Skeleton at London Dungeon found to be real

A skeleton at the London Dungeon’s popular “creepy crypt” exhibit has been found to be real.

It is believed that the bones could have been displayed at the attraction since it opened in 1975.

Now the skeleton has been found to be genuine, it must be licensed by the Human Tissues Authority at a cost of 2,000 pounds a year.

The remains, which include a rib-cage and backbone, have been named Kate - after model Kate Moss.

It is thought she might date from the early days of anatomical research when bodies were regularly smuggled in from the Far East

And staff now suspect another skeleton hanging in a gibbet cage might also be real. She is known as Twiggy.

Maya Royal Tombs Found With Rare Woman Ruler

A woman ruler’s skeleton—her head mysteriously placed between two bowls—is one of two royal burials recently found at the Maya ruins of Nakum in Guatemala.

The roughly 2,000-year-old tomb was found underneath another, 1,300-year-old tomb filled with treasures such as jade gorgets—normally used to protect the throat—beads, and ceremonial knives.

The upper tomb’s corpse had been badly destroyed by rodents within the last few centuries, but the body was clearly that of another Maya ruler—perhaps another female, based on the small size of a ring found in that tomb.

(See “Bowls of Fingers, Baby Victims, More Found in Maya Tomb.”)

The royal burials are the first discovered in Nakum, once a densely packed Maya center. Study co-author Wiesław Koszkul and colleagues have been investigating Nakum’s surroundings, known as the Cultural Triangle, for decades. (Explore an interactive map of key Maya sites.)

“We think this structure was something like a mausoleum for the royal lineage for at least 400 years,” said Koszkul, of the Jagiellonian University Institute of Archaeology in Krakow, Poland.

The Maya royal-tomb discoveries are described in the September issue of the journal Antiquity.

Click through to see more amazing photographs…

nevver:

Bones, Heck Yeah Old Tech

For sale in Sweden: Three-bed house, includes skeleton

An estate agent in Sweden is offering a house with the remains of a medieval resident included in the price.

The property, built in 1750 in Visby, on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland, has a tomb and skeleton in the cellar.

The starting price for the three-bedroomed house, where the skeleton is visible through glass in the cellar, is 4.1m Kronor ($640,000; £390,780).

The property was built on the foundations of a Russian church, abandoned during the Middle Ages.

“It’s harder to get closer to history,” estate agent Leif Bertwig said of the house, according to Sweden’s Helagotland website.

The farm where the house is located shares part of its property with two other nearby houses that also have access to the basement, reached via a spiral staircase from the courtyard, the website reports.

Even if you cannot raise the asking price to buy the house, a local museum does organise occasional tours to visit the skeleton in the cellar.

This is like my dream house! 

Remains of St Edburg discovered under apartment block…?

A patron saint’s remains have been found buried under a block of flats, archaeologists believe.

A lead container was uncovered which is thought to contain remains of Saint Edburg, who was the daughter of a pagan King and born in around 620 AD.

Experts think the uncovering of the sacred remains marks the first time a saint’s bones have been found in this country…

Click the photo for further details…