UNESCO has announced that Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban ten years ago, will not be reconstructed. “We have to think of the public, and they don’t need to see a fake, they need to see the reality. And these statues have been destroyed. As much as we mourn that they have been destroyed it’s an historical fact,” said Francesco Bandarin, UNESCO’s assistant director-general for culture. 

Some archaeologists disagree with a plan to open the exhibit “Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds,” at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery next year. The ship was salvaged in Indonesian waters, and then its artifacts were sold to a company in Singapore for $32 million. “I think this exhibition would send a very bad message to the public, that the Smithsonian doesn’t stand for the preservation of archaeological resources and that mining archaeological sites is OK,” said Bruce Smith, curator of North American history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. 

New evidence suggests the ancient Britons were building well-engineered roads before the arrival of the Romans in the first century B.C. “The traditional view has often been that Iron Age Britons were unsophisticated people who needed to be civilized by the Romans,” said contract archaeologist Tim Malim. 

A construction project in Hampton, Virginia, has turned up thousands of eighteenth-century artifacts that will be donated to several museums. 

Here are some photographs of the Ming Dynasty mummy discovered by a road crew in eastern China. Its wooden coffin had been flooded and preserved in anaerobic conditions. 

A study conducted by scientists at Scotland’s Edinburgh University concludes that climate change is destroying archaeological treasures around the world. “Long-term efforts are needed to locate archaeological remains that are at risk, and research how best to care for them,” said researcher Dave Reay.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, March 11, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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