Canadian archaeologists excavating at Ucupe in northern Peru have discovered a 1,600-year-old tomb. The deceased was wearing a gold-colored mask and copper crowns, earrings, nose pieces, and ear flaps! Slight translation error with archaeologist saying “It will be a real pleasure to manipulate the data and compare them to sites like Sipan.” We suspect “analyze” is closer to what he’ll be doing than “manipulate.”

Here’s a biblical artifact with no known source!  It’s a painted stone tablet “probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan” that was “found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home.” The New York Times has a long article about it, but you will have to register to read it. The article says the painted text refers to a messiah who will rise three days after death, but pre-dates Jesus by a few decades. The Times article will likely be recycled in non-registration required venues over the coming days (such as the International Herald Tribune), for now, many shorter wire service items are out there. Ha’aretz has an okay summary.

This article discusses cultural resource management, or contract archaeology, work in Texas and especially Austin, noting “sometimes the finds are significant, such as a 19th-century limestone beer vault built by a German brewer that archaeologists uncovered when digging in the area around City Hall.”

Six skulls and a human ear bone held by the National Museums of Scotland and Edinburgh University are being handed over to a delegation of the Ngarrindjeri, an Aboriginal people from Australia.

Jeff Thorsen and his father revisited Grand Meadow, an important chert quarry in Minnesota, in the company of state archaeologist David Mather. The Thorsens sold the site to the Archaeology Conservancy in the 1990s. Grand Meadow chert has been found at sites throughout the Midwest.

Young Max Farrow “was digging around for Egyptian tombs in the back garden,” says his mom. No tombs, but a 300-year-old clay tobacco pipe.

A star exhibit at the Albert Hall Museum in Jaipur, Rajasthan, is a 2,200-year-old Egyptian mummy that was brought here from Cairo by the Jaipur royal family in 1887 from Cairo. As usual, children are fascinated by the mummy. This report notes “Ten-year-old Aarsha Rashid, from Udaipur said she is having a tough time to convince her little brother that all mummies are not evil.”

This entry was posted by Archaeology Magazine on Monday, July 7, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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