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OOPArts: Out Of Place Artefacts & Archaeological Erratics

BTW, could some passing Mod correct the thread title - it has a superfluous 'a' in it. (Something like OopArt or Oopart would be better.)
 
10:06? That is odd. 10:08 would be more typical.

10:08 is the time most clocks/watches are set to in adverts. Possibly because it best displays the hands or something. Or at least it used to.
 
Anome_ said:
10:06? That is odd. 10:08 would be more typical.

10:08 is the time most clocks/watches are set to in adverts.
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Well, it's not at all odd if it wasn't an advert.

And if it was an advert, it was rather unsuccessful anyway, if it's been there for a century!
 
rynner2 said:
Anome_ said:
10:06? That is odd. 10:08 would be more typical.

10:08 is the time most clocks/watches are set to in adverts.
Click to expand...
Well, it's not at all odd if it wasn't an advert.

And if it was an advert, it was rather unsuccessful anyway, if it's been there for a century!
Click to expand...

It's a good advert for the manufacturers if the watch still works.
 
'When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with metallic sound,' said Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Museum.

'We picked up the object, and found it was a ring.
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Bad archaeologist! Bad, Bad archaeologist! You are supposed to recover objects in situ, not drop them on the floor!
 
I took a Open University Earth Sciences course. There was a week long residential course, with OU staff and professional geologists. One evening one geologist was talking about his work taking sediment core samples from the Aegean. During one drilling session the drill bit had become snagged when tens of meters down, and they'd had to haul it back up. When they got it to the surface, they found it was tangled in a plastic bag.
We were all amazed a this, and the geologist realising he was straying into Fortean territory 'explained' that this must show just how fast sediments were building up in that part of the sea!
 
special_farces said:
One evening one geologist was talking about his work taking sediment core samples from the Aegean. During one drilling session the drill bit had become snagged when tens of meters down, and they'd had to haul it back up. When they got it to the surface, they found it was tangled in a plastic bag.
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Mmm. Depends, perhaps on what type of drilling rig they were using. I've worked on rigs drilling for oil, where they use a special 'mud' as drill bit lubricant and coolant. This 'mud' is pumped down from the surface, so it's just possible that the plastic bag accidentally reached the drill bit that way.

Although I can't remember now whether they use the mud when taking core samples.... :?
 
Here's a fairly long article covering lots of OoParts...

http://tinyurl.com/cvkjw2

The chart at the end (not in the original article) attempts to give a view of OoParts in history against their standing, grading from probably verified, through to possible, doubtful, and downright dubious...

http://tinyurl.com/ass2wg
 
IamSundog said:
I think this probably qualifies as an OOPA - evidence that the ancient egyptians smoked tobacco, although tobacco is supposed to have been unknown in the Old World until the 1500s. ...
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The basis for this suggestion was detection of trace nicotine.

Albeit in lower amounts, many plants in the nightshade family (other than tobacco) contain nicotine. One of these - aubergine / eggplant - was known and used in the Old World.
 
Dr. Gurlt's cube - fiction and fact

A friendly second-hand book seller (www.bookkers.nl) could not find a book I had ordered. To compensate me for the inconvenience I got a free copy of Extraterrestrial Visitations from Prehistoric Times to the Present
by Jacques Bergier. Here I hound this enticing story:

A few years ago famous Soviet scientific
journalist G.N. Ostroumov went to the Sa1zburg
Museum and asked permission to examine a cube,
or rather a parallelepiped, discovered by Dr. Gurlt
in a coal mine in the nineteenth century. According
to several nineteenth-century investigators,
this object, discovered inside a coal bed "that was
several, million years old, had nonetheless been
machine-made.

The journalist could not find the cube and felt
that the museum officials had treated him rather
badly. They told him that the object probably had
been lost some time before World War II and that
there was not even any normal proof of it's existence.

Ostroumov, furious, later published a series of
articles In which he asserted that the object was a hoax.

Dr. Gurlt found the cube in 1865, in a coal mine in Germany
where it was deeply embedded in a layer dating
from the tertiary. It had been there for tens of
millions of years, undoubtedly from shortly after
the dinosaurs met their demise. In 1886 Dr.
Gurlt made his find public.

Several other works on this subject also ap-
peared, notably in the 'transactions of the Acad-
emy of Sciences. The object was nearly a cube,
with two opposing faces of the cube being rounded
slightly. It measured about two and a half inches
by one and four fifths inches, the latter measure-
ment being taken between the two rounded sur-
faces, and weighed-about twenty-eight ounces, A
fairly deep incision went all the way around about
midway up its height. Its composition was that of
hard carbon-and-nickel steel. It did not have
enough sulfur to he made of pyrite, a natural
mineral that sometimes takes geometric shapes.

Some specialists of that period including Dr.
Gurlt himself, said that it was a fossil meteorite.
Others declared it a meteorite that had been re-
worked. But by whom? By the dinosaurs?

Finally, still other experts said that the object
was artificially manufactured, and it is this that I
find likely.

In any case, the object was deposited in the
Salzburg Museum, and there was less and less
talk of it. In 1910, it no longer appeared in the
museum's inventory. Where did it go? No one knew
anything about it.

Between the two world wars the museum
authorities, no doubt annoyed. by the number of
questions put to them about it, stopped answering.

After World War II even the file relating to the
period 1886-1910, when the cube was at the museum had disappeared.
This is, certainly strange.
Click to expand...

I think I will order more books by Bergier, because this is a nice "high strangeness story". They don't seem to make that kind of story any more ...


Unfortunately, the reality of it is much more prosaic. And it surprises me how much you can find on the Internet nowadays:

Dr Gero Kurat (born 1938) of the Museum and Dr Rudolf Grill (1910-1987) of the Geologische Bundesanstalt of Vienna thought it might be cast iron, the latter suggesting that objects of similar form had been used as ballast in early mining machinery. A further investigation by Hubert Mattlianer, in 1973, concluded that it had been cast using the cire perdue (lost wax) technique.
Images of the object do not show an impressive cubic artefact. Far from the artificial cube with complex features suggested by the written accounts, the photograph shows an object with an irregular shape. Considering that both the original object and a cast are said still to exist, it is curious that the photograph is almost never reproduced. On the other hand, perhaps it is not so curious: what we can see suggests that Adolf Gurlt’s opinion was a reasonable one.
Click to expand...

Picture of the object here:
http://www.badarchaeology.net/data/ooparts/cube.php
 
Re: Dr. Gurlt's cube - fiction and fact

Ye. Done.

uair01 said:
I think I will order more books by Bergier, because this is a nice "high strangeness story". They don't seem to make that kind of story any more ...
Click to expand...

Bergier is one half of the writing team that brought us Morning of the Magicians, which in turn helped trigger interest in Nazi UFOs/Vril and the ancient astronaut theory. They were big Forteans and helped get a lot of hos ideas into the mainstream but was also happy to uncritically present stories like the one above which investigation show have little merit (something found in a coal seam or deep in a mine seems to be a bog red flag that something is cobblers) and/or inflating passing mentions into big impressive stories (like the Nazis and Vril). It might be wroth chasing up other books but I suspect following most of the evidence could prove a disappointment. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bergier
 
In a moment of not-doing-quite-what-I-should, I found myself looking at the Wiki page for Jack Mcdevitt's story, Ancient Shores.

The story features the discovery of a very ancient, but very advanced yacht made of some sort of futuristic technology. The story then covers the problems faced with what would happen to society if we were suddenly gifted technology we hadn't developed.

I was delighted to then find that Mr Mcdevitt claims this to have been based on true events, and the boat actually exists.

Here is a page where he comments about the existence of the boat.

In a curious act of synchronicity, the fictional town of Fort Moxie is based on Pembina, where Mcdevitt claims the boat is, and real town of Pembina and is also the name of an institute researching sustainable power through 'innovative research".

What could be more innovative than using out of place technology?
 
kerravon said:
In a moment of not-doing-quite-what-I-should, I found myself looking at the Wiki page for Jack Mcdevitt's story, Ancient Shores.

The story features the discovery of a very ancient, but very advanced yacht made of some sort of futuristic technology. The story then covers the problems faced with what would happen to society if we were suddenly gifted technology we hadn't developed.

I was delighted to then find that Mr Mcdevitt claims this to have been based on true events, and the boat actually exists.
Click to expand...
Thanks for posting this - I hadn't heard of this story before, but it rings loads of bells with me, especially as I once worked as a yacht skipper.
 
Strange things found in the wrong place....

In 1912, some coal mined near Wilburton, Oklahoma, revealed a mystery which has still not been solved. Two employees of the Municipal Electric Plant, Thomas, Oklahoma, came upon a solid chunk of coal too large for the furnace. They broke it up with a sledge. An iron pot fell from the center where it had left an impression or mold in the piece of coal. An affidavit was made out by the two witnesses, and the pot was photographed. Many persons examined this strange object.... :D Has anyone found anything strange in the wrong place before ?....
 
I think we can forgive you not doing a search for "Ooparts" - Out of Place Artifacts! Quite a few of themHere :)
 
OOPArts: Out Of Place Artifacts

In fact, I've merged staploe's Thread with this one and clarified the title.


P_M
 
Archaeological Erratics

I have read many cases such as gold chains in lumps of coal, mysterious walls found in coal mines, strange stones with unknown writing on them, out of place objects the list is endless.

However despite the many books written, has anyone ever seen one of these objects? It seems to be a subject that suffers from the hand me down system of writing, lots of the stories seem to emanate from newspapers in the 19th Century especially small town American publications, the same stories keep appearing in book after book. Where are all these artefacts kept? Are they all locked up in some damp cellar? Kept from the prying eyes of the world just in case they upset the known chronological order? Or are they just over blown friend of a friend stories forever recycled by lazy authors who can not be bothered to research their subject?
 
I think your suggestions, and your post, in general... answer the questions themselves. I'd wager that if they doo exist, then they are out of the "prying eyes" of the rational amongst us! ;)
 
I'm sure I've seen photos of mystery found objects, but it all gets a bit Thunderbird photo if I try to remember exactly where. Certainly there's pictures of frogs found in stones. Er, aren't there?
 
I think a lot of those 'artifacts' were Victorian hoaxes. But what about the opposite. When someone you trust 100% tells you they'd seen something but there is no photo. In this case my dad used to work in a mine as a POW, about 3 miles down, in a crevice he could only lie in, he saw a strange animal petrified within the stone. He says it had kind of bat-like wings but looked like nothing he knew [and he knew a lot :) ]. There were no cameras to bring down and I had to take his word for it that the others that saw it were equally baffled.

Now, wether it was truly a strange animal or just a known prehistoric one that got a bit mangled is irrelevant. Point is, I believed him and it was something interesting that has never been catalogued. I wonder how many other weird / interesting things will never make it any further?
 
The Salzburg Cube comes to mind ...
 
That site is full of fantastical crap! "Who could have made it?" I'm sure just a fleeting bit of research would debunk the lot. :lol:
 
coaly said:
That site is full of fantastical crap! "Who could have made it?" I'm sure just a fleeting bit of research would debunk the lot. :lol:
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I have to disagree. Instead of 'fleeting' research, a lot of them had probably quite some detailed research applied to them, such as carbon dating. Also I don't think that a lot of these artefacts are weird enough to warrant a hoax. They are merely unexplainable to us today. What I consider hoaxes are Victorian mermaids, crystal skulls, frogs in stones and such like, not giant stone spheres or other interesting artefacts well within the capability of ancient people.
Would you say that the Antekythera device is a hoax? Because it isn't, it is a quite amazing Greek representation of our solar system but it fits in neatly with other artefacts.
Believing nothing is as bad as to believe everything. In order to find out the truth, healthy open minded scepticism will have a better chance.
 
Oh I forgot to add the disarming :lol:
 
No, the Antekythera device isn't a hoax, but on that site, they'r making it out to be some form of alien technology, (which is the the same inference as the other artefacts on there.) That is what I'm saying. There are no foot notes or references, purely because they wan t us to believe in some nonsense or other. Arthur C Clarke would be turning in his grave! :lol:
 
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