Kristina Killgrove of Vanderbilt University wants to sequence DNA extracted from ancient, lower-class Roman skeletons. She knows from isotope analysis that some of these people had immigrated to Rome from distant lands, and she thinks DNA could provide some answers to questions about their origins. “It’s an untapped data source, especially about the common people, the ones we know nothing about,” she said.

“A very ancient aristocratic house” unearthed near the Arch of Titus on Rome’s Palatine Hill might have been owned by Gaius Octavius, father of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. “We have unearthed more than 10 rooms, beautiful mosaic floors and frescoed walls,” said Clementina Panella of the University of Rome la Sapienza.

Six unmarked graves holding the remains of people thought to have been enslaved West Africans have been discovered at Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville, Florida.

Archaeologists will excavate the officers’ quarters at an Army outpost in southern Oregon that was occupied between 1853 and 1856. “When the fort was abandoned, it fell down in place and rotted away. There were some squatters here in the late 1800s,” said Mark Tveskov of South Oregon University.

A well and artifacts dating to the Civil War have been unearthed on the oldest part of the College of William & Mary campus in Williamsburg, Virginia. At the time, most of the school’s students returned home to fight for the Confederacy. Some 1,500 Union soldiers took over the school buildings.

Irish and Slovakian archaeologists used new microgravitational technology to search for a possible second passage tomb at Newgrange.

A Peruvian farmer will be fined for digging a well in the middle of the Nasca archaeological site. Nasca’s mysterious giant animal figures and geometric line drawings can be seen from the air.

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

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