“Shipwreck enthusiasts” Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville have found the HMS Ontario, a British Revolutionary War ship, intact on the bottom of Lake Ontario. They have no plans to raise the ship or retrieve artifacts from it, since it is considered a war grave and the property of the British Admiralty.

A fragment of a shell cup with engraved lines was unearthed at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois. Excavators are looking for the path of a defensive log stockade that surrounded the Central Ceremonial Precinct.  

Charges were dropped against Yves Lebourgeois, who had been accused of attempting to smuggle antiquities out of Yemen. The archaeology department at Sana’a University had determined that the objects in question are fakes.   A photograph of the artifacts seized from Lebourgeois is available in this article on Yemen’s crackdown on smuggling.  

Scientists have analyzed the teeth from more than 30 skeletons from a 7,000-year-old mass grave in southwest Germany. They found that no local women had been buried with the group, leading them to conclude that the women had been captured. “Our analysis points to the local women being regarded as somehow special and were therefore kept alive,” said Alex Bentley of Durham University. Was the capture of the women the motivation for the attack?  

A Mughal-period building was uncovered by the Archaeological Survey of India near the Taj Mahal.  

Archaeologists think they have discovered a warehouse at the Roman fortress of Caerleon in Wales. Excavations this summer should tell them more about storage facilities, provisioning, and the supply of Roman soldiers in Britain.  

Preservationists in Bangladesh are struggling to protect the country’s monuments, but the government isn’t interested. “In fact, nothing has been done so far to protect these sites. Businessmen and the rulers have consistently destroyed our heritage and cultural properties,” said historian Muntasir Mammon.  

Here’s a review of “The Lost Pyramid,” due to air on the History Channel.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, June 16, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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