The section of the city wall revealed, 70 meters long and six meters high, is located in the area known as the Ophel, between the City of David and the southern wall of the Temple Mount.

Uncovered in the city wall complex are: an inner gatehouse for access into the royal quarter of the city, a royal structure adjacent to the gatehouse, and a corner tower that overlooks a substantial section of the adjacent Kidron valley.

The excavations in the Ophel area were carried out over a three-month period with funding provided by Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman, a New York couple interested in Biblical Archeology. The funding supports both completion of the archaeological excavations and processing and analysis of the finds as well as conservation work and preparation of the site for viewing by the public within the Ophel Archaeological Park and the national park around the walls of Jerusalem.

The excavations were carried out in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and the Company for the Development of East Jerusalem. Archaeology students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as volunteer students from the Herbert W. Armstrong College in Edmond, Oklahoma, and hired workers all participated in the excavation work.

“The city wall that has been uncovered testifies to a ruling presence. Its strength and form of construction indicate a high level of engineering,” Mazar said. The city wall is at the eastern end of the Ophel area in a high, strategic location atop the western slop of the Kidron valley.

“A comparison of this latest finding with city walls and gates from the period of the First Temple, as well as pottery found at the site, enable us to postulate with a great degree of assurance that the wall that has been revealed is that which was built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in the latter part of the tenth century B.C.E.,” said Mazar

“This is the first time that a structure from that time has been found that may correlate with written descriptions of Solomon’s building in Jerusalem,” she added. “The Bible tells us that Solomon built — with the assistance of the Phoenicians, who were outstanding builders — the Temple and his new palace and surrounded them with a city, most probably connected to the more ancient wall of the City of David.” Mazar specifically cites the third chapter of the First Books of Kings where it refers to “until he (Solomon) had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the Lord, and the wall of Jerusalem round about.”

The six-meter-high gatehouse of the uncovered city wall complex is built in a style typical of those from the period of the First Temple like Megiddo, Beersheva and Ashdod. It has symmetrical plan of four identical small rooms, two on each side of the main passageway. Also there was a large, adjacent tower, covering an area of 24 by 18 meters, which was intended to serve as a watchtower to protect entry to the city. The tower is located today under the nearby road and still needs to be excavated. Nineteenth century British surveyor Charles Warren, who conducted an underground survey in the area, first described the outline of the large tower in 1867 but without attributing it to the era of Solomon.

“Part of the city wall complex served as commercial space and part as security stations,” explained Mazar. Within the courtyard of the large tower there were widespread public activities, she said. It served as a public meeting ground, as a place for conducting commercial activities and cult activities, and as a location for economic and legal activities.

Pottery shards discovered within the fill of the lowest floor of the royal building near the gatehouse also testify to the dating of the complex to the 10th century B.C.E. Found on the floor were remnants of large storage jars, 1.15 meters in height, that survived destruction by fire and that were found in rooms that apparently served as storage areas on the ground floor of the building. On one of the jars there is a partial inscription in ancient Hebrew indicating it belonged to a high-level government official.

“The jars that were found are the largest ever found in Jerusalem,” said Mazar, adding that “the inscription that was found on one of them shows that it belonged to a government official, apparently the person responsible for overseeing the provision of baked goods to the royal court.”

In addition to the pottery shards, cult figurines were also found in the area, as were seal impressions on jar handles with the word “to the king,” testifying to their usage within the monarchy. Also found were seal impressions (bullae) with Hebrew names, also indicating the royal nature of the structure. Most of the tiny fragments uncovered came from intricate wet sifting done with the help of the salvaging Temple Mount Sifting Project, directed by Dr. Gabriel Barkai and Zachi Zweig, under the auspice of the Nature and Parks Authority and the Ir David Foundation.

Between the large tower at the city gate and the royal building the archaeologists uncovered a section of the corner tower that is eight meters in length and six meters high. The tower was built of carved stones of unusual beauty.

East of the royal building, another section of the city wall that extends for some 35 meters also was revealed. This section is five meters high, and is part of the wall that continues to the northeast and once enclosed the Ophel area.

His topic, “Climate Change Impacts on Civilization: Lessons From Space Archeology,” certainly sounds contemporary. But he broke ranks by choosing to look back a thousand years — to the mysterious collapse of the Mayan empire.

Sever is one of the pioneers of satellite imaging technology, also known as remote sensing. His Mayan research (and Copenhagen appearance) is indicative of how far the field has come from the Cold War days of high-tech snooping for missile silos. Satellite imaging now figures into everything from disease prevention to monitoring human rights abuses.

“The applications of remote sensing are only going to keep increasing,” says Sarah Parcak, assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, who has used it to discover more than 130 historic sites buried in the Egyptian desert. “It’s a wonderful tool to track short-term and long-term changes, and it’s fairly cost-efficient.”

For about 20 years, Sever has been examining high-altitude pictures of the rain forests that blanket Central America’s Yucatan Peninsula. He’s able to look back through time by mining the images for information about such variables as soil content and moisture levels, then running that data through computer models.

His conclusion? The Mayans serve as a cautionary tale. They were voracious tree cutters, denuding the landscape to the point where it adversely affected crop yields and rainfall patterns. Multiple factors, including overpopulation, played a role in their demise, Sever notes, but deforestation “was one of them and perhaps a significant component.”

Ron Blom, principal scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., shared the stage with Sever in Copenhagen. He delved even deeper into the past, talking about how the Earth’s climate stabilized about 11,000 years ago, an “enabling circumstance” that allowed agricultural, non-nomadic societies to take root. But what nature gives, nature can take away.

According to Blom, satellite imaging has shown that the ancient cities of Petra in Jordan and Angkor Wat in Cambodia fell victim to brutally fickle weather. “Drought was the final thing that ruined them,” he says.

Blom and Sever both stumbled into satellite imaging in the early 1980s. Blom was among the NASA scientists who were stumped by the images taken by radar-equipped cameras that had been placed aboard the Challenger space shuttle during its test flights. The photographed terrain looked otherworldly. They eventually realized they were staring at pictures of the Sahara Desert that contained radar-enhanced details the human eye normally couldn’t see, particularly a spider’s web of dried river beds hidden under what had once been lush grassland.

Inspiration struck. Blom became part of a team that directed an archaeological dig near where several of those latent rivers intersected in southern Oman. They were betting that might be a suitable location of the fabled lost city of Ubar. They guessed right.

“It’s not an Instamatic snapshot,” Blom says, referring to all the image manipulating that must be done with most raw satellite photos. “The surface you see with your eye is not the surface the radar sees.”

Sever had taken a job fresh out of graduate school in 1978 as a data processor at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. He began playing around with NASA’s stock of satellite photos in his off hours. He eventually convinced NASA and the National Science Foundation to undertake a small demonstration project in the wilds of Costa Rica.

Boots-on-the-ground exploration subsequently confirmed a secret that satellite images first revealed to him: “We are able to find the oldest footpath in the world,” Sever says.

Archaeologists immediately grasped the significance of satellite imaging. Eyes in the sky can scour hundreds of square miles of land, pinpointing those spots most worthy of pick-and-shovel exploration. But other uses gradually materialized.

Satellite imaging has expanded the scope of human rights activists. Before-and-after aerial photos documented the destruction of villages by government-backed militias in Sudan, as well as the flow of people into refugee camps, which helped the Red Cross better plan its relief efforts. Amnesty International maintains an Eyes on Darfur bank of photos on the Internet with help from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Other organizations have scoured satellite images to monitor Israeli army activity in the Gaza strip, political prison camps in North Korea and evidence of mass graves in northern Afghanistan.

Sever currently teaches at the University of Alabama-Huntsville but continues to do contract work for NASA. He assisted the governments of Central America in setting up a regional satellite surveillance system called Servir in 2005. It’s being employed to detect forest fires and coastal outbreaks of toxic red tide, plus do comparative analysis of air quality. The Servir program has proved so successful that 15 African countries launched a spinoff in 2008.

In September, Parcak branched out from archaeology by being named director of a new Laboratory for Global Health Observation at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Remote sensing identified heavy mosquito breeding areas in Kenya, which then get sprayed to reduce the threat of malaria. UAB is trying to develop similar preventive measures for Lyme disease, studying whether changes in ambient temperature and deer proliferation might be reliable predictors of tick infestations.

Parcak says satellites could play a critical role in locating sources of clean water: “That’s going to be such a huge issue in the next 50 years, especially in Central Africa and India.”

The increased popularity of satellite imaging is owed in part to improvements in the quality and quantity of raw material. Governments have released stockpiles of formerly classified photos into the public domain. Add to that the proliferation of commercial satellites that will shoot panoramic photos on request, although a 15-square-mile image can cost as much as $1,000.

Over the years, grainy black-and-white film has given way to high-resolution, full-color digital pictures. You have a choice of radar, near-infrared, thermal-infrared and LIDAR (Light Dilution and Ranging) formats.

Historically, this has been a strictly land-based technology, something of a handicap on a planet where two-thirds of the surface is submerged. But in October, a Colorado company launched a satellite that reportedly can capture images through almost 50 feet of water.

“I read that and my jaw dropped,” Parcak says.

What’s that about a lost city of Atlantis?

The Location of the dicovery – Lagartero, Mexico; Source: Google Earth

In the bas-relief sculpture the Mayan ruler rises above an individual who lies at his feet, “a scene representing the seizing of power by one Maya group from another,” INAH said, adding that the archaeological area of Lagartero will be open to the public this year.

INAH experts found the stone monument in late 2009 at the 10th section of Pyramid 4 in Lagartero, the source said. Archaeologist Sonia Rivero Torres, who heads the Lagartero archaeological project, said that the stele or commemorative monument – the first to be found complete on the site – measures 2 meters (6 1/2 feet) long, 55 centimeters (22 inches) wide and 6 centimeters (2 1/3 inches) thick.

The stele was sculpted in metamorphic rock, known locally as “heart of stone.” “In the pre-Colombian monument the profile image of a Mayan ruler is seen standing over a bench carrying a bag of incense in one hand and dressed in a loincloth bound with a sash and wearing sandals and a feather headdress.

“At his feet, lying on his back on the bench, lies another, smaller person with his torso opened as a sign of sacrifice or of being overthrown,” the archaeologist said.

The expert added that the stele was discovered while exploring a rectangular stone casket, which had possibly been plundered in pre-Columbian times since no bones were found inside. The archaeologists also found, when they went down to a lower level of the pyramid, a pair of large earthenware pots, broken but complete, one of which contained an smaller, unbroken pot.

Together with these ceramics was a polychrome plate and a black vase with a zoopmorphic lid that contained a rich offering of jade objects, notable among which were two earflaps, a jointed turtle and a beaded necklace. Another box was found in the fifth section of Pyramid 4, from which 40 vessels of different shapes, zoomorphic vases and a few human bones were recovered, INAH said. Lagartero’s pre-Columbian ceremonial center extends the length and breadth of the 8 hectares (2 1/2 acres) that make up the islet of El Limonar, the biggest of the 11 dotting the lakes of Lagos de Colon, in the community of Cristobal Colon in the municipality of La Trinitaria, Chiapas.

Lagartero is known to have been occupied from the Classical Period to the Early Post-Classical Period, which is to say from 300 A.D. to 1200 A.D. Given its strategic wetlands location, the habitat of fresh-water species like the alligator, the Maya settlement controlled the area’s natural resources and could also restrict access by water. Lagartero was a key point for trading goods and products between the highlands of Guatemala and Mexico’s central plateau.

Archaeologists working at the site have uncovered an enclosed ball-playing court together with its five altars, along with a series of architectural structures, INAH said

Do you know who is Nostradamus? Let me remind you that he is the same person whose predictions have never gone wrong. And can you believe it that he has predicted that the whole world will come to an end on December 21st, 2012. Can you believe this? Nobody will certainly like to believe this. But nobody knows that what the truth is. It is still a mystery. The Mayan calendar is 5125 years old and it ends on December 21st 2012. What will happen after this? This is certainly a mystery. So let us see that what are some of the 2012 calendar predictions?

1. It is believed that the new age will come to the vicinity after December 21st. All of us and the whole world will take a new shape. However, the Mayan calendar does not predict that the atmosphere will also be destroyed. The atmosphere will certainly not be destroyed. This does means that there will be some changes on the earth crust. There can be very severe volcanic eruption throughout the world and this will lead to severe loss of lives. The calendar predicts that none of the people will be left. The year of 2012 will mark the beginning of the apocalypse.

2. The catastrophe might also occur in 2012. The first point also suggests the same thing but the words are different. You will certainly find out that the earth crust will tear up from various places and the lava will flow out of it. All the continents will see the major setbacks.

However there is a surprise for you. The Maya calendars are seldom used by the people. But if you will talk to the Maya tribes and the Mayan speaking peoples then you will come to know that they know nothing about 2012. They have no idea that what is going to happen on December 2012. Actually the western calendars have much to do with this prediction. The historians as well as the archeologist have been doing research on the Mayan civilization for a very long period of time.

Very recently they come up with this discovery and the prediction being given in the Mayan calendar. But certainly there is lots of mystery about it and you will certainly be confused to certain limit. Will the catastrophe will occur on December 21st or will the world come to an end. This is certainly a mystery and most of the researchers are researching on it. But only God knows that what is the truth.