February 16, 2011

Tasmania, Tasmania Wilderness, Wonders Of Australia, Tasmania Pics

In an area that’s been suffering from severe glaciation, these parks and reserves, with their steep gorges, covering an area of over 1 million ha, constitute one of the last expanses of temperate rainforest on the earth. Remains found in limestone caves verify the human occupation of the area for longer than 20,000 years.
Covering a place of over 1 million hectares, the Tasmanian Wilderness constitutes one of the last expanses of temperate rainforest in the world.

It comprises a contiguous network of reserved lands that extends over much of south-western Tasmania including several coastal islands.

In contrast to the mainland, the island of Tasmania is a rugged region with fold structures in the western half and fault structures in the east, each of which are represented in the property. The fold structure province in the south-west is an extremely rugged and densely vegetated region with north-south oriented mountain ranges and valley systems.

Changing climates have also influenced landscape development, highlighted most recently by late Cainozoic and Pleistocene glacial and periglacial events. Glacial erosion has contributed to spectacular landform features including horns, arêtes, cirques, U-shaped valleys and rock basins (tarns). The coastline has been put through a number of sea-level changes during the glaciations and today provides a classic example of a drowned landscape, as shown by the discordant coastline in the south.

Special landforms associated with the development of karst have formed through the solution of carbonate rocks such as (Precambrian) dolomite and (Ordovician) limestone. Features include cave systems, natural arches, clints and grikes, dolines, karren, pinnacles and blind valleys.

The vegetation has as much that is similar to cool, temperate parts of South America and New Zealand as with the rest of Australia. In addition to climatic and edaphic factors, the vegetation has developed in response to fire. Aboriginal occupation over the last 30,000 years has constituted a major source of fire; more recently, much fire can be related to the interests of fishermen, logging concerns and prospectors.

Kangaroos, Tasmania, Tasmania Wilderness, 7 Wonders, Tasmania Map

The fauna is of world importance because it includes an unusually high proportion of endemic species and relict groups of ancient lineage.

As a result of the diverse topography, geology, soils and vegetation in colaboration with harsh and variable climatic conditions combining to create a wide array of animal habitats, the fauna is correspondingly diverse.

The insularity of  Tasmania, and of the Tasmanian Wilderness in particular, has contributed to its uniqueness and has helped to protect it from the impact of exotic species which has seriously affected the mainland fauna.

Tasmania was cut off from mainland Australia by the flooding of Bass Strait at least 8000 years ago, thereby isolating the aboriginal inhabitants.

The Tasmanian Aborigines were, until the advent of the European explorer Abel Tasman, the longest isolated human group in world history, surviving some 500 generations without outside influence.

Surveys and excavations of inland river valleys have located 37 cave sites, all considered to have already been occupied between 30,000 and 11,500 years ago on such basis as the finds. Recent discoveries of rock art at three cave sites have shown that this painting had a ceremonial significance; hand stencils predominated.

Stone artefact scatters and quarries and rock shelters in the Tasmanian highlands indicate a distinctive adaptation to this subalpine environment in the later Holocene. The south coast contains a range of shell middens; evidence available so far suggests changing patterns of shellfish exploitation over several thousand years until the arrival of Europeans in the early 19th century.

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• Kakadu National Park, Australia
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October 30, 2010

The Aztecs had two different games – and patolli tlachtli. Tlachtli was a ball game between teams with a rubber ball. The court was shaped like a capital I and was 60 meters long and 10 meters wide. One person from each team would have to throw the ball through a hoop high vertically above head with hands-free knees. The ring is placed on opposite walls in the center of the court. Somehow this game of modern football and basketball. The team that made the first basket won the game. Sometimes it took hours to complete a game.

The other party, patolli was a game of chance played with stones and dry beans. In this game you are given six pieces to play and have ten stones of jade to play. The forum to play in an “X” divided into squares. Each player has a port in the middle of the “X”. Now you must decide how many jade stones you want to bet on the game. It gives you five cacao beans with white dots painted on them. These will be used as given. If you get a white dot moves one box, if you get two white dots that move two squares and so on, but if you get five white dots that move ten squares. The pieces must be right. To begin the game you have to throw one. When you do return to base, take that piece of board, your opponent is a jade stone. Keep playing until one player has lost all their beans.

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• The Aztecs, Laws and Politics
• Kiyomizu Temple – ( Kiyomizu dera ) Kyoto, Japan
• Becan Mayan Ruins In The southern area of Campeche, Mexico
• Maya Sites, Yaxchilán

May 18, 2010

For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy.

Even the new remote-sensing technologies, so effective in recent decades at surveying other archaeological sites, were no help. Imaging radar and multispectral surveys by air and from space could not “see” through the trees.
Then, in the dry spring season a year ago, the husband-and-wife team of Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase tried a new approach using airborne laser signals that penetrate the jungle cover and are reflected from the ground below. They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.
In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.
“We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.”
The Chases, who are professors of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, had determined from earlier surveys that Caracol extended over a wide area in its heyday, between A.D. 550 and 900. From a ceremonial center of palaces and broad plazas, it stretched out to industrial zones and poor neighborhoods and beyond to suburbs of substantial houses, markets and terraced fields and reservoirs.
This picture of urban sprawl led the Chases to estimate the city’s population at its peak at more than 115,000. But some archaeologists doubted the evidence warranted such expansive interpretations.
“Now we have a totality of data and see the entire landscape,” Dr. Arlen Chase said of the laser findings. “We know the size of the site, its boundaries, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terracing and begin to know how the people fed themselves.”
The Caracol survey was the first application of the advanced laser technology on such a large archaeological site. Several journal articles describe the use of lidar in the vicinity of Stonehenge in England and elsewhere at an Iron Age fort and American plantation sites. Only last year, Sarah H. Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham predicted, “Lidar imagery will have much to offer the archaeology of the rain forest regions.”
The Chases said they had been unaware of Dr. Parcak’s assessment, in her book “Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology” (Routledge, 2009), when they embarked on the Caracol survey. They acted on the recommendation of a Central Florida colleague, John F. Weishampel, a biologist who had for years used airborne laser sensors to study forests and other vegetation.
Dr. Weishampel arranged for the primary financing of the project from the little-known space archaeology program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The flights were conducted by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, operated by the University of Florida and the University of California, Berkeley.
Other archaeologists, who were not involved in the research but were familiar with the results, said the technology should be a boon to explorations, especially ones in the tropics, with its heavily overgrown vegetation, including pre-Columbian sites throughout Mexico and Central America. But they emphasized that it would not obviate the need to follow up with traditional mapping to establish “ground truth.”
Jeremy A. Sabloff, a former director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and now president of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said he wished he had had lidar when he was working in the Maya ruins at Sayil, in Mexico.
The new laser technology, Dr. Sabloff said, “would definitely have speeded up our mapping, given us more details and would have enabled us to refine our research questions and hypotheses much earlier in our field program than was possible in the 1980s.”
At first, Payson D. Sheets, a University of Colorado archaeologist, was not impressed with lidar. A NASA aircraft tested the laser system over his research area in Costa Rica, he said, “but when I saw it recorded the water in a lake sloping at 14 degrees, I did not use it again.”
Now, after examining the imagery from Caracol, Dr. Sheets said he planned to try lidar, with its improved technology, again. “I was stunned by the crisp precision and fine-grained resolution,” he said.
“Finally, we have a nondestructive and rapid means of documenting the present ground surface through heavy vegetation cover,” Dr. Sheets said, adding, “One can easily imagine, given the Caracol success, how important this would be in Southeast Asia, with the Khmer civilization at places like Angkor Wat.”
In recent reports at meetings of Mayanists and in interviews, the Chases noted that previous remote-sensing techniques focused more on the discovery of archaeological sites than on the detailed imaging of on-ground remains. The sensors could not see through much of the forest to resolve just how big the ancient cities had been. As a consequence, archaeologists may have underestimated the scope of Mayan accomplishments.

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