An American employed by a courier service has been taken into custody in Sri Lanka for trying to smuggle 74 Buddhist artifacts out of the country. The objects were allegedly headed to an art gallery in San Francisco.

“An explosion” of looting in Libya’s Roman cities has occurred since the country opened to the West in 2003, according to Gaetano Palumbo of the World Monuments Fund. The heads of statues are particularly prized.  

Archaeologists working at the Maya trading port of Moral-Reforma in Balancan, Mexico, are excavating a main level of a pyramid covered with soil. They have found a series of altars, masks, small sculptures, stones, spear points, and little limestone heads painted green.   

City officials in Franklin, Tennessee, are still discussing what to do with the remains of a Union soldier that turned up at the future site of a Chick-Fil-A. “Within a quarter-mile radius, I bet there’s more,” commented archaeologist Larry McKee.  

Two Cape Cod boys looking for their ball in a sand pit discovered human bones and alerted the police. “It looked like a piece of coral. It was old,” said Chatham Police Lt. Michael Anderson.  

Who was buried at the royal cemetery of Sutton Hoo?  

How have past generations responded to climate change? A long-term, international study is examining how people adjusted their settlement structures, food procurement strategies, and household architecture. “It has been possible to evaluate the relative advantages and disadvantages of past cultural practices in the face of environmental change and establish lessons that will contribute to contemporary mitigation strategies,” said Jago Cooper of the University of Leicester.  

“Gigapixel” pictures, developed for the NASA rovers on Mars, are a new tool available to archaeologists.  See if you can spot someone working at the Great Temple Excavation at Petra using the “GigaPan” image at National Geographic News.  

The state of Florida and the Historical Museum of Southern Florida are $250,000 short of the amount needed to construct a modest park at the site of the Miami Circle. The cost of the land was $27 million.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, May 28, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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