The Crosby Garrett Roman parade helmet has sold at Christie’s auction house for £2.28 million, or ten times the estimated amount, to an unknown bidder.

Here’s more information on Spain’s race to claim its historic shipwrecks in the Gulf of Cádiz ahead of commercial salvagers. In addition, Odyssey Marine International is expected to submit an appeal today on the ruling that the $500 million in coins that the company recovered from a shipwreck in 2007 belong to Spain. Odyssey still has the coins and the artifacts from the ship.  

The entrance to an unfinished water tunnel dug in 1853 was uncovered in an old Army landfill in San Francisco’s Presidio. “This is one example of the kind of infrastructure programs that were going on. We’ve got gold, we’ve got a new city. We’re going to build this tunnel,” explained archaeologist Kari Jones.  

Elaine Doran, collections manager for the Hancock-Clarke House in Lexington, Massachusetts, rediscovered early eighteenth-century artifacts from the site in the basement of the town’s visitors’ center. They had been excavated in the 1960s. John Hancock and Samuel Adams were guests in the house on the night of April 18, 1775, when Paul Revere and William Dawes both stopped to warn that the British were coming.  

Live Science spoke with University of Arizona anthropologist Vance Holliday about the article he and David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University wrote on the disappearance of the Clovis people. Were they wiped out by a catastrophic event? Holliday and Meltzer think not. “We saw that the artifact styles had changed, but that’s nothing new. As far as we could tell, the people didn’t become extinct – they just started making other tools,” Holliday said.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, October 7, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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