A second Viking site may have been identified in the New World, on Canada’s Baffin Island. Archaeologist Patricia Sutherland of Memorial University in Newfoundland and Scotland’s University of Aberdeen returned to Tanfield Valley, located on the southeastern coast of the island, where a building made of stone and sod was unearthed in the 1960s. She has since found blade-sharpening tools bearing traces of copper alloys and smelted iron. Such metals are known to have been used by the Norse, but are unknown among the Arctic peoples of the region. She has also uncovered remains of Old World rats, a whalebone shovel similar to those found from Greenland, and yarn resembling that made by Viking women. She thinks that Vikings may have traded with local hunters and trappers for ivory and furs. “I think things were a lot more complex in this part of the world than most people assumed,” she said.

Archaeologists are investigating a 1,300-year-old archaeological site along the banks of the Babine River in British Columbia. There could be as many as ten long houses at the fishing village, in addition to 1,000 areas where food and other materials were stored over a long period of occupation that ended about 200 years ago. “It was really quite amazing to see the whole range of tools and weapons going back to probably long before Europeans arrived, right to the point where European goods were available and then even into much more recent times,” said Farid Rahemtulla of the University of Northern British Columbia.

Researchers from Oxford University say the early writing system known as proto-Elamite, which was used in what is now southwestern Iran 5,000 years ago, could soon be understood. Some 1,200 signs have been translated so far by Jacob Dahl of Wolfson College. He thinks that the system is so difficult to translate because the texts are lacking in consistent patterns—evidence of mistakes in writing. “The lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless,” he said. New high-quality images of the clay tablets will be made available online.

Construction crews in San Francisco uncovered the foundations of Old City Hall last month. The massive structure took 25 years to build, but it was only open for ten years before it collapsed during the 1906 earthquake. Before that, the land held the remains of 9,000 people who were buried between 1850 and 1860. “We will bury it all again,” said Rebecca Karberg, a historic preservation specialist for the federal General Services Administration.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, October 22, 2012. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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