[考古] 两篇考古

Shinea white light on the Hope Diamond and it will dazzle you with the brilliance ofan amazing blue diamond. Shine an ultraviolet light on the Hope Diamond and thegem will glow red-orange for about five minutes. This phosphorescent propertyof blue diamonds can distinguish synthetic and altered diamonds from the realthing, and it may also provide a way to fingerprint individual blue diamondsfor identification purposes, according to a team of researchers from the NavalResearch Laboratory, the Smithsonian Institution and Penn State.Other colors ofdiamonds do not phosphoresce, but fluoresce, emitting visible light only aslong as they are stimulated with ultraviolet radiation. Blue diamonds thatphosphoresce emit light even after the ultraviolet lamp is turned off. Unlikethe Hope, however, most blue diamonds produce a bluish light rather thanreddish light.

  Thered phosphorescence is rare enough that researchers thought that those bluediamonds that did glow red must have come from the parent of the Hope – anoriginal 112-carat blue diamond mined in India in the mid-1600s. That diamondwas cut down to 67 carats to become the French Blue owned by French kings and,after being lost during the French Revolution, appeared 20 years later in 1812as the 45-carat stone known today as the Hope Diamond.

  Theresearch, reported in the current issue of Geology, confirms that all bluediamonds have a red phosphorescent component and that, through spectroscopicanalysis, each blue diamond can be individually identified.

  "TheHope Diamond is the most popular museum object in the world," says PeterJ. Heaney, professor of geosciences at Penn State. "Even so, theSmithsonian considers the specimens in the museum objects of scientific value.They have an enormous number of gemstones in their collection and theyencourage scientific research to figure out how the stones formed, and whatgives them their special properties."

  Aspopular as the Hope Diamond is, it is always on display at the Smithsonian.Heaney and the other researchers worked on the gems in the morning and afterthe museum closed.

"If you want to study the Hope diamondusing spectroscopy, you need to bring the machine to the Hope diamond,"says Heaney. "You cannot bring the Hope to the machine."

  Theresearchers, who included Heaney; first author Sally Eaton-Magana, GemologicalInstitute of America, formerly of the Naval Research Laboratory; Jaime Freitas,Paul Klein and James E. Butler, NRL; Roy Walters, Ocean Optics, Inc.; andJeffery E. Post, curator of gems and minerals, Smithsonian Institution, used aportable spectrometer manufactured by Ocean Optics that could be set up at themuseum. They tested a variety of blue stones known to be natural including theHope Diamond, the Blue Heart – the second largest blue diamond known, thePortuguese Diamond – another large stone, and 64 other blue diamonds, many ofwhich came from the Aurora Butterfly – a collection of 240 stones temporarilyon display at the museum.

  红色磷光十分罕见，研究人员认为那些发出红光的蓝色钻石必须来自希望的母体 - 这是在17世纪中叶在印度开采的原始的112克拉蓝色钻石。这颗钻石被切成67克拉，成为法国国王所拥有的法国蓝，在法国大革命中迷失之后，于1812年20年后出现，成为今天被称为希望钻石的45克拉石。

  “希望钻石是世界上最受欢迎的博物馆，”宾州州立大学地球科学教授彼得·J·海尼（Peter J. Heaney）说。“即便如此，史密森尼博物馆也将博物馆中的标本视为具有科学价值的博物馆，他们藏有大量的宝石，他们鼓励科学研究，弄清楚这些宝石是如何形成的，以及是什么赋予它们特殊的性质。

  和希望钻石一样受欢迎，它总是在史密森尼展出。希尼和其他研究人员在早上和博物馆关闭后，在宝石上工作。

  希尼说：“如果你想用光谱学来研究希望的钻石，那么你需要把机器带到希望的钻石里。“你不能把希望带到机器上。”

  包括希尼在内的研究人员;第一作者，曾在海军研究实验室工作的美国宝石学院的萨莉·伊顿 - 马加纳（Sally Eaton-Magana） Jaime Freitas，Paul Klein和James E. Butler，NRL;海洋光学公司的Roy Walters;和史密森学会（Smithsonian Institution）的宝石和矿物馆馆长杰弗里·E·波斯特（JefferyE. Post）使用了海洋光学公司制造的便携式光谱仪，该仪器可以在博物馆安装。他们测试了很多已知是天然的蓝宝石，包括希望钻石（Blue Diamond），蓝心（已知第二大的蓝钻石），另一块大石头葡萄牙钻石（Diamond）以及另外64颗蓝钻石（其中许多来自极光蝴蝶）在博物馆里暂时展示了240块宝石。

Proto-historic Hawaiiantemples on the island of Maui may have mushroomed up within just 30 years, not250 as previously supposed, scientists say. The findings could significantlyalter researchers' understanding of the pace of precontact sociopoliticalchange in the Pacific.　　  Hawaiian genealogiesand oral histories hold that sometime around 1600 A.D. a ruler named Pi'ilaniunited two opposing chiefdoms on Maui into a peaceful kingdom, marking theemergence of a religious state on the island. Archaeologists had been unable toconfirm that sequence of events, however, in part because of the limitations ofcarbon dating. (一种炭14元素测时间技术)

　　In the new work, Patrick V. Kirch and Warren D. Sharp of the Universityof California and Berkeley used another kind of radiometric technique involvingthorium-230, rather than carbon-14, to date bits of branch coral that werecollected from living reefs and left as divine offerings at seven differenttemples during construction.(部分细节定位题) Dates for these corals, which had beenincorporated into walls and platform fill, all fell in a narrow range of 1565to 16XX A.D., give or take a few years on either end. Moreover, dates on thesamples that best reflect the time they were harvested from the sea--those fromthe coral branch tips--ranged from 1608 to 16xx A.D., an interval of just 30years. These findings thus point to intensive temple-building during that time.Because temples served as centers for control of production and the collectionof surplus goods, the team contends, it seems likely that the construction boomaccompanied a profound shift in sociopolitical structure. (第二段有细节题，看仔细)
　　Kirch and Sharp observe that the conquests described by local oraltraditions coincide with these new dates, and would have more than doubled thesize of the Maui polity to upwards of 2,360 square kilometers--the magnitude ofexpansion expected with the formation of an archaic state. "The templesprovide tangible archaeological evidence of the speed with which a fundamentalsociopolitical transition occurred in proto-historic Hawaii," the authorsconclude. Indeed, they note, it may have happened in the span of a singlegeneration of Hawaiians. (证明夏威夷社会政治的发展比预想快，在一代就完成)