A new survey of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia shows that one fifth of the monument is gone. Archaeologists blame the weather and human activity for its disappearance.

The name of the goddess Vesta was reportedly found on the lid of a 4,000-year-old pot discovered in central Macedonia.  

More than 250 bronze artifacts, including nose rings and cone-shaped weights, were found in a burial site at Peru’s Archaeological Park of Sacsayhuaman.  

DNA analysis of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Indians in southeast Alaska has shown that they are probably not related to On Your Knees Cave man, whose 10,300-year-old skeleton was discovered on Prince of Wales Island in 1996. His type of mitochondrial DNA is more likely to be found in the Chumash people of southern California, the Cayapa of Ecuador, and the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego.  

At the future site of the Olympic sailing center in Dorset, England, archaeologists have found a cemetery containing a dozen burials ranging from the Neolithic to Roman eras.  

Archaeometallurgist Alan Williams and Tony Fry, a researcher at England’s National Physical Laboratory, have examined Viking swords bearing the name Ulfberht, and found some of them to be knockoffs of the real thing. Genuine Ulfberht swords were made with steel imported from Afghanistan and Iran, while the fakes were made from iron mined in northern Europe.  

Neanderthals were wiped out by competition with Cro-Magnon populations, and not climate change, according to a multidisciplinary study by a French-American research team. Neanderthal populations in southern Spain avoided direct contact with modern humans the longest and were thus the last to survive.  

Scientists have found that Neanderthals in northwest Spain had type O blood, and were genetically likely to be fair skinned, freckled, perhaps have red hair, and talk. “What we were trying to do was to create the most realistic image of the Neanderthals with details that are not visible in the fossils, but which form part of their identity,” said evolutionary biologist Carles Lalueza.  

The state of Michigan wants U.S. District Judge Robert Holmes Bell to dismiss a lawsuit, filed by Great Lakes Exploration, for custody of what the company claims is the wreck of a seventeenth-century vessel built by French explorer La Salle. Federal law states that shipwrecks belong to the state if the state shows it was abandoned and embedded in the lake bottom.  

Al-Ahram has more information on the return of a carved image of Amenhotep III to Egypt. The head was smuggled out of the country in 1992, and it traveled to Britain, America, and Switzerland. “The case was extremely complicated as the head was the subject of two criminal proceedings, in the UK and the US,” said Ashraf Ashmawi, a legal consultant to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Tuesday, December 30, 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.