An intact Etruscan tomb containing seven funerary urns was unearthed in the central Italian city of Perugia. The urns had been placed on benches running along two sides of the tomb.

Until last month, divers were restricted to just 620 miles of Greek coastline. Now, new legislation reportedly permits tourists to explore Greek waters freely. “What is really bad is that this legislation not only contradicts constitutional laws that go back to the foundation of the Greek state on how our archaeology should be protected, but it also allows people to dive at great depths with the latest technology,” said Katerina Delaporta, head of the department of marine antiquity at the ministry of culture.  

Sixty artifacts confiscated from Italian smuggler Ugo Bagnato in South Florida will be returned to Colombia. “He had absolute callous disregard for what they were. He was only interested in money,” commented Carol Damian of Florida International University.  

Road construction in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula has revealed a nineteenth-century Dena’ina house pit, cache pits for storing fish, and fire pits. “We found a spear point made of antler, and a harpoon tip also made of antler which was possibly used for hunting seal. We found bits of iron, some shards of Russian ceramics, and some window glass and bottle glass from rum or other spirits. It looked like they had fashioned a scraper from the glass,” said state archaeologist Dan Thompson.  

Drum roll please…The crystal skulls housed at the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution are “of relatively modern manufacture,” according to a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.   

Anthropologist Meredith F. Small celebrates summertime barbecues as the perfect time to remember the human dietary shift to cooked meat at least 700,000 years ago.  

Visit the UNESCO World Heritage Center website to learn which sites have been added to the World Heritage List. Today’s new inductees include Baha’i holy places in Israel, Chief Roi Mata’s Domain in Vanuatu, and the historic city center of Berat in Albania.  

The World Heritage Committee has also criticized the restoration of Skellig Michael, a sixth-century monastic outpost on an island off Ireland’s Kerry coast. An altar has been destroyed, and sections of the South Peak oratory were reconstructed, rather than conserved.  

English Heritage has created a list of registered historic battlefields “at risk” of development, farming, or unregulated metal detecting.   England’s underwater heritage is also disintegrating. The wreck of the first British-made submarine, the AI, has been harmed by divers and shellfish fishing.  

Four burials that could predate the Roman invasion in 43 A.D. have been found in central England. “We’ll try for a radio-carbon date off them to get a more clear idea if they are late Iron Age or early Roman,” said James Harvey of the University of Leicester.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, July 9, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.