An ancient Roman wood and ivory throne has been unearthed at a dig in Herculaneum, an ancient city near Pompeii. Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was destroyed in 79 AD, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The throne was found during an excavation in the Villa of the Papyri, the private house formerly belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, built on the slope of Mount Vesuvius. The name of the villa derives from the impressive library containing thousands of scrolls of papyrus discovered buried under meters (yards) of volcanic ash after the Vesuvius eruption.”

Other wooden objects have been excavated in nearby Pompeii, but experts have never before found such a significant ceremonial piece. Such thrones have previously only been seen in paintings or sculptures.

Reuters: Rare ancient wooden throne found in Herculaneum

There’s also a very cool page on Pompeii and its violent volcanic end at

Pompeii, Italy - The lost city.

Costa Rica is a relatively small country, a bit smaller than West Virginia. Now imagine putting 250 volcanoes in West Virginia!

The 250th volcano in Costa Rica was just confirmed by scientists. It’s over 7500 ft high, and has a crater about 650 ft in diameter. How did something this large escape detection until now?

It’s been hidden in the virgin forest of one of Costa Rica’s national parks. In 2006, a NASA airplane took infrared photos of the mountain, which looked like there was a hole or crater at the top. Scientists decided to investigate in person, and sure enough, this March they confirmed it is indeed another volcano.

250 of them - wow! I wonder how many more are still undiscovered…

Costa Rica pages: Existence of Costa Rica’s 250th Volcano Confirmed

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We do women’s adventures to Costa Rica every year, and this year the group got quite a treat, with Arenal (the most active volcano in the country) putting on a show for them during a lunar eclipse. It may be quite some time before a spectacle like this is repeated, but it’s always a fascinating country, and a delight to visit.

A bill to reform the 135 year old law governing hardrock mining passed the US House last year, and now the Senate is looking at it. Some say that the law made sense when it was passed in 1872, but times have changed. Gee, ya think?

“When the law was passed, it was lone prospectors with pack mules, and today, it’s a modern mining industry.” Currently, international corporations are allowed to take resources from US public land, without compensating taxpayers.

New Mexico has been one of the states hardest hit by pollution from old mines, and the new legislation would charge royalties to companies, and use some of that to pay for cleanup. It would also help protect the public interest - e.g. to protect the water supply. Right now, if a mine is staked on public land, you can’t say no.

That’s right - you could put your uranium mine anywhere on public land, and the public can’t have a say in it, and the public doesn’t get any $ for it, and the public is left with the cleanup costs. Does the phrase “public land” seem like a misnomer?

Predictably, opponents think that charging royalties will cut into their profits a bit too much. Seems like they’ve had it their way for the last 135 years.

Insight New Mexico: Updating Old Mining Law has NM Implications

We visit northern New Mexico each year on our women’s tour to Santa Fe & Taos. It’s a unique and beautiful area, and I certainly hope that we can all keep it that way. And yes, I agree that times may have changed a tad since 1872 - no blogging back then!

A scandal is hitting that well-known Irish tourist attraction, the Blarney Stone.

We’ve heard since childhood that if you kiss the famous stone, you’ll gain the gift of gab and great oratorical skills. Promoters even cite famous people who (supposedly) benefited from this eloquence-inspiring act, such as Sir Walter Scott and Winston Churchill.

Now a pair of archaeologists say that the real Blarney Stone is not the one everybody’s been kissing. They claim that for health and safety reasons - the owners of Blarney Castle have been guiding tourists to a “safer” stone for many decades. Does that mean Winston Churchill came by his oratorical skills naturally? That tourists brave kissing the same stone as millions of other people, without gaining an iota of verbal skill?

The marketing manager at Blarney Castle is reassuring the public that the archaeologists’ claims are just Blarney, and that the Blarney Stone you can kiss is really the one and only. Time will tell where the real Blarney lies.

And gee, a stone with its own marketing manager??

About: Ireland - The Blarney Stone a Load of Blarney?

We’ll be back to the Emerald Isle in June for our women’s tour of Ireland. I’ll wait for this battle to play out before taking my chances kissing any stone! In the meantime, stick with Toastmasters to improve your speaking skills.

Tombstone, Arizona. Even the name sounds dusty and desolate, with a streak of violence, doesn’t it? You can’t get more “wild west” than this.

Tombstone was a silver mining town that went through its cycles of boom and bust, like so many other mining towns. Back in the late 1800s it was booming — for a while it was bigger than San Francisco.

It was October 1881 when the famous gun battle took place — the Clantons and McLaurys on one side, the Earps and Doc Holliday on the other. The causes were complex: money, power, politics, pride, and a woman too. Here in Tombstone they had a way of settling those differences.

Shootout at the OK Corral: 8 gunslingers in close quarters for about 30 seconds. Results: 3 dead, everybody else wounded except Wyatt Earp. There’s considerable disagreement over who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. The Earps won this round, but the cowboys got revenge later. But that’s another story…

We visited the famous Boothill Graveyard, and found the graves of the OK Corral losers. There was a tourist sitting right on top of them, fiddling with his camera equipment. (I cropped him out here, but how tacky.) There’s a strikingly high percentage of graves here marked “shot”, or “murdered”.

With a wild west heritage like this, is it any wonder that Arizona’s proposed answer to school violence is to have more guns in the classroom?

Arizona’s a fascinating place, and there’s a lot here to discover! Adventurous Wench does tours to Sedona, Arizona a few times a year, and we’re planning more Arizona trips, too — coming soon!

The Santuario de Chimayo is a small church not far from Santa Fe. It’s main claim to fame is its healing dirt. Pilgrims come here from far and wide, hoping to be cured of whatever ails them. Some rub the dirt on their bodies; some even eat it. A collection of crutches and braces at the site attests to its effectiveness.

The story of the Santuario started in 1810, when Bernardo Abeyta found a buried cross shining a bright light from underground. This miraculous cross kept returning to the same location, no matter where they took it. Eventually Bernardo became the first to be cured at this spot. Many more have followed, and the Santuario was built on the site.

Now the pastor of the church is sowing doubt among believers. He has faith in the miracles, but says they come from God, not the dirt.

New York Times: A pastor begs to differ with flock

Personally, I’ve got a baggie of healing dirt from a visit to Chimayo a few years ago. It’s sitting in a drawer in the bathroom, and it seems to be working fine from there. I haven’t been sick or injured in the meantime, except for a sprained ankle when whitewater rafting in northern Canada, thousands of miles away from my dirt. Could that be just coincidence??

We’ll be visiting Chimayo on our Santa Fe trip in September. It’s well worth a visit, and we provide baggies in case you want to sample the healing dirt. Hey, what can it hurt? While you’re there, check out Holy Chiles across the way for some of the best chile products in New Mexico.

This is the kind of story we just don’t find here in the US…

Ireland, County Galway: A 15th century carved bishop’s head was rescued from a heap of rubble, shortly before it would have been carted off and dumped. Somehow the head (over the centuries) made its way from a Dominican Abbey, to a wall behind an old sweet shop, to a heap of rubble left when the wall was demolished during renovations. That’s where an amateur historian found and rescued it.

I can easily imagine his excitement at the discovery, and the sense of joy, pride and satisfaction at saving a “hugely important” artifact. What a thrill! And thank goodness he was there to save it.

If I had a 15th century stone head in my back wall, not only would I know about it, but it would be one of the great historical treasures of Phoenix.

Independent IE: Medieval artefact rescued by amateur historian

Unfortunately, not all historical treasures are so easily saved, even the large well-known ones. For more on the continuing saga of the M3 roadway through the ancient site of Tara, here’s a quote from an interesting site:

Tara has outlasted the invasions and conquests by internal and external geopolitical forces, climate changes of the iron age, religious crusades, plague, pestilence and famine. It is the repository of heritage and history of the Celtic people from eons ago.

But since the turn of the century, the twenty first century, Tara has succumbed to the conquest of the ‘global economy’, modernization and convenience. The government and its business partners are building a sixty km highway across its face and through its heart. If ever a place on this blessed earth earned the name, ‘heartland’, Tara is that sacred place.”

HubPages: Irish Kings of Tara

We’ll have a chance to see many of Ireland’s historical treasures on our women’s tour of Ireland this June. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be peering at every stone wall looking for bishops’ heads!

First it was the Norwegians, then AID, the World Bank, Canadians, Taiwanese, Dutch, Swedes and Germans. They’re all pulling funding from Costa Rica.

Costa Rica is a victim of its own success. Donations from abroad are drying up, as foreign countries decide that Costa Rica doesn’t need the aid money as much as less fortunate countries do. Costa Rica has a reputation as having “graduated” from underdevelopment, and is now seen as a “middle class” country.

Costa Rica blogs: Financial gifts from abroad drying up

We’ll be heading south for another women’s trip to Costa Rica next month. I’m always on the lookout for relevant items of interest, and post in our Costa Rica category.