Sri Lanka has opened a new maritime archaeology museum in an historic Dutch building in Galle Fort. A previous museum was destroyed by the tsunami of 2004.

A few more facts have become available on the apparent suicide of federal informant, Ted Gardiner. Gardiner assisted authorities who were investigating the illegal trafficking of American Indian artifacts in Utah.  How will Gardiner’s death affect the prosecution of the remaining cases?  

Egypt has received some 25,000 prehistoric artifacts from the University of London. The objects will be housed in a new museum.  

A silver pendant that was one of 200 items reported stolen from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has been returned by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The pendant was being offered for sale by an antiques dealer in Seattle.   

Here’s a photograph of some of the Hellenistic coins bearing images of Alexander the Great that were discovered in Syria.  

There’s more on the stone tools found in India above and beneath a 74,000-year-old layer of volcanic ash deposited by the Toba eruption in Indonesia. “We, therefore, infer that modern humans were in India before Toba, that is, before 74,000 years ago, which would be much earlier than anyone had suspected,” said Michael Petraglia of Oxford University. Petraglia adds that he tools on top of the ash suggest that the people who survived the eruption were the same population, using the same kinds of tools.  

A German tourist is in hot water after breaking into a protected Maori rock art site in New Zealand and posting pictures of herself doing it online.   Her apology follows.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, March 4, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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