Monday, August 31
August 31, 2009
Three men charged with trafficking in archaeological resources have been sentenced in South Dakota. A fourth has pleaded guilty and will be sentenced next year. They have forfeited more than 12,000 artifacts between them.
The Army Corps of Engineers cautions that a proposed floodwall at Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, could dredge up American Indian ancestral bones. “It’s almost a given that where there’s a shell midden, there are human remains,” agreed Ken Carleton, archaeologist for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw. Â
The skull of an American soldier who died in 1777 after being held on a British prisoner of war ship could be reburied after forensic study. As many as 1,000 men had been held on the ship; 46 of the men were dumped in Milford, Connecticut, where they died of smallpox and were buried in a mass grave. The skull was found in a local museum collection. Â
The bodies of the last two Australian soldiers missing in action in Vietnam will be returned home today for burial. Â
Miami’s Lemon City cemetery, where African-Americans were buried in the early twentieth century, will likely be preserved as a historical monument. Â
Ancient monuments in Pakistan’s Taxila Valley are threatened by quarrying and blasting. The vibrations produced by mining equipment have also damaged artifacts in the Taxila Museum. Â
British archaeologists dug test pits at a twentieth-century campsite in the Forest of Dean, but found little more than tent pegs. “The conclusion I draw from that is that people were very careful to take everything away with them,” said Lisa Hill, a doctoral candidate at St Cross College, Oxford. Â
Take a tour Magdeburg Cathedral, the first Gothic church in Germany, with archaeologist Rainer Kuhn as your guide.
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