Microscopic flax fibers were discovered in clay samples taken from Dzudzuana Cave in the Republic of Georgia. “It’s impossible to know exactly how they were used, but some of them are twisted. This is a very old principle of making rope and cord,” said Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University. The fibers are more than 30,000 years old.

An image of a menorah was found engraved in stone at the site of a synagogue near the Sea of Galilee. The engraving is thought to be 2,000 years old, and one of the earliest depictions of the seven-branched candelabra.   This article from Israel National News contains an aerial photograph of the synagogue.  

The floor and timber beams of a 2,000-year-old roundhouse were uncovered at an Iron Age settlement in Birnie, Scotland. “People tend to think they were scratching around living difficult existences and staying in huts, but this is no hut. This was a huge and impressive building,” said Fraser Hunter of the National Museums of Scotland.  

Here’s a composite side-scan sonar image of the U.S. Navy patrol boat found off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.  

Underwater treasure hunting is big business-and there is no gloss of archaeology on it in this article. “There are billions of dollars worth of valuable and interesting things laying on the ocean floor waiting for us to find. That is our business plan in a nutshell,” said Mark Gordon, president of Odyssey Marine Exploration. 

Disabled veterans living in Augusta, Georgia, will soon be cataloging artifacts from Army Corps of Engineers projects. “You probably have 20 years of work cataloging the objects,” said archaeologist Sonny Trimble, who wanted to help the soldiers who defended him while he was digging in Iraq.  

Officials from Greece, Egypt, and Italy attended a meeting in Baghdad, offering international support to conserve Iraq’s heritage.  

The Economist examines UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, and its ability to protect the 900 sites on its list.  

The stone tools found in the now-dry basin of Botswana’s Lake Makgadikgadi could be the world’s largest hand axes.  

Students from the University of Montana are excavating a ghost town in the Garnet Mountains.

This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on Friday, September 11, 2009. Discussion of this blog entry is now closed.

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