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About 3,000 years ago, a potter near Jerusalem made a big jar. It was meant to hold olive oil or wine or something else valuable enough to send to the king as a tax payment. The jar's handles were stamped with a royal seal, and the pot went into the kiln.
[...] All those years ago, as potters continued to throw clay, the molten iron that was rotating deep below them tugged at tiny bits of magnetic minerals embedded in the potters' clay. As the jars were heated in the kiln and then subsequently cooled, those minerals swiveled and froze into place like tiny compasses, responding to the direction and strength of the Earth's magnetic field at that very moment.
"It's kind of like a tape recorder," [Erez] Ben-Yosef says.
[...] When Ben-Yosef and his colleagues studied 67 jar handles spanning from the late 8th century B.C. to the late 2nd century B.C., they found that the Earth's magnetic activity has been a lot choppier than people expected.
Ben-Yosef et al. Six centuries of geomagnetic intensity variations recorded by royal Judean stamped jar handles [PNAS (2017) - Early Edition] DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1615797114
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @08:04AM
you could at least read the famous summary, where the title of the famous article is contained.
it says "intensity", not orientation.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday February 24 2017, @08:16AM
Thank you, AC! But the Finish Summary does still contain some ambiguity:
As the jars were heated in the kiln and then subsequently cooled, those minerals swiveled and froze into place like tiny compasses, responding to the direction and strength
So they were only interested in strength, since the tiny compasses lost orientation? OK, Now I might have to actually go read the linked article, or at least throw some very large pots, for science.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 24 2017, @05:16PM
The orientation might be able to tell you the angle of the field from vertical.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Friday February 24 2017, @10:57PM
Assuming the jugs were fired vertically? Just how large of a sample size are we working with?
(Score: 3, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:06AM
Assuming the jugs were fired vertically?
Seems reasonable to me. They have flat bases, so how else would you place them in a kiln?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday February 27 2017, @07:02AM
But a lot of jugs, including Amphorae, were pointed on the end. So is this a safe assumption? Or are we just doing "Holey Land" archeology?