A Union gunship, the USS Westfield, has been recovered as part of the preparations to deepen a shipping channel near Pelican Island, Texas. The ship exploded on New Year’s Day, 1863, while its crew prepared to scuttle it, killing 14. What remains will be conserved at Texas A&M University.  

The Archaeological Institute of America, ARCHAEOLOGY’s parent organization, supports expanding current import restrictions on cultural property to include ancient coins, as a way to curb the looting of archaeological sites. The State Department will review the policy next fall.  

Four days’ worth of bulldozing has destroyed what may have been an American Indian burial ground on farmland near Trumansburg, New York. The State Historic Preservation Office was able to halt construction because the project had received state funding. “There was confusion. The site should have been investigated before bulldozing began,” said Kurt Jordan of Cornell University.  

Excavation continues on the Philadelphia waterfront at the site of a future casino. Archaeologists have unearthed everything ranging from a 3,500-year-old fire pit and burned rocks and small tools, to the contents of eighteenth-century privies.  

Did the Greeks build their temples to face the rising sun? The debate rages on with a new study by Alun Salt of the University of Leicester. “There are quite a few temples in Greece which don’t face sunrise, so a few archaeologists have published that there’s nothing significant about the number that do face East. The problem is that no one has ever said what a significant number would be,” he explained.  

A photograph of two silver cups that were discovered in a Thracian tomb in southern Bulgaria last year is shown at the Sofia News Agency.     

Statistical analysis shows that Homo floresiensis is a human species, and not a diseased dwarf, according to researchers from Stony Brook Medical Center. “Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis,” said Karen Baab.  

Forty archaeological sites were damaged in American Samoa following a tsunami on in September. 

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, November 19, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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