Africa

Egypt
Song, dance, drink, and sex marked many a New Year celebration in antiquity, according to archaeologists digging at the Mut Temple in Luxor, where they discovered a column dating to the reign of Hatshepsut (1473-1458 B.C.) with text describing the Festival of Drunkenness. Though the event is known to date to the Middle Kingdom, this is the first time it has been identified in temple architecture that predates Ptolemaic times.

Asia & the Pacific

Asia
Until recently, archaeologists had been hard pressed to explain how a domesticated variant of a bottle gourd species native to Africa showed up at ancient sites from the mid-Atlantic to Peru. Now, comparison of DNA from modern bottle gourds with that from gourds recovered at archaeological sites in the Americas suggests that they were first brought over from Asia around 10,000 years ago.

China
Anticipating the find to rival the terra-cotta warriors of Xian, Chinese heritage officials are moving forward with plans to excavate an 800-year-old cargo ship off the coast of Guangdong Province. The 80-foot-long vessel, intact and upright in 60 feet of water, is believed to contain up to 70,000 artifacts, including early Southern Song Dynasty (A.D. 1127-1279) porcelain. A salvage vessel designed to raise the ship in one piece is currently under construction.

China Archaeologists are rewriting history in Hong Kong, where it was long thought no human activity took place until the Neolithic. Now, the discovery of a tool-making site 39,000-35,000 years old on the Sai Kung Peninsula has pushed back human presence in Hong Kong to the Paleolithic.

(© Photos.com)

Central America

Guatemala San Bartolo, site of the Maya world's earliest murals, rewrites scholarship with the discovery of the oldest-known Maya writing in the rubble of the site's Las Pinturas pyramid. Dating to 250 B.C., the six-inch-long strip of glyphs is 500 years older than the earliest solidly dated Maya text. Only the glyph ajaw, meaning "ruler," has been identified, but the text is clearly rendered, indicating that Maya literacy must date to even earlier.

(Boris Beltrán/Science)

Europe

Italy
Nero's spectacular Domus Aurea (Golden House), reopened to the public in 1999 after a 21-year-long restoration, is in danger of collapse and will be closed for at least two years, according to Italian cultural officials. Recent heavy rain has weakened the 2,000-year-old brick and plaster walls and ceilings.

United Kingdom
Currents that run through the Solent, an ancient valley that now serves as a channel between mainland England and the Isle of Wight, are scouring clean a unique underwater settlement, archaeologists warn. Scholars are eager to excavate the remains of a wooden structure, radiocarbon dated to 6000 B.C., and an adjacent pit containing burnt flint that researchers believe may be an oven or hearth. The settlement--the only one of its kind in the U.K.-- has been preserved under silt for millennia but now may disappear within a few years.

Near & Middle East

North America

New York
The Bronx may be up, but the Battery's definitely down. Archaeologists found a 45-foot-long stone wall beneath Manhattan's Battery Park that may be part of the seventeenth-century fort that gave the area its name. Unearthed by workers digging a subway tunnel extension, the wall may have been first built by Dutch settlers around a bank of cannons and then improved on by English colonists. Pottery, a 1744 King George II halfpenny, pipe fragments, and a pewter medallion were also found.

For more news, see "From the Trenches."

© 2006 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0603/news/world.html