1 . Unexpected Things About Archaeology (考古学)

Archaeology is an amazing career. We get to explore and debate how life has been and can be lived, and we get to share this knowledge with people in a way which benefits society. If you don’t know an archaeologist or haven’t worked with one before, you might not know what they actually do or you might think we do things that we don’t.     1    

A lot of people think of archaeology as being buried in the ground, but any physical material can tell us about the past.     2     In fact, there’s a whole specialism of archaeology that involves recording historic buildings and creating drawings and reports about them.

You might think archaeologists are only interested in the most precious items, like coins, valuable jewellery or well-preserved objects. But often the most common items, like pottery, clay tobacco pipes, glass bottles or bricks, can tell them the most information. They help build a picture of people’s lives. Sometimes, not finding an object we thought would be there tells us something about the people.

Many people think archaeologists spend all day brushing dirt off the items they find. They do sometimes use brushes to clean surfaces for clear photographs. But they mainly use tools like trowels, shovels or mattocks. A normal day involves a lot of heavy digging.    4     But sometimes archaeologists work with very fragile items. For this they would normally use tools like a thin “leave” trowel, but usually a brush.

Archaeologists can use technology to learn what is underground instead of digging.

    5     Geophysical Survey uses electric and magnets to find tiny differences in the earth and creates a map of potential archaeology under the earth. Drones can also be used to take aerial photographs, where things like crop-marks can be clues to past human activity.

Archaeology is a science, an art and a form of physical work. It’s varied and can appeal to people with different interests and skills. It may take you on a journey you don’t expect!

2 . Frozen in time, a 125-million-year-old mammal attacking a dinosaur. A 39-million-year-old whale, the heaviest animal that ever lived. The oldest known jellyfish, from 505 million years ago. Paleontology (古生物学) produces newsworthy discoveries.

Fossils (化石), moreover, provide direct evidence for the long history of life, allowing paleontologists to test hypotheses (假设) about evolution with data only they provide. They allow investigation of present and past life on Earth. Flows of biological diversity, appearances of new life forms and the extinctions of long existing ones, would go undiscovered without these efforts. But the headlines over exciting new fossils greatly underestimate the true importance of paleontology. Its real significance lies in how such discoveries brighten the grand history of life on Earth. From its beginnings, more than three billion years ago, to the present day, fossils record how life adapted or disappeared in the face of major environmental challenges.

Paleontologists provide us with a unique vantage on modern climate change. They play an essential role in interpreting ancient environments, in reconstructing ancient oceans, continents and climates. Fossils provide key limitation on the climate models that are essential for predicting future climate change. And the fossil record gives important insights into how life will respond to predicted future climate conditions, because these have occurred before in Earth’s history.

In addition, paleontology has provided a fundamental contribution to human thought: the reality of species extinction and thus of a world that has dramatically changed over time. In documenting the history of life, paleontologists recognized that many extinction episodes could occur suddenly, such as the event 66 million years ago that ended the dinosaurs. The search for the causes of past mass extinctions started pioneering studies from across the scientific spectrum (科学界), focusing on potential future threats to humanity.

Not only do paleontologists know what happens to life when things go bad, they also know how long it takes for ecosystems and biodiversity to recover from these disasters, which can take far longer than modern humans have existed.

Paleontologists thus provide a unique perspective on the nature and future long-term ecological impact of the current human-produced biodiversity crisis, the so-called Sixth Extinction, and therefore the importance of protecting modern biodiversity. The very concept of a Sixth Extinction would not exist without paleontologists documenting the first five.

Paleontologists know that understanding life’s past is critical to anticipating and adapting to life’s and humanity’s future. Paleontology is important because it brings its unique and critical perspective to current challenges in climate change, biodiversity loss and the environment. Paleontologists can predict the future because they know the past.

6 . In 1968 a grave dating from about 1100 was uncovered near Hattula, in Finland, Little remained of the occupant’s skeleton, but the inhumation included two swords and a knife. Such grave goods would normally suggest said occupant was a man. The skeleton was, ______ also decorated with brooches (胸针) and woollen clothing of types more usually worn at the time by women. This ______ guess that the burial was actually of a powerful woman, possibly a local ruler in her own right rather than just the wife of a male king.

This would be noteworthy enough. But a re-examination of the remains, just published in the European Journal of Archaeology by Ulla Moilanen of the University of Turku and Elina Salmela of the University of Helsinki, suggests the truth may be yet more ______. Ms. Moilanen and Dr Salmela suspect that the individual ______ may have had outward characteristics of both a man and a woman.

In 1968 working out the ______ of a skeleton in an ancient grave was tricky. After years of deterioration, the bones of men and women look pretty much ______. But that was before the use of DNA became possible. So Ms. Moilanen and Dr Salmela thought it worth trying again.

Most people have two sex chromosomes (染色体): XX in women and XY in men. Find DNA from a Y-chromosome in a skeleton and the chances are the body was ______. And, looking at a fragment of femur brought to her by Ms. Moilanen, who is the archaeologist in the ______, Dr. Salmela, who is the geneticist, did indeed find such DNA. But not much of it. That led her to wonder about contamination (污染), but also to consider whether the individual in the grave had had a(n) ______ X-chromosome that was swamping the signal from the Y.

Having an abnormal number of sex chromosomes is rare, but not vanishingly so. The particular ______ XXY leads to what is known as Klinefelter’s syndrome. To determine the occupant’s karyotype (染色体组型) from the tiny amount of DNA available, Dr. Salmela drew ______ with living people. The grave delivered 8,329 pieces, so she used a computer to draw samples of similar size from the genomes of living people with various karyotypes, including XXY, and also from mixtures of both sexes, to ______ contamination. She then compared these with the DNA from the grave and ______ it was 99.75% probable the individual concerned had indeed had Klinefelter’s syndrome.

While Dr Salmela was working all this out, Ms. Moilanen and her team had another look at the grave. They confirmed that it was a ______ burial. For instance, they found evidence of fine furs, probably from foxes. Clearly, this was a well-respected human being, but what led to that ______ in a world then dominated by male values is a matter of puzzle. Perhaps the person came from a family powerful enough for such things not to matter.

Archaeological (考古的)     1    (discover) of Changsha wares (陶器) have occurred randomly over the decades, and key findings of kiln (窑) ruins     2    (make) particularly since 2010. There were not only Tang Dynasty Changsha wares     3    (unearth), but also some celadons (青瓷) from an even     4    (early) period.

They’re key witnesses     5     the Silk Road on the sea and Sino-foreign exchanges of material culture. Archaeological findings show that Changsha wares were exported to about 30 countries,     6    (range) from East and Southeast Asian neighbors to North Africa. Craftsmen and workshop owners in Changsha participated in a wave of globalization     7     actively explored overseas markets.

    8    (consequent), shapes of Changsha wares were also influenced by foreign elements. Seeing the antiques, we can also understand     9     public aesthetics (审美) of their time. They tell     10     was viewed as traditional Chinese beauty.

9 . I first heard of what is now known as Aten-Egypt’s own Pompeii back in December 2019. I was speaking with Zahi Hawass, the famous former head of Egyptian antiquities, on the sidelines of Egypt’s World Youth Forum. I was interested to hear about the latest work in Egyptian archaeology. But from my 16 years in the Middle East, I’m always a bit tired of archaeologists who sell their site as “the most important ever” or findings that “change our understanding” of a civilization. But it was not what Dr. Hawass had discovered that interested me. At that point, his team had not yet broken ground. What interested me was the team itself. For the first time, Dr. Hawass was leading an all-Egyptian team where every role was filled by an Egyptian national.

For more than a century, western archaeologists have been the ones making “discoveries” in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia. Even in modern joint Arab-international digs, I would watch as foreign archaeologists almost always got the credit, while their local partners would seem less important. One major reason for this gap is institutional and financial: western archaeologists have big-name universities and funds behind them, while Egyptian and other Arab archaeologists often have to pay for their own tools.

The fact that Egyptians were now setting out to uncover more about their own archaeological heritage jumped out to me as an important story to tell. Unfortunately, the pandemic prevented me from joining Dr. Hawass and his team when they started excavations in 2020. When I finally arrived at their excavation sites in November 2022, I met passionate young Egyptian specialists, who expressed the hope of one day becoming university professors to pass on their knowledge and experience to the next generation of Egyptians. What I was witnessing was more than Egyptians gaining a renewed sense of dignity and reclaiming a past that was often told by others. It was a story of the many future Atens to be discovered by the all-Egyptian teams and archaeologists being inspired by this dig.

A pottery toilet used by ancient Chinese people during the Qin Dynasty has been discovered at the Yueyang City Ruins,     1       ancient Chinese palace archaeological site in Shaanxi province. The discovery is the first “flush toilet”    2     has been discovered by archaeology (考古).

The discovery was made by experts     3     (dig) the No.3 Ancient Building at the Yueyang City Ruins. The ancient relic    4    (consist) of two parts, an indoor toilet on a platform and a   pipe   system   below   directing   used   water   and   waste    5     (substance)   outside.     6       (unfortunate) the upper half of the flush toilet was not found during the excavation. Hence, experts cannot confirm whether    7     (it) users sat on it or squatted over it.

The toilet might have been used by Qin Xiaogong (381-338BC) or his father Qin Xian’gong (424-362BC) of the Qin Kingdom during the Warring States Period (475-221BC), or by Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD220).     8       (figure) it out, experts still have a lot of work to do.

“The flush toilet is concrete    9     (prove)   of the important attachment ancient Chinese people have    10     sanitation (卫生),” said Liu Rui from the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.