Monday, July 25
July 25, 2011
An engraved image of a speared reindeer could be the oldest rock art in Britain. The carving was found in a cave in Wales.
A fifth Christian church has been uncovered in the ancient city of Antioch of Pisidia, which is located in Turkey. This church had been constructed on top of an earlier temple.
The discovery of a cache of 600-year-old coins by a construction crew sparked a “melee†in the city of Srinagar in northern India. “People mistook the coins for gold ones and started looting them to make quick bucks,†said an official from Kashmir’s department of archives, archaeology, and museums.
Members of the Millbrook Society are looking for a colonial silversmith’s workshop in Pennsylvania. They’ve found a foundation full of trash. “We’ve been digging a big hole for a long time,†said Ron Beifuss, an assistant on the project.
Archival documents indicate that a statue of the Inca emperor Pachacuti once stood in Machu Picchu. The stone statue may have been coated with gold, and was probably looted before the arrival of Hiram Bingham in 1911.
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Friday, July 22
July 22, 2011
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts will return the top half of the Weary Herakles statue to Turkey, where it will be reunited with its bottom half at the Antalya Museum. The top half was purchased in 1981; the bottom half was excavated from the site of Perge in 1980.
A tiny, 2,000-year-old golden bell was found in a drainage channel near the Old City of Jerusalem. The bell was probably sewn onto the garment of a high official.
The ancient city of Shekhem, located in the West Bank, is being excavated in part by the Palestinian Department of Antiquities. “The local population has started very well to understand the value of the site, not only the historical value, but also the value for their own identity,†said Gerrit van der Kooij of Leiden University.
An examination of elite Egyptian weapons from the Bronze Age shows that many of them were used in battle.
Two skulls discovered in a sand quarry in Somerset, England, in 1928 have been radiocarbon dated and found to be 10,000 years old. “Such open-air cemeteries are extremely rare in Europe and this is the only one known from the UK,†said Richard Brunning of the Somerset County Council’s Heritage Service.
A 10,000-year-old camp site has been unearthed in New Brunswick, indicating that Canada’s First Nations lived among the ice. “We had individual spear points that we knew were that old. But it’s just we never had the sites to give us contextual information – like what people were eating, how they were living, the structures they may have been living in, what the population size may have been,†said archaeologist Brent Suttie.
Why did the Inca build Machu Picchu? National Geographic Daily News explains five top theories.
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