Newsbriefs, March/April 1997 - Archaeology Magazine Archive


Index of Newsbriefs	Volume 50 Number 2, March/April 1997

(Click on the title of a newsbrief to see the full text.)

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Ashkelon's Dead Babies	How and why the bones of nearly 100 infants were deposited in a late Roman-early Byzantine sewer beneath a bathhouse at Ashkelon, on the southern coast of Israel, continue to baffle scholars. Were they the victims of catastrophe or infanticide? Were they children of bathhouse prostitutes?
World's Oldest Stone Tools	More than 2,600 sharp-edged flakes, flake fragments, and cores from Ethiopia have been dated to between 2.52 and 2.60 million years ago, pushing back by more than 150,000 years the known date at which humans were making stone tools.
Inigo Jones' Lost Portico	More than 70 carved stones from Inigo Jones' (1573-1652) lost western portico to London's Old St. Paul's Cathedral have been found beneath the present cathedral.

Homo erectus Survival	New dates for Homo erectus fossils from Ngandong, Java, suggest this hominid lived as recently as 53,000 to 27,000 years ago.
La Débâcle Chauvet	The stunning discovery of Palaeolithic wall paintings in the Chauvet Cave at Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in southern France has been clouded by an almost equally stunning array of legal disputes that have kept the grotto closed to researchers.
More Nineveh Fragments for Sale	Nine more fragments from reliefs at the Sennacherib Palace Site Museum at Nineveh in northern Iraq have surfaced on the antiquities market.
Aucilla River Paleoindian Site	Florida's Aucilla River is yielding evidence of the adaptability of Paleoindians to their changing environment at the end of the Pleistocene, 10,000 years ago.
Alexandria Harbor Finds	Obscured by murky water for more than 1,500 years, remains of the ancient capital of the Ptolemies have been found in Egypt's Port of Alexandria.
Field Notes	Wendorf Wins Medal; Roman Statue Discovered; Khmer Sculptures Returned; The Whisky Trade