Archaeologist Mario Bergeron, aged 55, has died of injuries he sustained during an excavation in Montreal. He had been uncovering the remains of Canada’s first permanent parliament building.

A 50,000-year-old human skull fragment may have been used by Neanderthals as a sharpening tool. The bone was found in a cave in southwestern France, among other bone tools. “It could reflect that a human bone was not seen as any different from an animal one…Or it could reflect a particular process in which using this human bone as a tool had a special meaning, even though we don’t know which one,” explained Paleoanthropologist Christine Verna of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  

Casa Concha in Cusco, Peru, will be renovated to accommodate more than 300 artifacts from Machu Picchu to be returned by Yale University.  

Earlier this year, ancient agricultural fields and an entire town were discovered in central China, near a well-preserved site of 2,000-year-old houses that was found in 2003. “If these are preserved in the same way the houses are, it would really turn out to be a staggering development,” said Tristram Kidder of Washington University in St. Louis.  

National Geographic Daily News offers more information on the potential manipulation of sound effects in ancient Mesoamerican architecture.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, December 17, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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