A hoard of 4,500-year-old copper weapons was recovered from a beach in northern Greece. 

Excavations continue at the first-century A.D. Villa delle Vignacce. The villa was home to Quintus Servilius Pudens, a friend of Emperor Hadrian. “It’s very unusual to find such well-preserved remains in Rome because most of the sites have usually been plundered already and the artifacts stolen,” said archaeologist Dora Cirone.  

The 2,000-year-old skeleton of a woman was unearthed in Incheon, South Korea. She had been buried with fragments of an infant’s skull and jawbone.  

Three 800-year-old graves may mark the location of the church of Bix Gibwyn, in Oxfordshire, England. The church was abandoned in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and lost to local memory.  

In Boyds Corner, Delaware, archaeologists are excavating an early nineteenth-century store that had been owned by Irish immigrant John Boyd. “We know there was a store here in the 1840s. What we don’t know is how much earlier the store had been established,” explained archaeologist Ian Burrow.  

Marine archaeologist Sean Kingsley thinks that six submerged Neolithic villages near Israel’s Carmel Mountains may have inspired the biblical flood of Noah. But Ehud Galili, who has excavated the site for the past 25 years, says that sea levels rose slowly, and that the villages were not destroyed by a catastrophic event.  

Peru has sued Yale University for the return of 40,000 Machu Picchu artifacts removed by Hiram Bingham.  

I don’t know how I missed this one last month: The Friends of the Peruvian Hairless Dog Association has offered to send the Obama family a puppy named Ears to live in the White House. The hairless, and sometimes toothless, dogs were favored by Inca kings. “If we send it to the United States, its official name will be Machu Picchu,” said Claudia Galvez, director of the organization.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, December 11, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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