Members of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery who are looking for Amelia Earhart hope to recover DNA from artifacts they found on the island of Nikumaroro. They think she might have crashed into the sea and died a castaway.

An ochre powder production site estimated to be 58,000 years old has been unearthed at a rock shelter in South Africa. Project leader Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand found four cement hearths made of ash, where ochre powder could have been ground or stored and then heated in order to turn it red.  

Here’s a better photograph of what could be the world’s oldest rock art, discovered in a rock shelter in Australia.  

Brigham Young University archaeologist Bruce Bachand spoke with Utah’s Deseret News about his excavation of a Zoque burial of a royal couple that could be the oldest pyramid tomb in Mesoamerica.  

Indonesia is still undecided as to whether to ratify the UNESCO convention on the protection of underwater cultural heritage. The government attempted to sell artifacts salvaged from a 1,000-year-old shipwreck last month, but there were no bidders.  

Archaeologist Graham Keevil talks about the discovery of a 600-year-old window on the grounds at Rochester Cathedral in Kent, England, in this video.  

An Armenian church in Los Angeles has filed a civil lawsuit against the Getty Museum for the return of seven pages of the Armenian Orthodox Church’s Zeyt’un Gospels, which date to 1256. The museum acquired the pages in 1994 from a private collector who asked to remain anonymous. The church claims the pages were stolen during the Armenian Genocide of 1915.  

Eighteenth-century artifacts uncovered in a dusty warehouse crate will be returned to the Nez Perce tribe. “Every now and again, you still find one of those boxes that hasn’t been paid much attention to. We get surprised, just like anybody else,” said Leah Evans-Janke of the University of Idaho.  

Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University explains his work at the Maya city of Cancuen, in northern Guatemala, and the importance of ethical archaeology, in New Scientist.

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

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