The foundations and cellars of George Washington’s boyhood home have been uncovered at Ferry Farm, Virginia. Philip Levy of the University of South Florida oversaw the excavation, which recovered a half million artifacts, including a Masonic pipe, wig curlers, and a carnelian bead of a form popular in West Africa. Washington sold the property in 1774.   Photographs of the excavation and artifacts, and an illustration of what the house might have looked like when the Washingtons moved in 1738, are also available.

Physical traces of the not-so-distant past are falling to weather, wildfires, and neglect in the American West. “Without them, we get a distorted, romanticized view of the past,” said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee is meeting in 400-year-old Quebec City to discuss adding as many 45 new sites to the list of 851 places of “outstanding universal value.” Thirty sites are on the List of World Heritage in Danger.  

Whether or not Paleolithic people chose to paint in a cave may have depended upon its acoustics, according to Iegor Reznikoff of the University of Paris. He noticed that the images tend to be clustered in areas where the human voice is amplified. Musical instruments have also been found in decorated caves.  

Archaeologists will recover and map artifacts at the Harding House, where Union and Confederate soldiers fought on December 31, 1862, during the Battle of Stones River. “I hope the metal detector will help us pinpoint on the ground where troop locations were,” said Zada Law of Middle Tennessee State University.  

A row of Roman shop buildings and a villa have been discovered in South Wales, in a wealthy town known 1,800 years ago as Venta Silurum.  

Forty-thousand-year-old fossilized human toe bones found in China suggest that people were regularly wearing shoes. Shoe-wearing humans tend to have lest robust middle toe bones than those who go barefoot. 

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Thursday, July 3, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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