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Wendorf Wins Medal
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Fred Wendorf of Southern Methodist University has won the Lucy Wharton Drexel Medal for Archaeological Achievement for his work on early agriculture and environmental change. One of the first recipients of the medal, awarded by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, was Flinders Petrie (1903, for his work in Egypt); recent honorees include Homer Thompson (1978, Greece), Gordon Willey (1981, Maya), and Machteld Mellink (1994, Anatolia).
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Roman Statue Discovered
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A Roman statue of an unidentified woman was found during excavation of a Byzantine gate at Classe in northern Italy. Carved in marble in the first or second century A.D., the statue recalls the style of the fifth-century B.C. Athenian sculptor Praxiteles and may be a copy of a Greek original.
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Khmer Sculptures Returned
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Thailand has returned to Cambodia 13 sculptures stolen from the Khmer site of Angkor Wat and found six years ago in a Bangkok gallery. This is the first time that Thailand, long a target of UNESCO for turning a blind eye to the illegal trade in Southeast Asian antiquities, has returned stolen art works.
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Sardis Head Find
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A marble head more than four feet tall has been unearthed in the third-century B.C. Temple of Artemis at Sardis, Turkey. Preliminary assessment suggests the portrait depicts the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-180) or his son, Commodus (180-192).
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The Whisky Trade
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Excavations in the reconstructed early nineteenth-century town of New Salem, Illinois, have revealed a still house where grain alcohol was produced, and glass and shell beads, suggesting that European and Native Americans traded beads for whisky here. Abraham Lincoln, who lived in New Salem from 1831 to 1837, once talked about working in a small distillery there.
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