A luxurious Etruscan home has been discovered in central Italy. “Here today we are rewriting history. It is a unique case in Italy because with what we have found we will be able to completely reconstruct the entire house,” said Simona Rafanelli, of the Isidoro Falchi Archaeological Museum.

Here’s a fascinating slideshow about the “Ship of the Thousand Ingots,” narrated by Donatella Salvi, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, Italy. The ship sank under mysterious circumstances 2,000 years ago off the coast of Sardinia, carrying a load of Roman lead.  The lead has almost completely lost its natural radioactivity, and some of it will be used by physicists conducting particle experiments at an underground laboratory.  

After decades of research, botanists, geneticists, and archaeologists say they have confirmed that the wild ancestor of the domestic corn plant is a Mexican grass called teosinte, long thought to be a closer relative of rice than of maize. They estimate that domestication occurred about 9,000 years ago.  

More than 50,000 pieces of colonoware, a handmade pottery crafted by slaves, has been unearthed at a site on the coast of South Carolina that was home to 19 slave cabins for 150 years.  

The skeletal remains of prehistoric Puebloan people will be moved to make way for a dam and reservoir in Kanab, Utah. In all, 15 sites will be engulfed by the project, including prehistoric houses and storage pits, middens, and settlements from the pioneer period.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, May 25, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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