Another New Tomb in the Valley of the Kings?

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?"

Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom

[Doc Ruby]

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

[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 been eluding police for 15 years.

Anybody got that link? Anybody debunked it yet?

Google UnEarth

[Ageing Metalhead]

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 ;-)

Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom

[Quantum Fizz]

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.

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[Big Sean O]

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:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom

[Doc Ruby]

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.

We should leave some stuff where it is.

[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 Roman and Greek texts. I am worried that, if we slide into a dark age, there won't be anything left upon which to rebuild civilization.

Re:Reeves is not all he's cracked up to be

[barakn]

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.

Re:Lips of Truth Speak to Ears of Wisdom

[deglr6328]

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 energy) that they experience time dilation (thx. Einstein!) and actually can penetrate thousands of feet into the ground before decaying/being absorbed. Because they have an electric charge (-1) they feel the electromagnetic force and are thus trivially easy to detect. So you can put an array of detectors below say, a pyramid, and simply look for areas where you see more muons on the array, that's where a void must be (less attenuation) and you go search there. I think this was done in the 60's by physicist Luis Alvarez. Here, for instance is an image of the shadow of the moon [wikipedia.org]. Big deal you say? Well that image was taken "in muons" from 700 meters underground in the Soudan mine of Minnesota.

Whenever they talk about tomb robbers I laugh

[voss]

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.

"false positives" and false negatives

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience,17 years in North American archaeology, GPR is worthless.
The only way to test it is with good old fashioned back hoe and shovel excavation -an opportunity I have often had.
GPR "finds"(and misses) gravel lenses, boulders,bedrock outcrops ,recent and long rotted tree stumps. GPR "misses" structural remains, pit features, burials and other cultural features. You could achieve the same results with a dowsing rod. A skilled and perceptive archaeologist could easily do much better than GPR with a dowsing rod (by inferring high probability areas from topographic cues).
          Supposedly GPR "works" in detecting anomalies in perfectly homogenous sandy soils-say a buried rail road car or something.
Persoinally,I have never seen it work at all.