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Archaeology Magazine News Archive
2008-2012


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Monday, June 1
June 1, 2009

In Myanmar, the 2,300-year-old Danok Pagoda collapsed on Saturday, killing at least 20 people and injuring 150. Most of the dead are thought to have been construction workers who were working on a restoration of the ancient Buddhist temple.

The modern-style Ara Pacis Museum in Rome was splashed with red and green paint overnight, and a toilet and toilet paper were left next to it. The current building replaced one built my Mussolini in 1938 to house the sacrificial altar built in 9 B.C. by Emperor Augustus. “Hooliganism and vandalism won’t decide the debate over interventions on architecture and monuments in the city,” said Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno.  

Some Japanese scholars think that Queen Himiko may have been buried in the key-hole shaped Hashihaka burial mound in Nara, based on radiocarbon dates of the tomb, artifacts found within it, and the date of the queen’s death.  

The Spanish mission of Santa Catalina de Guale in Georgia was excavated in the 1980s. This article reviews what was uncovered, including tens of thousands of glass beads manufactured all over the world. “They were probably giving them to the Guale Indians who they were trying to convert to Catholicism,” said Lorann S.A. Pendleton, of the American Museum of Natural History.  

A section of “Wade’s Road” in Scotland, designed by General George Wade in the eighteenth century for the military, was not constructed according to plan, says archaeologist John Lewis.

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Friday, May 29
May 29, 2009

Traces of a sod-and-stone wall on Baffin Island could represent the second Viking structure to be found in the New World. A whalebone spade, yarn, decorated wood objects, and whetstones have also been unearthed.

Fragments of a spiral column that may have been part of a Roman temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis have been discovered near the courthouse in Florence, Italy. Artifacts from the temple have been found in the area for the past 300 years, but the actual temple has not yet been found.  

Did seafaring people follow a “kelp highway” along the Pacific Coast of the Americas 15,000 years ago?  

At least four sets of human remains were uncovered in Creel Bay, North Dakota, during the construction of a dike. The bones probably date to 1100 A.D.  

In Hampshire, England, workers uncovered the burial of a sixteenth-century man, who appears to have been buried a few hundred yards outside of the village’s churchyard. “You do get instances of criminals or suicides being buried outside churchyards, but they are normally in designated areas,” said archaeologist Tracey Matthews.  

In Scotland, archaeologists will look for the foundations of the “lost mansion” of Jacobite sympathizer James Erskine, Lord Grange. The house served as a hospital and orphanage in the nineteenth century before it was demolished.  

Mike Boehm of the Los Angeles Times talked with Charles Stanish of UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology about his essay, “Forging Ahead, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love eBay,” for the May/June issue of ARCHAEOLOGY. Boehm also spoke with representatives from eBay, art gallery owners, and archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella, who disagrees with Stanish. “What’s going to decrease plundering is n forgeries, it’s only if governments take more action,” he said.   

The Society for Industrial Archaeology will meet in Pittsburgh and tour some of its industrial relics, described in the Post-Gazette. “We study American history through the industrial remains of the past. Pittsburgh was the most important industrial city of America, so it’s got a lot of important sites and important people associated with them,” said Bode Morin of Michigan Technological University.  

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