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Another New Tomb in the Valley of the Kings?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Aug 06, 2006 11:25 AM
from the pharoh's-got-the-coolest-forts dept.
Science
Praxiteles writes "A radar survey in 2000 found KV63, the tomb excavated near King Tutankhamen's tomb earlier this year. (KV stands for Valley of the Kings). Just announced is that this same radar survey shows an image of what appears to be a shaft to another tomb just 15 meters north of KV63. Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"
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  • What?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jlowery (47102) on Sunday August 06 2006, @11:34AM (#15855570)
    "Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

    Let's hope it will open up new opportunities to learn about history, which contributes to the wealth of everyone.
    • Thank you for saying that because the summary was great until that line which made me upset because my class on archaeology beat it into my head fairly well that the "search for buried treasure" has destroyed an incredible amount of history and has caused other artificats to be lost or altered (due to the "art market").
        • If it's from all over the world then that would include the Middle East and Asia (which it does as archaelogists from those locations do not like grave robbers either). There are other ways of making a living that don't include robbing your own country of its cultural history (which grave robbers do). The archaeologists I've spoken to (admittedly just a handful) don't seem very interested in 'career changing' discoveries but more so in uncovering the mysteries of the past without destroying the site (which

    • Re:What?? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Tx (96709) on Sunday August 06 2006, @12:25PM (#15855714) Journal
      "Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

      Let's hope it will open up new opportunities to learn about history, which contributes to the wealth of everyone.

      Maybe, but "Lara Croft, Radar Stratigrapher" just doesn't have that ring to it.
    • Well said!

      History is by far more important than any monetary value of the finds in any archeological foray. Long after any riches have lined the pockets of someone, the understanding of the past remains in our minds (if we let it). There is so much to learn from what happened in the Egyptian dynastic holdings region. So much to learn...

      I'm in hope that as our technology advances, so will our explorations - and perhaps our ability to preserve the purity of the finds.

  • Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Sunday August 06 2006, @11:36AM (#15855575) Homepage Journal
    Ever since I read Larry Niven's Ringworld I've been waiting for some geek who also read it to invent deep radar [google.com].

    Every time I see that someone has got a neutrino detector [wikipedia.org] up, I think we've finally got a deep "radar" that can see through practically everything (AFAWCT) in the Universe, offering us a neutrino detector detector.

    I won't be surprised when we fire it up and the Valley of the Kings lights up, along with various museums (and attics) in France, UK, US, Germany and Japan.

    • Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They have. Allegedly. I was reading abot some (Brazillian I think) guy who demonstrated a device
      he built as a mine detector. It works slowly but can find anything burried within anything
      as long as there is a material anomoly. I was very suspicious of the story because it had
      all the "scientists" saying it was "impossible" and the guy wouldn't fully share the method
      until it was patented. Anyway he did a practical demonstration and discovered several
      buried bodies, arms caches and stuff in a field that had bee
      • apocrpyhal [reference.com]: Of questionable authorship or authenticity.
        (from apo/far + crypt/hidden)
      • > Anybody debunked it yet?

        I hope your not one of those of people [vast majority afaict] who
        have very different standards of evidence between a claim and
        the debunking of a claim.

        Someone makes a claim and no matter what evidence they provide,
        the hearing from someone else that that person had heard it was
        "debunked" is enough for them to discard it.

        I am familiar [and sympathetic to] the viewpoint that extraordinary
        claims require extraordinary evidence, but this phenomena is different.
        Just the use of the word

    • Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Quantum Fizz (860218) on Sunday August 06 2006, @12:10PM (#15855674)
      Neutrinos are notoriously difficult to detect, for precisely the same reasons that you propose using them as imaging - they can travel through nearly everything. I used to work for the SNO [wikipedia.org] project back around 1996, the amount of engineering and technological sophistication that goes into a detector like this is quite amazing.
      .

      Back in the day there were proposals about using neutrinos to communicate with submarines and other military vehicles around the planet, since neutrinos can travel through the Earth. Since a military vessel would have to have a very small neutrino detector (to keep its mobility), the detection of neutrinos by this thing would be super low. IIRC, expected usable bandwidths (not sure if they actually did the experiment or not) would be something like a byte per day, which is obviously too low to be useful for military.

      • Neutrinos are overkill for scales of subs on Earth. For Death Stars across galaxies, entanglement's SAAD avoids latency. Neutrinos are good for finding distant, old objects. I don't know if any astrarchaeologist could afford a detector in their mobile phone.
      • > Back in the day there were proposals about using neutrinos to communicate with submarines and other military vehicles around the planet, since neutrinos can travel through the Earth. Since a military vessel would have to have a very small neutrino detector (to keep its mobility), the detection of neutrinos by this thing would be super low. IIRC, expected usable bandwidths (not sure if they actually did the experiment or not) would be something like a byte per day, which is obviously too low to be usefu

      • Oblig Stargate Quote (Score:5, Funny)

        by Gryle (933382) on Sunday August 06 2006, @03:16PM (#15856225)
        Col O'Neill: "Don't matter what kind of radation suit we have. If you'd been listening you'd know that Nintendos pass through everything."
    • Not neutrinos, muons. Neutrinos can barrel through a lightyear thick piece of lead without noticing, they only interact with normal matter via the weak force and are far too difficult to image with. Muons (leptons, -kinda like heavy electrons) which are continuously created in the upper atmosphere by cosmic ray collisions with the gasses there produce copious amounts of muons which rain down from abovde all the time. the muon has a short half life (2 microseconds) but are travelling so fast (high kinetic en

  • Don't open it! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's probably a Goa'uld trap. Wait, it might have a Zero-Point Module--open it but have a lot of guards and SG-1 standing by.

  • Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2006, @11:41AM (#15855589)
    My aunt works in Egyptology, and she doesn't have a lot of good things to say about this Reeves guy, so take this all with a grain of salt. The scan has found *something*, but not necessarily a tomb - limestone is naturally porous, and this could very well just be an air bubble. Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.

    He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers. Generally not a reputable character.
    • I view GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) as a diagnostic tool. There are definite cases where GPR has generated false positives. Think about when the FBI destroyed that barn recently while looking for Jimmy Hoffa. This technology cannot be trusted on its own, but it can help reduce the wholesale destruction of exploratory digging. It is possible that this shaft is a natural formation or something else that will not lead to treasure (or a deeper understanding of history).

    • He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers. Generally not a reputable character.

      Well... FTA...

      Reeves was falsely accused of involvement in antiquities smuggling and his permit was revoked. In August 2005, he was officially cleared of any wrongdoing by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA)

      Looks like the Egyptians looked into that and cleared him. Sounds to me like your aunt has a personal axe to grind...

      • Or, he greased the proper palms.

        One thing I learned from my trip to Egypt: almost anything is possible -- with the right baksheesh [wikipedia.org].

      • Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Interesting)

        by barakn (641218) on Sunday August 06 2006, @01:01PM (#15855813)
        FTFA, with the part you omitted highlighted in bold:
        Reeves was falsely accused of involvement in antiquities smuggling and his permit was revoked. In August 2005, he was officially cleared of any wrongdoing by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), though not allowed to return to his work in the Valley.
        Perhaps they just didn't have enough evidence.
      • OJ didn't do it either.
        and MJ is completely innocent.
        Oh and lets not forget MS isn't exactly being held to any form of punishment even though they were found guilty....
        I would trust the real peers of this guy to have a more accurate picture than any government, court, or "jury of peers" because a jury is NEVER really your peers. So axe or not, this is certainly no reason to believe the aunt in question has an axe to grind.

    • Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Informative)

      by hey! (33014) on Sunday August 06 2006, @12:06PM (#15855659) Homepage Journal
      He also isn't even allowed in the Valley of the Kings. He got the boot because he's been known to work with smugglers.


      Shades of E A Wallis Budge [thebritishmuseum.ac.uk], a man so vain and unscrupulous, that the British Museum, the organization that he worked for, can only say this of him:


      Budge's works are still in print, but this is because they are out of copyright, and so the text can be cheaply reprinted. While they are well illustrated, full of information and extremely cheap, they are at best unreliable, and usually misleading.


      They only stopped short of slapping a red banner across his photo with the world "Crackpot".

      Yet, nobody says Budge was stupid. Nor that he was unenterprising. He brought home lots of archaeological treasure that the Museum might not have received otherwise, which makes the Museum an important place for scholars. The down side is that he destroyed priceless and possibly irreplaceable knowledge in the process, which undermined the Museum's mission.

      So, it isn't out of the question that a freebooting antiquities smuggler found a new, possibly unlooted, probably even royal tomb. IIRC we don't have tombs to match up every ruler we know to have existed from the period where the Valley of the Kings was in use. Furthermore, while most people I know are marginally unethical, very few of them view themselves as ruthlessly bad. Therefore he might not scruple to support antiquities smuggling, but might draw the line at looting a newly discovered tomb. Or the tomb, if it exists, may not be excatable without a fairly major engineering effort.

      Or it may not exist at all. But I hope it does. Even a looted tomb is bound to be very interesting, unless all the inscriptions and paintings have been removed.

    • Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be (Score:5, Informative)

      by techno-vampire (666512) on Sunday August 06 2006, @12:37PM (#15855745) Homepage
      Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.


      If you'd bothered to RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know this is Slashdot; people never RTFA before posting.) you'd have seen two things. First, he's not saying it is a new tomb but that it might be. Second, he gives credit for the discovery of the other new tomb to the person who excavated it, even thought it had been found earlier in the radar survey.

    • Well, after Googling this subject for a bit (and looking at the Project's Web site) it appears that he announced his results after Otto Schaden and his team independently found the tomb (it was found in what was originally Reeve's concession.) He also states very clearly that even though his radar results identified a tomb-like structure some time before the physical discovery of the tomb, Schaden's group clearly deserves the credit for finding it. Doesn't sound like as much of an asshole as you're trying t
    • Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.

      It:s that easy, huh? Hell, I don't even need to LOOK at the X-Ray scans... Even from here I can clearly see half a dozen undiscovered tombs! And at least one of them has some shocking new discovery! I'll take the credit for that, thank you very much.
    • Not only the accusation but the continued ban can be due to reasons ranging from Reeves being guilty but the authorities lacking evidence to professional jealousy that succeeded moving an "interloper" out of the way. It could be as simple as a rival hearing about the discovery of voids revealed by Reeves's radar data and taking a cynical step to remove Reeves from the field. In the Valley of the Kings, "voids" evoke the possibility of tombs.

      Reeve's discovery of intact stratigraphy outside of the tombs (it

  • Agenda week on slashdot. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2006, @11:44AM (#15855600)
    "Will radar stratigraphy change the multi-millennial tradition of destructive excavation and open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

    I have a better question. Why does every submission have to have the posters agenda? You could have said "Will radar stratigraphy open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?".

  • I guess it's not... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jeian (409916) on Sunday August 06 2006, @11:52AM (#15855619)
    ... the Valley of Kings in Loch Modan.

    I should play WoW less.

  • Google UnEarth (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ageing Metalhead (586837) on Sunday August 06 2006, @11:58AM (#15855635)
    All we need is a deep radar satellite, to spin around the world, and then we can have "google unearth". People searching the globe with their PCs looking for buried treasure from their armchair. Mind you, it will probably throw up more unearthed Mafia corpses than treasure ;-)

  • Arrrr matey! (Score:3, Funny)

    by krell (896769) on Sunday August 06 2006, @12:23PM (#15855708) Journal
    " open new opportunities in the search for buried treasure?"

    Arr, matey! Any of ye swabs got a pirate ship that can sail in the desert?

  • We should leave some stuff where it is. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The trouble is that if we find and excavate all the ancient sites, we are in peril of losing them forever. Maybe we should dig them up, photograph them and then put them back. The media that we use to store information are quite volitile. With one good war we could erase all information about our society as well as all the artifacts we have excavated from previous civilizations. The only historical information left would be the stuff we haven't dug up yet.

    The Renaissance was jump-started by ancient Roma

      • Re:We should leave some stuff where it is. (Score:5, Informative)

        by MjrTom (68324) <trjames.uchicago@edu> on Sunday August 06 2006, @07:12PM (#15856852)
        You are entirely correct. Funding does play a big part (archaeology is incredibly expense if it's done right), however the truth is that for the most part, those of us who do archaeology today are worlds better than those who went before us. We also realize that those who come after us will be much better than we are due to advances in methodology, theory, and technologies such as gradiometry and resistivity. When I was working actively in the academic research side of things we tried to excavate no more than 5% of a site, leave the rest for future archs who will know things we don't, and thus will be able to get information we cannot. It must always be remembered that archaeology is at its heart a destructive science - we can't just do it over again if we screw up, screw ups mean that information is permanently lost.

        On the salvage side of things it's slightly different, for example if there was a new interstate highway going through an archaeological site and there was absolutely no way to reroute that road, we would attempt to do 100% recovery of the site. This almost never happens (it'd have to be a really small site - digging right takes a long time and the road builders get pissy if you sit there and delay them for too long. Can't stop progress). In salvage or "Section 106" or whathaveyou style archaeology the rule is to reover as much as possible as quickly as possible.

  • Plenty of false positives... (Score:5, Informative)

    by posterlogo (943853) on Sunday August 06 2006, @01:01PM (#15855816)
    ...called "dry holes" in the KV and surrounding areas, where tomb builders would build the antechamber, but then change their minds and go to another spot. So a supposed shaft, while exciting, even if what rader is picking up really was a product of ancient tomb builders, may still be a dead end.

  • Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by voss (52565) on Sunday August 06 2006, @02:31PM (#15856086)
    Good for the tomb robbers...That treasure was collected off the backs of thousands of
    slaves and from the pockets of honest egyptians for thousands of years. The "tomb robbers"
    are not thieves, that stuff was abandoned the same as a sunken treasure ship. The egyptian government didnt even care until they realized they could make money off it.

    At least the tomb robbers did something with the gold and treasure instead of just taking
    from innocent people and burying it. What good does it do history yet another
    Golden mask sitting in some museum somewhere. At least the tomb robbers enjoyed the
    treasure and put the gold into the economy.

    You want to talk about a treasure...the palimpset of archimedes is a treasure, the Rosetta stone is a treasure, the ruins of pompeii and karnak are treasures, Gold should be used for the living not the dead.

  • Typical /. story... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tiro (19535) on Sunday August 06 2006, @05:22PM (#15856532) Journal
    Come on, this stuff is Ancient History!!

  • Archeologist versus Grave Robber (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BuildMonkey (585376) on Sunday August 06 2006, @07:58PM (#15856970)
    How long does a body have to be in the ground before digging it up the corpse and taking its valuables stops being grave robbing and becomes archeology? Is it archeology if you just take enough pictures and measurements? Shall we do some "archeology" on Westminster Abbey? The Vatican? I'm sure there are valuables buried with those bodies. How about digging up Lincoln's tomb - it could tell us more about how he lived and died. If you find these examples offensive consider this:

    Time after time, from the Incas, the Mayas, the Egyptians, American Indians, etc. entire cities or societies worked for a generation to ensure that their royalty, leaders, or god-kings could rest forever undisturbed. What gives us the right to violate that sanctity? "Knowledge" is the canonical answer, but is it curiosity for curiosity's sake? And is that sufficient justification violate an entire society's clear wishes?

    • Re:Archeologist versus Grave Robber (Score:4, Insightful)

      by woolio (927141) on Sunday August 06 2006, @08:30PM (#15857046) Journal
      How long does a body have to be in the ground before digging it up the corpse and taking its valuables stops being grave robbing and becomes archeology?

      Grave robbing occurs when a burial ground is disturbed while members of the same race/society/tribe/etc are still present.

      As soon as they have all been exterminated and the previous society no longer exists, then it becomes archaelogy..... because there is no longer any protest...

    • How long does a body have to be in the ground before digging it up the corpse and taking its valuables stops being grave robbing and becomes archeology? Is it archeology if you just take enough pictures and measurements? Shall we do some "archeology" on Westminster Abbey? The Vatican?

      Actually archaeological digs on 'recent' burials and in the West is fairly common. (The just completed one at Little Big Horn about a decade back for example.) Then there is the study of the Franklin expedition back in the

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