My mind hurts thinking about the instruction book you'd have to write for this one, but it is quite the nerdtastic feast! All hail builder Ryan McNaught, who built this for the University of Sydney using over 200,000 blocks! See more over at Gizmodo.
This brilliant model of the ancient neolithic shrine at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey is by someone named Carl. Nice work, Carl! Via Archaeosoup productions (Twitter / Facebook).
Today's battle cry: Occupy Archaeology... with LEGO!!!!!!!
Here's a couple 'making of' clips that explain the epic trompe l'œil. It's the latest part of the evolving mythos of mysterious giant Lego maker Ego Leonard. Check out how crazy it looks from any other angle!
Holy crap. From Small Mammal (via Boing Boing), a functional replica of the Antikythera Mechanism MADE OF LEGOS:
This is a 2000-year-old analog computing device reconstructed out of Lego. It predicts solar and lunar eclipses, accurate to within two hours — all using plastic gears. Andy Carol, its designer, builds mechanical computers out of Lego as a hobby. He made this device basically because Adam Rutherford, an editor and producer at Nature, dared him to. When Adam heard that Andy had actually built the device, he called me and said, “Well, clearly we have to make some sort of film about this thing now.”
So they did, and here it is. This makes me jump up and down and shake around with delight.
Andy Carol also made a working model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, probably the most complex analog computer since the Antikythera Mechanism! Of course, the real thing looks totally different (by which I mean ugly):
The story of the device itself is amazing - discovered in a shipwreck by sponge divers in 1901, it remained a more or less a mystery for decades. Everyone knew it was a sophisticated machine but the thing was in such bad shape that no one could do much with it. (Besides speculate about the influence of ancient astronauts, as the "History" channel is wont to do.) The advent of high-tech x-ray scanners, however, unlocked the device's mysteries, as this video from Nature reports:
I think Michael Wright's model of the device gives a great sense of how the device actually looked and functioned:
I have to put in a plug here for my pet project, "archaeological optimism". Most of the news coverage of the device portrays it something out of time. Like this headline from an io9 story on the device: "Advanced imaging reveals a computer 1,500 years ahead of its time". Bullshit! It was exactly appropriate for its time because that was the time when it was made. Greek scientists had the capacity to create complex mechanical calculators, and did. No need to drag them out of their place.
The 'device out of time' trope is just the arrogance of the present, thinking that we are the culmination of all of history so far. Bullshit. Time and civilization does not have an end point or a state that is 'better' than another. That attitude becomes an excuse for belittling the genius of our forebears by painting their greatest accomplishments as something abnormal, instead of granting them an equal moral status to us.
This was posted on Boing Boing last year. It’s still awesome. My architect friends will no doubt be busy revising their opinions on suitable material for patching ancient walls.
I've never met Carly Whelan, but she's already made me a very happy man with this Flickr photoset. Painstaking accuracy? Check. Runaway cuteness? Double check.
"Test Pit": "The Site": Love the stratigraphic profile! "Survey" "Screening": "Burial": More here!
Archaeopop is a blog by Daniel Shoup about archaeology and popular culture. I like the strange ways the past gets recycled into the present as art, economics, politics, and straight-up trash. I'm a researcher at the University of Bologna, Italy. Follow me on Twitter (@archaeopop) or get in touch at archaeopop@gmail.com.
