CNN 2012-01-13（在线收听） |
We`re talking about anything from stone tools to complex machines. A lot of times archeologists have to dig in order to find those artifacts. Not the researchers features in our next report from Nick Glass.They`re using modern technology to try to learn about ancient cultures, and they`re making discoveries without ever disturbing the ground. Watch this. This is obviously a visible Roman monument. But our story is about the invisible, what`s below ground, and a new form of archeology, which reveals it in sensational detail.
Austrian farmland lying fallow half a kilometer square, a small tractor heads towards the horizon and trundles back again. Up and down, up and down it goes. The white box at the front is ground- penetrating radar. The whole system costs $300,000.
There are 16 separate antennae in there, collecting data, enough data for a 3-D image to a depth of two meters. This is instant bone-shaking archeology without the need to excavate.
I was -- I was just looking on this animation of the radar data, going up and down in the subsurface, when this circular feature came up. I said, wow, this is a sensation.
This perfect circle was crucial. What we are looking at is a gladiator training ring circa 100 A.D. And the tiny dot in the center was a clinching detail, a posthole.
So this was the main feature of a training arena.
And what do they use there? They slash their swords against it or --
Yes, they draped it like an enemy, and then they trained with the different -- with the different weapons.
It`s not a question of just imagining what the amphitheater and the gladiator school looked like, but of rebuilding them in virtual reality. The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Vienna, or LBI for short, exists, in its words, for archeological prospection and virtual archeology. And its work seems surgically precise.
The gladiator school was 2,800 square meters. It served 50 gladiators and their indoor training hall had underfloor heating. All this technology was first developed in the 1950s and `60s by the military, by the oil industry. But archeologists have adapted it and refined it -- without breaking ground, they`re finding new ways of investigating the story of man.
Before we go, when is a penny saved not a penny earned?
When someone`s willing to pay more than 100 million pennies for it. That`s how much this one-cent piece went for at an auction recently, more than a million dollars.
It came from a collection that included one example of every coin ever produced by the U.S. Two reasons this coin was so valuable. First, it was from 1793, the first year the United States started minting its own currency.
Second, it was in great shape with almost no sign of wear. |
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