Chinese archaeologists claim to have found one of the 84,000 miniature pagodas commissioned in the second century B.C. by the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great. The pagodas were said to hold relics of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. 

The case of the golden burial mask of Ka Nefer Nefer heats up as Egypt pursues its return from the St. Louis Art Museum. “This is the No. 1 case,” Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the press. The mask was unearthed at Saqqara in 1952 by archaeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim, and there is no record that it left Egypt legally. The museum purchased the mask in 1998 from an art gallery in Switzerland.  

More information on the 1,800-year-old Thracian chariot unearthed in a burial mound in Bulgaria is now available. The four-wheeled, bronze-sheathed vehicle was found near wooden and leather objects that may be harnesses, and the remains of horses. This is the second intact chariot to be found in Bulgaria this year.   

A new 575-acre park will preserve Civil War battlefields in Northern Virginia. “The historic significance of this site is huge in every way,” said Elizabeth Paradis Stern, assistant director of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation.  

Aerial photographs of Britain suggest that the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in 122 A.D. spurred the local economy, employing farmers, traders, craftsmen, laborers, and prostitutes to support the Roman army. “Some of the local population will have seen the opportunity presented by the occupying forces and gone for it,” said David MacLeod of English Heritage.  

The Iron Age fortress of Gaer Fawr in heavily wooded central Wales has been recreated digitally. “Our new survey has shown what a very impressive and advanced building it was,” said Royal Commission archaeologist Toby Driver.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, November 24, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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