An “eye” stolen from a statue of Amenhotep III in 1972 will be returned to Egypt by a Swiss museum. “The thieves sold it to an American antiquities dealer who then auctioned it at Sotheby’s,” explained Egypt’s culture minister, Faruk Hosni.

Archaeologist Denise To and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command are looking for the remains of some of the 30,000 American soldiers killed during World War II in western Germany during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, including a young pilot from Texas whose plane was shot down on November 5, 1944.   

The Bill Barrett Corporation is digging natural gas wells in the Nine Mile Canyon area of Utah, and the company’s public relations campaign promises that “There will be no net impacts.” But Steve Bloch, of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, says the company is “greenwashing” the drilling, which he says is having an adverse impact on the region’s rock art.  

ATVs and dirt bikes are damaging rock art and artifacts in the Nanaimo area of British Columbia, Canada. “It really comes down to the individual, you can educate them as much as you want but it comes down to if they care,” said Julie Cowie, president of the local archaeological society.  

The Anthropology Museum at Wake Forest University in North Carolina has created an online database of its more than 26,000 artifacts. The database is open to the public.  

Some of the 4,000-year-old bones of a young person were uncovered in Ireland’s County Clare, in the passageway to the central burial chamber of the stone fort known as Caherconnell Cashel. “The fact that all the bones were not there would suggest that the body was brought from somewhere else and were allowed to decompose before burial,” said archaeologist Graham Hull.  

UNESCO says that seven World Heritage sites in Great Britain are in danger, including the Tower of London, the old town of Edinburgh, and Stonehenge.   

In suburban Chicago, sixth-grade teacher Jennifer Combs had her students excavate an ancient civilization from a tray of brownies. “Once we dig in there, it is destroyed. We can’t go back and recreate what was going on,” she told them.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Wednesday, September 10, 2008. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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