Did ancient Australian Aborigines change the climate by burning grasslands and vegetation in northern Australia during the dry season? A new simulation by climate scientist Michael Notaro of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, suggests that the burning delayed the monsoon season.

The Sackler Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., has postponed its exhibition of “Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds.” The artifacts in the show were salvaged from a Tang dynasty shipwreck and purchased by the government of Singapore.

Planks decorated with shells and sparkling pieces of industrial waste have been conserved and returned to Newhailes House in Musselburgh, Scotland. The planks had been mounted on the walls of a shell grotto on the estate in the eighteenth century. “As part of the estate walk you’d stand on the opposite side of the pool. There’s a small waterfall and then there’s this highly reflective shell grotto. Two torches mounted either side of the doorway would reflect in the pool and the shells. It’s part of the entire designed landscape,” said Daniel Rhodes of the National Trust for Scotland.

Human remains were unearthed during sewer repairs in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. “It’s definitely a problem when you have an active community on top of an archaeological site, people can’t do very much without disturbing the ground in one way or another,” commented archaeologist David Archer of Northwest Community College.

After examining the teeth of 266 individuals found buried beneath houses in Çatalhöyük, researchers from Ohio State University concluded that the people, in general, were not related to each other. “I think that as society becomes more sedentary and complex that kinship itself doesn’t seem to be sufficient to hold it together. This is suggesting that they’ve got [a] sufficiently complex level that they needed something more complex than kinship,” commented Ian Hodder of Stanford University. Hodder directs excavations and research at the 9,000-year-old site.

The restoration and reconstruction of the eleventh-century Angkor temple of Baphuon has been finished after 50 years of work. “We were facing a three-dimensional puzzle, a 300,000-piece puzzle to which we had lost the picture. And that was the main difficulty of this project,” said Pascal Royere from the Ecole francaise d’Extreme-Orient.

National Geographic Daily News has several photographs of the tomb hidden within a pyramid at the Maya site of Palenque.

Fragments of fifteenth-century frescoes were uncovered in an excavation in the yard of Saints Petar and Pavel church in Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. The fragments, which depict religious scenes and figures, had been buried in a religious ceremony. “Perhaps frescoes fell down after a strong earthquake in the sixteenth century,” said archaeologist Hitko Vachev.

And a 1,400-year-old fresco of St Paul has been discovered in the Catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples, Italy.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, June 30, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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