“Move the door jamb up and make the passage wider,” is one of the inscriptions found in an unfinished tunnel in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Though discovered in 1960, the tunnel has only now been completely cleared, revealing preliminary decoration sketches and instructions left by the architect.

Archaeologists now believe a mass burial of infants at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley may have been associated with a brothel. The similar size of the remains points to infanticide, says skeletal biologist Simon Mays, who is investigating the finds.

“Maybe you missed a shot and your weapon disappeared into the snowbank. It’s like finding your keys when you drop them in snow,” says University of Colorado at Boulder’s Craig Lee of the 10,000-year-old atlatl dart found melting out of an ice sheet near Yellowstone National Park. Watch a video about the discovery here.

It may turn out to be just a simple fire hearth, but a 500-year-old fire pit found in North Dakota last year may been used to harden pottery, making it the only such pit ever discovered along the Missouri River.

More of Gloucester’s Roman past has been revealed. Stone blocks, part of a Roman wall, have been uncovered in Gloucester, England, during development in Kimbrose Triangle. Two medieval burials were also found at the site last month.

A new computer system has been developed that was able to decipher much of the ancient Semitic language Ugaritic in hours. Until now, it has been thought that computers lack the “intuition” needed for successful archaeological decipherment. The work will be presented at next month’s Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Meeting.

This entry was posted by Archaeology Magazine on Wednesday, June 30, 2010. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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