Some archaeologists think that as many as 20 million people may have once inhabited the Amazonian rain forest. Their wooden cities would have been quickly swallowed by the jungle if the residents had been killed off by European diseases, but they did leave behind heavy, black dirt, called terra preta, which was made fertile when mixed with charcoal, human waste, and other organic matter. “There is a gigantic footprint in the forest,” said Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo of the University of Florida.

Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder will hire a new team of lab leaders for the next phase of research at the 9,500-year-old site of Catalhöyük in Turkey. “I have felt over recent years that the project was getting comfortable with itself and so not challenging each other or me or the assumptions that we were all taking for granted,” he explained.  

Two unmarked graves discovered on the campus of Virginia’s William & Mary College contained the remains of dogs that had been buried during the Colonial period. “When we first identified the sites, we treated the remains as human because they were buried like people,” said Joe Jones, director of the college’s department of anthropology.  

Are there any artifacts at Indian Mound Park in Columbus, Ohio? Franco Ruffini, Ohio’s deputy historic preservation officer, wants an archaeological survey to be conducted before bulldozers continue to clear land for athletic fields.  Artifacts from the Hopewell period and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been found in Etna, Ohio.  

Large doses of tetracycline have been found in the bones of ancient Nubian mummies, who probably imbibed the antibiotic through beer and gruel made from fermented grain. “Given the amount of tetracycline there, they had to know what they were doing,” said George Armelagos of Emory University.  

Fossilized bones excavated from a Spanish cave known as Gran Dolina show signs of “gastronomic cannibalism,” or the consumption of other humans by Homo antecessor as a regular food source. Human and animal bones bearing cut marks had been tossed away together for some 100,000 years.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, September 3, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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