Officials from Mexico and Austria are considering a temporary exchange of artifacts as a “common cultural legacy.” Mexico would receive an Aztec feather headdress on loan from a museum in Vienna, and Austria would receive a gilded carriage used by Emperor Maximilian in the nineteenth century. Mexico has sought the return of the large, feathered headdress for decades.

A genetic study has shown that grapes were first cultivated 8,000 years ago in the South Caucasus, between the Caspian and Black Seas.  

A little-known fourth escape tunnel dug by Allied prisoners at the World War II Stalag Luft III camp in Poland will be investigated by a British team. The 1963 movie “The Great Escape” tells the story of the 76 prisoners who escaped using the first three tunnels.  

The Associated Press has picked up the story of the discovery of a 9,400-year-old bone fragment thought to be from a domesticated dog in a dried-out sample of human waste. Samuel Belknap III of the University of Maine says that the sample represents the oldest direct evidence of a domesticated dog in North America.  

Charred nut shells and stone flakes indicate that American Indians occupied a river-side construction site in New Jersey as early as 500 B.C. “The most intriguing evidence are the physical remains of a large number of hearths. They are the remains of where the Native Americans would have been cooking food for storage and for daily meals,” said contract archaeologist John Lawrence.  

Signs of an early wooden fort have been unearthed in St. Augustine, Florida, according to city archaeologist Carl Halbirt.  

Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, remembers his first visit to the Valley of the Kings.  

A Civil War revolver that was stolen from the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, in 1975 has been recovered in Tennessee.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, January 19, 2011. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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