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Later the Greeks moved east from Cumae to Neapolis, the New City, a little farther along the coast where modern Naples now stands. We have a very good idea what life in this sun-splashed land was like during the Roman era because of the recovered splendor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But as the well-trod earth of Campania continues to yield ancient secrets, Mastrolorenzo and Petrone, with their colleague Lucia Pappalardo, have put together a rich view of an earlier time and what may have been humankind’s first encounter with the primal force of Vesuvius. Almost all has come to light by chance. In May 2001, for example, construction workers began digging the foundation for a supermarket next to a desolate, weed-strewn intersection just outside the town of Nola. An archaeologist working for the province of Naples noticed several trances of burned wood a few feet below the surface, an indication of earlier human habitation. At 19 feet below, relicts of a perfectly preserved Early Bronze Age village began to emerge. Over the next several months, the excavation unearthed three large prehistoric dwellings: horseshoe shaped huts with clearly demarked entrances, living areas, and the equivalent of kitchens. Researchers found dozens of pots, pottery plates, and crude hourglass-shaped canisters that still contained fossilized traces of almonds, flour, grain, acorns, olive-pits, even mushrooms. Simple partitions separated the rooms; one hut had what appeared to be a loft. The tracks of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, as well as their human masters, crisscrossed the yard outside. The skeletons of nine pregnant goats lay in an enclosed area that included an animal pen. If a skeleton can be said to cower, the bones of an apparently terrified dog huddled under the eaves of one roof. What preserved this prehistoric village, what formed a perfect impression of its quotidian contents right down to leaves in the thatch roofs and cereal grains in the kitchen containers, was the fallout and surge and mud from the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius. Claude Albore Livadie, a French archaeologist who published the initial report on the Nola discovery, dubbed it "a first Pompeii". During May and June 2001, provincial archaeological authorities oversaw excavation of the site Mastrolorenzo hurried out to Nola, about 18 miles east of Naples. He and Pappalardo took samples of the ash and volcanic deposits, which contained chemical clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But then the scientific story veered off into the familiar opera buffa of Italian archaeology. The owner of the site agitated for construction of the supermarket to resume or to be compensated for the delay—not an unusual dilemma in a country where the backhoes and bulldozers of a modern economy clang against the ubiquitous remains of ancient civilizations. Government archaeologists hastily excavated the site and removed the objects. As it turns out, the supermarket was never built, and all that remains of a site that miraculously captured one of civilization’s earliest encounters with volcanic destruction is a hole in the ground on a vacant, weed-choked lot, the foundation walls of the huts barely visible. A small, weathered sign proclaiming the "Pompeii of Prehistory" hangs limply from a padlocked gate. Despite the loss of Nola as well as some other archaeological sites, Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo, and American volcanologist Michael Sheridan triggered world wide fascination when they summarized these findings in the spring of 2006 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). But their research went beyond mere archaeological documentation. The Avellino event, they wrote, "caused a social-demographic collapse and abandonment of the entire area for centuries. " The new findings, along with computer models, show that an Avellino-size eruption would unleash a concentric wave of destruction that could devastate Naples and much of its surroundings. In the world before Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, these warnings might have sounded as remote and transitory as those prehistoric footsteps. Not anymore. According to the relicts, we can infer that domestic animal died because
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Scotland Yard’s top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief superintendent Gerald Lamhourne had a request from the British Museum’s Prehistoric department to force his magnifying glass on a mystery somewhat outside my usual beat. This was not a question of Whodunit, but Who Was lt. The blunt instruments, he pored over were the antlers of red deer, dated by radio-carbon examination as being up to 5,000 years old. They were used as mining picks by Neolithic man to hack flints and chalk, and the fingerprints he was looking for were of our remote ancestors who had last wielded them. The antlers were unearthed in July during the British Museum’s five-year-long excavation at Grime’s Graves. near Therford, Norfolk, a 93 acre site containing more than 600 vertical shafts in the chalk some 40 feet deep. From artifacts found in many parts of Britain it is evident that flint was extensively used by Neolithic man as he slowly learned how to farm land in the period from 3, 000 to 1, 500 B. C. Flint was especially used for ax-heads to clear forests for agriculture, and the quality of the flint on the Norfolk site suggests that the miners there were kept busy with many orders. What excited Mr. CT. Sieveking, the museum’s deputy director of the excavations, was the dried mud still sticking to some of them. "Our deduction is that the miners coated the base of the antlers with mud so that they could get a better grip," he says. "The exciting possibility was that fingerprints left in this mud might at last identify as individuals as people who have left few relics, who could not read or write, but who may have had much more intelligence than had been supposed in the past." Chief Superintendent Lambourne, who had "assisted" the British Museum by taking the fingerprints of a 4, 000-year-old Egyptian mummy, spent two hours last week examining about 50 antlers. On some he found minute marks indicating a human hand--that part of the hand just below the fingers where most pressure would be brought to bear the wielding of a pick. After 25 years’ specialization in the Yard’s fingerprints department, Chief Superintendent Lambourne knows all about ridge structures--technically known as the "tri-radiate section". It was his identification of that part of the hand that helped to incriminate some of the Great Train Robbers. In 1995 he discovered similar handprints on a bloodstained tee-maker on a golf-course where a woman had been brutally murdered. They eventually led to the killer, after 4, 065 handprints had been taken. Chief Superintendent Lamboure had agreed to visit the Norfolk site during further excavations next summer, when it is hoped that further hand-marked antlers will come to light, But he is cautious about the historic significance of his findings. "Fingerprints and handprints are unique to each individual but they can tell nothing about the age, physical characteristics, even sex of the person who left them," he says. "Even the finger prints of gorilla could be mistaken for those of a man. But if a number of imprinted antlers are recovered from given shafts on this site I could at least determine which antlers were handled by the same man, and from there might be deduced the number of miners employed in a team." "As an indication of intelligence I might determine which way up the miners held the antlers and how they wielded them." To Mr. Sieveking and his museum colleagues, any such findings will be added to their dossier of what might appear to the layman as trivial and unrelated facts but from which might emerge one day an impressive new image of our remote ancestors. (620) What had been the principal use of the antlers
We live in southern California growing grapes, a first generation of vintners, our home adjacent to the vineyards and the winery. It’s a very pretty place, and in order to earn the money to realize our dream of making wine, we worked for many years in a business that demanded several household moves, an incredible amount of risk-taking and long absences from my husband. When it was time, we traded in our old life, cinched up our belts and began the creation of the winery. We make small amounts of premium wine, and our lives are dictated by the rhythm of nature and the demands of the living vines. The vines start sprouting tiny green tendrils in March and April, and the baby grapes begin to form in miniature, so perfect that they can be dipped in gold to form jewelry. The grapes swell and ripen in early fall, and when their sugar content is at the right level, they are harvested carefully by hand and crushed in small lots. The wine is fermented and tended until it is ready to be bottled. The vineyards shed their leaves, the vines are pruned and made ready for the dormant months -- and the next vintage. It sounds nice, doesn’t it Living in the country, our days were spent in the ancient routine of the vineyard, knowing that the course of our lives as vintners was choreographed long ago and that if we practiced diligently, our wine would be good and we’d be successful. From the start we knew there was a price for the privilege of becoming a winemaking family, connected to the land and the caprices of nature. We work hard at something we love, we are slow to panic over the daily emergencies, and we are nimble at solving problems as they arise. Some hazards to completing a successful vintage are expected: rain just before harvesting can cause mold; electricity unexpectedly interrupted during the cold fermentation of white wine can damage it; a delayed payment from a major client when the money is needed. There are outside influences that disrupt production and take patience, good will and perseverance. (For example) the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regulates every facet of the wine business. A winery’s records are audited as often as two or three times a year and every label--newly written for each year’s vintage must be approved ... (But) The greatest threat to the winery, and one that almost made us lose heart, came out of a lawyer’s imagination. Our little winery was served notice that we were named in a lawsuit accusing us of endangering the public health by using lead foils on our bottles (it was the only material used until recently) "without warning consumers of a possible risk." There it was, our winery’s name listed with the industry’s giants ... I must have asked a hundred times: "Who gets the money if the lawsuit is successful" The answer was, and I never was able to assimilate it, the plaintiffs and their lawyers who filed the suit! Since the lawsuit was brought on behalf of consumers, it seemed to me that consumers must get something if it was proved that a lead foil was dangerous to them. We were told one of the two consumer claimants was an employee of the firm filing the suit! There are attorneys who focus their careers on lawsuits like this. It is an immense danger to the small businessman. Cash reserves can be used up in the blink of an eye when in the company of lawyers. As long as it’s possible for anyone to sue anybody for anything, we are all in danger. As long as the legal profession allows members to practice law dishonorably and lawyers are congratulated for winning big money in this way, we’ll all be plagued with a corruptible justice system. The phrase "cinched up our belts", in the first paragraph, suggests that the couple
The bizarre antics of sleepwalkers have puzzled police, perplexed scientists, and fascinated writers for centuries. There is an endless supply of stories about sleepwalkers. Persons have been said to climb on steep roofs, solve mathematical problems, compose music, walk through plate-glass windows, and commit murder in their sleep. How many of these stories have a basis in fact, and how many are pure fakery No one knows, but if some of the most sensational stories should be taken with a barrel of salt, others are a matter of record. In Revere, Massachusetts, a hundred policemen combed a waterfront neighborhood for a lost boy who left his home in his sleep and woke up five hours later on a strange sofa in a strange living room, with no idea how he had got there. There is an early medical record of a somnambulist who wrote a novel in his sleep. And the great French writer Voltaire knew a sleepwalker who once got out of bed, dressed himself, made a polite bow, danced a minuet, and then undressed and went back to bed. According to experts on sleepwalking, sleepwalkers ______. A. can commit murder or other dangerous things B. can be fatally hurt if they are wakened abruptly C. are partially awake D. are immune to injury
As in the field of space travel, so in undersea exploration new technologies continue to appear. They share a number of similarities with each other--as well as some important differences. Manned submersibles, like spaceships, must maintain living conditions in an unnatural environment. But while a spaceship must simply be sealed against the vacuum of space, a submersible must be able to bear extreme pressure if it is not to break up in the deep water. In exploring space, unmanned vehicles were employed before astronauts. In undersea exploration, on the other hand, men paved the way, and only recently have unmanned re- mote-operated vehicles (ROVs) been put to use. One reason for this is that communicating with vehicles in orbit is much easier than talking to those underwater. A vacuum is an ideal medium for radio communications, but underwater communications are limited to much slower sound waves. Thus, most undersea vehicles-particularly ROVs-operate at the end of long ropes. For a similar reason, knowing where you are undersea is much more difficult than in space. A spaceship’s position can be located by following its radio signal, or by using telescopes and radar. For an undersea vehicle, however, a special network of sonar devices must be laid out in advance on the ocean floor in the area of a dive to locate the vehicle’s position. Though undersea exploration is more challenging than outer space in a number of aspects, it has a distinct advantage, going to the ocean depths doesn’t require the power necessary to escape Earth’s gravity. Thus, it remains far less expensive. Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage
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