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“Hybrid electric cars such as the Toyota Prius rely on petrol engines, with their batteries being charged by the waste energy from braking. These cars provide better fuel economy for urban driving than a conventional car,” explained Professor Islam.

The exhibition also coincides with the launch of the new Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment (I-SEE) at the University of Bath. This will bring together experts from diverse fields of science HP  nx4800 Battery, engineering, social policy and economics to tackle the problems posed by global warming.

Professor Saiful Islam, of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath, is researching new materials to use in rechargeable lithium batteries, similar to those that have helped to power the worldwide ‘portable revolution’ in mobile phones HP Compaq 2400 Battery, laptops and MP3 players. For hybrid cars, new materials are crucial to make the batteries lighter, safer and more efficient in storing energy.

Researchers at the University of Bath are helping to develop new rechargeable batteries that could improve hybrid electric cars in the future. Transport is a major energy user and is estimated to be responsible for around 25% of the UK’s total carbon emissions.

As concern grows about climate change, a range of ‘green technologies’ are being developed to help reduce carbon emissions.

Hybrid petrol/electric cars that use conventional metal-hydride batteries are already available but they are heavy and the cars have limited HP nx7200 Battery power.

Professor Islam’s research, which recently won the Fuel Cell Science & Technology Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, will be presented at the Sustainable Energy and the Environment research showcase on September 17 at the University of Bath, alongside other cutting-edge research from across the region.

“Developing new materials holds the key to lighter and more efficient rechargeable batteries for hybrid electric cars, reducing our use of fossil fuels and cutting carbon emissions.”

The showcase will be opened by David Willetts MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, and will be attended by key industrialists HP Compaq nc2400 Battery, research councils, local and national government officials and other key stakeholders from across the South West.

Professor Islam added: “I-SEE reflects the growing focus on ‘green technology’ at the University, which is a major centre for sustainable energy and chemical research.”

The showcase event on 17 September will also feature exhibitions from other researchers from the University on subjects such as affordable solar cells and hydrogen fuel production.

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“Currently, the best pumps and motors may have a top efficiency of 92 percent, but this efficiency level is only in a certain range of operation,” Ivantysynova said. “These hydraulic pumps don’t always run at this maximum level. Sometimes you only need them to provide a small amount of pressure or flow, for example, to simply hold a tool in place. Then you aren’t running the pump under its highest loads, and the efficiency goes way down.”

An excavator has been equipped with the new valveless technology in the Purdue center.

These microstructured surfaces are located in narrow gaps at several locations inside a pump that are filled with hydraulic fluid Sony VGP-BPS2C Battery. The fluid-filled gaps, which both seal the high-pressure chamber and also work as a bearing that allows parts to move freely, are a major source of power losses.

Ivantysynova made the microstructured surface discovery while studying the effects of improperly machined surfaces.

“We learned that it actually improved performance to have surfaces that were not completely smooth, which was unexpected,” she said.

Purdue has filed a patent for the innovation, called an “advanced gap surface design.”

The innovations might be applied to a new “hydraulic hybrid” concept for cars that would use a hydraulic motor to save energy in hybrid cars.

In conventional electric hybrids, energy is stored by charging a HP Pavilion dv2000 Battery  while the car is braking.

“With batteries, however, only a portion of the braking energy can be stored because it takes much longer to charge the battery than it does to charge the accumulator with high-pressure hydraulic fluid,” she said.

Engineers in the center are building a test rig of the hydraulic hybrid design, and Purdue has filed a patent on the concept.

The new designs incorporate two innovations: They eliminate valves now needed to direct the flow of hydraulic fluid in heavy equipment, and they also might incorporate textured “microstructured” surfaces inside pumps to improve performance.

Research has shown the “valveless” design alone could reduce fuel consumption by 40 percent. Further savings could be realized by combining the valveless design with the advanced microstructured surface concept, said Monika Ivantysynova HP Pavilion dv8000 Battery, Maha Fluid Power Systems Professor in Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering.

Hydraulic systems use a central “variable displacement pump” that pressurizes fluid, and valves direct the flow of fluid to “actuators,” which move tools such as shovels and buckets in excavation equipment. In the new valveless design, each actuator has its own pump, eliminating the need for valves.

“We are working on those gaps by using computer simulations to understand all the physical effects and to reduce efficiency losses due to friction caused by the viscosity of hydraulic fluid,” she said. “We know our simulations are very close to the real physics HP Pavilion DV9000 Battery, and we are currently working to manufacture the surfaces and will do measurements.”

Findings were detailed in several technical papers presented by her research group earlier this summer at the Fifth Fluid Power Net International Ph.D. Symposium in Krakow, Poland.

Findings have shown the microstructured surfaces reduce losses due to friction by up to 57 percent when the pump is operating at low levels and about 10 percent when operating under heavy loads PB992A. One of the research papers about the microstructured surfaces was cited as a “best paper” during the conference and was written by graduate student Jonathan Baker and Ivantysynova.

The hydraulic hybrids would store energy while a car is braking by compressing hydraulic fluid in a tanklike “accumulator.” Then the high-pressure fluid in the accumulator would be used to drive a hydraulic motor, providing torque to the wheels and saving fuel.

The Maha Fluid Power Research Center is part of the Engineering Research Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power 398876-001, funded by the National Science Foundation, participating companies and universities.

The microstructured surfaces have been shown to dramatically reduce power losses due to friction caused by hydraulic fluid, said Ivantysynova, director of Purdue’s Maha Fluid Power Research Center.

Engineers in the center are working on ways to design pumps and motors that are more efficient in their entire range of operation.

Researchers at Purdue University have shown how to reduce fuel consumption and dramatically improve the efficiency of hydraulic pumps and motors in heavy construction equipment.

Conventional wisdom states that the surfaces should be polished smooth, but Ivantysynova discovered that having a surface containing features one micron high improves efficiency 381374-001. The gaps are located between the pump’s piston and cylinder walls and between the cylinder block and a part called the valve plate, which connects to the cylinder along with the pump ports.

While hydraulic pumps work by compressing a fluid, which is then used to drive tools, hydraulic motors operate in the reverse manner: high-pressure fluid is pushed into a chamber, which is used to drive a shaft and provide torque.

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The team has received help from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service, and has been advised by Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and founder of A123 Systems, a supplier of high-power lithium-ion Toshbai Satellite A300 Battery.

The project came about because “we wanted to figure out where energy is being wasted in a vehicle,” senior Zack Anderson explains. Some hybrid cars already do a good job of recovering the energy from braking, so the team looked elsewhere, and quickly homed in on the suspension.

They filed for a patent last year and formed a company, called Levant Power Corp., to develop and commercialize the product. They are currently doing a series of tests with their converted Humvee to optimize the system’s efficiency Toshiba Satellite A100 Battery . They hope their technology will help give an edge to the military vehicle company in securing the expected $40 billion contract for the new army vehicle called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV.

A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. The students hope to initially find customers among companies that operate large fleets of heavy vehicles. They have already drawn interest from the U.S. military and several truck manufacturers.

Not only would improved fuel efficiency be a big plus for the army by requiring less stockpiling and transportation of fuel into the war zone, but the Toshiba Satellite A200 Battery better ride produced by the actively controlled shock absorbers make for safer handling, the students say. “If it’s a smoother ride, you can go over the terrain faster,” says Anderson.

Senior Shakeel Avadhany and his teammates say they can produce up to a 10 percent improvement in overall vehicle fuel efficiency by using the regenerative shock absorbers. The company that produces Humvees for the army, and is currently working on development of the next-generation version of the all-purpose vehicle, is interested enough to have loaned them a vehicle for testing purposes.

The group, which also includes senior Zachary Jackowski and alumni Paul Abel ‘08, Ryan Bavetta ‘07 and Vladimir Tarasov ‘08, plans to have a final, fine-tuned version of the device ready this summer. Then they will start talking to potential big customers Toshiba Satellite M100 Battery. For example, they have calculated that a company such as Wal-Mart could save $13 million a year in fuel costs by converting its fleet of trucks.

In their testing so far, the students found that in a 6-shock heavy truck, each shock absorber could generate up to an average of 1 kW on a standard road — enough power to completely displace the large alternator load in heavy trucks and military vehicles, and in some cases even run accessory devices such as hybrid trailer refrigeration units.

They began by renting a variety of different car models, outfitting the suspension with sensors to determine the energy potential, and driving around with a laptop Toshiba Satellite L100 Battery computer recording the sensor data. Their tests showed “a significant amount of energy” was being wasted in conventional suspension systems, Anderson says, “especially for heavy vehicles.”

“They see it as something that’s going to be a differentiator” in the quest for that lucrative contract, says Avadhany. He adds, “it is a completely new paradigm of damping.”

“This is a disruptive technology,” Anderson says. “It’s a game-changer.”

“Simply put — we want this technology on every heavy-truck, military vehicle and consumer hybrid on the road,” Avadhany says.

Once they realized the possibilities, the students set about building a prototype system to harness the wasted power. Their prototype shock absorbers use a hydraulic system that forces fluid through a turbine attached to a generator. The system is controlled by an active electronic Toshiba Satellite M200 Battery system that optimizes the damping, providing a smoother ride than conventional shocks while generating electricity to recharge the batteries or operate electrical equipment.

The new shocks also have a fail-safe feature: If the electronics fail for any reason, the system simply acts like a regular shock absorber.

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The site is just outside of the ancient Greek city-state of Apollonia, and dates back to the late 6th century B.C. That would put its use in the Archaic and Classical periods, a time from which little has been recovered from inside the acropolis of Apollonia.

In 2002, Albanian archeologists, working collaboratively with Davis and other UC colleagues, conducted a surface survey. Measuring off a grid in the low-lying land between the ancient walls of Apollonia and the Adriatic Sea, team members walked Toshiba PA3191U-4BAS Battery, painstakingly searching for artifacts hidden in the dirt and vegetation.

Now, the UC-Albanian team needed to dig. Evidence was mounting that a large temple, not just a sanctuary, had occupied the site. The archeologists wanted to “trace lines of (the) massive ashlar blocks” that had been disturbed during the building of the family’s house, Davis said.

“It now seems likely that the life of the sanctuary began not long after the founding of the Apollonia colony,” Davis says. “What we discover here will contribute much to our understanding of religious life in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., a period that is hardly known from previous excavations inside the borders of Apollonia itself.”

The UC researchers, along with colleagues from the International Centre for Albanian Archaeology and the Institute of Archaeology Toshiba PA3478U-1BRS Battery,  Tirana, will be presenting on their new work on Friday, Jan. 6, 2006, in Montreal at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.

The history of excavations on the site, located on a farm known by the family name of Bonjaket, dates back more than 40 years ago, when a farmer’s tractor uncovered terracotta figurines outside the walls of Apollonia. The site appeared to include remains of a sanctuary. An Albanian-Russian archeological team explored it, finding traces of brick walls and dating hundreds of the figurines to the 4th-2nd century B.C. Their work went unnoticed, however: the rupture in Soviet-Albanian relations in 1960 kept the team from publishing much about their work

Then came the kicker: a family who owns a section of the land told Albanian team leader Lorenc Bejko that they had uncovered a foundation made of large Toshiba PA3400U-1BRS Battery, regular blocks as they were building a new house back in 1997.

“This is a case where a hunch about the potential of a site is paying off in the discovery of a temple that has extraordinary and singular importance to Albanian archaeology and to the history of Greek colonization in the Adriatic Sea region,” says Jack L. Davis, the Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati and co-director of the international research team working at the site Toshiba PA3480U-1BRS Battery. “We are gaining the tools for an understanding of religious life in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., a part of the early history of Apollonia of which little is known.”

“It seemed to us that the sanctuary was already being used in the Archaic period,” some 100-350 years earlier than the 1960 team had believed, he said.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati’s Classics faculty are preparing to make their first public presentation of details surrounding their find of one of the earliest Greek temples in the Adriatic region north of Greece.

After careful negotiations with the Bonjaket family TOSHIBA PA3176U-1BRS Battery, major work began in 2004 to unearth the true scope of the apparent temple. After two seasons spent at the site, momentum continues to build that many details about the religious history of the temple and the Apollonia colony are about to be determined.

The temple they have discovered, located in coastal Albania, is only the fifth known stone temple in Albania. It stands out both because of its age and its size.

They found more figurines, the foot of a statue, a late Greek inscription, a small stone altar – and pottery from a much earlier date.

Presenting with Davis will be UC colleagues Sharon R. Stocker, Kathleen Lynch and Evi Gorogianni, along with Albanian researchers Iris Pojani and Vangjel Dimo Toshiba PA3479U-1BRS Battery.

The combination of figurines, “which often point to ancient places of worship,” and the older pottery led the team to believe the site was older than they first thought, Davis said.

So far, in addition to remains of sacrificial meals and broken fineware pottery, substantial numbers of Classical and Hellenistic figurines have been found Toshiba PA3285U-2BRS Battery, although the principal deity of the sanctuary remains undetermined at this point.

The researchers suspected the temple was large, but only recently determined its approximate proportions: 14 meters by 40 meters.

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The systematic, regional survey has been able to identify other Longshan sites in the area and objectively determine that Liangchengzhen was indeed a large center as early investigators hypothesized. It also revealed another large center in the south, Yaowangcheng, that may have been a rival.

“When we began the project in China, systematic regional surveys had already proven to be an empirical key for understanding and evaluating the rise of and changes in early civilizations in highland Mexico, the Andean region, and the Near East,” Feinman said. “Since then, two prominent scholars have called the advent of settlement pattern studies across the world the most important breakthrough in archaeology during the second half of the 20th century.”

“Most people understand traditional archaeological excavation from TV shows, but the regional survey method is not well known,” said Dr. Anne Underhill, Field Museum China specialist and American project director and lead author of research about the Shandong survey to be published in the March 2008 Journal of Anthropological Archaeology Acer Aspire 3000 Battery. “The team has walked over every kind of terrain possible, including farms and orchards, towns and forested hills.”
Imagine future archaeologists trying to understand Illinois, California or New York based on a few excavations in each of those states. They might excavate small areas in city centers, since those sites would probably be the first ruins they would come across Acer Aspire 3610 Battery. Meanwhile, the archaeologists they might fail to notice or study farms, suburbs, shopping malls, canals and airports.

“Scientific archaeology was introduced into China during the 1920s, and during the 1980s, investigations about the rise of civilization increased,” said Dr. Hui Fang, Professor of Archaeology at the Center for East Asian Archaeology Studies at Shandong University and co-author of the research. “Then in the 1990s, abundant results from archaeological fieldwork made it possible to adopt new approaches such as the theory and method of settlement pattern studies to interpret the process of the beginning of civilization in areas such as Shandong province.”

Over the years and centuries, human activity (such as plowing and construction) and natural processes (such as erosion) bring many ancient artifacts to the surface of the ground. Survey crews look for such evidence by walking in the late fall or early winter when crops have been harvested, increasing the visibility of objects. Crew members, who are spaced out evenly Acer Aspire 5050 Battery, learn to identify the characteristics (color, paste, style, etc.) of pottery sherds that indicate particular time periods.

The survey also suggests that the agricultural colonization of the region occurred primarily during the later half of the Neolithic period. This was rapidly followed by the development of a four-tiered settlement hierarchy with two primary centers during the Early Longshan. The archaeologists conclude that the region was not merely a marginal backwater throughout its history in comparison to areas in the central Yellow River valley where known early states developed, as some scholars believe.

“Our collaborative project has been very successful,” Fang said. “In comparison with 13 years ago, we now know much more about the process of the rise of complex society in the southeastern Shandong area.”

The Shandong University-Field Museum project in southeastern Shandong Province (including both survey and excavation, and involving four Shandong University professors) is one of the longest running collaborations of any kind between Chinese and American scientists. In the early 1990s, the Chinese government decided to allow foreigners to collaborate in fieldwork with Chinese professionals for the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 Acer Aspire 5580 Battery. The team decided to focus on investigating key changes in settlement and regional organization during the late prehistoric, Longshan period, c. 2600-1900 B.C.

Although still relatively unknown to the general public, an archaeological method that is being practiced at several locations around the world helps scientists overcome such bias toward large, readily noticeable sites. The method is called a regional settlement pattern survey. It involves walking systematically over a large landscape to find traces of archaeological sites on the surface of the ground. This field procedure can yield a holistic, integrated view of how settlement has shifted in a region over the course of history.

Southeastern Shandong Province poorly understood

China has an extraordinarily rich record of archaeological remains, from the Paleolithic period to the historic dynasties. Given the vast number of sites throughout Shandong Province Acer Aspire 9100 Battery, southeastern Shandong had not been a focus of research for quite some time prior to this research project.

Expertise with the survey method has been provided by two Field Museum scientists and co-authors of the research, Dr. Gary Feinman, Curator of Mesoamerican Anthropology, and Linda Nicholas, Adjunct Curator of Anthropology. They surveyed extensively for archaeological sites in Oaxaca, Mexico, before joining the Shandong survey team.

Previous excavations in 1936 and test excavations during the early 1980s uncovered elegant, black pottery and jade items over a large area, suggesting that the Longshan period site of Liangchengzhen was some kind of regional center during the Longshan (c. 2600-1900 BC).

The broad-based results of the regional settlement pattern survey clearly illustrate that there were diverse pathways to social complexity in northern China.

For the past 13 years, archaeologists from The Field Museum and Shandong University have used this method to develop a multifarious overview of an important but understudied region along the northeastern coast of The People’s Republic of China. By the time the project is completed, the archaeologists expect to have walked systematically over 1,500 square kilometers around the coastal city of Rizhao in Shandong Province.

“The large-scale organization of culture can only be understood by revealing the overall layout of settlements in a region and comparing their sizes,” Underhill said. “Then one can begin to analyze other aspects of regional organization such as population density, distances between sites, and distances to water sources, all of which can reveal information about economics, trade, interactions, and other factors.”

“Regional survey data are one key to understanding and comparing the rise of early Chinese civilization, both from one part of China to another as well as with other global regions,” Feinman said.

The method is very effective Acer Aspire 9800 Battery, Nicholas said. “We discover and map many ancient sites on a daily basis. Because so few of these sites will ever be excavated, the survey maps become the only permanent record of most ancient settlements in a region.”

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The ground plan of the earliest of these temples is unlike anything previously discovered in Egypt, and no other sites are known where a similar series of temples was built one on top of the other and which date back so far. The archaeologists do not yet know which gods were worshipped in the temples. In the third-earliest, they discovered about a thousand “disposable ritual objects”, including statuettes of baboons and pottery. According to the laws of the ancient Egyptians, objects which had been used in religious worship must not be profaned and they therefore had to be preserved within the walls of the temple Acer BTP-AMJ1 Battery. The objects are currently being studied to see what they can tell us about temple rituals at this early date. No inscriptions were found to provide any clues.

The archaeologists are collaborating under the auspices of the Netherlands Foundation for Archaeological Research in Egypt, linked to Amsterdam University (UvA). They chose the area to be excavated ten years ago on the basis of the remains of walls and fragments of pottery visible on the surface. Increasing population pressure in the Nile Delta is making archaeological investigations more difficult Acer Aspire 5050 Battery. Only five percent of Egypt is habitable, so that archaeological research has to compete with land cultivation, infrastructure and urban expansion.

During excavations at Tel Ibrahim Awad in the eastern Nile Delta, Dutch archaeologists discovered a large Middle Kingdom temple. Beneath this building, which dates from around 2000 BC, there were traces of five earlier temples, the earliest dating back to around 3100 BC. This is at least as old as the oldest temple previously discovered, namely at Hierakonpolis. Heavy-duty groundwater pumps had to be brought in to make it possible to reach the earliest remainsAcer Aspire 9800 Battery. Financial support for the excavations was provided by the NWO¹s Council for the Humanities.

Alongside the temple, a burial ground was discovered containing 50 small-scale tombs from various periods. Excavation of a large First Dynasty tomb (about 3000 BC) uncovered rich finds of pottery and of stone and bronze vessels Acer Aspire 7000 Battery.

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“The results of our work show that the existing models for the origins of ancient cities may in fact be flawed,” says Ur. “Urbanism does not appear to have originated with a single, powerful ruler or political entity Aspire One Battery. Instead, it was the organic outgrowth of many groups coming together.”

According to the survey of distribution of artifacts, around 4200 BCE the “central mound” was suddenly surrounded by these clusters, suggesting immigration to the city. These clusters were separated from one another, indicating social distance among the groups, possibly because the social mechanisms that allow strangers to live together in an urban environment had not yet evolved Acer BATBL50L6 Battery. The patterns of settlement and distance from the “central mound” also signified autonomy from the political center of the city.

The research was funded by the British Academy, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the Society of Antiquaries, the Charlotte Bonham-Carter Charitable Trust Acer BATBL50L8H Battery, the University of Michigan and Harvard University.

Ancient cities arose not by decree from a centralized political power, as was previously widely believed, but as the outgrowth of decisions made by smaller groups or individuals, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard University Acer BATCL50L Battery, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh.

Excavation of Tell Brak has been conducted by researchers from the University of Cambridge since 1976. While archaeologists had been aware of the large scale of Tell Brak, they had previously concentrated on excavating and observing the more densely populated “central mound.” This field survey has demonstrated that the city was much larger geographically than realized Acer BATCL50L4 Battery, and had also been populated by settlement clusters surrounding the “central mound.”

Published in Science August 31, the research was led by Jason Ur, assistant professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, with Philip Karsgaard of the University of Edinburgh Acer BTP-42C1 Battery, and Joan Oates of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research of the University of Cambridge.

“Ours is a largely urban society, and the nascent urbanization of Tell Brak tells us about the formation of the very first cities in the world,” says Ur.

To understand patterns of population growth in the earliest urban areas, archaeologists surveyed the spatial distribution of artifacts at Tell Brak, located in northern Mesopotamia, in what is today northern Iraq and northeastern Syria. The researchers’ work was based on observation of surface objects at the site, along with satellite imagery and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) spatial analysis. Surface artifacts included bits of broken pottery and other ancient garbage Acer BTP-43D1 Battery, which indicated to the archaeologists where the inhabitants of the city lived. In this survey, the patterns of distribution of these objects were examined over an 800 year period.

The theory of a singular leader as the catalyst for urbanization has been widely supported in part because it is reinforced by the story of Gilgamesh, who “built” the city of Uruk. Uruk, located in what is today southern Iraq, had been considered the world’s oldest city. The field survey Acer BTP-63D1 Battery, along with recent related excavation by the University of Cambridge has shown that the urban development of Tell Brak was concurrent, or may have been earlier, than the development of Uruk.

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The international team plans to do an archaeological survey of the coastal region where an ancient Greek colony once flourished. Located in western Albania along the Adriatic Sea, the site is about 40 minutes northwest of Tirana by car.

The information gathered by the archaeologists, who will be joined in Albania by Adam Gutteridge of Cambridge University, England, will be reported to Albanian local authorities and to a Cambridge team that plans to open an archaeological project at Durres this summer Dell Vostro 1000 Battery. Henry Hurst will head the Cambridge project.

According to Davis, looting of archaeological sites throughout Albania makes this mission an urgent one. Since the communist fall, few resources have been available for Albanians to do archaeological work.

Jack L. Davis, UC’s Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology, and classics doctoral student Sharon Stocker are leading a UC team that will be heading to Durres, Albania, March 10-April 4. Their urgent mission will be funded by the Packard Center in Tirana Dell Latitude E6500 Battery. The UC archaeologists will collaborate with Albanian peers, led by Iris Pojani and Afrim Hoti of the Institute of Archaeology, also in Tirana.

Established in 627 B.C. by Corinthian colonists living on the island of Korfu, Epidamnos held a strategic position in the Greek and Roman world. It was located just across the Adriatic Sea from present-day Italy. The city also became one of the points of disagreement between Sparta and Athens during the Peloponnesian War. In the Roman era, it bore the name of Dyrrachium and was the western starting point of the Via Egnatia, a road that ran all the way to Istanbul Dell Inspiron 6000 Battery. The city also holds significance in that Pompey had a base there during his civil war with Julius Caesar.

The chaos that was once Albania could become tomorrow’s hotspot for development. Before that commercialization begins, University of Cincinnati archaeologists want to identify ancient sites that should be studied or preserved.

The pressing mission of surveying the region will be conducted using field surface survey, an archaeological technique that is cheaper than excavation. Davis has been one of the pioneers of this approach in the Mediterranean region. Field surface survey involves teams of archaeologists walking across the terrain in rows Dell Latitude D620 Battery, observing and taking notes on ancient features, artifacts, vegetation and other surface characteristics. One of the advantages of this strategy is that observations can be made regarding a variety of historical periods before a major dig gets under way.

Davis also co-directs a team that has been surveying the Mallakastra region of central Albania - the site of the Greek colony of Apollonia - since 1998. In addition to Davis, Stocker and Wolpert, the UC team in Durres will include: John Wallrodt, computer specialist Dell Vostro 1500 Battery; Phoebe Acheson, field surface survey team leader and classics doctoral student; Rodney Fitzsimons, classics doctoral student; and Siriol Davies, a post-doctoral fellow from Great Britain.

Although the turmoil and anarchy of 1997 has subsided, the U.S. State Department still views travel to Albania, Europe’s poorest and least developed nation, as potentially dangerous. During the earlier unrest, many weapons were looted from government arms depots Dell Vostro 1400 Battery. Armed crime, especially at night, runs high.

According to Aaron Wolpert, UC doctoral student in classics and the field director for this month’s project, the exact location of the original Greek colony, Epidamnos, remains unknown. “It would be tremendous if we could pinpoint it,” adds Stocker.

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