The volcanic eruption at the Greek island Thera that is the leading candidate for the demise of the Minoan civilization as well as one of the more probable sources of the Atlantis story was twice as powerful as was previously thought, or so yesterday’s National Geographic article reports.

BBC News reports that the myterious trading city of Muziris may have been located. Muziris was the centre of trade between the Roman Empire and India around two thousand years ago, yet archaeologists have so far failed to pinpoint where exactly on the west coast of the Indian subcontinent the city was located.

For some reason a year-old Pravda article just floated my way today. I never trust Pravda with anything, yet tremendously enjoy reading many of their writeups.

The article that caught my eye today, which you can find here, is about the Arkaim site in Russia. The headline screams, “Ancient Aryan civilization achieved incredible technological progress 40 centuries ago”, which ought to give you a picture of what it is about. Yet, the Arkaim site in itself is not entirely without mystery. Like the related Wikipedia entry mentions, much is still unknown about this almost four millennia old settlement. Even if I have yet to see any actual evidence for “incredible technological progress” there or elsewhere in the ancient world (although some vedas have certainly been interpreted as discussing flying vehicles and atomic bombs), I think that even without having to consider extraterrestrials or the Atlantis (which doesn’t mean that we must automatically rule them out, of course), the site remains extremely interesting.

The Scotsman has an article on the Antikythera Mechanism and how it is now thought to be a device showing a heliocentric version of the solar system known to the Greeks. Apparently, a three-dimensional X-ray scan has made visible inscriptions that have gone unseen for 2,000 years.

BBC reports about a Stonehenge like structure that has been found in the Amazon.

A new study suggests that corn was cultivated in southern Peru nearly 4,000 years ago, or about a thousand years earlier than previously thought.