Carbon dating of organic materials from archaeological sites has been calibrated for the variations in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere against the known ages of tree rings since the 1960s. Tree rings provide a record that dates back about 14,000 years. Corals have also been used to try to calibrate the clock further back in time, but the levels of carbon-14 in the air and in the ocean are not identical. But new sediment cores  taken from Japan’s Lake Suigetsu provide a direct record dating back 52,000 years. Preserved leaves in the cores provided 651 carbon dates that can be compared to calendar dates, making it possible to obtain more accurate ages for older archaeological sites. “If you’re trying to look at archaeological sites at the order of 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, the ages may shift by only a few hundred years but that may be significant in putting them before or after changes in climate,” said geochronologist Christopher Bronk Ramsey of the University of Oxford.

People accused of looting led police to a previously unknown site in Rome’s Alban Hills where they found votive offerings dating from the fourth to the second century B.C. The life-sized terra cotta statues  and parts of statues were probably offered to the goddess Juno at a nearby sanctuary.

While trying to retrieve a runaway cat, Mirko Curti discovered a 2,000-year-old tomb in a cliff near Rome’s Via di Pietralata. “The cat managed to get into a grotto and we followed the sound of its miaowing,” he said. They found niches that probably once supported burial urns and bones that may have fallen from a tomb located further up the cliff face. The entrance to the tomb, which dates between the first century B.C. and the second century A.D., may have been opened by recent heavy rains.

The 2,000-year-old Sarpy Creek Bison Kill site in Montana has been hastily excavated with a backhoe to make way for the expansion of a coal mine. The prehistoric site is located on the Crow Indian Reservation, and was found last year during a survey required by the National Historic Preservation Act. “Basically what we have right now is this big hole that is roughly size of an Olympic swimming pool where there once was a really beautiful bison bone bed, and sitting next to that is a giant pile of extremely valuable butchered bison remains just laying out on the ground in the middle of nowhere, exposed to the weather with cows stomping around on them,” said Judson Finley of Utah State University. Finley thinks that, had it been carefully excavated, the site would have qualified for the National Register of Historic Places or as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Morocco’s Communications Minister Mustapha Khalfi denied that radicals had destroyed ancient stone carvings in the High Atlas Mountains. The government organized a trip for journalists to the Yagour Plateau to view some undamaged carvings of the sun. “This kind of incident, contrary to our values, cannot take place in Morocco,” read a statement released by the culture ministry, following an investigation into the claims.

Additional medieval tombs near Timbuktu  were destroyed by extremists yesterday. “They arrived aboard six or seven vehicles, heavily armed. They flattened everything with a bulldozer and pulled up the skeletal remains,” said a local resident. Northern Mali is now under the control of rebels from a mixture of Islamist groups.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, October 19, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.