Last year, five people working for oil companies doing business in Yemen were arrested for trying to smuggle antiquities out of the country, but only one has been prosecuted. Yemeni officials suspect that many executives have gotten away with such theft. Sometimes the artifacts are placed within diplomatic cases or in oil tankers, or are flown out on private planes, which are not inspected.

Negotiations between lawyers for Italy and the Cleveland Museum of Art are in their final stages.  

Arlen and Diane Chase of the University of Central Florida are using LiDAR remote sensing technology to map the Maya site of Caracol in Belize. “The lasers we’re using to map the ruins have never been used before. And it’s going to make a world of difference because traditional methods of mapping are very time consuming, very laborious, and very slow,” said anthropologist Arlen Chase.  

Here’s some more information on the 1,000 graves discovered at Usme, Colombia, whose occupants lived between the first and sixteenth centuries A.D.  “A settlement like Usme offers the chance to research the settlement’s development through different moments in a prolonged occupation,” said Maria Groot of the National University of Colombia.  

Campers have erected seven tents in front of a property on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i containing 30 burials. The Kaua’i Island Burial Council has given the landowner permission to move seven of the graves to build a house, but the protesting campers want the site to be left alone.  

A medieval shipwreck was discovered during the construction of an apartment building in central Barcelona, in an area that used to be under water.  

Robotic probes carrying cameras will descend to the bottom of Lake Ontario and the upright wrecks of the Hamilton and the Scourge. The two ships sank in a storm during the War of 1812, taking some 50 American sailors with them.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Monday, May 12, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.