Monday, September 29
by Jessica E. Saraceni
September 29, 2008
The port of the ancient Phoenician city of Tharros has been discovered off the coast of Sardinia, in the Mistras Lagoon.
A 3,000-year-old knife and other artifacts were found in the Firse Sten tomb in Sweden. The tomb is 5,000 years old, but was reused during the Bronze Age. Â
Archaeologist David Nichols says that as much as 70% of the cultural material has been plundered from Mojave National Preserve’s 1,600 documented sites. “It’s awful. And because the place is so vast we never, ever catch anyone in the act of doing anything,” he said. Â
Tiles that once formed the edge of eaves on a building at Poongnap Toseong, South Korea, were unearthed by the Hanshin University Museum. Poongnap Toseong is an earthen wall from the first capital of Baekje, which was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, from 18 B.C. to 660 A.D.  Â
Here’s a summary of what’s been published so far about the sixteenth-century Portuguese shipwreck discovered off Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. The ship was probably carrying its heavy load of gold, silver, copper, tin, and ivory to India or Asia.  Â
A man in Texas called archaeologists after he found spear points in a load of topsoil from the banks of the Guadalupe River. Â
The Lone Star Flight Museum in Galveston, Texas, was damaged by a storm surge from Hurricane Ike, but the museum’s irreplaceable World War II planes were moved to safety in time. “We were hit hard, but we’ll be back,” said museum president Larry Gregory. Â
The remains of Australian and British World War I soldiers buried in mass graves at Fromelles, France, will be reburied in individual graves at a new military cemetery. No decision has been made at this time as to whether or not to try to identify the remains. Â
Scholars are looking for missing pages of the 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible known as the Crown of Aleppo. The codex had been held in an iron chest in a synagogue in Syria for centuries, until 1947.  Â
Fragments of copper sheeting that may have come from the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror were found by Parks Canada archaeologists. The ships carried the 128-man crew of Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition in 1845.
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