Archaeology Magazine Archive

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Tuesday, May 4
May 4, 2010

The granite body to a statue of a Ptolemaic-era king has been unearthed at the temple of Taposiris Magna, near Alexandria, Egypt.

Enjoy these pictures of Egyptian crocodile mummies at National Geographic Daily News. The mummies were given computed tomography scans at the Stanford School of Medicine in California.  

Pottery found beneath Aviles Street in St. Augustine, Florida, suggests that the road dates back to the early 1600s. City archaeologist Carl Halbirt claims that makes Aviles Street the oldest in the country.  

BBC News has a photograph of a rare Roman neck guard that was discovered at Carlisle Castle, located in northern England.  

A thirteenth-century skeleton excavated in southeast England belonged to a man from Tunisia who lived in England for about ten years before he died. “I believe this is the first physical evidence of Africans in medieval England,” commented Jim Bolton of the University of London.  

Six 2,300-year-old sculptures in Mexico’s Chakanbakan Archaeological Zone will be restored.  

A trial date has been set in October for the five remaining defendants in the federal artifact-trafficking sting operation that took place in Utah and the Four Corners region.  

Two burials consisting of wooden caskets were unearthed during construction of a modular prison unit in Pennsylvania. “We have no idea yet on how old the caskets are, but we think they possibly date back to the 1800s, when this land was the site of the Somerset Poor House and then the Somerset State Hospital. It may have been a pauper’s grave site,” explained prison spokeswoman Betsy Nightingale.

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Monday, May 3
May 3, 2010

An intact prehistoric site on private land is being excavated in Wisconsin this summer to make room for a highway expansion project. Pottery, stone points, and debris from tool making have been found. “We could put a sign out warning people that it’s an archaeological site, but that’s like the Wizard of Oz telling people not to look behind the curtain,” said project manager Mark Vesperman. 

State archaeologists may have located the grave of famed Texas Ranger Jim Coryell, who was killed by Caddo Indians in 1837 and buried nearby in an unmarked grave. “We may have found the needle in the haystack,” said James Bruseth, chief archaeologist for the Texas Historical Commission.  

More than 130 burials were found in Mexico City, at the Great Base of Tlatelolco Archaeological Zone. The burials are probably Christian and from the sixteenth century.  

In Bulgaria, police captured a metal detector and looted artifacts from a “known treasure hunter,” and “dealer of antiques.”   

Vietnam War photographers Dana Stone and Sean Flynn, son of actor Errol Flynn, disappeared in Cambodia in 1970. Now two amateur bone hunters claim to have found Flynn’s remains. “The remains are badly fragmented due to the manner in which they were recovered,” according to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, where testing is underway.  

A couple of pigs digging for food unearthed a World War II-era anti-tank gun on private land in Germany.  

Chinese conservators will attempt to preserve a message written on a chalk board by President Hu Jintao at a school in Tibet after the earthquake on April 14, 2010. “In order to preserve the characters forever, I need to do many experiments, adjust technical settings and design a special air-tight container to fit the board,” said Li Yuhu of Shaanxi Normal University.  

Meet some of the British personalities involved in the crusade to stop the sale of looted antiquities.  

A committee of scholars responds to amateur diggers who claim to uncover biblical artifacts. “We really just decided that it was time to take back our field,” said Eric Cline of George Washington University.  

Ethan Rarick, who has written about the Donner Party, comments on the recent report from Appalachian State University that no human remains had been found at the site of a cooking hearth at the Alder Creek campsite.

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